Category Archives: Business

Price Hike

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Comcast CEO Says “You Can’t Keep Raising The Price Forever,” But Does It Anyway.

He’s not alone.

Federal Reserve officials continue to avoid raising short-term interest rates because inflation remains “stuck at exceptionally low levels,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

Say what?

Inflation: a sustained increase in the general level of prices for goods and services.

The Social Security Administration will to announce that there will be no Cost of Living Adjustment on Thursday, when it releases the Consumer Price Index.

Say what?

The lack of a COLA means that older people will face higher health care costs. Younger people already are.

The Unaffordable Care Act was passed based on per capita health care costs of $7,825 under the Bush Administration. Obamacare promised to save us money. So far, per capita health care has cost $8,054 in $2009, $8,299 in 2010, $8,553 in 2011, $8,845 in 2012, $9,146 in 2013, and it is expected to come in at $9,458 in 2014 and $9,800 in 2015, all under the Obama Administration.

“Oddly, I’ve been spending more and getting less for everything but driving around,” my roofer friend Dean “Dino” Russell told me. “Milk for my cats is up to $4.79 a gallon. I don’t even buy beef anymore.” Hamburger sold for about $2.19 per pound at his Publix in 2008; it was “on sale” for $4.79 this week. And gas may be cheaper than a year ago but it hasn’t come back down to the kind of prices we had for more than a decade.

Dino won’t even talk about how much his health insurance or windstorm insurance costs.

I ran the numbers for Dino’s neighbor, Ralph. Ralph is 38, single, lives in Miami, and earned $46,494 last year, so that’s the basis for his Obamacare premium. He paid $370.40 per month ($4,444.80 total this year). His insurance company received a 16% increase for 2016.

Speaking of price hikes…

Pants on Fire• I have the misfortune of contracting with “Citizens” Property Insurance Co. I don’t know how they came up with the name with a straight face. “Citizens” was established by the Florida Legislature as a not-for-profit insurer of last resort. It quickly became the largest insurer in the state and about the only place we can get windstorm insurance.

I paid !@#$%^Citizens $2,455 for wind storm coverage in 2008. The price has risen more than health care every year. I paid !@#$%^Citizens $4,489 for wind storm coverage in 2015.

“It’s the higher water damage claims in the Keys”, a Citizens rep said. “Otherwise we would have reduced property insurance rates for most homeowners here.”

OK. Wait. !@#$%^Citizens insures against wind storm damage. They refuse to pay for water damage, referring those to FEMA or your homeowner’s policy. And the last major hurricane to hit South Florida was Wilma in 2005. In fact, Fitch upgraded their bonds to “AA-” thanks to !@#$%^Citizens’ successful efforts to reduce its exposure to claims by lowering and transferring risk not to mention the small fact that there have been no hurricane losses over the past nine years.

Pants on Fire• I paid !@#$%^Comcast $742.59 for basic cable and Interwebs in 2008.

“Our rate hasn’t changed,” a !@#$%^Comcast rep told me.

OK. Oh, wait. I paid !@#$%^Comcast $1,169.10 for basic cable and Interwebs in 2015. I guess a 57% increase isn’t actually a rate change. The Baud rate has mostly stayed the same though.

Pants on Fire• Elsewhere, Verizon says it will raise the price of its remaining unlimited data plans by $20. Again.

“Verizon will not increase the price on any lines with an unlimited data plan that is currently in a two-year contract,” the company said.

“When this happens, I will probably leave Verizon,” Liz Arden said.

Verizon has been wallowing in extra money from all the customers who own their own phones but pay full subsidized phone prices for service. “The only people left on unlimited plans are people like me [who own their own phones] so VZW’s been pocketing all that extra cash,” she notes.

We can leave !@#$%^Verizon. We’re stuck with !@#$%^Citizens. We’re stuck with !@#$%^Comcast.

Can you hear me now?

It turns out most companies raise prices for only two reasons: when they can do it without alienating their customers and when they don’t care about alienating their customers.

Verizon and Comcast and Citizens don’t care if they alienate customers. In fact, Citizens wants to drive customers away but it, like Comcast, is the only game in town.

Despite consistently ranking among the bottom ten companies in the world, Citizens, Comcast, and Verizon are breaking the banks financially. Citizens is a “non-profit.” They can levy 10% emergency assessments on nearly every policy holder in the state forever and in an unlimited amount to pay off bonds. Comcast reported $8.38 billion net income on $68.78 billion sales. Verizon reported $4.22 billion net income on $127.08 billion sales.

Wouldn’t it be loverly if we thought not doing business with these laughing stocks would change their behavior?

“It would work better to punish them,” Ms. Arden said.

