Category Archives: Business

Guest Post: George says You Have to Buy the Gas

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I went to WalMart this morning and bought a nice brushed chrome desk lamp to put beside my bed to replace the one that got knocked off by one of the cats.

This was made in China, and it only cost $9.97.  When I got home, I put a bulb in it and plugged it in, and it did not work.  I changed bulbs and it still did not work.  Pissed me off.

I’m taking it back tomorrow and exchange for another made in china that hopefully works.  I’ll make sure it works before I leave the store with it.

What really grinds my ass is that it’s a ten mile round trip, and that equates to about $3 in my huge, gas guzzling Ford Explosion.   So, the freaking lamp will end up costing me $16 — all things considered.

— George Poleczech

Friggin’ ‘Frig

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It was a rough winter in North Puffin. Fortunately, I was in South Puffin at the time. We had some plumbing issues. It turns out we also had a difficulty with the frig.

I have changed my spelling preference.
♦ The first citation of “frig” as short for refrigerator in the OED is from E. F. Spanner’s 1926 novel Broken Trident: “Best part of our stuff here is chilled, and with no ’frig plant working, the mercury will climb like a rocket.”
♦ The earliest “fridge” cite is from Frame-Up, a 1935 crime novel by Collin Brooks: “Do you mean that you keep a dead body in a fridge waiting for the right moment to bring her out?”
Hmmm.

The frig didn’t seem as cold as it should but our only freezer thermometer died in the freezer downstairs, so our first clue was that the milk seemed warm in the glass.

I’ve always resisted buying a refrigerator. We bought this more-than-20-years old frig because SWMBO wanted it, not because our previous white-box-that-makes-cold stopped making cold. It’s a really nice bottom freezer model with adjustable shelves and great access. It was the champ when it was young and had lots of fans. Unfortunately one of the fans has maybe gone on to love someone else. The white-box-that-makes-cold stopped pushing the cold into the box with the food in it.

I put some of the frozen canisters I use in my coolers in the frig and moved the ice cream to the otter freezer.

SWMBO and I both have wanted a French door, bottom freezer, frig.

New FrigNew French door, bottom freezer appliances cost more than some cars. As my friend “Bob” said in 2009, “$1,200 is too much. $3,000 is mindless.”

I agree wholeheartedly. I gave SWMBO the assignment. Check the sale fliers. Check the garage sales. Check craigislist. Find something we can afford.

Regular readers know I like Craigs List.

She found one in the third listing. “Brand new Kenmore…” The asking price was about half the current sale price for that model. I was on the road 10 minutes later.

I don’t really think the young seller is in the Russian Mafia, but it is indeed a brand new frig, fresh off the truck, with original packing and wrapping and taping. SWMBO is quite pleased.

On the subject of tape, if there is an uptick in refrigerator sales, buy stock in tape companies. It took most of a day to find the seller, inspect and buy the frig, and install it. It took twice that to remove all the tape. I don’t think I actually removed all the tape.

We arranged to meet in a hotel parking lot because the seller wasn’t sure of his mother-in-law’s address where the frig was in the garage. We arrived at the hotel first to find a Vermont Law Enforcement convention but no seller. He eventually drove in (the truck he was going to bring it with wouldn’t start), sneezed on us, and lead us back north to his mother-in-law’s house at the exit just south of where we started.

My truck has a cap so we had to lay the new frig down in the bed. The widest door in the house is the front door to the great room. That’s the only possible entrance for a box that is 34″ deep and 36″ wide.

Step 1: Stand the new frig up on the front porch. Cover with blue tarp so it is invisible. Let it stay awhile to reacclimate to being vertical.

Step 2: Move old frig into the middle of the great room and plug it back in until the new one settles down.

Step 3: We renovated the kitchen a few years ago, including building an alcove for the 33″ wide old frig with a nice liquor cabinet beside it. The carpenter had buried the screws in the side of the liquor cabinet, kind of behind the 2″ butcher block top. I pulled the top, got to the screws, and pulled the cabinet. I put it in the garage — out of sight, out of mind. It won’t fit beside the new 36″ wide frig but it’s too nice to toss.

