Category Archives: Economics

Still no such thing as a free lunch

Economics, News, Politics, , , , , , , , , ,

Some moron running for senate in Georgia thinks he has a great idea to, well, I don’t really know what it would solve, but like usual, a House Representative in Georgia, who wants to rise in power, thinks it’s a really good idea to put school children to work to earn their “free lunches.” Basically, U.S.Representative Jack Kingston thinks it would be really nifty for the poor to put them to work sweeping up cafeterias for their lunch money, because somehow this would instill in them the idea that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you think about it, he’s advocating a legal fix to an old adage that doesn’t actually have a lot of connection to anyone’s reality.

The obvious counter to this whole situation is this belief that somehow this is going to make poor kids feel like they’ve “earned” their lunch. No kid pays for his or her own lunch at that age, or at least very few do, because no kids have their own money at that age. Their parents give them money, so they aren’t learning money management skills. They’re learning that their parents have money, or they’re learning that their parents have no money. That’s really the lesson that gets taught here no matter how some Republican Neanderthal wants to spin it.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. Well, it’s not really a secret, but I grew up dirt poor. My mom was uneducated and my dad split when I was too young to ever know him. So my mom worked crap jobs and was basically too uneducated (and proud) to take government handouts. She probably should have. It didn’t help that she was sick and then went blind in one eye. She tried and that’s really all that’s important.

So, at one point I was put on discount lunches. Somehow, even though our apartment was overrun with cockroaches on a daily basis and our neighbors were crack addicts and prostitutes, we were too well off to get full free lunches. So, my mom had to pay a certain amount of money and then got discounted lunches for me when I went to school.

Let me tell you about those discounts. They gave you a special paper card that you had to present each and every time you presented for lunch, and the system was so obviously designed to point out that you were using this card, which meant that every other kid looked at you when you were presenting it, and I can’t tell you how bad kids are at making someone feel like shit in some weird process of making themselves feel better about themselves. It was humiliating every time I had to present that card and then pay my token of the discount I was allowed to pay. There were many times when I skipped lunch because it was easier to not eat than to have to go through that process each and every time at lunch.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that Representative Kingston never had to go through that experience when he was growing up. And I’ll bet that not once has one of his children ever had to go through such a thing just to get a stupid lunch meal. That sort of thing scars you for a long time, and even in my middle age these days, I have never forgot how it felt to have to present that stupid card when I was at that age.

And that’s the problem with a lot of our representatives who think they actually represent people they serve. Edmund Burke argued a long time ago that he could “represent” miners in his district even though he’s never been a miner because he knows what’s best for them. He was wrong then, and Kingston is wrong today. I’m sure there’s a special place in Goddess Hell where Kingston has to ask for a school lunch each and every day and is told that no, he must starve because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

It’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving

Business, Economics, Healthcare, Memoirs, , , , , , , , ,

Years ago, I used to work for a hotel that loved good publicity. It would volunteer for neighborhood “giving” things, and then recruits its employees to provide the ground work for what needed to happen. And then it would release a big press release about how much that hotel was doing for the community.

One of the employee “perks” of working for that large hotel chain was that on every Thanksgiving the hotel would give a turkey to each employee before that holiday. It was a nice thing, and if you had a family, or could cook a turkey, it was probably a great benefit. I worked for that company for seven years, and five years in I realized that each year they gave away a turkey, I never took one because I basically had no family and no way to actually cook it. So, it would have been a waste of food. But on that fifth year, I had a new idea. I was going to give my turkey to a food shelter so other people could benefit from the free item I was given.

As I told other people about this, I started to discover how many people didn’t have families of their own, and how many of them turned down the turkey each year on Thanksgiving because they had nothing to do with it. So, they started asking me if they could give their turkeys to me and then have me donate them to the food shelter I was going to give mine to. In a few short days, I had the promise of 25 turkeys from random people at work who told other people who then contacted me. When the givaway occurred, I realized I had a bit of a problem because I really had no ability to carry 25 turkeys home with me, or any place to store them for several days before I would be able to deliver them. So, I contacted one of the main kitchen executives, and he gave me access to a freezer for the time being so I could store this bounty.

Then I got onto the phone and started calling food banks, before realizing that unless you’re a “donor” they know, they’re sometimes not all that interested in someone giving them free food. Finally, I found a San Francisco food kitchen that was in desperate need of this sort of thing, and I arranged to deliver it to them.

