950 O Tannen Bummed

O Tannen Bummed

Here it is early December and the radio has been pumping out the usual Christmas hits since Thanksgiving.  Sometimes earlier.  By Christmas Eve, you’ll have had it up to here with this stuff, even if you love the music and the season.

How many times can you hear “Rudolph” or “White Christmas” or “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer?”  Or “Santa Claus is Coming to Town?” Can you take any more of Burl Ives and Brenda Lee and even Bing?

There must be 500 different versions of “The Little Drummer Boy,” and all but the original are getting hard to listen to, and getting harder by the year.

Some of the more serious stuff, lovely as it may be, gets worn thin early.  

Christmas music overkill diminishes the beauty of the music and the beauty of the season.

Here are some hints to avoid that.  Turn off the radio.  Wear ear plugs to the mall (just be sure you take them out before you start driving home.  Put a post it note reminder on the dashboard if you have to.)  Play only the stuff you like on your iPod or home stereo.  Don’t click on the links in this post. like this one or even this other one.

Or you can just grit your teeth and take it.



Shrapnel:

--You have to wonder if the animal rights moguls and the real estate moguls of New York are in cahoots.  There’s a new push to eliminate the hansom cabs in Central Park.  The excuse is having a horse pull a cart is cruel, but the real reason is all that land the stables take up on the west side and which could be sold at a huge profit, even in today’s depressed market.


--The Challenger Explosion Syndrome strikes again with another example of how we get the high tech stuff right and the low tech stuff wrong.  Some Chevy “Volts” have caught fire.  The problem has been traced not to its fancy electro-mechanical engine, not to its amazing battery, but to an ordinary coolant leak in an ordinary coolant pipe that’s been manufactured and used the same way for 100 years.

--Harry Morgan was one of those actors who you noticed most when he wasn’t there. M*A*S*H or Dragnet would have been far less without him and so would the 100 movies he made. Morgan was 96 when he died this week.


Holiday Shopping Tip:  Pay attention to the negative reviews on the internet shopping sites.  They’ll often praise the product, backstopping what the seller says in its ad. But it will add things the seller won’t tell you:  Sure that hand vac is powerful enough to lift a bowling ball, but will the plastic accessories hold up?  Sure, the Tanzanite pendant sparkles, but does the back of it scratch your skin?  That kind of thing.  The sites are pretty open about reviews.  It’s the low-star comments that count.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011
(Harry Simeone Chorale “Little Drummer Boy” awaiting expected permission from 20th Century Fox Records. Rob Thomas “New York City Christmas” courtesy NBC.  John Rutter & Cambridge Singers “Joy to the World” courtesy Collegium Records.)

949 The Postman Always Rings Twice (But Later Than Usual)

949 The Postman Always Rings Twice (But Later Than Usual)

You mail a letter from, say, Moote Pointe NY to North Moote Pointe, a distance of two miles.  The letter then goes to the Moote Pointe post office to the mail sorting center in Hicksville, ten miles.  Then from Hicksville, it goes to North Moote Pointe’s post office.  So another ten miles.  And finally, it’s delivered.  Running time: two days, maybe three.  Mileage, 22.

Under the new system, just announced by the US Postal Service, the route changes.  It goes from Moote Pointe to Bowdie, South Dakota, where half the population of 500 is employed by a mail outsourcing service.  From Bowdie, the letter goes to the Winter Mail Warmer Home in Ocean Ridge, Florida where it warms up.  Finally, it goes to the North Moote Pointe post office where it is ignored for a week.

The recipient gets the letter 27 days after you sent it … unless, of course, you mailed it on a Sunday when there’s no pickup.  One mile, 27 days. Forty four cents.  

Used to be you sent your checks out maybe five days before the bills were due.  Lately, ten days has become the norm.  After the post office makes the changes it has announced, two weeks is pushing it.

What’ll happen?  More people will pay using the internet and the post office will be in deeper financial yogurt than it is now.  Deliveries of your mail order meds will be slower.  You’ll get your Time or Newsweek the day after it expires.


