Monday, July 18, 2011 by Dick.

I’ll bet you thought this would be about the maroons in Washington who suck the oxygen out of the air wondering whether Roger Clemens took steroids instead of buckling down to the business of running a government.

And, yes, Roger Clemens could probably do a better job at the business of running a government. Jessica Rabbit could probably do a better job at the business of running a government.

Heck, even the Great State of New York with its 783 year history of waiting until 2153 to pass the 1960 budget brought theirs in on time this year.

Word play maybe isn’t as much fun as sex but it’s still pretty satisfying (I may catch holy hell from the missus for saying that).

Last week, I noted that Washington is a fine mess (most everyone there is a real phony) but I didn’t have space to work in absolutely unsure, devout atheist, genuine-imitation leather, or half naked.

Of course I, like all my readers, am absolutely sure of everything I write. For example the true believers in anthropogenic global warming have literal faith that planetary temps have risen almost exactly 10 degrees since last week. I should note that many on that side of the aisle who believe implicitly in political science poo pooh the scientific creationism embraced on the other.

I AM™ increasingly irked by the food industry for selling me twelve-ounce pound cakes and 48-ounce half gallons of ice cream. Food giants take a different view of the smaller, lighter, easier to carry half gallon orange juice cartons so I invited Popsicle-Klondike-Ocean Spray-Slim Fast-Starbucks-Ben & Jerry’s-Breyers-Heartbrand-PepsiCo-Frito Lay-Quaker Oats-Tropicana spokesman Ross Messier to comment. He pronounces his name ROSS.

“We already sell personal servings in many markets. We see the bigger containers as our dual entree in the grocery and convenience markets,” Mr. Messier (pronounced MAY-she) said. “Convenience stores are big on Super-Sizing their offerings.”

Remember, you read it here first when you see a straw taped to the side of a “half gallon” OJ carton and a wooden spoon on the ice cream tub at the Quick Stop next year.

I bought a new shirt last week. It’s a nice, blue, button-down, pinpoint oxford that drapes superbly and has a marvelous hand. The girls wouldn’t let me buy the one I really wanted, though. Maybe because it had a random pattern.

I’m in rather a financial pickle as so many are in these perilous times, but I like fine clothing, have a good eye, and even have my mom’s sketch books for inspiration. Oh, I know. I generally wear khaki slacks, button down shirts, and Bass Weejuns with no socks but I truly believe I could develop a line that caters to early adopting young taste makers who love the originality and eclectic style of mature clothing lines. And by “mature” I mean “old.” All I really need is a nameless celebrity to endorse me!

For the record, I wrote this whilst sucking on a sweet tart in my home office where the IRS prohibits personal business. I gotta get back to work.

Posted in Newspaper "Science", Marketing, Business, Politics & News, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 by Dick.

If more than half your customer base thinks a Smart™ Car™ isn’t, would it not be wiser to paint your logo on something else?

Posted in Marketing, Quickies | 1 Comment »

Monday, January 31, 2011 by Dick.

Locally renowned entrepreneur (and my old friend) Ernie Epplethorpe is starting another new business, Excellent Ernest’s X-Ray Emporium. He sent me a copy of the message he spammed around, partly so I’d know what he’s up to and partly in case I wanted to bid the job. (I didn’t.)

Website designers: I’d like to create www.excellenternestsXXXemporium.net. I’ve been working on it myself but have started to realize I might be better served getting grants for the business and hiring a designer. If you are interested (and are seriously affordable) please call me. Thanks!

No sooner had I responded to that message than a new client did show up in the dooryard. A local dipswitch manufacturer named Dudley Donato is moving from his garage operation to a shared new building in the county industrial development park in Puffin Center. Mr. Donato needs to install some new packers and to scale up his order fulfillment technology since most orders are either for one or two switches or for one or two pallet loads.

Dudley Donato’s Dependable Dipswitches and Excellent Ernest’s X-Ray Emporium. Really. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

We’ll have new equipment on Mr. Donato’s dock by the end of February.

I told Mr. Epplethorpe that we’re not cheap enough but I did advise that he would be well served by concentrating on his core strengths and hiring (somebody) out to do the jobs he doesn’t want or can’t do.

That’s Business Startup 101.

There’s a caveat, though.