The day I pulled up my station wagon to the loading dock to load all of these turkeys, I was met in the loading dock by a minion from the human resources department., She wanted to know what I was doing with all of these turkeys. After I explained it to her, she indicated that these turkeys were for employees, and that I had no permission from the hotel to be doing what I was doing. I explained that these turkeys were given to me by employees who wanted them to go to some place where they would be of use. She was adamant that this had to be approved by higher ups. The guys in the loading dock ignored her and loaded up my car with the turkeys and then allowed me to leave. When I returned to work on Monday morning, I was subsequently written up by someone in human resources for subordination, which ended up being dissolved after a union rep was brought in to dispute the charge.

The next year, no less than 40 people approached me about donating turkeys, even though I didn’t even say I was going to do it that year. As I started coordinating the activity, another person from human resources had me called into her office where she explained to me that if it wasn’t a hotel function, designed by hotel HR, then it was not my option to do. I explained that these turkeys were given to employees, which meant they could do anything they waned with them. She explained that if the hotel wasn’t getting credit for its charity, then I was to cease this activity immediately. I said no, as this wasn’t really her choice to make. We never came to an agreement.

I stopped working there the next year and went back to school, but let’s just say that it taught me an important lesson when it comes to HR and corporations. I’ll let you figure out what that lesson was.

Fast forward to now, and I now work for a hospital system that loves its publicity (sound familiar). It constantly reveals how loved it is in the community to which it serves, and it often calls on its employees to make it appear even better. An example I find eye-opening is its yearly United Way campaign. Every year, expensively produced materials are given to every employee to assist them in making the maximum contribution they can. What I find interesting is that one of the very attractive women I work with who NEVER speaks to me on a daily basis, actually starts speaking to me right before she approaches me to “give” to the United Way campaign because she is the department’s spokesperson and her success in getting signatures is part of how she is perceived to management.

Now, I have personal problems with the United Way that are irrelevant to the discussion, but let’s just say that due to my experiences with them, I do not contribute to them. I do contribute to other places. Just not them. But the place where I work feels it is important for maximum contributions and consistently overplays how important it is that each employee contribute. One such appeal came the other day from a corporate VP who felt that employees weren’t giving enough, so he was opening up the time to give for longer than originally planned. All I kept thinking was “you know, this guy makes so much money that he could probably make up the need that he wants all by himself, but I bet he’s not interested because he’s only giving a certain amount that will be represented by a certain percentage of what he can claim on his taxes this year.” Or something like that.

When this whole campaign is over, the place where I work will claim victory and won’t actually say “Our employees were so great because they gave this much money to the United Way.” Instead, the expensively printed materials will indicate that the place where I work reached its goals and provided a certain amount of money to the United Way. Again, it may just be semantics, but those semantics are why I tend to avoid corporate giving in most instances. It’s almost always about the corporation, not about the people who work for that organization. Sure, they’ll have a nice little memo that goes out to the employees, but when it comes to the real recognition, they’ll take full credit and bask in the glory.

That’s why I say it’s not really charity if you want credit for your giving. When I gave away those turkeys, the recipient who off loaded them wanted to know who she should give credit, even trying to figure out who to make out  receipt, and I just stared at her dumbfounded, revealing that I did it because people were hungry and I had extra food. What more needed to be said than that?

Amazon’s Business Practices Discriminate Against the “Out of Money” Class

Business, Economics, , , , ,
Often, us poor people have to live in places like this, such as my Summer resort, where cable isn't fee!
Often, us poor people have to live in places like this, such as my Summer retreat, where cable isn’t fee!

Today, I was thinking of buying a book that I don’t really need, but for some reason felt I had to have it right then and there. So, I went onto Amazon’s site, put in the information for the book and found out that I could purchase it used for $7.54. I went through the full process of buying, but when it came to the last stage (well, the stage before I give my address to send it to), I was halted by a statement indicating that my credit card could not process the transaction. So I immediately checked my checking account and discovered that my balance was 32 cents. So I then went back to Amazon, realizing that my bank had no more funds in my account and tried to figure out how they could accommodate me.

It turns out that Amazon has no contingency plan for those who do not have enough money to afford their products. In other words, I was proverbially screwed.

