Zale Corporation

The Zale Corporation is a United States jewelry retailer, incorporated in Delaware in 1993. The principal executive offices are located in Irving, Texas.

History

Early years

The company began in 1924 in Wichita Falls, Texas, when Morris (M. B.) Zale, William Zale, and Ben Lipshy opened the first Zales Jewelers store. As a marketing strategy, the Zale brothers instituted a credit plan whereby customers could pay "a penny down and a dollar a week," making jewelry and other merchandise affordable for the average working American. The success of this credit policy led to the company expanding to a total of 12 stores in Oklahoma and Texas by 1941.

Zales Jewelers moved its headquarters from Wichita Falls to Dallas in 1946.

Shopping malls

In 1957, Zales Jewelers broadened its reach, opening the first store in a shopping center—a major shift from operating only in downtown locations. The same year, Zales announced the initial public offering of its stock (ZLC) and began trading its public shares on the American Stock Exchange in 1958. In 1989, Zale acquired Gordon Jewelry.

Zale (disambiguation)

Zale or Zales may refer to:

Zale (moth)

Zale is a genus of moths in the Erebidae family.

Species

Zale meriata

Ape

Apes (Hominoidea) are a branch of Old World tailless anthropoid catarrhine primates native to Africa and Southeast Asia. They are distinguished from other primates by a wider degree of freedom of motion at the shoulder joint as evolved by the influence of brachiation. There are two extant branches of the superfamily Hominoidea: the gibbons, or lesser apes; and the hominids, or great apes.

Xanthosoma

Xanthosoma is a genus of flowering plants in the arum family, Araceae. The genus is native to tropical America but widely cultivated and naturalized in other tropical regions. Several are grown for their starchy corms, an important food staple of tropical regions, known variously as malanga, otoy, otoe, cocoyam (or new cocoyam), tannia, tannier, yautía, macabo, ocumo, macal, taioba, dasheen, quequisque, ʻape and (in Papua New Guinea) as Singapore taro (taro kongkong). Many other species (including especially X. roseum) are used as ornamental plants, and in popular horticultural literature are known as ‘ape or elephant ear (from the purported resemblance of the leaf to an elephant's ear), although the latter name is sometimes also applied to members with similar appearance and uses in the closely related genera Caladium, Colocasia (i.e., taro), and Alocasia. The leaves of most Xanthosoma species are 40-200 cm long, sagittate (arrowhead-shaped) or subdivided into three or as many as 18 segments. Unlike the leaves of Colocasia, those of Xanthosoma are usually not peltate- the upper v-notch extends into the point of attachment of the leaf petiole to the blade.

Monkey's Audio

Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Monkey's Audio does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as AAC, MP3, Vorbis and Musepack.

Data file compression is employed in order to reduce bandwidth, file transfer time, or storage requirements. A digital recording (such as a CD) encoded to the Monkey's Audio format can be decompressed into an identical copy of the original audio data. As with the FLAC and Apple Lossless format, files encoded to Monkey's Audio are typically reduced to about half of the original size, with data transfer rates and bandwidth requirements being reduced accordingly.

Monkey's Audio's advantages are better compression rates compared to FLAC and WavPack, as well as multithreading/multicore support. Monkey's Audio main drawbacks are the fact that it employs a symmetric algorithm, meaning the decoding takes comparable resources to encoding, which makes it unsuitable for all but the fastest portable players (via Rockbox firmware), and that it has limited support on software platforms other than Windows; on other platforms only decoding is officially supported by third-party programs. Although the original source code is freely available, the license is not considered to be an open source one. A GPL version of the decoder has been independently written for Rockbox and then included in ffmpeg.