Gas Price Rant #11 caffeinated panic sets in · Thursday April 24, 2008 by colin newell
What happens when you have to make the choice; food or gas?
It seems that coffee hungry Californians have made of their minds – much to the chagrin of coffee giant Starbucks
Java junkies looking for that last legal rap on the cortex are counting pennies by sipping less expensive coffee drinks, home-brewing or eschewing the brown elixir entirely. The turning tide is effecting everyone from the mom-and-pop java joints all the way up to Starbucks, which reported Wednesday that it expected lower second-quarter profit and full-year earnings. The economy not its prices appear to be the culprit.
Faced with deciding between a 99 cent of black coffee from the 7-11 and a 4 dollar latte from the Green Machine has never been easier – or so it would appear.
Starbucks is also facing down the Ronald McDonald brand of gourmet Joe which threatens to shake up the specialty market entirely.
Unconfirmed reports have Starbucks C.E.O. Howard Shultz uttering: “Cannot sleep… Clowns might kill me…”
Now I know what he means.
“The current economic climate is the weakest in our company’s history,” said Howard Schultz, Starbucks Corp.‘s chief executive. The company said it was being hit especially hard in California and Florida, which make up nearly one-third of its U.S. retail revenue.
No surprise considering that California and Florida residents would give up coffee, their spouse or certain vestigial appendages before getting out of their SUV’s.
There are exceptions mind you. I will take my coffee before the car thank you very much. I mean, I cannot drive if I am asleep.
I am running pretty lean anyway. I brew specialty coffee in my lab at the University that I work at. I bake all my own muffins from scratch… so my monthly treat budget is pretty low.
So. To those with this tough choice to make, I salute you… by raise a steaming hot mug of Organic Ethiopian Sidamo brewed at exactly 196 degrees (F) into a thermal glass carafe! Cheers!
Thanks to Jeanie Sepin for the inspiration and research that went into this blog
Canadian Mental Health Report #1 · Thursday April 17, 2008 by colin newell
The CBC and Angus Reid reports that Canadians are more angry than they were a year ago.
No $&#@‘ing kidding?
According to the pollster, almost 50% of Canadians feel their fellow Canucks are angrier than they were last year, and 25% admit to losing their own temper more often now than in the past.
Apparently women and young adults seem especially irritable: 30 per cent of women and 32 per cent of those age 18 to 34 say their fuses are way shorter than they used to be.
Why is that? Kathryn Jennings, a counsellor at Anger Management Counselling Practice in Toronto, suspects the increasing use of computers and technology is shortening our patience.
“With technology, our lives are faster, access is faster, and a lot of our needs are met immediately,” she says. “It has made our expectations higher. We expect that things should work and should work quickly.”
Personally, I feel a corporate culture and mind-set has invaded many employers previously more evenly paced… leading to frazzled worker bees.
Take my employer for instance – I will let you, the readers, figure out who that is.
Not that it really matters.
My work environment has quadrupled in size in 15 years with a net increase in individual responsibilities (within our technical group) by a factor of about 3 to 5. And if that is not entirely clear – My workload has probably tripled and the number of bodies available to deal with this massive increase in responsibility has dropped.
Where we once had 4 or 5 guys handling a large chunk of technical territory, we now have about 1.
Recently my employer approached me about taking on about 50% more work on top of this – with no increase in pay of course.
Another example: A colleague of mine crossed my path on the job site recently reporting how intense things have become. I replied… “We have become members in a culture of intensity…” “running from fire to fire is our way of life every day on the job…” “We start a job and that job is interrupted and that interruption is clobbered by yet another interruption… or a more serious crisis…”
It is bullshit. It gets a little worse each week. And we are willing participants in this ballet of madness. As my colleague and I parted ways, I coined another phrase…
“This trend is like an asteroid within… slowly making its way toward crushing our sanity…” An asteroid within… Damn. That’s witty.
So what else is making Canadians angry? Apparently queue jumpers are at the top of the list. I encountered one at a bank machine once… if you can believe that someone would be silly enough to cut in front of a line-up of busy and aggravated people (myself included…) in a bank machine line-up. I assure you… he will never do that again.
Other irritants include loud cell phone talkers, aggressive drivers and, oddly, people who ignore greetings in the office or have generally bad manners.
My personal favorites include motorists who eat breakfast cereal while at the wheel, cyclists who do their make-up – or hockey fans who talk about their financial portfolios for 3 periods of play.