This immediately inflamed me because all companies should have resources in place to assist those of us who are “financially challenged”, which, according to an Internet search I just did that brought up lots of lesbian pornography, I discovered that the financially challenged are quite often the most overlooked disenfranchised class of people in American society. It’s almost as if businesses think that people need to “work” for the things they wish to buy and aren’t too proud to not say so.

So, I contacted several loser friends of mine to inquire whether or not they have ever been discriminated like this before, and four of those five friends indicated they had (the fifth could not answer as he was suffering from a severe case of “Cheetos-overimbibing”). I was shocked to discover this was not just an isolated incident.

This has inflamed me to no end, and I decided that I would send out the word to everyone that these practices must be stopped immediately, or we would use our financial clout in massive protest and show them that without our inability to pay for goods backing up their company, they’d…um…um, you know maybe I haven’t thought this through enough.

Let me get back to you, and when I do, boy am I going to have something for you to rally behind!

So what does the sequester mean for the rest of us?

Business, Economics, Politics, , , , , ,
Sometiimes you have to back up your words
Sometiimes you have to back up your words

I keep reading, hearing and watching doom and gloom stories about how the apocalypse is now upon us because of the sequester. A few weeks out, it was warnings of all government services suddenly stopping on Saturday morning. When that didn’t make much of a dent in everyone’s day, we started hearing about how the Defense Department would have to stop giving out guns and issue recycled plastic sporks to soldiers instead, the homeless would be fed turf grass, and our income tax returns wouldn’t be returned to us until the Year 2375.

Then Friday happened, the two parties couldn’t come to an agreement, and then the apocalypse came upon us. The news stories around then seemed to all have the same point: “The other guys are being really mean to the good guys, and now the world is at an end.”

Now, I understand the whole desire to blame the other guys; we’ve been doing that sort of thing as long as we were old enough to point fingers at other people. One thing we never really learned was how to stop pointing fingers and just get things done. This would be easy if we didn’t have a government that’s so two-sided that they are completely incapable of coming up with compromise. The funny thing is: In Morris Fiorina’s must read book (if you were doing a Ph.d in political science it was, in fact, a must read book), Divided Government, having a government where one side wasn’t in charge (which is what we have now) is the greatest thing ever because that means both sides compromise and work out solutions that benefit the most people. Unfortunately, it hasn’t looked that way for about a decade now, and I don’t perceive it going back to the way things were before. Hell, even Fiorina turned around last election and heralded Ron Paul as a solution to our problems, basically throwing his lot in with someone who had zero chance of winning whatsoever. If our main political scientists have given up on both sides, it can’t mean good things for the Republic.

But right now, we’re in sequester land, which means Monday morning a lot of sober people are going to have to look at the government they’re leading and realize it is going nowhere very fast. Does that mean we’ll start to see compromise, or will it be more of this zero sum crap we keep seeing all of the time where one side has to lose so the other side can win? Instead of governance, we get kids in the playground laughing at the handicapped kids because they haven’t been taught that’s inappropriate.

There are some real issues that need to be worked out, but probably never will because the people who have to work them out are rich, out of touch with the population and more interested in being reelected than they are in making things better. What they don’t realize is that there aren’t two sides to this problem; there are three: The Republicans, the Democrats and then everyone else who has to actually fund these two sides in their esteemed places in government. That third party (the people themselves) often is seen as only signficant when it comes to elections. Otherwise, they’re mostly ignored and spit on the rest of the time.

It should be interesting to see where things go from here.

Our Constitutional rights are decided in the strangest places

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When it comes to the rights of men and women in the United States, quite often the very limitations of those rights are fought in the strangest of places. When it comes to freedom of speech, some of those rights were decided by the Supreme Court when analyzing whether or not pornography should be authorized as a version of “speech and expressioin”. The right to protest was decided by a case involving someone who burned an American flag. Now, taxation is being argued in an equally unlikely place: A strip club called Nite Moves.

Nite Moves argues that its exotic dancers are conducting performance art, and therefore, are not subject to sales tax, because that is a right under its state tax laws if the act can be construed as “art”.

