Category Archives: Business

Goose Egg

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NAPA and Sears have about the most user unfriendly sites that I have visited this week.

I need a battery for my Keyscar.

Sears.com offers 80 or so choices at different prices but you have to drill down three levels to find out the battery group size. What’s a group size? Sears doesn’t tell you that because there is no “find your battery by car type” button. I can tell you that the $59.99 DieHard doesn’t come in Group 34, but I can tell you that only after 10 minutes of swearing at the screen.

NAPAonline.com does have the button but I had to disable the firewall for their battery page to load; it never did show prices. It showed a column for prices and a column for “selection.” Both were blank.

I have a headache.

I think I shall go eat eggs.

Funny Ought Not Be Bad Business

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What is the most important part of the Sunday paper?

As a kid, I would have told you the funnies. As an adult (yeah, yeah), one might point to the arts and entertainment section or the world news on the front page, the business and help wanted ads, or the sports pages. Many people look for the coupons. As an op-ed writer, I’d like you to turn to the editorial pages first. As an advertiser, I’ll tell you that the first smidgen of ink the readers see is the most important part of the Sunday paper. Or the last.

I like two kinds of newspapers. A true, independent, local paper that covers every local occurrence and activity of impact as well as some that are simply interesting is a godsend. If you have one, subscribe to it. Cherish it. A big, regional paper is also crucial because it will have the farthest reaching, in depth coverage of most major stories. (Other than the specialized Wall Street Journal, the lightweight USA Today, and the tabloids, we have no national newspaper.)

All newspapers have another feature critical to a consumer society: advertising.

I grew up with the Philadelphia Inquirer. I now subscribe to the Miami Herald. The Sunday Herald offers most of what I want: world and South Florida news, business news, Entertainment, jobs, real estate, sports, travel, world class columnists and, of course, decent funnies. Oh, sure, I can do without Cathy and I wouldn’t mind if it carried B.C., but it’s not a bad comics section. As an aside, I sure do miss Al Capp, Milt Caniff, and Ham Fisher.

There is a point in here; this is Marketing 101.

Once upon a time the color comics were the easiest section to find in the overflowing Sunday newspaper. Now the color comics are just one more insert that wraps ads. I like the sales fliers the Miami Herald includes with every Sunday paper, but I don’t like the extra fold worth of ads the Herald puts on the funnies. It makes them harder to find and much harder to read.

I tear off that fold.

Right away.

I don’t even look to see if it is interesting.

If I dislike those ads so much that I’m writing about them here, I gotta think that’s pretty bad marketing. The primo law of marketing may not be, “First, do no harm” but methinks it maybe ought to be.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

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The accent may be on the wrong syl LA ble.

A friend mentioned that he had heard that a very large bank was talking to the Fed about liquidity problems. He was nervous that we might be on the brink of something way uglier than most are thinking.

He had probably heard the first rumblings about the Bear Stearns calamity. JP Morgan Chase agreed Sunday night to acquire B-S but the problem in the financial markets is widespread and still growing. The Wall Street Journal has a short history of troubled investment bank sales here: snipurl.com/21y4f

We recovered from the junk-bond market debacles and from the savings and loan scandals and from the insider trading/arbitrage adversity. We will recover from this sub-prime mortgage mess, too. Nonetheless, I am not happy about owning banking stocks right now.

That said, I have two thoughts for my friend.

Really.

Just two.

(1) 99.94% of the ARM crisis has been caused by systemic fraud (as in felonious behavior) on the part of the mortgage sellers and particularly the banks that financed the mortgages, then resold them as “secure” investments to pension funds and the like. The only good news is the Saudis and the Chinese appear to hold at least some of the paper.

(2) There is no real real estate problem no matter what the news says. Lemme repeat that. There is no real real estate problem no matter what the ID10Ts in Congress say.

