1253 Grand Theft Shopping Cart or Cartjacking

1253 Grand Theft Shopping Cart or Cartjacking

(Note: this is parody.  And fiction.)

Once a horse thief could be shot.

Now, steal a car and you’ll do time.

So stealing someone else’s transportation is nothing new.

What’s next?

In the parking lot of a big box store, men in green jumpsuits are doing what looks from a distance like repairs to a long line of shopping carts that appear pristine.

Repairs?  No.  What they’re doing is putting tiny little tracking devices, mini GPS devices in a place they would disclose only if I didn’t tell all.  So I won’t.

The thought:  They want to track the carts through the aisles so they can see how long people look at a particular shelf or section.  Maybe this is a prelude to letting people scan their items as they go and then check out automatically at the door.

Nope.

Nothing so experimental.

They want to track the carts when someone pushes them out of the store, out of the parking lot, onto the sidewalk, then home where they are abandoned.

Really, are THAT many stolen and not returned?  

Yup.

Green suit invites me to tour the neighborhood, and in a circle of less than a mile, we spotted more than a dozen orphan carts.

“These things are expensive,” he says.  And they disappear at a terrible rate.”  

How many, how often?  Classified.

How much does the GPS add to the cost? Classified.

Where is the receiver so the collection van knows where to go? Classified.

Stealing shopping carts is as old as shopping.

This little experiment in electronic surveillance could not have been done thoroughly even a few years ago.  But now, thanks to the NSA, the Pentagon, the phone companies and Google Earth it’s cheap and easy.

And you can bet if the experiment is even close to successful companies will be using these nationwide.

Second offenders will have to get security clearance.

Third offenders will be tailed home by green jumpsuits in Cart Patrol cars.

The American Civil Liberties Union will take the merchants to court on some kind of a privacy violation charge and probably will win at least the first round.

What would Alvah Roebuck or R.H. Macy think? Or even Sam Walton.  Or Wyatt Earp?

How to reduce your chances of getting caught:

1. Roll the cart into the parking lot, looking around from side to side and stopping occasionally as if trying to remember where you’re parked even if you aren’t parked.

2. Use step one at night when it’s hard for anyone to see what you’re really doing.

3. Steal with a partner. No one steals in pairs so no one will suspect the two of you of anything.

If you get caught tell the green suit:

1. Oh, my, I didn’t realize I still had it.

2. Your recycled plastic bags are so thin they rip with a sharp look, so I’m really protecting you against unnecessary returns of damaged goods that fall through them.

3. I’m not stealing, I bought this at a yard sale.

Things you can’t do with a stolen cart:

1. Find a shady chop shop to buy it from you, strip it and export the parts to Saudi Arabia.

2. Auction it on eBay.

3. Hold it for ransom.

Where not to leave it once you’re done with it:

1. A neighbor’s driveway.

2. Your own driveway.

3. The local police precinct house.

I’m Wes Richards, my opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1252 Free Gift

1252 Free Gift

Wait a minute? If two positives make a negative, “free gift” means the gift isn’t free, right? Consider this sentence:  “I am not not going to Grandma’s for dinner.”  That means you ARE going.

You know the offers.  The cosmetics people offer “free gifts” when you buy a certain amount of something.  But the gifts aren’t free. The price is built in to whatever you’re buying.

“We’ll DOUBLE the offer and send you a second roll of our ‘Amazing non-stick adhesive tape’ Absolutely free!!!! Just pay additional shipping and handling.”

The price of the item is, say, five bucks.  You get two for the price of one, so that’s $2.50 each.  The shipping and handling is $7.95 and you have to pay it twice.  So that’s $16, plus the five, makes $21.00 so the price of the five dollar purchase is actually more than double the price of one roll.  And you can’t buy just one.

Free gift, indeed.  Are there gifts with a price? Obviously.

There’s nothing wrong with offering bribes to customers.  It’s almost as old as commerce itself.

But some of it is ridiculous.  

Let’s look at over the counter medicine bottles.  The aspirin makers are kings of hollow.  They’ll put 100 pills in a bottle that could easily hold 500.  Sometimes they’ll bribe you with a banner “25% extra FREE!!!”  So now the bottle can hold all they sell you, but room for only 475 more.

Listerine is fond of the flavor of the month bribe.  We all know Listerine works well because anything that burns and tastes that foul HAS to be good.

But you now can get the stuff in half a dozen flavors, none of which have that icky medicinal taste we love to hate.  And none of which come with the original’s built in “this-awful-stuff-MUST-work.”

So they bundle a small bottle of the taste they’re pushing with the original so you can try it for yourself.  A decent size “free gift.”

Listerine has been around and essentially unchanged since 1879.  So it’s not like they have huge medical research and development costs.

The free bottle brings the price per ounce down to almost reasonable.

