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Ben & Jerry's is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Unilever, which is responsible for all business decisions, and appoints its own independent board of directors. All of Ben & Jerry's profits go to Unilever. Ben & Jerry's did not respond to requests for comment.

Crunchy Brand, Competitive World
Ever since Ben & Jerry's was bought by Unilever for $326 million in 2000, the ice-cream maker has struggled to maintain its crunchy image amid competitive business practices.

Founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (who tried to prevent the buyout) no longer hold management positions, remaining involved solely as brand ambassadors. Executive salaries -- once capped at seven times the salary of the lowest paid employee -- are now undisclosed. And the company's 2009 commitment to fair trade ingredients proved a struggle to implement under Unilever's oversight, as the founders revealed to the Financial Times.

Ultimately, Unilever OK'd fair trade for Ben & Jerry's, deciding that "a more sustainable brand is often a more desirable brand," a spokesman told The New York Times later that year. The brand is now in the process of sourcing fair trade ingredients for all its U.S. products, a project it hopes to have completed by 2013.

Protest vs. Profit

Ben & Jerry's progressive and independent image remains essential to its success as a brand, says Tom Zara, the Global Practice Leader of Corporate Citizenship at Interbrand.

"Ben & Jerry's is about celebrating individuality, self expression, and the political process in its good, bad, and ugly forms ... It's very much in its DNA to participate in what is a modern version of Woodstock," he explains.

Occupy Wall Street is only the company's most recent cause. Ben & Jerry's has released flavors like "Something's Fishy," in protest of FDA approval of genetically engineered salmon, and "Yes, Pecan!", after Barack Obama's election. It has also moved to use cage-free eggs in its ice cream, and pays workers at its Vermont plant a "living wage" significantly above the state minimum.

But rarely have Ben & Jerry's activist endorsements directly conflicted with the practices of its parent company. While the nebulous demands of Occupy Wall Street make it hard to define specific points of disagreement, the lobbying money spent by Unilever seems inconsistent with the message posted on Ben & Jerry's website Saturday.

"Unilever respects the unique social mission of Ben & Jerry's and the independence of its board in speaking out on social issues," the Unilever spokesperson told DailyFinance.

According to Zara, allowing Ben & Jerry autonomy in branding itself as anti-establishment and associating with the protest is ultimately in Unilever's interest. "While as the owner [Unilever] has the license to do anything it wants with Ben & Jerry's ... the unique brand is a quantifiable contribution to the bottom line," he says. "The asset they bought would diminish in value if they were to change it."

In other words, endorsements of protests can turn into profit.

Still, some Occupiers defend their favorite ice cream brand, maintaining that its interest in the protest is genuine despite possible benefit to Unilever.

For Jules Caldarera, the protester from New Mexico, Ben & Jerry's giveaway reminded her of its pre-corporate past. "I don't think it's a marketing scheme," she says. "Ben & Jerry's cares about the cause and are donating real support in the form of food."

"They're not like the Democratic party," she added.

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Passed by a divided government during the Reagan administration, the Federal WARN law of 1988 is widely considered a weak piece of legislation, say René Roupinian and Jack Raisner of Outten & Golden LLP. Their firm represented workers in the Charlie Brown's case and in an ongoing WARN lawsuit against Jevic Transportation, which, like Friendly's, is a Sun Capital company.

New York's 2009 WARN Act, passed in response to the surge of mass layoffs during the economic crisis, prohibits companies from downsizing more than 25 full-time employees from a single site without at least 90 days notice. Friendly's laid off roughly 120 employees at six locations in New York.

With roughly 20 employees per location -- the number fluctuates seasonally -- it's unclear if any of the closed Friendly's in New York might be on the edge of a WARN Act violation. Thus far, no former employees have taken legal action.

Gallery: From Bohemian to Boardroom-Ready

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Malls and churches may seem like an strange combination, like Auntie Annie's pretzels washed down with communion wine. Still, over the past decade, congregations in Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, and Colorado, among others, have taken advantage of cheap suburban retail space to expand.

Store Purgatory; Seeker Paradise

As malls across the country empty out, it's no wonder their remains are being scavenged. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, a third of America's indoor malls are currently in "financial distress." Retailers are leaving indoor and strip malls for popular outdoor "lifestyle centers," those cutesy, mixed-use developments that resemble the Main Streets their predecessors helped destroy.