Anyone else remember when you could mail a letter at 10 in the morning and it would be delivered a mile away later that afternoon?  And at the time, first class postage was three cents?  And the Post Office turned a profit?


Shrapnel:

--Is credit card debt killing you?  Maybe you should let it.  The Wall St. Journal reports in many cases, if you don’t have a co-signer or a card-sharer, if you die, the banks can’t collect even though they try.

--Guitar players often get endorsement deals from makers... Chet Atkins and Gretsch, Les Paul and Gibson, everyone else with either Martin or Fender or Ovation.  But you don’t see this with other instruments.  Where’s the Arthur Rubenstein Steinway, the Benny Goodman Selmer, the Charlie Parker Conn sax or the Tuba Gooding Sousaphone?

Holiday Shopping Tip:
Avoid the early bird specials unless you are a natural early bird yourself.  These come-ons rarely save much and often you hear “I’m sorry, ma’am, headquarters only supplied us with one of those $25 iPods, and we’ve already sold it.”  The early opening sales are designed to increase foot traffic at what are usually off-hours.  The hope is to increase impulse buying.  But remember, in order to open at 4 or 5 in the morning, the store’s staff costs are going to go up and they have to compensate for that, and will.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

948 Cain's Bane

948 Cain’s Bane

It’s taken about a month for Herman Cain to self destruct.  Back then, it was his “blond/blonde” problem.  Now, it’s L’non-affaire Ginger White, the woman Cain called a “good friend,” and to whom he supplied money, and who calls Cain her on and off lover for more than a dozen years.

Cain suspended his campaign after “prayer and soul searching.”  Translation:  once he got home from the current campaign tour, wife Gloria beat the living daylights out of him.

Suspending is not the same as ending, at least legally.  Suspending means he still can raise and spend money and he says he plans to do both.   Ending means he can’t.  But the suspend-idate says he will “soon make an endorsement.”  That kind of sounds like “I quit and I’ll pass along my robots to the robot collection of” one of the other GOP nutcases seeking the party’s presidential nomination.

Meantime, keep those bucks coming in.

Can he use this money in the divorce settlement?  Or will he just find some other deserving woman whose bills he wants to pay?  Or maybe he can pay off some of that credit card debt, or his mortgage or his auto loan.

Cain is no more of a freak than his competitors, just dumber than all of them (except Rick Perry,) only slightly more delusional than they are (except Gingrich) when it comes to estimating the smarts of the average voter and more doctrinaire (except Santorum.)


Shrapnel:

--(STATE COLLEGE, Pa) -- accused boy-lover Jerry Sandusky is again on the campaign trail giving the New York Times a four hour, two day interview, in which he said more or less the same thing he told Brian Williams’ NBC magazine program: he’s just a poor, misunderstood father figure, not a child molester.  Which proves that even a football guy can swing at and hit softballs.   And that a great investigative newspaper can throw them.

--Anyone else have this problem?  The “Shockwave” multimedia program crashes Google Chrome regularly, requiring you to close the browser and reopen it, and possibly losing unsaved work.  There seems no fix yet, among the pages and pages of “Why don’t you try ‘this:” followed by steps no layman can understand and which, according to feedback, don’t work anyway.


Holiday Shopping Tip:  
Careful of that alleged price cut, it might not be real, even though the “cut” price may still be a bargain. In order to claim an item is “50%” off “regular price,” it has to have been sold at regular price.  Sometimes that “regular price” never makes it all the way from the stockroom to the sales floor at all.  Sometimes it’s regular price for one day and then it’s cut for the rest of the season. Be even more careful of “compare at” or “comparable value.”  Those phrases have more rubber in them than a carton of balloons or all five of your car’s tires.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

947 A Letter From the Airline

947 A Letter From the Airline

From: Farkluct Airways
To: Farkluct Frequent Flyer Mile Members
Re: Our Bankruptcy Filing

Dear Frequent Flyer:  As you know, we filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 this week and we are writing to assure you that your Farkluct Frequent Flyer Miles are safe and that we will honor them as well as all tickets to all of our destinations throughout this proceeding.

