Business

An Anchorage renter of recreational vehicles has again been sued by the state over deceptive business practices — three years after the firm was penalized for similar issues.

Alaska Motor Home, along with registered owners Peter and Cole Harkovitch, are named in a state complaint filed Thursday. The company, which faced state action in 2019, has abruptly closed its doors this week.

“The lawsuit alleges that the defendants engaged in deceptive practices such as charging $2,500 damage deposits before consumers had picked up their RV, charging consumers taxes they did not owe, and forging a consumer’s signature on receipts to win a credit card chargeback dispute,” officials said in a statement from the Alaska Department of Law.

Assistant Attorney General John Haley, who filed the suit, said Friday that Cole Harkovitch reportedly transferred his shares in Alaska Motor Home to Peter about two weeks ago. He said the state believes hundreds of customers have been affected by the company’s actions, which he called “unprecedented.”

“I think this is fairly unique, because it’s happening at the beginning of the tourist season,” he said.

The company, which has allegedly taken thousands of dollars for summer RV rentals and has 40 RVs on hand, told the state this week that it planned to shut down Friday, without providing refunds to customers.

Attorney General Treg Taylor said the company’s customers  have been left in a “terrible situation.”

“Alaskan trips people have dreamed about for years are getting thrown into chaos,” Taylor said in the statement.

Multiple email and phone messages to Alaska Motor Home seeking comment were not returned Friday. The company’s website was offline, and its Facebook page has not had any new posts this year.

On Friday morning, numerous RVs were parked outside Alaska Motor Home’s office in an industrial park off C Street near Raspberry Road. Nobody was present outside, and the office door was locked.

In the state’s 29-page complaint, prosecutors said that Peter Harkovitch “has a history of using Alaska Motor Home’s assets as his personal assets,” directly using company funds for his own expenses. They also noted that he is jailed in Florida on criminal charges including aggravated battery, battery on a law enforcement officer and threatening a public servant linked to a domestic-violence case.

“The expenses associated with this litigation provide extra motivation for Alaska Motor Home’s owners to siphon money from the company, rather than to refund consumers or pay the company’s other debts,” prosecutors said.

In 2019, a Department of Law statement said Alaska Motor Home had imposed steep terms on renters including “a $300/hour charge for late returns, a $1,000 fine for putting fish in the RV refrigerator, and a $1,000 fine for leaving an RV excessively dirty.” None of them were disclosed until renters had already paid a deposit.

Under an injunction placed against Alaska Motor Home in that case, it is barred from arbitrarily canceling customers’ reservations. It must also keep exact records of any costs charged as a tax, as well as provide customers charged for damaging an RV a photograph of the damage and a history of repairs along with their itemized costs.

According to Thursday’s complaint, a Utah paralegal who rented a 26-foot RV in August 2023 was instead given a 32-foot RV against her wishes.

“When (the customer) told the Alaska Motor Home agent that she had booked a (26-foot) RV, and that a (32-foot) RV was too long, the Alaska Motor Home agent threatened to cancel her reservation,” prosecutors wrote. “The contract (she) had signed did not provide that Alaska Motor Home could substitute a different RV from the one listed on the contract.”

After the customer’s husband accidentally pumped gasoline into the RV’s water tank, prosecutors said, she informed the company and provided her Visa card. Staff did not immediately bill the card, but she soon saw $7,500 in unauthorized charges on it. After she froze the card and the American Express with which she had reserved the RV, she saw Harkovitch attempt to charge $7,240 on the American Express.

Soon afterward, the woman received a statement from Alaska Motor Home claiming she had paid $11,750 – which also noted the $7,500 she had already paid and claimed she owed an additional $4,240.

“These two statements are contradictory,” prosecutors wrote. “In addition, $7,500 plus $4,240 does not equal $11,750.”

The woman said she thought the RV was insured against damage, based on statements in Alaska Motor Home’s advertising.

“The contract (she) signed stated, ‘Insurance coverage includes collision, comprehensive, and liability,’” prosecutors wrote. “This contract language is in all of Alaska Motor Home’s RV rental contracts. However, this language is deceptive because Alaska Motor Home’s RV rentals do not come with insurance that insures the renter or driver.”

A dispute over the RV’s repair bills escalated until Harkovitch called the woman’s law firm in Utah, and she emailed him asking him not to call her at her office.

“Peter Harkovitch responded to the email stating, ‘Sorry, as a lawyer, your boss needs to be aware of the slime that works for her. Have a great day,’” prosecutors wrote.

Harkovitch also allegedly wrote the woman’s employer, who also asked him not to contact her at work.