Mr. Epplethorpe, despite the grandeur of his newest corporate name, is a sole proprietor. Here’s what I asked — and told — him:

Are you working the requisite 80 billable hours/week? If not, are you working 80 hours/week on something that will lead to something billable? Are you motivated enough to do it yourself?

If those answers are no and no and no, Are you a good enough HTML jockey and are you also good enough at marketing? If so, your own time might be better spent on webwork than on other activities.

New business owners have a perennial problem. When there is enough time, there is never enough money to do a job. When there is enough money, there is never enough time.

We’ve all seen the new “Coming Soon!” restaurant in town not open and not open and not open while the owners slave with spackling and paintbrushes and oven wiring. Not much money coming in the doors when the doors aren’t open. The best argument to plan for outside help is this: excellenternestsXXXemporium.net has yet to go live and Mr. Donato’s dipswitches are switching on and off already.

The Great Female Vocalist (rock/pop/country singer-songwriter) of last week just finished submitting a new song to the Library of Congress. “It is so easy now that everything is done electronically,” she told me. “Some artists have ‘people’ to do this stuff. I am my people. Hey, I think I’ll have a company party tonight.”

It was a great party.

Posted in Marketing, Business, Random Access | 2 Comments »

Friday, November 26, 2010 by Dick.

My 25 year old dryer and 15 year old washer were still running when Sears ran its Black Friday ad last year. Brand new, low water use, high efficiency, front loading, stackable washer-dryer pair for $579.98. Regular retail (does anyone pay regular retail for appliances?) price on those particular models was $1,399.98. “At least four per store” the ad said.

Key West has a very small store and it is an hour away. I figured four pairs would be the most they ever had.

Hmmm. I wonder if it is four pairs or four appliances? I didn’t want to get up at 0:dark:30 and drive 55 miles for something I didn’t absolutely need right then.

Why should I have expected any different? I called the store and the appliance department manager treated me like an annoyance.

I want a nap.

After the short wait programmed into the auto-attendant phone system, “Darrell” answered. I asked if he had the advertised washer and dryer in stock.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m in the shipping department.”

I asked the expected question about why a call to the major appliance department would be shunted to the shipping department.

“Because I’m the appliance manager but all my people are on the floor with customers.” Ahh, Sears.

Oddly, I was a customer.

Darrell spent about 10 minutes refusing to help me and asking for my phone number so “someone could call me back.” I do not respond well to stonewalling so I spent my part of those 10 minutes demanding that he treat me like a customer and give me the info I wanted. I got nowhere but I did leave my number with him.

He also refused to let me speak to his supervisor; he then refused to let me speak to the store manager when I asked to be transferred.

“You know,” I said near the end of the conversation, “if you had simply looked up whether you had the product in stock instead of being a dickweed (actually I probably said ‘instead of jerking me around’), you would have had a happy customer in me and would have had time to take care of two or even three other customers.”

I called the store back to speak to the Sears store manager. I had to leave my number on voice mail. I’m still waiting for that call back.

I need a nap.

OTOH, a saleslady named Ann did call me 45 minutes later.

“We had four pairs in stock,” she said. “I know we sold two right after the store opened but I think there are still two left.

Ann explained that they were giving customers a ticket that let them buy the appliances and that the sale rules said they could not do a telephone sale. Sort of no tickee no shirty, and you must be present to win. She put me on hold to check.

They did have two pairs left; Ann advised driving down right then. Key West is an hour from my little house but I loaded up and did just that.

The store sold one more pair while I was on the road. I got the last pair.

Ann tried twice to sell me a new pigtail and vent but I demurred. I wondered why anyone would buy either, since most retail appliances today are replacements.

“Our installers will not use an existing cord,” she said citing liability. “If yours is even a little bit frayed and your house burns, we would buy you a new house.”

Loading was interesting. The dryer was the first box out the door. The stock boy rocked his hand truck back steeply and laid the bottom front edge of on the tailgate. He rocked the hand truck up a little and we lifted it right onto the tailgate.

Oops.

The box was two-three inches taller than my truck cap. No problem. He popped it over on its side and we pushed it to the front of the bed. The second stock boy brought the washer; the two of them laid it down on its side and popped it in without issue.

So here’s the bottom line. Ann at Sears was very nice, very helpful and deserves the little bit of commission they paid her. I got the washer and dryer I wanted. My 25 year old dryer and 15 year old washer experienced some … issues over the winter so I put the new ones in service and moved the old ones elsewhere. And I didn’t have to take Harvest Gold. Or Plum.