We want to assure you that we will continue to provide you with normal flight schedules, reservations, refunds, and all of our other services and that the 80-thousand employees here at Farkluct are happy to see you and happy to help you on your journey.

When we emerge from reorganization, we expect to make several improvements.  Among the things you can look forward to is our new in-flight fitness program.  We plan to remove 28 percent of the seats on each plane and install subway-style polls and straps so you can improve circulation and muscle tone while standing for the duration of your flight.  

Your FFFMiles can be used to upgrade you to a half time, three quarter time or full time seat (Times do not include runway waits or other on-ground delays.Other restrictions may apply.)  

Farther along, we plan to reduce personnel overhead, keeping your costs low.  Among our innovations will be our new fleet of Airbus FarkluctDrone aircraft.  Be assured that your safety is our first concern.  An experienced Farkluct Pilot will be at ground controls at all times to assure a safe and smooth trip for no more than five aircraft at one time.

Farkluct will also make flying more economical by rescinding baggage handling fees.  As we expect to downsize our contingent of baggage handlers by 100%, we will be inviting all passengers to place their own baggage in the cargo hold before takeoff and retrieving it should the flight reach its destination.  We believe this new efficiency will reduce boarding and deplaning times by at least 52%.

As always, we will be providing the world class service for which we have become renowned.  And thank you for flying Farkluct.

Shrapnel:

--Romney, supposed grown-up among the Republican candidates for the party’s presidential nomination, has an ad in which a quote from Obama is twisted 180 degrees to seem like he means the opposite of what he said.  This is something you’d expect from a Bachmann or a Newt.  Giving Mitt the benefit of the doubt in which one assumes he wasn’t aware of the misquote... the guy needs to pay more attention to what his ads  say in his behalf, especially when they don’t withdraw the ad when outed.

Holiday Shopping Tip:  Watch batteries don’t last forever and getting them replaced is becoming something of a chore.  First, you try it yourself.  Usually you can’t get the back open.  So you bring it to the nearest big box store because jewelers charge a bundle.  But the big box stores tend not to change batteries in watches when they don’t sell the brand and many no longer change batteries at all.  The toughest of the tough is Fossil, which is a shame because they make so much nice stuff.  Getting a battery changed in a Fossil watch is harder than getting a battery changed in a Prius.



I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

946 Soak the Poor

946 Soak the Poor

These flaming liberals have it all wrong.  Soak the poor, not the rich!  And the old.  Boomers?  Punks, every one of them.  Think the world owes them a living.  And the REAL old?  They’re even worse.

Look at the assets these creeps absorb.  Medicare.  Medicaid.  Social Security.  Disability.  Food stamps!  Pouring money down the sewer.  In the meantime we job creators and hard working small business owners are being pushed around like a bunch of geese by a border collie.

It’s time to stand up for our rights as free Americans!  The poor, the old, the disabled --ingrates--  are stealing from the rest of us.  They don’t understand how much we’ve done for them.  

You say the poor have nothing to tax?  Baloney! Every one of them has hidden assets.  Let them sell their trailers and their assisted living condos or at least stop using subsidized heating fuel. Let ‘em burn grass clippings or leaves if they’re not too lazy to rake them up and save them.  Get their hidden money out of their offshore bank accounts and their bug-infested mattresses.

They have cars and trucks.  Sell ‘em for scrap and let the owners ride the bus and the subway.  Take away their flat screens and sell ‘em.

The homeless?  What’s REALLY in those stolen shopping carts they all seem to push around!  And while we’re at it, let’s sterilize those single mothers.  Sluts!  Can’t keep their legs closed!  They keep pumping out litters for more welfare.

And if you can’t eliminate welfare, tax it, too.

Damned commies!  They’re taking over.