On Sept. 2, 2023, Harkovitch sent the woman an invoice for $20,455, listed as $4,240 for “Water System Damage” – plus $235 a day for loss of the RV’s future use.

“The invoice charged for 69 days loss of use, a period running through Nov. 5, 2023,” prosecutors wrote. “However, (Nov. 5) was still more than two months away.”

The next month, the woman’s disputes of the initial $7,500 in charges were denied because Alaska Motor Home provided August documents bearing her signature through the online service Docusign. The state says those signatures were forged, after Docusign told investigators the woman had not signed any documents through the service that month.

Two other people also reported issues renting an RV from Alaska Motor Home during the 2023 season, according to the complaint. One couldn’t contact the company about a reservation, and the other had his reservation canceled but only received a partial refund of his costs.

The Anchorage Daily News reported in 2021 that a judge levied a $110,000 penalty against Alaska Motor Home over the 2019 allegations. As of Thursday, according to the state’s new complaint, Alaska Motor Home had paid about half of that penalty.

After the state relayed word of the outstanding penalties to Florida authorities, in an effort to collect the funds during that case, an attorney for Alaska Motor Home told state officials on Monday that the company would be closing down its operations Friday.

Still, according to prosecutors, the company was still taking reservations by late Monday afternoon. An investigator was able to book an RV rental for August on Alaska Motor Home’s website, providing a credit card number for a $500 deposit.

“If Alaska Motor Home is closing operations, there is no legitimate reason for the company to accept reservations or take credit card information for an August 2024 rental,” prosecutors wrote.

Haley declined to say whether Thursday’s lawsuit is the only state action that will be taken against the company.

The state is seeking an injunction to stop Alaska Motor Home from continuing to engage in deceptive practices, as well as penalties for its violations of state law. Prosecutors also seek to have renters’ costs reimbursed, but Haley said Friday that they can’t guarantee they will recover funds from the company.

Haley said Alaska Motor Home has begun sending cancellation notices to customers, who he said will have to book new RVs and accommodations at likely higher costs or cancel trips entirely.

Haley also urged anyone owed money by Alaska Motor Home to fill out a consumer complaint form on the Department of Law website.

“All I can say is we’re going to do our best, and we can’t help people if we don’t know who they are,” he said.

Alaska Public Media’s Matthew Faubion contributed information to this story.

Ally Hartman and Baylee Loyd’s bookstore is an experience. Each of the three rooms has a distinct vibe and different subgenres sorted by colors on the shelves. One room is green and white, another pink, and the third is black.

“The dark room isn’t going to be all romance. It’s going to be mostly dark romance and fantasy. Because the books, their covers, mostly fit that vibe,” Hartman said.

Growing up, Loyd said she would read whatever she could get her hands on. Hartman said she hasn’t always enjoyed reading. But when both sisters became pregnant in 2022, Loyd said it gave them something to bond over.

“It was books. And then that’s how this whole thing came together,” said Loyd.

Beauty and the Book Alaska specializes in the romance genre — a growing trend in Alaska and around the country. The store, located in the City Center strip mall in midtown, has been a fun and fulfilling project for two sisters who bonded over reading after giving birth to their first children.

Loyd said she didn’t have much time to read as a young adult. She was working full time, trying new hobbies and managing a social life. She said she fell into deep postpartum depression after giving birth and was looking for a healthy coping mechanism. She started reading the Ice Planet Barbarians series by Ruby Dixon.

“I read all 35 books in the series, within two weeks,” Loyd said.

At least nine other romance book stores opened across the country last year. Several more, including Beauty and the Book, are opening this year. The stores are taking advantage of a boom for the genre. In 2022, sales of romance books surged about 52% according to Publishers Weekly.

Some experts credit the TikTok hashtag #Booktok with helping drive the trend. It’s a large subcommunity with over 33 million posts on TikTok where readers share and review books they’ve read.

Dozens of customers lined up down the sidewalk on opening day Saturday. The sisters said they were surprised when customers began lining up almost an hour before opening.

Hartman said they wanted to create a kind of “haven” in person for romance book lovers in Anchorage. Loyd said their store has something for everyone, from sports to scientific romance, to more subtle forms of the genre.

“You can read a fade to black where you don’t get any of the super hardcore romance scenes,” Loyd said. “You get a kiss and a cuddle and then the book’s over. And that’s perfect for some people.”

Hartman and Loyd say they also want their store to carry a selection of romance novels that readers can’t find at big box stores. They reached out to individual authors rather than publishers to stock their shelves, which Hartman said had its perks.

“They [authors] were sending us swag to have here that match their books, they were sending us signed books,” Hartman said. “And sending us all their love and support giving us connections to publishers.”