Now, if I didn’t know the “adult” entertainment business as well as I do (I’ve talked before about how I used to design web sites for that industry back when web pages were new), I’d say this is a great battle, and that it’s about time there was a movement to represent women who are often exploited (by both customers, and unfortunately, their employers), but in reality, I’m not convinced that the company involved is looking out for the interests of their dancers rather than their own bottom lines. Unfortunately, that business model has always been that way. This is one of those industries (and I’m not talking about Nite Moves, specifically, as I don’t know their personal business model) where quite often the female workers (who do all of the work that actually attracts customers) are treated as independent contractors for any reasons that benefit the management and as employees when it benefits the management. Let me explain an example: When it comes to taxation, the business holds the girls as independent contractors so they’re not paying taxes on their intake (and other such little schemes), but when it comes to paying them a required minimum wage, they’re independent contractors who are not obligated to pay, legalized employee rights, health care and sick pay. Yet, they’ll be required to come to work on specific days, work specific hours and do specific employee-like things. One of the biggest gimmicks these types of companies do is charge the girls a performance charge (or skim from their profits somehow), so they can’t work unless they pay rent on the stage or something like that.

Sadly enough, this is the kind of atmosphere where this Constitutional fight will take place. Now, if Nite Moves is nothing like I just said, that’s great. Unfortunately, these rights will be fought for the many disreputable companies out there that are that way, and that’s unfortunate, but that’s how many of our rights first make it into the legal process.

Personally, I think lap dancing is one of the greatest forms of both art because it involves not only dancing but acting. The dancing makes sense (regardless of whether or not it’s actually great dancing or just gyrating on a guy’s crotch until the time is up), but the acting is a little overlooked by the industry at large. I would imagine that a young woman has to be one of the greatest actresses around to act like she’s really enjoying giving a lap dance to some loser that equates his interactions with women by how many dollar bills he carried into the strip joint (honestly, I have no idea what the going rate these days is for this, so if it helps the post by replacing “dollar bills” with “twenty dollar bills” I’m fine with that, too.

What is the rationale for charging the poor more than everyone else?

Business, Economics, News, , , ,

I was dropping off a friend of mine at a car repair place on the other side of town last night when I decided to pick up some McDonald’s chicken mcnuggets on the way home. I’d never stopped at any place in this neighborhood before, but this was one of those ethnically diverse areas where most of the signs were in Spanish, bordering on an African-American-based population area. This was the kind of area where a lot of economically struggling families live, although not so bad a neighborhood as to constitute a fear for anyone visiting the neighborhood. 

I’m a creature of habit. I tend to buy the same thing constantly, so the meal I always get costs me $6.46 at the McDonald’s I normally frequent. This time, however, the charge came to $6.66. For some reason, a few miles from the other McDonald’s, my cost was twenty cents more than what it normally cost me. I paid it, but it left me thinking, why is the charge more here than in the nicer area where I normally get my food? 

It’s not like the people in this area can afford more. Economically, they are less well off than the people who frequent the McDonald’s in my neighborhood. Yet, because they are figuratively in a completely different universe than the other McDonald’s, the pricing is completely different. 

I remember when I lived in San Francisco, and I worked at the Hilton downtown. The people at the Hilton liked to say they were in the “financial district”. In reality, they were in the Tenderloin, one of the lowest of the economic areas in San Francisco. 

Across the street from the hotel, I used to grab a carton of milk every day. It was one of those habit things where I never thought much about it. However, one day, I was a paying more attention than usual, and I noticed that the Arabic clerk always looked at a sheet of tax prices that was centered under a glass sheet on the main counter. My milk cost 99 cents, but the clerk looked on his list and then told me my price for the milk (with tax) was now $1.35. Right then and there, I thought, wait, nowhere in the country is the local sales tax 36 percent. NOWHERE. So, I inquired about this. The clerk said, “tax.” I informed him that 36 percent is outrageous. 

His response wasn’t “Wow, you’re right” and then charged me the correct amount. Instead, he took the milk out of the bag and proceeded to kick me out of his store. When I protested, I actually saw his hand moving towards a spot under the counter, where I noticed there was a revolver. Taking my losses, I left the store. 

What this taught me is that there’s an outright intent to screw people over whenever you can. In the Tenderloin district, I suspect that store owners figure the people are too stupid to realize they’re being cheated, and they’re dimed and quartered (as opposed to being nickle and dimed) endlessly. 

So, what are your thoughts? Is this capitalism at its norm? Is this corruption? Or do people just generally not care because it’s happening to the poor, and they’re supposed to be victims any way?