Holiday Season Shopping Tip:

If you’re a CVS customer, be cautious of those “Extra Bucks” deals.  First, ads for products with “Extra Bucks” rebates are misleading if you only glance at them, provoking many to believe advertised prices are lower than they really are.  Second, “Extra Bucks” have short shelf lives, are easy to forget and easy to misplace.
  Third:  If you’re buying a lot of stuff at the same time, split the purchase.  Get the “Extra Bucks” item or items paid for first, and then use the rebates on the rest of the stuff you’re buying.  This doesn’t work for single item purchases.



Shrapnel:

--When will newspapers learn that no one much cares and fewer are influenced by their endorsements?  Latest example is the recent full-width-front-page editorial in the Manchester NH Union Leader backing Gingrich.  The only New Hampsherites who want Newt are democrats because he’s easier to beat in the general election than Romney will be.

--Ford says it’s ending production of the Crown Victoria sedan, which means every police department still using it will have to look elsewhere.  The Crown Vic had authority; gravitas; the ability to instill fear when you got pulled over. Can you imagine Smokey being as intimidating in, say, a Kia?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

945 Low Battery

945 Low Battery

ATT’s acquisition of T-Mobile isn’t dead, but it might well be any day now.  And it couldn’t happen to a nicer outfit, ATT, which will be forced to pay Deutsche Telkom billions if the present low battery runs completely out of juice.  How’s THAT for an early termination fee!

The Justice Department doesn’t much care for this corporate maneuver.  The Federal Communications Commission ain’t overjoyed either.

And the companies have withdrawn their request for FCC approval.  They need that because wireless phone carriers are licensed broadcasters who use radio transmission to get the signal from phone to phone by way of the cell towers.

Both companies insist the deal is still on.  So why would they rescind their license applications?   Easy.  Because once the FCC starts to act on the paperwork, information that’s now secret becomes public.

And what’s in those secret filings?  No one knows for sure, but you can bet on this:  whatever’s there contradicts statements everyone’s been making in public.

ATT has been advertising the benefits of the acquisition.  More jobs.  Better service.  Blah blah blah.  Do the secret filings contradict any or all of that?  We don’t know.  But insiders in both companies do.  So what are they hiding?

Meantime, T-Mobile is talking about closing retail stores that are too near ATT equivalents (more jobs?) And it’s probably not keeping up with the perpetually changing hardware market.  How can they buy the latest stuff if they expect to be taken over?

ATT insists in public that this deal will improve service.  That’s probably true, given the stinking coverage and call dropping they offer.

Deregulation was supposed to increase competition.  How does one giant devouring another affect that?  Take a look at the airlines, the broadcast industry in general, the NBC/Comcast deal, any of the zombie banks.

Bailout for telco down the road?  AT&Too Big To Fail, anyone?  An acquisition of T-Mobile by, say, poor, beleaguered Sprint might make more sense.  Sprint needs all the help it can get if it’s going to compete with the other big guys and the throwaway phones and the Jitterbug Phones, the AARP phones and land lines and calling cards and wrapping notes around bricks and sending them sailing through windows.

The whole deal centers on ATT wanting to be bigger than Verizon, once itself a baby bell.  What would be the advantage in that, besides bragging rights?

This battery isn’t holding its charge.   But don’t worry, guys, we’ll be glad to supply new ones in return for a new two-year contract.



Shrapnel (mergers and acquisitions edition):

--There’s almost no such thing as a merger.  It’s almost always a takeover.  And this is nothing new, it goes back to the earliest days of commerce in this country.

--So why use the term “merger?”  Because it’s prettier than “devour,” and it fools a lot of people.  Fooling a lot of people is one of the major goals of corporations with something to hide.

--All this goes back at least two thousand years.  Was the merger of the New Testament into the Bible a merger?  Or was it a takeover that used the original name, kind of like when Chemical Bank took over Chase and called itself by the better-known Chase name?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011

944 Black Friday

944 Black Friday

This is that day.  This tough- to- understand and awkward phrase applies to the Friday after Thanksgiving when retailers say they stop using red ink and start using black on their ledgers (do any of them use ink, or have ledgers for that matter?)  Seems hard to imagine that they have to go well into the eleventh month of any given year to turn a buck.  But that’s what they claim.