Bonus blog life in the big city #1 · Friday April 11, 2008 by colin newell
Pulled from BoingBoing.Net – and I am looking for comments from a Victoria B.C. or Canadian perspective…
Lenore Skenazy wrote a piece for the April 4 edition of the New York Sun about letting her 9-year-old son find his way home from downtown NYC using the subway system. Many people were upset with her.
Isn’t New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It’s not like we’re living in downtown Baghdad.
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.
No, I did not give him a cell phone. Didn’t want to lose it. And no, I didn’t trail him, like a mommy private eye. I trusted him to figure out that he should take the Lexington Avenue subway down, and the 34th Street crosstown bus home. If he couldn’t do that, I trusted him to ask a stranger. And then I even trusted that stranger not to think, “Gee, I was about to catch my train home, but now I think I’ll abduct this adorable child instead.”
Long story short: My son got home, ecstatic with independence.
Long story longer, and analyzed, to boot: Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.
Personally, I think there is a right age for allowing this kind of exploration. And I guess it also comes down to the environment as well.
I was about 10 or 11, on or about 1970 when my parents dropped me off in a somewhat more innocent and small Victoria B.C.
I spent about an hour downtown before I high tailed it back to my country home some 4 miles from where I was dropped off. The World seemed like a much bigger place then.
I do believe that we live in a World (at least here in the West) where we are constantly exposed to a barrage of fear-filled messages on how dangerous our World is… and that is because there are corporate forces at work that profit from a culture of fear – plain and simple.
The government of Canada (and especially the government of the U.S.A.) totally buy into this culture of fear; terrorists under every rock and baddies around every corner…
I say: The only thing to fear is the Government itself!
Walmart law-suit shocks even me · Wednesday April 2, 2008 by colin newell
I have ranted, in the past, about how totally and completely morally bankrupt the Walmart corporation appears to be; alleged exploitation of workers, unsafe working conditions, denial of health care coverage for almost 1/2 their work force, theft of hours, harassment of employees and on and on and on and on. The documentation backing all this up is staggering.
Now for an update: Enter Deborah Shank.
A devastating collision with a semi-trailer truck seven years ago left 52-year-old Deborah Shank permanently brain-damaged and in a wheelchair. Her husband, Jim, and three sons won a $700,000 accident settlement from the trucking company involved. After legal fees and other expenses, the remaining $417,000 was put in a special trust. It was to be used for Mrs. Shank’s care. Or so they thought.
Instead, all of it is now slated to go to Mrs. Shank’s former employer, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
Two years ago, the retail giant’s health plan sued the Shanks for the $470,000 it had spent on her medical care. A federal judge ruled last year in Wal-Mart’s favor, backed by an appeals-court decision in August. Now, her family has to rely on Medicaid and Mrs. Shank’s social-security payments to keep up her round-the-clock care.
Wow. Walmart must be really hurting financially to go after this woman.
But are they? Not really.
Their C.E.O. made over 17 million dollars last year – his salary alone.
That is twice the average C.E.O. salary of 9.6 million.
So how do Walmart employees fair? They get $9.68 an hour – if they are full time. 26% of Walmart employees are part-time.
How do Walmart’s myriad subcontractor employees do World wide?
Between Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Indonesia, China and Swaziland, the average wage for a Walmart subcontractor is about 25 cents… an hour. When they actually get paid that is.
25 cents an hour. So you can save money.
Back to Deborah: – Less than a week after the Shanks lost their appeal, their son Jeremy was killed in Iraq… Ironically protecting the American Dream, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
Get this: On the advice of consultants, Jim has divorced his wife, to make her eligible for public aid as a single and totally disabled person. After attending her son’s funeral, she still could not figure out why he was missing from the family circle.
So – how does this all happen with Walmart’s HMO? When Deborah signed onto the Walmart health plan, she agreed that her employer would be first in line for payment out of any subrogation. Yea, it’s in the fine print.
Subrogation – fancy word… It means that if an accident victim is paid out – and that victim was employed when the accident happened – and insured by the employers insurance company – and there is a big pay out – guess who has their hand out?
In this case… Walmart. Cutting the heart out of the American worker by hiring Chinese workers to make toxic junk (for 25 cents an hour) so you can buy something more that you don’t need – that you will invariably throw away – to fill up a toxic landfill in China.
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