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Denver Inc.: Crocs take knocks as comfy old slippers

Published July 8, 2006 at midnight

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The backlash has begun.

The whole world once loved Crocs - those ubiquitous holey "comfort" shoes in colors not found in nature that made Colorado famous for one more weird thing and the Niwot-based company's founders rich earlier this year in the largest footwear IPO in history.

But you knew it couldn't last. You yourself might be sick of 'em by now. And yet, wouldn't you know it? It takes a Canadian to actually express an alternate view publicly.

Lezlie Lowe, a columnist for an alternative newspaper, The Coast - Halifax's Weekly, expresses her love-hate relationship with Crocs in a column in the paper's July 6 issue.

"Crocs are the perfect shoe," Lowe writes. "But for God's sake, people, will you have a little self-respect and stop wearing them in public?"

The craze, she continues, "is just making people feel more comfortable wearing slippers. I mean, really, Crocs are no more than slippers fashioned from the Styrofoam Big Mac containers used to be made out of in the '80s in public."

You get the idea. For the complete column, go to and click on "The Lowedown" under Columnists.

'Sleeper house' sale out-of-this-world deal

The "Sleeper house" turned out to be quite a bargain after all.

The clamshell-shaped Genesee house featured in Woody Allen's 1973 Sleeper sold for $3.45 million to Michael Dunahay, founder of Denver-based Vacation Solutions, after sitting on the market for four years, according to The Wall Street Journal.

John Huggins, Denver's director of economic development who bought the house in 1999 for $1.3 million and says he spent millions more on renovations, put it up for sale in 2002 for $10 million. Last year, he sold part of the property, about 10 acres, for $1.23 million. He re-listed the house for $4.85 million last year after unsuccessfully trying to sell it at auction.

Dude ranchers were 'sitting on a gold mine'

Speaking of sleepers, here's one of another sort.

EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman became the proud owner of a former dude ranch in Telluride when she bought the 150-acre Skyline Ranch near Telluride for just under $20 million (this also from the Journal).

Exhausted from all the work and all the headaches of running a dude ranch, the former owners, Sherry and Dave Farny, said they realized they were "sitting on a gold mine," according to the Journal. They weren't kidding. The Farneys bought the ranch in 1968 for $168,000. That's right, thousand.

Assistant Business Editor Jane Hoback and Deputy Business Editor Gil Rudawsky write about local business talk that doesn't necessarily end up in quarterly reports. They can be reached at .