Meanwhile, it is no news that Protestant churches in the American suburbs are growing and franchising. The Hartford Institute for Religious Research defines a megachurch as a Protestant congregation with more than 2,000 members, and estimates that their numbers have grown from 350 to more than 1,200 since since 1993.

Most of the churches DailyFinance identified that reside in malls or former malls fit the Institute's description. According to its 2008 survey, which got responses from about a third of the nation's megachurches, most practice a generic form of evangelism, view themselves as contemporary, and regularly adjust worship styles to meet demand. While individual church practices vary, many are "seeker friendly" in that they use technology, pop music, and relatable sermon topics to reach non-churchgoers.

Looking conventional isn't a priority for many of these churches, either. As Lead Executive Pastor Chris Hahn of Southland Christian Church in Lexington, Ky., explained, "We don't want to seem intimidating. We want to convey welcoming, inviting space to anyone, including those who feel like the traditional church may have disappointed them."

Southlands (a 9,000-plus member church famous for its "Jesus Loves You" letters to Britney Spears during her bald period) is currently renovating the two-story Dillards (DDS) department store in the empty Lexington Mall. The building will become its third satellite campus, a modern structure of glass and steel that will look more like a college science department building than a church. Southlands had raised $18 million from its congregation for the renovation as of November 2010.


God's (City) Plan

South Park still looks like a mall today, but one where the stores are all religiously themed. Summer Grove Baptist Church, a 162-year-old congregation, jumped at the opportunity to buy the nearly empty million-square-foot mall for a mere $3 million in 2005.

After renovating the old J.C. Penny's (JCP) into a worship hall and adding a steeple, Summer Grove converted the remaining stores into church "ministries," or stations for community outreach. Where once there were stores and restaurants, now one finds counseling services, banquet halls, classrooms, a cancer center, a food bank, a daycare, a charity clothing store and (soon) a nonprofit pharmacy. Summer Grove has also donated spaces to the local school board and sheriff's office. Today, the mall is full again, says Dr. Quinn Nyman, minister and director of counseling at Summer Grove.

While Summer Grove isn't a glitzy new church with multiple campuses, "it has always been on the cutting edge," says Nyman. "Our older members remember meeting in a circus tent for two years while another location was being built. They know how much fun and good memories there are when something like that happens."

The only retail business still hanging at South Park on is the Burlington Coat Factory, which remains open in its anchor location, though not connected to the rest of the mall. Burlington had a long-term lease, Nyman explains, so Summer Grove set up a private LLC to charge the department store rent. As nonprofits, churches don't pay taxes. However, they're allowed to operate unrelated income-producing businesses that report revenue and pay taxes separately.

Cities like Shreveport lose property tax revenue when churches move into big retail spaces. Still, this is less than they would probably spend chasing crime from enormous, derelict buildings.

"There used to be a lot of crime in the area," Nyman says. "It's gone down so much since we moved in it's unbelievable."

Church, Inc.?

There is some data to go on, though: According to the 2008 Hartford Institute survey, 47% of megachurch income typically goes to employee salaries and benefits, compared to 13% for missions and benevolence. According to Leadership Network, a Christian nonprofit, pastor salaries in megachurches can reach as high as $400,000 a year. The IRS monitors salaries and specifically prohibits shareholder-like pay for ministers and church employees. Still, popular personalities regularly command higher salaries.

Churches maintain that monetary growth is just a means to the end of gaining new converts, not the other way around. On its website, Southland writes: "Some say, 'We don't need more churches. We're only draining the rolls of other churches.' Our hope is that we're draining the rolls of hell. More locations provide more opportunity for evangelism."

For churches like Southland, paintball courts and letters to Britney are ultimately good because they help bring more people to God. Malls, similarly, are tools that bring in more members. But at what point does embracing commercial culture change one's religious message? While holding services in a renovated Dillards might not affect how worshipers see Jesus, giving away flat screen TVs and cars to new attendees as prizes on an Easter Sunday "egg hunt" probably does. (The hunt, hosted by Bay Area Fellowship of Corpus Cristi, TX, also served as a casting call for a new season of MTV's reality show "Made.")

Even when they become shells of their former selves, malls' pasts never completely disappear, as Summer Grove's recycled mall Christmas decorations suggest. Whether you fasten on a steeple or add a glass facade, Americans remember malls as childhood fantasy lands, where they could meet Santa Claus and play with any toy. Perhaps it's not a bad bet, then, that as adults, they might come back to meet Jesus.

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