Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Everybody hates Wal-Mart except those who shop and those who work there. Wal-Mart has grown from a small discount store (originally named Wal-Mart Discount City) opened July 2, 1962 in Rogers, Arkansas by 44-year-old Sam Walton and his younger brother James; first-year sales were $975,000 (source: The Wal-Mart Decade, by Robert Slater, Penguin Group, New York, 2003). As it grew, emphasis in the earlier years was on concentrating its stores in rural areas. Today it is the largest retailer in the world: its sales during the fiscal year ended January 31, 2006 were $312 billion; it employs 1.6 million people in 3,800 stores in the U.S. and in 2,400 stores in fifteen other countries (source: Wall-Mart’s website www.walmart.com).

I have three books on the company: Wal-Mart Decade (cited above), The Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman, The Penguin Press, New York, 2006, and How Wal-Mart is Destroying America (and the world) And What You Can Do About It, by Bill Quinn, Ten Speed Press, Berkely, CA, 2000.

Wal-Mart Decade is an objective study of the company, emphasizing its founders’ philosophy of keeping prices low and making shopping at its stores a "happy experience." It tells how Sam Walton personally visited his stores, even after they had proliferated into a large number, to make certain that his guidelines were being implemented.

The Wal-Mart Effect faults Wal-Mart in many respects, but does so in an objective way (if one assumes that its fact are accurate) and, thus, can be considered reasonably balanced. It cites several ways in which the company has been detrimental:

--A 1993 study of its presence in Iowa reported that, over a recent five-year period following the opening of a first Wal-Mart store in towns that didn’t previously have any: ...the arrival of Wal-Mart coincided with a swath of destruction. Grocery stores lost 5 percent of their business after five years, specialty stores lost 14 percent of their business, and clothing stores lost 18 percent of their business–all while total sales were rising 6 percent after Wal-Mart’s arrival. (p. 156)

It gives several accounts of how Wal-Mart pressures suppliers to hew to its demands or else lose its business. One such case is with Vlasic, a pickle supplier. Wal-Mart demanded that it provide gallon jars of pickles at a price that would let them be priced at $2.97 at Wal-Mart stores. This was ...a price so low that Vlasic and Wal-Mart were only making a penny or two on a jar, if that...The gallon jar of pickles became what you might call a "devastating success" for Vlasic.

"Quickly, it started to cannibalize our non-Wal-Mart business" says (a Vlasic executive)...Vlasic was struggling...and couldn’t afford to risk the Wal-Mart business...(Eventually) profits in pickles had been cut by 50 percent–millions of dollars in lost profits, even as the business itself grew...(The Vlasic story) shows the impact of Wal-Mart’s scale and power in what we all think is a market economy. Wal-Mart’s focus on pricing, and its ability to hold a supplier’s business hostage to its own agenda, distorts markets in ways that consumers don’t see, and ways the suppliers can’t effectively counter. Wal-Mart is so large that it can often defy the laws of supply, demand and competition. (p. 80)

--The book points out how Wal-Mart is notorious for forcing its suppliers to make moves–including setting up manufacturing operations in foreign countries–to keep down the prices of merchandise sold in its stores. Such moves, although they allow the suppliers to keep Wal-Mart as a customer (at least, temporarily)--business they can’t afford to lose–overall the moves are actually detrimental to them.

Arm-twisting by Wal-Mart was a major factor in Levi Strauss, the internationally-known maker of blue jeans, having to shut down 58 U.S. manufacturing plants, at the same time sending 25% of its sewing operations overseas.

Likewise, L. R. Nelson, a manufacturer of lawn sprinklers since 1911, based in Peoria, Illinois, has reduced its work force in Peoria in recent years from 450 full-time employees (total employees used to reach 1,000 during the seasonal busy part of the year) to 120; it no longer makes lawn sprinklers in Peoria, only commercial irrigation systems. At the same time, Nelson had to set up manufacturing of its lawn sprinklers and other related items in China. Notwithstanding this move, Wal-Mart undercuts Nelson by selling its own brand of garden hose nozzles at $1.74 alongside Nelson’s at $6.72.

–Much attention has been given in the media to Wal-Mart’s treatment of its employees (known as "associates"). This book gets into that also–about employees having to do work after they have checked out (for which they are not compensated), being locked in the stores when they are closed to the public, so that they won’t pilfer merchandise, and many being classified as part-time so that they only qualify for skimpy benefits. The book gets into this also.