Step 4: When I say I covered a mouse hole in the wall behind the frig, I mean a MOUSE hole. About 4″ high and 12″ wide. I have a vague recollection that the carpenter punched that hole by drilling lots of holes around the perimeter, then punching it out so we’d have access for a water line if desired. It left something that really looked chewed. And I could be misremembering. I do not want to meet that mouse. I covered it with a piece of steel. Since I have now really annoyed it, I really really do not want to meet that mouse.

Step 5: Boy howdy, new frigs don’t roll sideways.

Lurve jail blankets. Lurve.

This is a story very much like the platform bed coming down the low clearance stairway in Jersey. The tape measure said it wouldn’t fit so we just didn’t tell the movers.

I removed the door handles (bad design: two different size allen wrenches required) from the new frig. Popped the great room and cellar doors off their hinges. Moved furniture. There was no wiggle room, even if the frig had been inclined to move sideways when wiggled. I put a plywood plate on my handtruck to distribute the load and used my truck loadbinders to strap the thing on. Used jail blankets to pad the box. Anne pushed. I pulled and balanced. And we got the thing in the door. After considerable jockeying, it landed in front of the alcove and slid right in as if made for it.

I did not break my hand. Anne did not get concussed. We had to put it down while it was still on the porch because we didn’t get lined up straight. She stopped it with her head. And putting it down next to the alcove, it caught my hand. No apparent damage to the frig.

Step 6: Plug it in, run it a couple of hours, and fill.

Lo and behold, it ran like a new frig. Even the door alarm works, evidenced by how long we had it open while loading it. (Thankfully, that isn’t a siren call; it makes a steady ping-ping-ping, then the lights turned off.) There is both more and less room innit. I can put two gallons of milk and three 2-liter bottles in the door(s) but there isn’t as much room for butter or salad dressings because the door shelves aren’t adjustable height.

The worst part of having a new frig is the inconvenience of retraining. I have spent 20 years walking into the kitchen and opening the door by popping it on the edge. Now I have to pull a handle in the middle.

Step 7: Took the handles off the old frig and rolled it out onto the porch. Number One Daughter gave me instruction for that. “For the love of God, Pete and all that is Holy — please put the old fridge directly on the truck and take it to Hodgdons. Seriously, why touch something more than once — don’t move it from one place to another — JUST GET RID OF IT.”

Seriously, after we bounced it around the great room, the temp came down to normal. Maybe the mouse (remember the mouse?) had climbed in the air duct to build a home …

Writing the craigslist ad to sell it now.

A Southern friend pointed out to me that I overlooked a different solution:
Frig Repair
 

Why I Hate Tubbo

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Today is the day.

Although 64% of individual tax returns filed electronically this year were done by tax professionals (as of April 2), the total number of electronically filed, self-prepared returns was up 6.7%. More than 36 million people used tax software this year.

E-filed returns account for about 80% of individual tax returns filed.

Tubbo Tax Review

Sales of Intuit’s TubboTax, the largest, bulkiest, most annoying tax software available, rose 10%.

I started tax prep in January this year, since I have to report sales tax then. It gave me a nice jump on louts like Rufus who hope the post office will stay open until midnight.

Except.

There were a couple of glitches.

I couldn’t finish until Vermont sent SWMBO a W2. January came and went. February came and went. Much of Marchuary came and went. We couldn’t even log into her employee account online to get the electronic copy.

They did eventually give her a new login so we discovered they had addressed her W2 to the street address of her former (and now defunct) employer, not to her home. That was useful.

She called to get a “corrected” W2.

“Oh, you don’t need that,” the State of Vermont Payroll Division rep told her. “The IRS won’t look at that.”

<sigh>

It looked as if we’d gotten everything straightened out until I discovered that there was no longer a mortgage interest deduction on Anne’s return and that !@#$%^ Tubbo had “forgotten” some of the personal info checkboxes. She has claimed that mortgage interest on every return we’ve used !@#$%^ Tubbo. The 1098 for the bank was right there in the Forms. Blank. It wouldn’t let her enter the interest until she created a new 1099.

I found the most recent round of errors by going line by line through the tax return PDFs rather than through the pages in !@#$%^ Tubbo. It’s easier in !@#$%^ Tubbo because I can quick link to other pages but I keep discovering that what it shows me on screen may not match what it prints. The PDF does.