The Problem with Investing in Imaginary Goods

Business, Economics, News, Social Networking, , , , , , , ,

Today, Zynga’s stock kind of went into a tailspin downwards. Zynga, in case you’re not aware, is famous for building software that used to consist of games you could play specifically on Facebook. Then they went public, making lots of money and continued to try to make games (sometimes in Facebook and sometimes outside of it). At the time of their IPO, all I could think to myself was “this is a company that doesn’t really make anything that’s profitable.” Their profit comes from trying to get people to pay for virtual goods IN A FREE ONLINE GAME. While pay for play works in some venues, like MMO’s like City of Heroes and Lord of the Rings Online, people didn’t go to Zynga because they were interested in playing a specific game. Zynga, on the other hand, tries to interest people in their site and THEN trying to get them to play some of their games. And then if that works, they try to get them to pay money for the game they’re already getting for free.

Does anyone see a problem here?

Well, their stock is continuing to go down, mainly because their “hits” are very old, and they’ve never really done anything to convince potential customers that they have something just as good. Farmville was their famous property, and even though I played it at the time, I never invested a dime in the game, and after I grew bored with it, I stopped playing it and anything else Zynga had to offer.

Facebook, however, has been interlinked with Zynga since the beginning. Facebook gets a bit of profit from anything that Zynga makes from its transactions.

Which means I should probably talk about Facebook, too. This is another online company that has absolutely no value whatseover. Basically, it’s value is to get people to sign on and then tell other people who are signed on what they’re doing. Facebook offers nothing other than being the park bench where people are sitting.

When Facebook went public, it was already feared that there was no real revenue stream available from the company. All it really did was advertise, and it doesn’t do it very well. In its early days, I paid for an ad to sell one of my books on their site, and the results were horribly bad. I never paid for the service again. Instead, I got much better returns from places like Goodreads.com. Facebook, as people have started to realize, has a customer base that shows up, looks at traffic and then goes away. Some stay online forever, but they NEVER press any of the buttons that take them to the ads. In other words, Facebook has absolutely no revenue stream whatsoever when it comes to advertisements. The only way they could make money is to charge people for using the service, but once they did that, their service would become a graveyard.

This is the problem with companies that sell imaginary goods. Some, like Lord of the Rings Online, which actually offers something tangible (a lot of fun and a strong customer base that has remained with them for years, first as paying customers), Facebook and Zynga offer nothing really tangible. Zynga doesn’t even offer very good games. They’re casual games, which means that they’re meant to be played as you’re doing something else. Think of their games as almost an afterthought. Whereas, Lord of the Rings Online is a game meant to be played with your full attention.

Facebook, as well, offers nothing but a place for people to report their happenings. If you’re not a celebrity, chances are pretty good that not a lot of people (aside from really close friends and maybe family) really care. Even Google Plus, which does appeal mainly to following celebrities, isn’t all that popular, no matter how much Google wishes that weren’t so.

Facebook has a few days until its reckoning emerges. You see, they have to reveal to stockholders just how well they’re doing. I suspect they’re not doing well. With Zynga’s loss reported today, it’s only a matter of time before we hear that Facebook isn’t doing any better. And then their stock is going to go down really fast.

It’s unfortunate, but then we’re dealing with companies that have no actual value, other than perceived value and fantasies of being more than they really are. I like to think that their value is comparable to my ability to date Jessica Alba. Sure, it’s very possible it might happen, but she’s really an imaginary good (a really, really GOOD good), but the reality of my dating her is pretty dismal. That’s how I see Facebook and Zynga. Slowly, I’m noticing more and more people are starting to feel the same way.

Talking About Student Loans Is Pandering; Doing Something About Student Loans Is Progress

Business, Economics, Education, Politics, , , , , ,

The latest appeal to the votes of young people involves the student loan crisis. President Obama has started to “talk” about student loans to show that he’s paying attention to young people issues. Mitt Romney is talking about student loans to show that he’s not overlooking the issue either. Students (or former students with debt) are thinking, hey, they’re finally paying attention to an issue that’s near and dear to me.

Fact: They’re not. In fact, what both the president and his opponent are doing is called pandering. Pandering is when someone talks about an issue that is important to people, but in reality, they’re not actually going to do anything substantial about it. They might, if forced into a corner, make some minor stride, but when pandering, the point is to show that you care without actually really caring.