The sisters say their mom, Sasha Loyd, is their biggest supporter and encouraged them to bring personality to the space. She’s also their investor. The sisters say their mom isn’t a reader, but read a four-book series they recommended in a month. Loyd admits she reads on her Kindle, but she said traditional book is a different experience.

“There’s really nothing like going into a store and grabbing a book that the cover looks interesting. Or you heard about it on #Booktok and you didn’t go straight to your Kindle and download it,” Loyd said.

The sisters are fans of numerous romance book stores, but one of their favorites happens to be a few hours away.

Olivia Pack opened The Ivy in Fairbanks in February. To her knowledge, it was the first romance bookstore in the state. She said she’s always been a reader. She said there isn’t much to do for fun in Fairbanks if you’re not an outdoorsy person.

Pack is a mother to twin toddlers. Like Baylee Loyd, Pack said reading helped her postpartum depression and anxiety. She said The Ivy provides a space for mothers to escape in a book and “live a different life for a moment.”

“I just figured, what would be better than to open up a romance bookstore and help give women you know, a healthy hobby to have outside of like being a mom or working full time or whatever it is,” said Pack.

Pack said she wasn’t sure how much of a demand there was for romance novels, or a bookstore dedicated to them. But she said customers were lined up outside the building opening day, and many became regulars.

She said the community gets excited about new local businesses popping up, whether it be her bookstore or a restaurant.

“Anytime a new small business pops up, and just once I’ve been here for a long time, everyone really tries to nurture them and you know, just really support them,” Pack said.

For Pack and the Beauty and the Book sisters, opening the bookstores is a passion project. Hartman said she’s not expecting to get rich off selling books, and it’s not her goal either.

“This is something we’re going to enjoy doing,” Hartman said. “It’s just something fun, you know. You live such a short life. You can work super, super hard, or you can enjoy the little things. And this is one of those little things that we can enjoy.”

Beauty and the Book sold so much inventory on opening day that they couldn’t reopen Sunday. But by Wednesday, they had restocked the shelves, and were ready to sell more books.

On a sunny Saturday at the Fisherman’s Bend gas station back in February, Juneau resident Joyce Sepel was filling up her tank. She said the Auke Bay gas station is her favorite.

“I’ve been going to Fred Meyer because it was cheaper,” she said. “But now I’ll just watch. I like coming here. It’s convenient, and I love watching the water here while I do it. But they’ve been the most competitive during the winter.”

On Valentine’s Day, prices at Auke Bay stations were cheaper than elsewhere in Juneau — as much as 40 cents cheaper. De Hart’s charged $3.50 per gallon, and the Fisherman’s Bend station charged $3.51. 

Meanwhile, Mike’s Airport Express was charging $3.70 per gallon. Petro One was charging $3.58 at its Lemon Creek station. Downtown, the Delta Western station was charging $3.90.

Some listeners have asked us why gas tends to be cheaper in Auke Bay. For her last Curious Juneau, erstwhile KTOO reporter Katie Anastas decided to find out. And as a bonus, she took on another reader question: Why does it cost more to fly to Ketchikan than to fly all the way to Seattle?

Catching drivers before they head south

Matthew Lewis is an economics professor at Clemson University. He studies how gas stations compete with each other, and how consumers respond to that competition.

“If consumers are driving or commuting a fair distance, they’re probably passing more gas station options along the way,” he said. “So that gives much more flexibility in where consumers might purchase.”

If someone lives in Auke Bay and drives to Lemon Creek or downtown for work every day, that driver passes by a lot of gas stations. Lewis said the Auke Bay stations need to keep prices low to try to catch those drivers before they go south.

“It is on the outskirts of where people are,” he said. “It’s not a convenient location for a lot of people, and so they need to have a relatively low price to stay competitive. Stations on a prominent, convenient part of a heavily traveled road or downtown can charge a high price and many consumers will still go.”

But gas stations do compete within neighborhoods

More broadly, four things affect the cost of gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The biggest is the cost of crude oil, which makes up more than half of the retail price of gasoline. Lower oil production drives up crude oil’s cost per barrel. 

Taxes and the costs of refining and distribution make up the rest.

As those costs change, so do the prices at the pump. But ultimately, Lewis said, stations decide how much they think they can charge.

When the crude oil and refined gasoline prices go up, the stations have to raise their prices and they do so fairly rapidly,” he said. “But when oil and wholesale costs go down, the stations tend to be a little bit slower to lower their price.”

Lewis said competition drives stations’ prices, even within the same neighborhood. Back in October, the Juneau Empire reported an 80-cent per gallon difference between the two Auke Bay stations.