We own a house. The roof still keeps the rain off, the heat still keeps the cold out, and the rent-a-cat still curls up by the fire. It absolutely does not matter to me today if this house is worth a dollar, a million dollars, or something in between. As it happens, the house is worth more than when we bought it. Yay! It’s also worth less than it was a year ago. Boo! Oh, wait. I didn’t sell it a year ago and I don’t plan to sell it today so its value on the market is of absolutely no consequence to me.

OK, its value on the market is of absolutely no consequence to me except when I pay taxes on its value but that’s a whole nother story.

Now the bad news. In other words, here’s why my friend may be right.

Nobody believes me.

We are so driven by this Chicken Little squawking about the housing sky falling that we really really believe the end is nigh.

And so it will be.

For a while.

Wot to do, wot to do.

Buy.

Warren Buffet is a whole lot smarter about this stuff than I am. His advice is simple. When you find a good property at a bargain price, buy it. Unfortunately, nobody believes him right now, either.

It’s not just the economy. It’s the stupidity of the herd that drives the economy.

Sit Next to Me

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Alice Roosevelt Longworth embroidered on her sofa pillow, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.” Gossip is the chief currency in news and in “news” magazines, so that may now be the majority motto.

Loving gossip isn’t new. Alice Roosevelt became an idol to Progressive Era women around the world, Carl Anthony wrote, and her style of detached disdain is celebrated today.

Two of my acquaintances are worlds apart in that attitude. One whom I’ll call John because his name is John, revels in gossip and in bad news about anyone outside of his own circle of friends. Maybe even within his circle of friends. The other whom I’ll call Juan because his name isn’t, is more data driven.

Juan works for “Infonablah,” an electronics company that is a very likely takeover target. They have a couple of new products and a still-useful older product line. (This is not a Microsoft v. Yahoo story.) The WSJ has reported talks about a joint venture between the large Chinese conglomerate Batooey-dot-com and Infonablah. Juan designs interface modules for Infonablah’s consumer goods division here in Vermont.

Juan foresees Infonablah stocking up on next generation goodies and letting the current customer stuff go to the “low cost” manufacturing centers Batooey maintains in China and on the South Pole. He figures the Batooey engineers are thinking the same thing.

I don’t know that Batooey would give Infonablah its next gen stuff; I think it’s more likely that Infonablah will be stripped and will disappear. Their current customer stuff will definitely go to low cost centers no matter what else happens.

That said, “combining synergies” in B-speak always means more layoffs.

Here’s the heart of it. John doesn’t know Juan but his reaction to this story would be glee when he figured out that Juan’s job might be in jeopardy.

That saddens me.

We peeps spend entirely too much time reveling in the downfall of our peers.

I like gossip as much as the next guy, but Alice was wrong. My mom and hers before her were right. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

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When I wrote this piece, I used TLAs (a three letter acronym for “three letter acronym”) to stand in for the real company names. Juan then worked for DGX, a biz about to be consumed by Wall Street Greed and a Large Chinese Conglomerate (LCC). A quick Google search showed me that DGX is Quest Diagnostics and LCC is the USAirways Group. I neither recommend nor pan these securities.

Good News/Bad News

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David Barboza reported in the New York Times that China’s inflation is hitting American price tags.

“The higher costs in China could spell the end of an era of ultra-cheap goods.”

The good news is that importing countries like the U.S. might very well look within their own shores for at least some manufacturing again. The bad news is that if China sees its income from exports fall, the pressure on Chinese leaders to lash out will skyrocket.

The bad news is serious. We have long predicted that, on the day after the Beijing Olympics close, China will nationalize (read “steal”) many of the manufacturing plants that U.S. and E.U. companies are nicely building for them. Now this Perfect Storm of shoddy or dangerous goods, rising prices, and internal growth may sink China, Inc. If the global monies pouring into China slow to a trickle, that gives China an excuse to move troops into its “economic resource centers” in Eastern Russia and Southwestern Asia.

It may be a good thing we’ve built new military bases in Iraq but what can Mr. Putin do?