Obama mentioned yesterday that he just recently paid off his student loans. So young people should understand that he “feels” your pain. No, he doesn’t. He’s a one percenter who is filthy rich and will never have to worry about paying off a loan again in his lifetime. He mentioned he paid off his loans 8 years ago. 8 years ago, he was in the Senate, which meant he was in a position that allowed him almost unlimited access to the abilty to paying off his debt. THAT is how he paid off his student loans. Not through some great government assistance that came to his rescue. Unless you consider that government assistance to be a position in the Senate.

And Romney talking about student loans is just a filthy rich billionaire who doesn’t give a flying crap about people in debt. He made his money off of other people, and when people do that, they don’t care about the struggles of others, especially when your company that made you rich makes a mint off of people who are struggling anyway.

What’s of more concern here is the fact that so many of us are overwhelmed with student loan debt that we may never be able to pay off in our lifetimes. Generally, the response of the rest of society (usually from people who are well off and have never had to really suffer under any real debt) is that it’s all our own fault for going into debt, that we’re a bunch of lazy young people who need to go get a job, or some other innane banter that unravels once you actually start thinking about it.

Neither President Obama nor Citizen Romney have any intentions of doing anything to upset the apple cart of student loan debt that so many banks are profiting off these days. Government looks after the wealthy and the banks, not students or common citizens. Instead, government panders to the common people, throws them table scraps and then pretends they really care.

Expect more of this kind of drivel leading up to the Election of 2012. Neither Congress nor the President is going to enact anything that really helps students. Keeping a loan rate at a lower interest rate ISN’T assisting anyone in any great way as the debt still exists, the balance continues to increase, and nothing actually got any better. It’s just more of the same, kind of like “keeping Bush’s tax cuts” is somehow supposed to “create jobs” by doing exactly what we’ve been doing before when somehow that wasn’t leading to the creation of jobs in the past, but is somehow going to lead to a surplus of jobs that logical economics can’t seem to figure out how to make happen.

What would solve the student loan problem? Mass forgiveness of debt, kind of like people have been advocating for forclosures, which are forgiven through bankruptcy. The problem with student loan debt is that bankruptcy does NOTHING to assist someone. If you fall under, you fall under for life, and you’ll never get back out under it because the lobbyist groups that put our government people in power were on the side of banks that wanted to screw over students with student loan debt. Think about this for a moment. You can gamble away every cent you might ever borrow from a bank and be forgiven, but if one dime of that was in student loan debt, you’re screwed. As long as that one issue remains, no politician is ever going to help out the little guy. Why not? Because they honestly don’t care.

If they tell you they do care, they’re pandering. Remember that because no one else is going to tell you that. Instead, the media will tell us what a great job both sides are doing at “caring about” the problem by doing absolutely nothing but painting over the broken foundation.

Why Don’t Banks Seem to Care When Their Customers Are Fraudulently Targeted?

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I was a victim of a theft last night. I’d say it’s identity theft but this was more of an outside company that made an illegal charge on my checking account online in some mysterious way that I have yet to be able to figure out how it happened. This happened on a Friday night, so that meant that getting any customer service was extremely limited, and my bank put me through an endless process of “press 1 for happy thoughts” crap before I finally, after three runs around their system that got me to a person who then transferred me back to the beginning of the “press 1” tree crap again. After some time, and some very frustrating and infuriating moments, I finally got to a person whose only course of plan was to freeze my account and wish me good luck. The charge was “processing” which meant they couldn’t do anything about it until it’s charged.

Honestly, what kind of stupidity is that? Is it not possible to catch a bank robber until after he spends the money, even if you catch him in the bank and have surrounded him with cops?

The next day, I had to get a brand new check card, and no one can tell me why it happened, or even more important: How do I stop it from happening again? The guy on the phone last night was a dickwad who seemed to think it must have been me with my liberal spending ways on the Internet. This is coming from a bank company that advertises its desire to have me using its services online because their the ones who do it best. Anyway, the next day, I’m still out that money that was stolen from my checking account because the processing isn’t done, and ONLY AFTER IT’S DONE can I put in a claim to get my money back. So, I’ve lost access to a LOT of my own money because some unauthorized charge happened from France (or Russia for all I know), and the bank really doesn’t give a fuck.