“Prices do change regularly, so consumers really often aren’t all that well informed about what different stations are charging at different points in time,” Lewis said.

So next time you need to fill up, call around to a few stations. The lowest price could be closer than you think.

Along those same lines…

Have you ever wondered why it’s sometimes cheaper to fly from Juneau to Seattle than to Ketchikan? Some of our listeners have.

Alaska Travelgram writer Scott McMurren answered us with a question: “How many airlines fly between Juneau and Seattle?”

There are two.

“So Alaska and Delta compete on that route, particularly in the summer,” McMurren said. “The next question is, how many airlines offer jet service between Juneau and Ketchikan?”

For jet service, there’s just one.

Like gas prices, it comes down to competition. Multiple airlines will compete for customers. But if one airline has a monopoly on a route, like Alaska Airlines does from Juneau to Ketchikan, it’s up to them to set the price. 

Fast-food restaurants have come and gone from Juneau for decades — but very few stick around for long. 

Beyond Subway, McDonald’s, Domino’s, Papa John’s and Papa Murphy’s, you won’t find any other national chains in the capital city. Sure, there are restaurants like Pel’meni’s or Crepe Escape downtown where you can get food fast, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

Some residents, like Ken Judson, who was grabbing a Subway sandwich during a recent lunch hour, wish they had more choices. 

“Oh you know, Taco Bell or Burger King. Arby’s,” he said. “We see the commercials, but we’re always stuck with the one McDonalds, and there used to be other stuff. I think there’s still room for more.”

He’s right — partly. Juneau once had popular chains like Taco Bell, Burger King and Wendy’s. Some even had multiple locations. But they came and went. Several Curious Juneau listeners asked KTOO why that is.

Any day of the week you can pull up to McDonald’s in Juneau and grab a Big Mac and fries. It’s right by the McNugget intersection. When it opened in 1982, corporate officials said it sold more hamburgers and fries in its first week than any other store in the company’s history. 

And at one point there were two McDonald’s in Juneau. A second one opened downtown, four years after the first one, where Heritage Coffee is now. That one closed in 2010.

There’s no Taco Bell in Juneau today, but once there were two of those, too. Wendy’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Time, Burger King and Baskin Robbins — they all came and went by the mid-90s. Burger King even had a food truck, but that shut down, too. 

Bruce Denton opened the Senate Building on South Franklin Street downtown in 1982 and still owns it today. Wendy’s and Burger King had locations there in the 80s. 

“It’s interesting when you look historically at Juneau,” he said. “I mean, we had a Kentucky Fried Chicken for years that isn’t here anymore. We had Taco Time and a Taco Bell. McDonald’s is kind of the sole success story.”

Denton said the downtown area is tough for restaurants in general — but especially fast food —  because you can’t put in a drive-thru, and there’s not enough foot traffic. 

“They clearly weren’t getting enough traffic,” he said. “Particularly in the winter. And you think about the cruise ship passengers, one thing about the cruise is that they’re royally fed. So there’s not a lot of tourists that are scrambling in to eat.”

One of the few fast-food restaurants in Juneau that has passed the test of time is Subway. Its owner is Assembly member Wade Bryson.

He said owning any business in Juneau is tough, but trying to make money in fast food here is like walking a razor-thin wire. 

“What do you call a business without profit? You call it closed,” he said. “So, once a business doesn’t cross a profit threshold, it can’t continue to operate. It is hands-down one of the most challenging locations in the United States to operate a business.” 

Bryson took over the two existing Subway restaurants in Juneau in 2004, one in the valley and one downtown. The downtown location burned down less than a year later. He opened another one in Lemon Creek in 2010, but that closed in 2015. Then he opened yet another one downtown, but closed it in 2020. 

Like many businesses in Juneau, he said that fast-food restaurants deal with three big issues: inflated prices, lack of housing and a struggle to find workers. To make a profit, he said he typically needs to charge about 30% more than what a Subway sandwich would cost in the Lower 48.

“The cost of food is just escalating literally on a daily basis,” he said. “And in Alaska, the housing crisis, which led to the employment crisis, which led to the wage crisis, which has now compounded the housing crisis — I mean, it’s all just circling together.”

None of this is new. Even back in 1995, former McDonald’s owner and operator Mike White told the Juneau Empire that finding employees in Juneau was tough. Dale Martens, the former vice president of the Anchorage Taco Bell of Alaska was quoted in the story saying that staffing in Juneau “has always been a challenge.” 

Bryson said the demand for fast food in Juneau hasn’t gone away, but running a restaurant in Juneau often just doesn’t pencil out. 

“I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me to open a Taco Bell here in town — I would have had enough money to do it,” he said.