I was taking a “last look” at my tax return when I wondered about something I simply had not noticed before: a data error in a 1099.

I looked up the proper numbers and overrode the Tubbo values.

The $282,834 !@#$%^ Tubbo reported as my tax due certainly got my attention.

There is no easy way to correct imported data because the “forms view” doesn’t have a copy of the 1099 it came from. I found it by going back through the “interview” and correcting it there. That’s when !@#$%^ Tubbo decided my income was $1,203,147.14. Ya know, if I had made a million bucks, I’d pay the tax in a heartbeat and retire.

Estupido.

I did eventually find a hidden link to the right data entry point.

Then we tried to e-file.

Worked great for the federal return, sort of.

The “Congratulations! Your Returns Have Been Sent! (Your current e-file status is pending)” emails did drift in but I had to go to IRS.gov to be sure the IRS had accepted them.

And e-filing didn’t work for SWMBO’s state return. Seeing “Federal State Returns” plus “E-File” in bold letters on the box led me to expect I could e-file our Federal and State returns.

Noooooo.

!@#$%^ Tubbo demanded $24.99 to file her first (and only) state return electronically.

She has printed and mailed her Vermont return, complete with a printout of the W2 the State of Vermont sent to the wrong address.

Tax Freedom Day is not until April 21, three days than last year.

We have a voluntary tax system. It’s the law that people pay, but the government doesn’t calculate it for you.

Not until after you file, anyway.

 

Pay Me

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Almost 50 years ago, my mom’s friend Eddie Maranowski was a photographer for the Daily Local News but he also owned a shoe store right next door to the Warner Theater where I was an usher.

Eddie hired me for a promotion for a brand of shoe he sold. I was the (very local) “Kolonel Keds” for the opening of a now-forgotten movie at the Warner. I greeted kids, handed out trinkets, and looked heroic.

Keds™ is an American brand of canvas shoes with rubber soles introduced in 1916 by U.S. Rubber (the company later known as Uniroyal). In 1960 they became the first mass-marketed canvas-top “sneakers” because the rubber soles let us sneak up silently on spaceships. Kolonel Keds flew Bell™ jet packs, rescued kids, and extolled the virtues of the scientifically designed, built-in booster pad in the shoes.

Eddie gave me a few bucks and a brand new pair of sneakers. I didn’t get to keep the Bell crash helmet, though.

Keds logo
I got paid to wear the logo. There’s a lesson there.

Everybody wants to “monetize” the Interwebs. “It’s been 25 years of ‘free free free’,” Internet inventor Al Gore said. “It’s time we start understanding nothing is free.”

I agree.

See, when you hear an expert say we should monetize anything you know he means he wants money to flow from you to him.

That’s backwards.

Ralph Lauren wanted me to embroider his polo pony on my shirt for free, not to tell the peeps I met how cool I am but to market his shirt to the peeps I meet. He never responded to my request for a share of the profits, so I don’t wear his shirts. On the other hand, I painted Lanson Machine on the fenders of the race car because they did pay for that.

Data is the currency of the Internet.

The World Economic Forum in a 2011 report called personal data the “new oil.” Data brokers estimate information about you is worth a fraction of a cent for a single piece of data to $5,000 or more for a full digital profile.

The Denver Post had 25 trackers on a recent visit: Adblade, AddThis, BrightTag, ChartBeat, Crowdynews, DoubleClick, Facebook Connect, Google +1, Google Adsense, Google Analytics, LinkedIn Widgets, Lotame, Mixpanel, NDN Analytics, New Relic, Newstogram, Omniture (Adobe Analytics), Outbrain, Press+, Quantcast, ScoreCard Research Beacon, Twitter Badge, Twitter Button, Tynt, and Visual Revenue. Surprisingly, nytimes.com set only seven the same day: Audience Science, Brightcove, ChartBeat, Conviva, Dynamic Yield, Google Analytics, Krux Digital, New York Times Beacon, ScoreCard Research Beacon, and WebTrends.

Judge Lucy Koh of the Northern District Court of California found last year that Google might have violated wiretap laws.