This year was different.

My UPS has been talking back lately so I’m thinking it’s time. Electronics don’t last as long here as in gentler climes. Office Depot had an APC 1500 VA UPS on sale for half price. No shipping. Big batteried UPSes are expensive to ship. I set the alarm for 5:40. Ayem.

Pink and purple sunrise and me without a camera phone. It was not red enough to take warning but I did watch. Not a sight I recognized.

Got to Office Depot about 6:20 and was dumbfounded to see the parking lot full. As in seriously full. Had to drive past many cars to find a parking space.

I did (eventually and with the help of a personal shopper) find and buy the UPS I wanted. Long lines at the checkout, mostly because the cashiers were hard selling extended warranties. Everyone was helpful and very nice. No Android Tablets. None of my other gimmes.

I also looked at a Ryobi cordless tool bundle in the Home Depot flier and didn’t even bother going there. Ditto the wrapping paper at Walgreens.

I thought long and hard about the wrapping paper. Then I thought long and hard about the lines. Inertia and the fact that I don’t actually use wrapping paper, particularly here, won out. About the Ryobi, if this year is anything like last year, the store was sold out in 10-15 minutes. It is the new 19.2 volt model which matches nothing I have. Drill, light, circular saw, vacuum. I would use the drill and light but can’t see much use for the circular saw or vacuum.

Back to the UPS. The Office Depot parking lot was full but, after writing that, I realized that “full” in a small town is a whole lot different than “full” in Miami or New York. Here, there were three or four or even five peeps at each of the three or four open registers. I’m really really really glad I didn’t find anything I couldn’t live without at Brandsmart up in the United States.

Posted in Marketing, Business, Sociology, Holidays, Random Access | 1 Comment »

Monday, August 16, 2010 by Dick.

A lifetime ago in political terms I ran for state representative. I visited every dairy farm, rich and poor, in our then-two-Town district (Puffin East and North Puffin).

I spoke at some length with Etienne Chasseur, a North Puffin farmer milking about 75 head on 180 acres over on the Sweep Road.

“You need to sign on to the Canadian supply management system,” he told me. “I’m going broke here on an $11 milk check but my brother-in-law up north gets $18 U.S. for milking the same size herd.”

What, is he nuts? Etienne left out some of the story. I didn’t sign on then and would not now.

Vermont is a major dairy state with minor farms. The state defines a “large farm” as more than 600 cows; the median farm here now milks 120 head. Wisconsin, California, and even Nebraska dairy farms often milk 1,500, 2,000, or more. Many more. In 1991, a Vermont cow on one of our 2,381 farms produced about 15,000 pounds of milk per year. By 2000, average annual production per cow had risen to almost 17,500 pounds per year. (There were 11,019 farms here at the middle of the 20th Century.) Farmers measure milk production in “hundredweight” rather than gallons. About 12 gallons of milk weighs one hundred pounds.

Dairy farming here is unique because dairy farmers cannot set the price of milk and cannot pass along increases in operating costs. Neither Etienne Chasseur nor Wisconsin dairy farmer Paul Rozwadowski knows how much his milk sold for until the “milk check” comes in the mail. A month later.

Canada and the EU have a two-tiered system that offer farmers a (fixed) high price for “quota” milk, but a very low price for milk that is more than the quota for each farm. I’ve talked to some dairy farmers in Quebec. One compared his 150 cows to a 1,500 head herd in Wisconsin. Over the last dozen years, he made more total profit on 150 cows than the Wisconsin farm did on 1,500 for nine of those years.

The latest debate over dairy supply management began in 2007 and has picked up again.

The current milk pricing system is “inadequate, unfair and devastating family farms across the country,” Mr. Rozwadowski told the St. Albans Messenger. His last milk check brought in $13.80 per hundredweight for milk that he said cost $18/cwt to produce.

That price is based on dairy commodity sales. The USDA Federal Milk Marketing Order Office monitor the price of butter, dry milk powder, whey powder, and cheddar cheese sold on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The feds jinker with the numbers to come up with the mailbox price, or the price that the farmer actually receives.

So. What have we learned?

• The government sets the price farmers sell for
• Some farmers want to “level the playing field” by having the government also limit how much they can sell.

