2036 The Errand Boy

Once again, old is new.  In many places, you can get your groceries delivered or call in your order and pick it up.

In olden times, you could just phone your local grocer (remember those?) and they’d put your order in a big pushcart and deliver it to your door.  The errand boy -- they were all boys -- would bring the stuff upstairs if you lived in an apartment and if that’s what you wanted. They worked for tips.  

As chain supermarkets began to replace the locals, the practice first became an endangered species and then became extinct.  But it’s back. Bigly.

Here are the majors:

--Instacart: They hire personal shoppers who take your list around the market, then deliver your order.  Insta serves mostly small chain stores in regions where many people don’t drive.

--Peapod: It’s a division of Stop & Shop and a pioneer in this resurgent trade.

--Amazon.com: They’re just starting.  For now, no perishables. But you can bet that will change and soon.

--Google Express: again, no perishables.  But you can buy bulk items like cleaning supplies, paper towels, bathroom tissue.

--Walmart: Not quite there yet. But you can order on line and pick up from a reserved parking space right outside the store. They’re trying something like this at their Sam’s Club division, too.

Ms. Zhao, in her 70s, and not a driver doesn’t want “some sloppy kid choosing my tomatoes for me.  That’s what sloppy husbands are for.” Inspired by this, the Wessays(™) undercover research department dispatched observers to three different chain grocers to see how the sloppy kids do their jobs.  Some conclusions:

1.    All the errand boys were girls.

2.    All the errand boys inspected the perishables, one at a time before putting them in their carts.

3.    They checked that eggs weren’t cracked.

4.    They checked that dairy was within sell-by dates.

5.    The made sure fragile stuff -- chips, eggs, bread, etc. were bagged separately.

6.    They wore exam gloves.

“I think of my customers like they were my grandparents,” said Sarah the order picker.  “I love my grandparents and wouldn’t dream of bringing them a cracked egg, a bruised apple or tomato or a dented can,” she said.

Next thing you know, gas stations will start hiring pump jockeys. Office towers will start hiring elevator operators. Footwear stores will hire shoe dogs who know style, fit and which colors clash.

SHRAPNEL:

--Have you had enough Kool-Aid yet? If the answer is “no” try the newest flavor, Jamaica Estates Orange. And for a limited time only, each carton comes with a coupon good for a bucket of balls at the trump driving range in Moscow.

--Congratulations to Susan Zirinsky, newly named President of CBS News and the perfect choice for the job.  But while we’re throwing bouquets at “Z,” as she’s often called, let’s not forget Hinda Glasser, technically Cronkite’s secretary but actually the woman behind the throne at CBS News when women behind the throne weren’t acknowledged.

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

Comments? Wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2035 Amazon Invades Queens

Jeff Bezos is frightened. A multibillionaire frightened? More than likely.  Else Amazon would not be out there courting the residents of Long Island City where it plans a “second headquarters” employing 25-thousand people.

Neighborhood opposition has grown geometrically since the plan was announced along with a $1.5 billion tax break from the city and state. Eat your heart out, Welcome Wagon.

Leading indicator of the fright level:  Amazon has taken out ads promising to work and learn and “grow together” with its “new neighbors.”  That sounds like the company believes the opposition is real and has some clout.

A propaganda campaign similar to those of big countries about to annex smaller ones may be the best way to win the hearts and minds of landlords salivating to turn their buildings to coops. But it does little for the tenants.

Various levels of legislators oppose the incursion.  

Wait a minute.  Why would politicians whose only real job is running for the next term want to chase away the prospect of all those jobs, some of them high-paying?  Easy answer: sometimes working for their constituents is unavoidable.  So they do it.  Granted it’s a distraction from their real work, glad handing and making ridiculous promises from the throne rooms of their air castles. But …

Long Island City lies on the east bank of the East River.  It is fabulously crowded.  And it has few conduits for people heading to or from Manhattan on the west bank, the Ed Koch 59th St. Bridge, several clogged highways and tunnels and an already over-strained combination of buses and subways.

It has long been an industrial area, once bustling with factories that baked bread, bottled milk, manufactured electrical and office equipment. It built watches.  It made chewing gum.  It made household cleaning chemicals.  It prints the New York Times and Newsday.

Now, it has a college, a major magnet vocational high school with excellent ratings, a movie and TV studio and countless smaller product and service businesses.  So the glory days of heavy industry are gone and Amazon proposes to bring them back.

Until recently it resisted gentrification. But it’s a happening place, seven minutes from Midtown on those rare days when there’s no trouble on the Seven Train. In adjacent Sunnyside, and in LIC proper, rents already are rising in anticipation of the Amazon conquest.  And they weren’t exactly low cost housing to being with.  Say the same a short distance north in Astoria.

Does the area need a boost?  Yes and no. 

Does it need more cars and trucks on the road, more people in the buses and subways?  Does it need the kind of rent gouging that’s going on in other parts of the city?

So, Jeff, how about figuring out a way to keep your employees off the roads and subways… use those famous drones for same day delivery.