I’m really lost here because I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know where this came from, what caused it, or even how to prevent it from ever happening again. I don’t use my credit card on risky sites or anything like that. I don’t do online gambling or any crap like that. I use it for normal things, which somehow appears to be more and more susceptible to fraud these days. Is my only recourse to close my banking accounts forever and start hiding money in my mattress again? I know it sounds like that’s some kind of reactive joke, but seriously, what are you supposed to do when you’re basically screwed no matter what you do? I really needed that money on Monday morning for a dental procedure I’m about to have to undergo (my crown fell out of my mouth a few days ago). Now, I’m totally screwed. I can’t even contact the bank until after Monday because the charge doesn’t get processed until Monday, which means I’m going to be in surgery, knowing that I have pretty much no way to pay for it because some criminals thought it would be really cool to fuck over a complete stranger.

And, as stated, nobody fucking cares.

Attention: Your Sales Event is ONLY Timely to You, Not Me

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I received an email from Bed, Bath & Beyond this morning, announcing “Online Clearance: These deals won’t last forever.” Before that, I received one from Best Buy, indicating that I had only two days to come in and take advantage of their “special” sale on electronics. Newegg thinks that if I don’t respond by today that I’m going to miss out on great savings. Amazon sends me a message practically every day that tries to convince me, like Barnes & Noble does every other day, that I only have one day to take advantage of outrageous savings.

Look, I get it. You want to sell me shit. And you want me to buy it today, not tomorrow. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret here they probably didn’t teach you in your Overhyped Management 201 Class at Harvard: I don’t care. There is absolutely no priority for me to have to buy a Blu-Ray player by Thursday, or heaven forbid, I might miss out on unbelievable savings. I don’t really need a Blu-Ray player. I have one. And I bought it at a convenient time when I actually felt like I needed one. It happened to be on a day when I was in the mood to go to the store, look at the different choice, and then chose the one that fit me best. I didn’t buy it because some screaming sales pitch indicated that I was running out of time, like some episode of 24 where Jack Bauer has to torture his secretary for information about terrorist activities.

I understand the economy sucks, and you need to make money. But the more I keep being hit by hyped pitches to buy things, the less I want to buy. And no, I’m no fooled by the barrages of letters and emails that indicate that you are responding to my requests for information because I would remember if I was interested in buying a Kia car, which prompted you to send me an email as if you’re answering my inquiry instead of writing me out of the blue, hoping I might be stupid enough to think, “you know, I don’t remember ever thinking about buying a Kia vehicle, but if he says I stopped by and looked at one, it must be true.”

There’s a whole slough of literature written on the attempt to convince people to buy things they weren’t interested in to begin with. It’s the stuff often referred to as “foot in the door” techniques, and there’s an entire shunned practice that evolves from it called “bait and switch” where you advertise one thing and then try to sell us something we weren’t interested in. But this whole hurried approach to sales really needs to end because I’m getting really tired of opening mail and discovering I have twenty seconds to respond or the whole world will explode.

Part of the problem with a lot of marketing today is that there seems to be a lot less interest in matching people with the things they want to buy, rather than mass mailing everyone under the sun in hopes of finding someone who might want to buy something they weren’t interested in at all. But I’ll let you in on a bigger secret and that’s that if you’re really interested in selling to me, you’ll offer something really of good value at a good price and then convince me you’re the only one willing to do that. Don’t try to get me into your store in one day. Just convince me that your selection is better than your competition, and I’m probably going to make it to your business place. An example: I’m really interested in the new game Skyrim, made by Bethesda. But it’s overly expensive for a computer game. Offer it to me for a better price, and I’ll probably buy it. Offer it to me for the same price and add a lot of extra features to the sale, and I might still buy it. But sending me nonstop messages about how I need to buy it immediately or I will somehow miss out on the fun, and you’re not setting up a sale. At all. You see, I can wait you out. You, on the other hand, need the sale. It’s that simple. It is in YOUR best interest to get me to want to buy from you. Hype doesn’t do it. Expiration periods of pretend sales won’t do it. A good sale that seems pretty honest, well, that works wonders.

Businesses are constantly making the mistake of thinking most consumers are stupid, or easily fooled. We’re not. Some are, but they’re really a minority and not a sustainable business model. But smart consumers who will continue to buy your product if you offer value, service and consistency, well, those are the ones you should be going after. But your current model isn’t doing it.

So, take your time because I’m not going anywhere. You, a lot like Netflix that keeps trying to convince me I have a short time to “come back” to their “great deal”, might be. And it may not be where you want to end up.

I’m just saying.