You can get a “free” book of Medicare demystification from Humana and “free” information on end-of-life life insurance from Met Life.

The price you pay for either is a thousand completely legal marketing phone calls from each.

Free and dirt cheap phone, internet, cable and satellite packages escalate exponentially when the bribe expires.

When you accept a free trial of a high priced item and want to return it, the seller sends a contractor crew to your house to build a maze from which there is no escape.

Subway sandwich shops offered add on avocado paste on its sandwiches and started charging for that midway through their widely advertised promotion period.

So, pony up for that “Free Gift!”  But forget about the “free” part.

Shrapnel:

--WOR radio non-personality John Gambling announced his retirement as of 12/20/13 and insisted the decision was his own and that the end of his show will mark the first time in 88 years that someone with that name is not on the air somewhere in New York. But unlike professional sports, they won’t retire his jersey number.  Too many others covet it and they’ll need a playoff series to see who gets that “0.”

--In more than 90 years on the air, WOR has had only four owners.  The first one wising up quickly and selling, the FCC pulling the license of the second… the third selling almost before the chairman’s coffin was in the ground. The fourth  -- current -- a perfect combination of stingy and grasping and headed by a guy who scabbed during a strike at NBC.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments and any stray free gifts to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR

1251 It's Not a Good Sign

1251 It’s Not a Good Sign

I.

It’s not a good sign when you can’t remove the glued-on label from the non-stick surface of the frying pan.

Let’s see. First, try peeling it off.

Nope.

Okay. A little gentle scraping with a fingernail.

Nope.

Maybe some water and a sponge?

Nope.

How about boiling it off?

Nope.

Vinegar and lemon juice?

Nope.

They sure make good label glue these days.

How you supposed to cook with this?

Use anything rougher, like Brillo, and you’ll remove more non-stick surface than you will label glue. “That can be fatal to your health,” explained Walt, who knows his cooking. “You don’t wanna be cooking with busted Teflon. Gets into your blood… you know—like lead poisoning.”

Walt is a leading anti-lead activist. He was the first guy to try unleaded gasoline in his 56 Packard, even though he didn’t have to.

“Get the Lead Out!” That was Walt’s motto back then.

Now, he may be the country’s first Anti Teflon Activist.

It’s not that he doesn’t like Teflon. It’s just that he sees its dangers, perhaps more vividly than others.

Presenting the label problem to Walt wasn’t easy. You can never find an anti-teflon activist when you need one.

But once on the case, Walt cannot be moved.

“Take the thing back,” he counsels. “Don’t let those bozos fill you with chemicals. We don’t know what’s in that glue. What happens if you slip a couple of  burgers on the fire one day… and you come back with beef and glue!”

Maybe that’s the way to get the label off.

Or not.

Where was this label glue when we needed it?

The Teflon President, the Teflon Don. Could have used some of that glue in their day.

Does Walt want to ban Teflon? Is he trying to work up a class action lawsuit? He gets cagy when you ask:“That’s a tough question,” he answers. Then when you try to rephrase, “do you think there’s money in this problem?” he smiles a little and repeats “That’s a tough question.”

II.

It’s not a good sign when you’re a reporter trying to renew your visa in Beijing and you’ve waited almost a year and the only answer you get from the Foreign Ministry is “I’m sorry, they’re all in a meeting.”

People from the New York Times, Reuters and Bloomberg News are having trouble getting into or getting back into China because -- silly them -- they or their employers have violated one of the billion rules that govern such things.  What rules?  Oh, you know, like the ones that forbid you from making the government look bad.

Not only are the reporters barred but in some cases, so are their websites.

Bloomberg Zombified a story critical of China recently.  Zombified? Yes.  They didn’t kill the story, they just made it un-dead. The highest ranking editor said it would run… “eventually.”  This after a team spent almost a year putting the piece together.

III.

It’s not a good sign when your “check engine” light glows.  It probably means you’re in violation of one of the billion laws that cover everything from emissions to whether your gas filler cap is too loose.

In an era when everything -- everything -- is controlled by a touch screen, you’d think they could program all the sensors in your car to actually tell you what’s wrong instead of forcing you into a dealership or a diagnostic specialty center and pay big bucks for them just to tell you what the light is warning you about.

Shrapnel:

--We don’t pay much attention to Veterans Day these days.  But we often pay even less attention to veterans themselves. As one vet put it, “when I hear ‘thank you for your service,’ I reply ‘thank you for your lip service.’”

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013

1250 Again, The Mighty Fitz

1249 Again, The Mighty Fitz

It’s that time of year again.  We’re about to mark the 38th anniversary of the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

We remember some shipwrecks. The Titanic, the Andrea Doria, the General Slocum, the Lusitania, the Bismarck.  Had Gordon Lightfoot not made an unusual song about it, though, we might not remember the Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down in on the Canadian side of Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.