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

Comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2019

2034 Why the Chicken Crossed the Road

2018 ended with no real surprises.  Nothing out of the ordinary happened.  The government shut down. The wars continued in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. North Korea and Iran remained nuclear threats.  And the revolving door to the White House continued to spin with the leaving of a so-so number of bigwigs, some of them generals.

We’re so used to all this stuff that we barely notice when it happens.  What we would notice is when it doesn’t.  No worries. 

Although the democrats now are the majority party in the House the president still is president, the Senate is still a flock of headless chickens. They may be even more chicken now because the traffic lights on the road they keep trying to cross have been turned off as part of the shutdown.

Impending roadkill.

Oh, about those generals:  Do you think they all left at around the same time so they could hang out at the Officers’ Club to plot the coup? Probably not. We have no one to ride to trump’s defense as Yeltsin in the tank did for Gorbachev.

The “president” has a new enemy in his own party, Mitt Romney, someone unlikely to attract sympathy from practically anyone.  But he has two things going for him:  Romneycare in Massachusetts and a big mouth, but polite.

The worry about Mr. Private Equity Fund is that he’ll run his mouth in speeches, then toe with party line when the votes are counted.  Romney is no McCain, Flake or Corker, but he’ll do for now.

He’s right when it comes to one thing: the presidency is not “just” about policy and appointments.  The president, he said less clearly than necessary, sets the moral tone and the attitude of a country.

At this point a stiff like Mitt is preferable to an amoral pirate more at home on the seas around Somalia than in the White House of a supposedly civilized first world country.

In any case, when you’re at the supermarket, avoid the whole chickens in the cooler if they have tire tread marks, else you might be having Mitch McConnell for dinner.

SHRAPNEL:

--China has landed a spaceship on the dark side of the moon.  A friend predicts it will be followed by a McDonald’s franchise.  Others see the construction of steel mills and sewing factories that don’t meet code.

--Apple says sales of iPhones in China have been slowing, leading the company to revise earnings downward and investors to push the stock lower in a market that’s already shaky. The mighty hasn’t exactly fallen, though. Fourth quarter revenue is still going to land in the 80 billion dollar range, between five and ten billion less than most analysts forecast.

--And about those analysts: They’re so often wrong, few pay much attention. They also are the largest breed of worker bees who get to keep their jobs.  Oh, and some get raises for their A-for-effort.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this post is fake.

© WJR 2019

                                 

Winter Break

Wessays is on Winter Break.  We'll be back on Friday, January 4, 2019.  Happy holidays, one and all.

2033 Internet News v. Radio News

Since the early days of radio news, the people at newspapers have called us names or hurled accusations.  Shallow. Lacking context. Headline service without substance.

And since the early days of radio news, we have been firing back:  Too much detail. “You work on only one story a day?”  “It takes a bunch of people to put out that one story?” And worst of all: It’s yesterday’s news.

Well, for the most part, radio news is dead.  That’s because radio news either doesn’t exist or meets the anti-criteria in the first paragraph.  

But writing news for on-line reading is the same as writing for radio.  What works best is conversational style and sometimes a needle in the balloon of conventional grammar.

WMCA, New York used to have a slogan: “No sooner done than said.”

The Associated Press had a slogan “Deadline Every Minute” which was truer than true at the broadcast wire that served thousands of radio and TV networks and stations.

And people making the transition from working for papers to working for websites now face the same time deadline.

Oh, say the ink-stained wretches, but we have to be careful.  Check every fact. Make sure we get the quotations right.  Yes, you do and so do we.  But if you do, how come you get so much wrong so often?

The newspapers with true transparency often have elephantine correction sections.  With radio and the internet, we either fix it right away or at worst during the next hourly report.

So, welcome to the 21st century, ladies and gentlemen of the ink world.  Some of you will catch on. The rest of you? Well… there are schools of communication everywhere and you can either learn or teach.  And there’s always the Dark Side: public relations.

GRAPESHOT:

-Newspapers fail -- and always have -- when they locate their newsrooms where they’re more than staggering distance from a decent saloon.

-Here’s how to help kill the language: either start your own dialect which no one will understand or wrap it in the straightjacket of the APA or MLA stylebooks or Miss Grundy’s 19th Century grammar book.

SHRAPNEL:

--People complain that a certain famous and nearly defunct retail store is awarding zillions of dollars in bonuses to upper echelon executives.  But it’s truly worth the money.  It’s not easy to find a death squad that can make mass murder look like an accident.

--People are making a huge fuss over the apparent threat of suicide by a cast member of Saturday Night Live, Pete Davidson.  And yes, it would be a shame if he offed himself.  But there are thousands of others in the same boat as Pete and where’s the fuss about them?

--The so-called President wants to find out if it’s legal for Saturday Night Live to make fun of him. Maybe he should ask one or another of his lawyer friends.  Michael Cohen comes to mind as do Crooked Hillary, Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb, Lyin’ Ted, for starters.

TODAY’S QUOTation:

-“If the stock market is going to have a Santa Claus Rally this year, it must peel Santa off the pavement first.” -- Bloomberg Newsletter

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this post is fake.

© WJR 2018

2032 Baby It's Cold Outside

Jo & Frank Loesser

She and He have been coworkers for years but never see each other outside of the office.  One day, they decide to go out for breakfast.  This dialogue follows:

He: I want to warn you, I never do anything on a first date.