Oh, and by the way? Gas prices will rise in January.

 

65 Cents Lost

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I found 65 cents on the road this morning. Since that’s a nickle more than I made in an hour on my first job, I was aghast.

Marlboro Reds
This poor, abandoned pack of smokes fell out of someone’s pocket to be run over by at least one small truck.

I always hated it when the pack fell out of my shirt pocket but I hated it even more when it was my Zippo lighter and I was on the boat. If you find a 40-year old Zippo in the grassy bottom at the bend of the Chester River at Devils Reach off what used to be a corn field, it’s mine. It will probably still work.

Regular readers may recall that I quit smoking for my birthday in 1976, in large part because it had gotten so expensive. I smoked Between the Acts, a little cigarette-shaped nicotine delivery device (NDD) made with cigar tobacco. It was a convenient package because one could smoke an entire “cigar” during a short intermission. I liked the taste and the fact that they cost only 35 cents per pack because cigars weren’t subject to the same taxes as cigarettes.

Minimum wage was $2.30/hour in 1976 except for farm workers. Farmers reached parity with nonfarm workers in 1977 but anyone “working for tips” such as restaurant staff and theater ushers remain uncovered by minimum wage laws.

Marlboros (we didn’t have to call them “Reds” in 1976), jumped to $5/carton that year on state taxes and the state legislature planned to add the taxes to cigars like mine.

Minimum wage smokers then had to work about two-and-a-half hours, after deductions for Social Security and a dime of income tax, to buy a whole carton of cigs.

I called the local drug store this morning. That single pack of Marlboros cost $6.03 plus state and local sales taxes for a total price of $6.48 here today. Embedded in the price (and therefore doubly taxed) is $1.339 per pack in excise taxes. In 2013, the same pack of smokes cost $6.00 here in Florida, down 5% from $6.29 in 2012. Last summer, Florida prices came back up 5% to $6.30. We won’t even talk about New York where that same pack would cost you $12.85 or more.

All told, that’s $65 per carton here today.

Every year, the Awl “checks the prices of cigarettes in all fifty legally recognized states of this fair Union.” Founded in 2009, the Awl publishes “the curios and oddities” of the Internet.

The 2015 minimum wage in Florida is $8.05 per hour, with a minimum of at least $5.03 per hour for tipped employees. Plus tips.

Minimum wage smokers today need to work about ten hours or a quarter of a work week, after an 89 cent deduction for Social Security and Medicare and another half a buck of income tax, to buy a carton of cigs.

So I have to wonder, How does anyone afford to smoke, let alone to lose, cigarettes?

 

Let Them Eat Kale

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You can’t tax people into eating kale. Except in Vermont.

Members of the Vermont House Ways and Means Committee are ready bring out H.235, a controversial bill to levy an excise tax of two cents on every ounce of sugared beverage distributed in the state. Sodas. Fruit drinks. Sports drinks. Flavored water. Energy drinks. Iced teas. And probably the orange juice I drink every morning. In short, any nonalcoholic beverage, carbonated or noncarbonated, that is intended for human consumption in Vermont. The bill won support in the Health Care Committee on Thursday.

The excise tax would be charged to the retail stores who would turn around and raise the price on the shelf. It’s a tax that would generate about $30 million in revenue per year for Vermont

Vermonters are debating what a sugar-sweetened-beverage tax would do. The consensus appears split between two choices:

(a) Merely increase sales of sugar-sweetened kale chips; or
(a) Drive sweet-toothed residents across state lines to New Hampshire where there is no sales tax or New York where not long ago, huge 17-ounce beverage cups were banned. And there are a lot of taxes.

Nobody surveyed thought it would change behaviors.

A bottle of fruit juice with some added sugar costs about 66 cents or 3/$2. That fruit juice would jump to about 86 cents with the tax, Vermont Retail and Grocers Association president Jim Harrison said. In some cases, the cost of your favorite fizzy beverage would about double.

Eat Mo Kale“There is no doubt their real reason is the $30 million,” my red-haired friend Caitlin Abbate said. “Bye bye BOGO.”

They’re both right. Two cents is about the retail price per ounce of a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi™ or Coke™ which tells me the members of the state Ways and Means Committee aren’t interested in fixing obesity in the state. They’re interested in the $30 million in new annual revenue. And, since sin taxes never drop (consider the taxes on cigarettes, whiskey, gasoline, and oregano), we can expect a can of pop to cost about the same as a pack of smokes in a year or two.

Even Florida’s manatees have taken up the cause. I reckon someone convinced them it will mean more free lettuce for them.