It’s time the money start flowing from them to us. Amazon wants to set a tracking cookie to see where I click next? That’ll be one cent, please. TVGuide wants to sell a third-party cookie so someone else profits from where I click next, too? That’ll be a nickle, please. Verizon wants to know where I am to connect my phone call? Cool. Verizon wants to sell where I am to the donut shop? I want a dime for that. Andy Monfried might sell my email address to ABCMegaUltraCorp? I get a tenth of a cent each time. Spamford Wallace emails me an ad for a penis reduction tool. That’ll cost him a buck. For the record, I never did collect from Spamford.

This could work. All we need is a micropayment system to collect it and pay us.

A micropayment is just what it sounds like: a very small sum of money that usually transfers from my account to yours (or vice versa) online. Unfortunately, ystems that allow transactions like these, from fractional pennies to a few cents each have seen little success so far. W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium) planned to include micropayments in HTML but those efforts have stalled, so there are no widely used micropayment systems on the Internet. CentUp is a mostly blogging and podcasting system that collect donations for content. I haven’t seen many sites that use it. Flattr uses actual banks. M-Coin and Zong charge your phone bill. PayPal will do charges under $12 but their fees are high. IBM and Visa are among the big operators who have tried and failed. It was just too expensive, I guess. Bitcoin might work.

Once upon a time, businesses spent money directly — with surveys and coupons or discounts on their products, for example — to harvest data about us and to mail us enticements to buy more. Now they want to do it for free. Eddie paid me to help him sell those sneaks.

Who knows? A side benefit might be to the post office. If we raise the cost of entry high enough, advertisers might just go back to snail mail.

 

I Hate Lines

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I hate liars more.

!@#$%& KMart had peanuts on sale and I needed a clothes line. The peanut aisle was, of course, empty of peanuts and had no “sale” stickers on the shelves so I went to the front counter to grab a flier, just to make sure I was right.

I was.

A slight aside: This event occurred at the Marathon, Florida, KMart. This store, perhaps the least liked of all KMart locations, has long been said to be the most profitable per square foot of all that chain’s retail locations. Local customers dislike the store because they regularly run out of sale merchandise. Local customers dislike the store because many of the staff are surly or missing. Local customers dislike the store because the one or two open checkout lines are always backed up and slow. A typical Yelp review of this location was “now I know why KMart is struggling and closing stores.” It does have a decent fishing section. There were no peanuts there, either.

Since I was at the customer service counter and there was no line, I asked for a rain check.

“What’s a rain check?” the customer service employee asked.

After I dope slapped myself to make sure I heard correctly, I explained.

“This term comes from baseball, where in the 1880s it became the practice to offer paying spectators a rain check entitling them to future admission for a game that was postponed or ended early owing to bad weather. By the early 1900s the term was transferred to tickets for other kinds of entertainment, and later to a coupon entitling a customer to buy, at a later date and at the same price, a sale item temporarily out of stock.”

“Oh, we don’t give those.”

“Of course you do. Every KMart in the country does.”

“No we never have.”

We never have?

Welcome to the MyKmart Community!
Rain checks are normally offered as a final solution after all other options have been completed in locating your item. Rain checks do not apply to special purchases, clearance and closeout sales where quantities are advertised as being limited.
Normally once a rain check is filled out, you will be called once the merchandise comes in and have a specific amount of days to come in and pick up your items, otherwise they will be placed back on the shelf.

Another employee was there. He said they did and to call Mr. So-and-So.

“No, we don’t do that.” The other fellow faded. I guess he saw the look on my face. I hate to be lied to.

A third rocket scientist came up.

“Oh, we have never given rain checks,” she said.

That’s when I returned my cart to her.

Rain checks are a good news/bad news solution for a retail store. Every business wants to minimize inventory and maximize inventory turns. If you hold too much inventory, whether on the shelf or in the warehouse, you risk getting stuck with stuff you can’t sell. If you hold too little inventory, then you risk running out and losing customer good will. Either problem costs you money.

KMart apparently worries not about losing customer good will.

Were I a KMart employee, particularly one charged with maintaining inventory, I might not want to give a customer a rain check either. See, their 1940s policy to bring in the oversold/sold out merchandise, store it in the layaway center, and then stand around in the layaway center back there in the far dungeon of the store waiting for the customer, I’m sure I’d find something better to do with my time.

Still, were I a KMart employee, I wouldn’t lie about it to the customer.

!@#$%& Kmart. I never did get my clothesline.