Alaska telecommunications firm GCI has permanently halted a plan to phase out customers’ email accounts, although it will now charge account holders a monthly fee to retain them.

The update, posted in a Wednesday statement on GCI’s website, mentions that staff have “received a lot of feedback letting us know just how much our customers want to keep their gci.net email addresses.”

“We value your feedback and have decided not to take any action that would discontinue the use of GCI-hosted email accounts,” company officials said.

The decision rolls back a plan reported by the Anchorage Daily News last summer to close more than 40,000 customer email accounts. The July announcement drew a backlash from customers, some of whom had relied on GCI accounts for decades.

The company later announced that it was reconsidering the decision, imposing a temporary $4.99 monthly fee for email accounts as it studied alternatives to a shutdown. That fee will now be permanent, officials said in Wednesday’s statement.

GCI officials didn’t immediately respond Tuesday morning to a request for comment on the decision.

According to the statement, GCI email accounts closed since the shutdown announcement can’t be reopened.

Artificial Intelligence or AI technology is advancing faster than most people can keep up. That includes small business owners in Alaska. The Alaska Small Business Development Center has a new resource center aimed at familiarizing businesses with AI tools.

Jon Bittner is the director of the new center.

Listen:

Ava White: Jon, what prompted you to start this center?

Jon Bittner: A lot of things. Artificial intelligence technology has been around for a while, but recent changes in its accessibility really meant that it was being implemented by a lot of different people really rapidly. We had several people on our staff that were very interested in trying to explore some of those opportunities and we decided to run with it.

Ava White: What do you see as the potential for AI use for small businesses in Alaska?

Jon Bittner: It’s helpful for people to contextualize this as something similar to the creation of the personal computer or the home printer or cellular technology. It doesn’t solve any one simple problem. It solves a host of problems. So you can use it for marketing, you can use it for business development, you can use it for data, generating new images and things like it really is pretty ubiquitous at this point.

Ava White: What kind of challenges do Alaskan small businesses face specifically that you think AI technology can help with?

Jon Bittner: Absolutely. I’ve been doing business and economic development in Alaska for a long time. What you realize pretty quickly is that a lot of the barriers to business have been around for even longer, decades. It’s a lack of workforce, high operating cost, lack of access to technical skill sets, things like that, particularly in rural communities. I think AI has the potential to help with all of these. You can really up your efficiency, you can get access to certain levels of technology and professional services that you couldn’t get otherwise. I think it’s going to be a real game changer, honestly. The big thing is how you interact with it, you don’t need to be a coder, you can just talk to it, like we’re talking right now. And you can generate really advanced responses.

Ava White: What do you think small businesses need to be thinking about in terms of balancing the use of AI while maintaining human interaction with customers?

Jon Bittner: I think that it’s good to look at AI as sort of a supplement to what you do. I wouldn’t recommend just letting AI handle all your customer interactions, I don’t think that’s a good idea. But it can help when you’re dealing with customers on the front end, it can help drive them to the right place. You can embed AI driven bots on your website to make sure that they’re not wasting a lot of time and insights that they don’t need. It can help you develop better management for your social media platforms and your outreach and your marketing, identifying who your market is. As technology is changing so fast, I think it’s really important to just try and be open to understanding what’s happening there and being ready to take advantage of it when something comes along that you can use.

Ava White: The state has seen a drop in the working-aged population and it’s expected to continue declining through 2030. You touched on it a little bit, but can you talk more about how the AI resource center might help businesses deal with the employee shortage?

Jon Bittner: I think that one of the easiest ways that it’s going to address that is through greater efficiency. We use it a lot in our own offices for helping to generate emails, helping to generate online content, we let it write one of our newsletters one month, that was a lot of fun. Really, where we’re seeing the most implementation is in letting AI do the things that none of us have ever liked to do, the repetitive grindy time consuming tasks so that we can focus on the things that we do like to do, figuring out the broader picture, actually implementing things that come out launching businesses, deploying capital, as opposed to writing endless proposals or writing, all sorts of things that just take a lot of time. And nobody really reads anymore. It’s like the terms and conditions on new software. I mean, somebody had to write that, but maybe three people on the planet ever read it.

Ava White: AI can be intimidating. What’s your pitch to small business owners in terms of overcoming any fears they might have?

Jon Bittner: Our recommendation is to start small. The good news is, there are no special skills required here. I mean, you can train yourself to get better results, but anybody can jump into numerous AI platforms that are free. The more you use it, I think, the more you’ll realize, ‘oh, this isn’t a scary technology, but it is a technology that is going to deeply impact a lot of aspects of our lives.’

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