Here are some store reviews and comments, a little something to read on line as you wait to check out of MegaMart:

What hurts Best Buy:  diminished customer service.  Diminished need for and availability of expert floor help as people become more knowledgeable about electronics and shift to Costco and its siblings and to Amazon.com, Tiger.com and Newegg.  BBY is not always competitive on major appliance prices or selection.

Radio Shack:  probably gets a boost from its recently renewed affiliation with Verizon, especially where their other cell phone carriers (A&TT, Sprint) have inferior signals. But overall, they're in trouble from the same competitors as BBY and because there's almost no margin in some of the small stuff they sell.

What hurts mall Jewelers (Kay, Gordon’s, etc.) overpriced, complex conditions in their warranties.  Increased competition from TV shopping channels (primarily the smaller ones, JTV and ShopNBC.)

Macy's:  the last traditional national mid-price full line department store chain standing.  They have a pricing policy that seems completely unrelated to their costs, which means some things there have to be overpriced to make up for all the cutting they do in clothing and accessories.   They've recently ended their contract with the outfit that leased the better jewelry department and have started running it themselves, an improvement.

Look for a reasonably good holiday results from the high-end chains, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Lord & Taylor, Neiman Marcus.  Saks just was hit with a pretty big price-per-foot increase at its Fifth Avenue flagship store.  You know who’s going to pay for that.

What hurts Wal-Mart: bad front ends. Checking out is slower than almost anywhere else on earth.  (City and suburban CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreen and Duane Reade locations are worse.)   Wal-Mart is a store of last resort.

Sam’s Club, the Wal-Mart- owned answer to the unfortunately-named B.J.’s Wholesale Club and Costco suffers from the same slow checkout and carries less stuff than its competitors.

Costco benefits from consistently good Consumer Reports Magazine ratings of its house brands.


Target:  trying to promote itself as low priced and fashionable non-Wal-Mart Wal-Mart.  People are attracted to logical displays and decent checkout.  Target is going big into groceries, an iffy, low-margin, high shrinkage area.


TJMaxx & Marshalls:  TJs are better run than jointly owned Marshalls, and both are more upscale than prime competitor, Ross.  

Bed Bath:  overpriced, and a bad stop for claustrophobic shoppers.  Sloppy front end.

Sears:  Eddie Lampert hasn't killed it yet.  But wait until there's a rebound in real estate and they and K-mart are gone with the wind.  Sears-owned Lands' End probably will survive because of its huge loyal customer base.  But it’s being hurt, by year-round free shipping from LL Bean, and smart merchandising from the other Eddie, Bauer.  Sears still is a good place to buy tools and major appliances.  Consumer Reports loves their Kenmore brand.  Some Kenmore owners and repair people don’t and shouldn’t.  They sell plenty of good name brands alongside their own.

Furniture:  Buy floor models or stuff that’s in the warehouse and that you’ve personally inspected.  Don’t order anything from anybody. Period. Inspect your purchase before it leaves the truck and if unacceptable, don’t accept delivery.

Craft stores:  You want to solve the terrorism problem?  Lock the suspects up in one of these places for a couple of hours and they’ll confess to anything. No water board required (or included.)

Not recommended: K-Mart (prices, quality,) Lowe’s (limited selection in all but the largest units,)  Old Navy (unless you’re looking for wear-once-throw-away,) Dollar General (see K-Mart.)  Pay-Less Shoes (see Dollar General,)  GNC (same kind of stuff is available at the big box discounters or any drug store and comes with a whole lot less theatrical b.s. plus you’ll pay much less.) Any candle shop, Pier One, Bath & Body Works (see “Air,” below.)

Air:  Newer stores and many malls are generally badly ventilated, reason enough to stay away and shop on line unless you don’t mind breathing stale air and fabric particles.  Many also are overheated and alternately over-cooled.  Some older buildings share this problem, but not all of them.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2011