I filed a FOIA request and found a Vermont lobbying permit granted to the BORECOLE Corporation. Ban Or Eliminate Costly Oversight for Lettuce Eaters is a Florida corporation headquartered in Manatee County.

“The cost of a beverage would nearly double…”

I was able to speak to Josiah (not his real name) Bartlett about their lobbying efforts. “We believe in obesity and in re-education,” he said. “People need to be taught to consume kale-based foods in order to reduce the demands on lettuce.”

To that end, a pilot plant is already up and running right on the river in Bradenton where the first Kaola Pop is on trucks waiting for delivery. Kaola Pop is a kale-based cola with no high fructose or any other corn syrup, added sugars, honey, agave nectar, or even beet juice. It has no sweetening at all, just the natural goodness of Kale.

A spokesman for U.S. Sugar in Clewiston, Florida, welcomed Kaola Pop to the market.

“Someone convinced the manatees it will mean more free lettuce for them…”

“Manatees are so stupid,” Marie Antoinette said some years ago. “Let them eat kale.”

 

!@#$%^&^ Comcast

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Asshole Brown or Comcast?

CBS News requested comment from Comcast Wednesday night but did not receive an immediate reply.

[Updated Feb. 6, 2015, just 8 days later]

Turns our “Asshole Brown” isn’t alone. Comcast has just added “Super Bitch” Bauer to the ranks, along with “Dummy,” and “Bitch Dog” Govan.

And those are just the ones we know about. Comcast has created a company culture where to lie, to cheat, to malign, and to malinger isn’t just common; it seems to us mere mortals to be company policy. I have a lot of trouble believing the fine hand of CEO Brian L. Roberts isn’t in here somewhere.

Super Bitch Bauer or Super Bitch Comcast?
 

Not Bait. Definitely Switched

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I went to Walgreens to cash in my 4,050 points against the two gallons of $4.19 milk I bought yesterday. They wouldn’t let me.

“Plenty of points. In plenty of places,” the Walgreens ads trumpet. The store’s “Balance Rewards” appear on featured items in the store fliers and online each week. They promote buying “more for healthy behavior.”

Walgreens, at the corner of Happy and Healthy chocolate barsThis week, the flier offers 1,000 points on Lindt Chocolates, 1,000 points on Schweppes seltzer water, 1,000 points on Planters winter spice or brittle nut medley, and 1,000 points on Hallmark greeting cards. Yep, healthy choices all.

“Oh, we have a policy not to redeem those points on dairy,” the manager said.

Turns out the fine print does say that points are “good on next purchase. Points are not earned if Store Credit or Redemption Dollars are used in a transaction and cannot be redeemed on some items. Complete details at Walgreens.com/Balance.”

I wondered about the policy that sells healthy chocolate and soda and nuts and greeting cards but won’t redeem them on milk, so I turned to the Interwebs.

“Due to state and federal laws, points cannot be earned on some items. Points will not be awarded to anyone who currently is or was at any time in the 6 months prior to purchasing Pharmacy Items covered by Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare or any other government-funded healthcare program. Pharmacy Items must be purchased at participating Walgreens Drugstore, Rxpress, Duane Reade, or Walgreens Pharmacy locations (“Participating Stores”) to earn points. Excludes Pharmacy Items purchased from AR, NJ or NY pharmacies and prescriptions transferred to a Participating Store located in AL, MS, OR or PR. See Balance Rewards terms and conditions for full details.” [Emphasis added]

The Terms and Conditions of the loyalty program offered by Walgreen Co. to its customers (also referred to as “the Program”) (I presume the loyalty program is referred to as “the Program,” not the customers) runs to five dense, single spaced pages of legalese. Buried near the bottom of page 3, I found this:

“Redemption Dollars may not be used for the purchase of the following: dairy; alcohol; tobacco; stamps; phone/pre-paid/gift cards; money order/transfers; transportation passes; charitable donations; prescriptions; pseudoephedrine or ephedrine products; immunizations, health tests or other healthcare items or services; Prescription Savings Club membership fee; clinic services.”

Walgreens may, of course, at any time and without notice, change, eliminate, or terminate the Point earning and redemption procedures and offerings.

I can understand that a drug store might not want to encourage discounts on booze and tobacco and would “lose” money on cash stuff like stamps, cash cards, and money order and the like. I don’t understand why a drug store “at the corner of happy and healthy” would discourage discounts on prescription, immunizations, health tests, items and services.

CVS annoys me, too, but I really wish they hadn’t left town.

“I dislike CVS,” Liz Arden said, “simply because they refuse Google Wallet and Apple Pay forms of payment. I like Walgreens because they accept Google Wallet.”

There is that, of course.

As far as I know, Walgreens does not sell bait. I feel happier and healthier already.