Where else could this plan this work? (1) Since the Obamanation owns General Motors, can we expect to see car sales limited to, say, 4 million units annually for all sellers and no more than 50,000 Chevy Volts sold prix fixe $65,000? If GM wants to sell more, the remainder must sell for $3,000 each. (2) Perhaps the feds should limit the oil companies to 15,680,000 barrels/day (about 5 million per day below current consumption) and fix the price at $180/barrel. Any production over the 15 million must be sold for $10/barrel. (3) Next, all manufacturers of men’s knit shirts will be held to 686 million units next year and the price set at $21 each wholesale. Anything over 686 million units must be wholesaled out for $6.

Did any of that really make sense to you?

Things that should be simple seldom are:
Try reading the Federal Tax Code

Got milk? Maybe, just maybe, farmers should look for a better way to price their milk instead of beseeching the feds for yet another set of regulations to hamper them.

Posted in What? Are They Nuts?, Marketing, Politics & News, Random Access | 3 Comments »

Monday, August 2, 2010 by Dick.

I miss my landline. Can never find the damn cell phone! the lovely Chris.tine said yesterday. Naturally, that got me to thinking.

I’ve become a VOIP evangelist or perhaps a voipelist for short. A few years ago, I looked at my then-Verizon bill and my dissatisfaction with Verizon-chicanery and realized that technology could save me money.

One of Verizon’s cute tricks in this market is to charge for message units. They don’t use that Jersey-centric term here (they call it “local calling”) but the bottom line is that they charged a long distance rate for calling the next door neighbor and they hid the charge in an arcane counter rather than breaking out the individual calls. I prefer knowing how much it costs me to call Rufus, so that irked me. I hate toll calls. I bought the upgrade with unlimited local calls just to keep my blood pressure in check

At the time, Ma Bell and her progeny cost us about $75 per month and I was paying another $20 or so for dial up Internet access. Remember dial up? ‘Nuff said.

Cable service finally came to North Puffin and Vonage was advertising pretty heavily. I could buy “High Speed Internet” bundled with basic cable TV and switch my existing phone number to the VOIP provider, all for less than the $95 per month POTS and dial up cost us.

Sold, American.

This wasn’t an easy step for a Luddite like me. I just replaced my VCR with another VCR, wear button-down shirts, and drive a ten-year old car and a ten-year old truck. Not simultaneously.

On the other hand I also have a cellphone. SWMBO has a cellphone. I’m thinking about dropping even the VOIP service in favor of those cells alone.

I’m not alone. The number of U.S. households choosing only cell phones surpassed households with only landlines in 2009. Verizon reports that the number of homes with a traditional copper POTS connection dropped 11.4 percent last year, to 17.4 million on their system now. That also means Verizon recently announced it would cut at least 11,000 jobs, people they don’t need to maintain landlines.

The cell phone has come a long way since Motorola introduced the DynaTAC which cost $3,995 in 1984. (Wealthy) users could talk for 30 minutes or so before performing a 10 hour battery recharge in the two-pound “brick.”

One big operator offers discounts to landline-free wireless customers who combine Internet or TV service from the company which, of course, means they still tether you to their land-based infrastructure.

Even businesses are dropping their own landline phone systems, and moving to wireless.

I’m still a voipelist for a few important reasons. I really really prefer using all the house phones because the sound quality is good, the phones are convenient, and anyone in the house can access them. Cell docks don’t do that all that well yet and the speaker phone on my cell is lousy. I call Canadian numbers frequently. We have business contacts, friends, and a dentist north of the border. The cell plans that interest me make Canada a toll call. Remember, I hate toll calls. Oh, yeah, and cell service right here in North Puffin still sucks.

Hey, T-Mobiley! Fix those problems and I’ll dump my sort-of-landline in a heartbeat.

I am never without my cell. I feel naked without it. It was the house phone I would always lose, another correspondent wrote.

I probably shouldn’t say this out loud but I have never (yet) lost a cell phone and I rarely lose the housephone(s). Some of them are hardwired to the wall and the cordless variety all have this wonderful “page” feature. At the end of the day, though, I mostly carry the phone — whether cordless or cell — in my pocket.

The most popular irritation voiced in the surveys I checked is to figure out where the darned cell phone is.

Here’s a thought. One in 50 households has no phones at all.

Posted in Marketing, Tech Toys, Sociology, Random Access | 4 Comments »