She: Aww. Too bad.

This role reversal doesn’t much happen in real life.  But it was a joke between friendly co-workers.

Today, if a woman says “no,” it means just that, “no.”  As opposed to “No means ‘convince me,’” or “No means yes but I don’t want to be responsible for allowing this.”

And belatedly, women -- #MeToo” victims and others are looking askance at what’s happening in a song that’s been on this hit parade since 1944: “Baby, it’s Cold Outside.”

In the unlikely event you’re unfamiliar with it, here are the basics:

--A woman is visiting a man at his home.

--It’s late.

--It’s cold outside.

--The man wants her to stay the night.

--She is flirty but keeps saying “no,” worrying about her mother worrying and…

        -what the neighbors might think

        -“What’s in this drink?”

        -“My sister might be suspicious”

        -“Oh well I tried” (to leave)

She has another drink and he says “that took a lot of convincing.”

Now that you see it, you get it, right?

Songwriter Frank Loesser wrote that song and recorded it with his wife who came to her senses shortly thereafter and divorced him.

The song has become a wintertime “standard” and to many an expected part of a Christmas music rotation.

Until now.

Broadcast program directors and other people who decide what music you hear and when have removed it from the playlist.

So, is this political correctness in high gear or is it just moving a “how-to” manual to the adults-only section of the internet?  Depends on who’s asked.

Defenders of manly manhood say it’s a holiday tradition, like getting drunk, credit card bills, leaving milk and cookies near the fireplace for Santa and festive lights that blow fuses and circuit breakers. Plus, she’s obviously going along with his game.

Many -- but not all -- women are saying “no.”  The Wessays(™) Editorial Bored Board agrees with them except for enthusiastically consenting adults.

SHRAPNEL:

--Consider shopping for a mass card. This, because Giuliani says he’ll let Mueller interview trump over “my dead body.”  Give that lawyer the Charlton Heston “cold dead hand” award.

--Here’s a publishing tip from your friends at Facebook.  If you have news you know that can damage you, don’t let it out unless you do it on a Friday afternoon.  Less chance of it going viral.

--Here’s an application tip for unqualified high schoolers applying for admission to elite colleges. Lie, but keep it believable. No one checks that stuff unless it’s absolutely outrageous.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is fake.

© WJR 2018

2031 Catch and Kill

What’s going on with this?  We trust the National Enquirer but not the New York Times or CNN?  How did that happen?

Yes, the Enquirer has come a long way from the days when its predecessor, the New York Enquirer, put stories on its front page about two headed babies from outer space and “actual” pictures of Bigfoot.

And, in fact, they have pioneered a new and threatening kind of journalism called catch and kill.

Let’s say some starlet has a fling with someone important or potentially important. Maybe a candidate for President of the United States.  The Enquirer rushes in and pays her for an “exclusive” and then goes to said candidate and offers to withhold the story.

Ms. Starlet is legally prevented from telling her story elsewhere.  So the story is dead, often to the benefit of the campaigner.  Evidently, this three-way exchange is considered a campaign contribution, but not a legal one.

Can this happen in real life? Dunno. Some people say it can and some others even say it does. Or has. Perish forbid.

The supermarket tabloids are among the few print publications that see regular and loyal buyers and readers.  And there are sure-fire stories that guarantee this.

A favorite topic is Hillary Clinton.  “Hillary fighting for her life” is a good headline.  You can always invent something that’s troubling Mrs. Clinton and make it sounds like it’s a struggle for her to keep breathing. Contrast that with “Hillary in Pain From Ingrown Toenail.”

No one would buy that headline.  But that life and death struggle with a toe could lead to much juicier front pages.

How about “Proof Obama Birth Certificate Fake!”  Well, sure.  Easy enough to play make believe with that lie.

Here are some real and recent Enquirer headlines:

--“Meagan & Kate: warring wives tear princes apart.”

Really?  Well, anything about the British royals sells. America has both Brit envy and royalty envy.

--“Regis Philbin’s Dying Regrets.” Facts were MIA.

And here’s the kind of headline that provoked the creation of WestraDamus parodies three decades ago: “Mystic Baba Vanga Predicts 2019’s major shocks.” Go ahead, buy the issue.  Clip the article.  And in 2020 look for the followup.  There will be none.

So, no more two-headed babies from outer space.  But close enough as the tabs get closer to earth.

Can you imagine what would happen if someone tried to foist a buy-and-kill to the Associated Press or any of the major TV networks?

They’d be run out of the office with pitchfork wielding security personnel.

SHRAPNEL:

--We’re at the 25th anniversary of the Monica and Bill thing.  All of a sudden, she’s #MeToo?  After 25 years of calling it “mutual attraction?”

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“I voted Republican this year. The Democrats left a bad taste in my mouth.” --Monica Lewinsky quoted by Brainyquote.com

GRAPESHOT:

-The Senate has passed a resolution blaming that Saudi prince for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and now the we’re all waiting for the prince to fess up and fall on his sword.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this post is fake.

© WJR 2018