Unlike the sunken battleships or the sunken luxury liners or the sunken touring boats, the Fitz was a mere ore carrier.  There were no deck chairs or orchestras or huge guns.  The Mighty Fitz was a bathtub with a propeller.  And a shipwreck on a lake?  A LAKE?!

Those of us who grew up on the Atlantic maybe too often turn our noses up at the thought of a lake as a formidable body of water. Superior is the largest lake in the world.  And it is the third largest by volume with 200 rivers feeding it from several angles. Put it anywhere else, add a little salt and you've got yourself a perfectly fine sea.

And that bathtub with a propeller?  Standing on the dock and looking up, you could confuse it with a mountain or a skyscraper. Length?  Bigger than anything that floats and that you've been on. Seven hundred twenty nine feet.  (The Titanic was 883.5, so only 150 feet or so bigger.)

We know what killed the Titanic, the Andrea Doria, the General Slocum, the Lusitania, the Bismarck.  We do not know what killed the Edmund Fitz.  A storm with hurricane force winds came suddenly and went?  The bathtub overturned and broke up and went down, all so fast there wasn't time for a real distress call?

We can't exactly ask Capt. Ernest McSorley or any of the 28 others on board.  But think about this:  this vast ship, largest of its class and time, a city size bathtub carrying more than a quarter million tons of taconite, rocks with iron, falls 500 feet down and no one knows why or how.

It took awhile to find the wreck.  The US Navy did that with magnets.

They've dived down and gotten the ship's bell. Did that only in 1995.   It's in the museum they built.   

Fifteen thousand people were on hand for the launch in '58. Twenty nine were on board for the sinking in  '75.  And they remain on board, preserved in their final moments and probably in good condition at that.  The freshwater doesn't destroy its victims as the ocean does and there are no real predators down there.

As far as we know, all the crew remain where they landed.  The families don't want them brought up.   

That's the way they do it on the lakes.  And this is the time of year we remember them.

Shrapnel:

--Stanford University's expert on multitasking, Clifford Nass, has died. Nass was 55 years old. In a statement, the University said that he did so many things at once, he got everything done way ahead of time.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Parts of this post were self plagiarized from earlier Wessays™ on this subject.

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© 2013, 2009, 2001 WJR

1249 Wall Street Thieves

1249 Wall Street Thieves

Call it the Milken effect.  Insider trading.  Hedge funds.  Financial products you understand less after the explanation than before.

Leave it to one of our favorite billionaires, Steven A. “Teflon Steve” Cohen, owner of the giant hedge fund SAC Capital, larger than life wheeler dealer, to pay out between 1.2 and 1.8 billion dollars in insider trading fines without trading pinstripes for insider jail stripes.  At least so far.

Steve is an oval-faced, bald, benevolent looking guy who you’d never take for the 43rd richest man in America, worth, according to Forbes, 9 plus billion.

SAC issued one of those fuzzy statements when it reached a plea agreement with the US Attorney.  It used the “a few bad apples” defense.

A judge still has to sign off on the deal.  But judges don’t generally come tabula rasa to these affairs.  If they’re not directly in on the talks, chances are they have a way of knowing the outlines and indicating a thumbs up or down.

Insider trading is when you have info on a company that the public doesn’t.  Often, that’s a doorway to buying low with the expectation of a sudden uptick or selling high when you know someone’s about to pull a skeleton out of the closet.

The charges the agreement aims to resolve does not mention Teflon Steve by name.  It calls him “the owner.”

Teflon still faces criminal counts not covered by this deal.  He is charged, in effect, with knowing about the problems and not stopping them.

Milken -- remember him -- was the junk bond king and briefly a guest of the federal government.  Now, he’s head of a think tank and through a foundation, gives away gazillions to educational causes.

And his fortune has been put at a relatively paltry two billion dollars.

So what do we learn from these two proud grads of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania?

Insider trading is possible at just about any level of investment.  And if you don’t understand something, don’t buy in.

The SEC may come up with some more regulations to clamp down on this kind of thing.  But like computer hackers, the bad guys are generally a dozen steps ahead of the good guys.

There are Cohens and Milkens and, for that matter, Madoffs lurking all over the financial world.  We just don’t know yet who they are and who they aren’t.

Shrapnel:

--De Blasio whomped Lhota in the election for mayor as New York returned to its roots after an eight year dalliance with The Toughest Guy in the room and a 12 year dalliance with The Smartest Guy in the Room.  He gave an old fashioned stem winder victory speech, full of promise.  Okay, Bill, good going… now show us what the watch does after the stem is wound.

--Everyone thinks Bill is really really tall.  But he’s actually only 5’4”.  When his feet once again touch the ground, you’ll see the difference.

--Over in Jayzee, Governor Pillsbury’s big win sent a message to the tea party:  get out of Dodge.  With any luck, that’ll start a trend. But will he have time to govern between presidential campaign stops?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2013