I heard the author, Charles Fishman, on a radio talk show recently. He commented that Wal-Mart, when it is opening a new store, will put out publicity that it is creating, say, 350 new jobs in the community. This isn’t true, he says, because something like only 50 are truly new jobs with the other 300 being filled by people leaving other local jobs to move to Wal-Mart. This stands logic on its head: First, to the 350 people they are all new jobs, presumably better ones than those they left. Second, most, if not all, of the 300 vacated jobs would probably have to be filled–although a few may not be filled for various reasons, the great majority of the new "associates" probably worked in fast-food restaurants or as bank tellers, seasonal construction workers, cab drivers, etc.–jobs that would have to be filled.

–Finally, the book includes a very interesting observation: that people who rant about Wal-Mart’s harmful practices still shop there. It describes the findings of a research firm that interviewed people in Oklahoma City:

They discovered four basic kinds of Wal-Mart shoppers: champions, enthusiasts, conflicted, and rejecters...The conflicted shoppers–15 percent in Oklahoma City–actively dislike Wal-Mart because of its impact on communities, wages, and jobs. But by a wide margin, they are the second most frequent shoppers at the store–they go there more than once a week (5.6 visits in a month), and they spend nearly as much as the champions–$289 a month...(Even the rejecters shop at Wal-Mart an average of nine times a year, and they spend more than $450 a year.) (p. 220)

How Wal-Mart is Destroying America...
is just one long diatribe. Its author, one Bill Quinn, said that he was 88 years-old and living in a small town in Texas (and had earlier run a family publishing business) when his book was published in 2000. Its chapter headings tell it all:

Seven Bad Things That Happen When Wal-Mart Comes to Town
One Sure-Fire Way Wal-Mart Barges Into Town (and 3 Ways it Sneaks In)
Two Ways Wal-Mart Is Oh So Greedy
Six Reasons to Beware of Wal-Mart
Nine Ways Wal-Mart is Downright Bad to the Bone
Five Ways Wal-Mart is a Menace to America–and the World
Here’s What You Can Do About It!


Quinn’s style of writing is often corny homespun. If I were on an anti-Wal-Mart crusade, I wouldn’t want him as a compatriot. In a preface he says that his virulent hatred of Wal-Mart is due to the closings of small businesses in and around his small town, for which he blames Wal-Mart (although the closest Wal-Mart is 13 miles from the town). Maybe there are some Targets, Home Depots, Lowes, Best Buys, Circuit Cities, Sears, CVSes, Walgreens, Eckerds, RiteAids, Staples, Office Depots, not to mention supermarkets, nearby that also have had something to do with those closings.

I strongly suspect that his principal motivation was to sell his book.

Wal-Mart does pose a conundrum. Isn’t the builder of a better mousetrap supposed to do well? No one charges Wal-Mart with violating any laws other than occasionally some relatively minor labor law infractions. I recently bought a pair of jogging shoes at Wal-Mart for $9.78; they look good, are very comfortable, and seem to be built to last a long time–I would be a hypocrite to be one of its critics.

Yet, one can see the possibility of Wal-Mart, if not restrained in some way, becoming so powerful in the future that a "tipping point" (I apologize for the use of this over-used term) could be reached whereby the benefits to society of its wide variety of merchandise at attractive prices might be outweighed by detrimental effects of its unbridled power.

Monday, March 27, 2006

The dead returns to life (a true story). When I was a young child my mother would occasionally mention her older brother Bob, whom the family believed to have died in the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. Bob (who was much older than my mother because he was the third of fourteen children and my mother was the twelfth) had been, to put it charitably, unfocused. After holding various jobs around the family home in North Carolina, he took off for the Canadian Yukon Territory Klondike region soon after gold was discovered there in 1897; like most of the 30,000 men said to answered the call of the Klondike, he found little or no gold.

Bob then went to San Francisco and remained there several years, doing what for a living I don’t think the family ever knew. They never heard from him after the quake and, thus, assumed that he was one of its victims; after a seven-year period when no trace of him could be found, his life insurance company paid his policy benefit (I don’t know who in the family was the beneficiary).

Fast-forwarding to the year 1938, my mother went with a group of her bridge club friends to a restaurant for dinner; after dinner, a fortune teller entertained the group. When the latter asked my mother what question she would like answered, she came up with the question "What became of my brother Bob? Unhesitatingly the fortune teller responded, "He is alive and you will see him soon." Naturally, my mother and her friends thought that this was just feel-good fortune teller talk and soon forgot about it.

However, early in 1939 my mother received a phone call from one of her bridge club friends to tell her that she had just heard on the radio that a long-lost man, presumed to have died, showed up at the home of his oldest sister in Durham, N.C. The friend had remembered the fortune teller incident and thought that the returned man might just be my mother’s brother.

Indeed it was long-lost Bob. He had moved from San Francisco before the quake to the Los Angeles area. As he told it, he had earned his living in various ways in the L.A. area, sometimes doing well and then not so well; he had wanted to communicate with his family but decided to wait until his life was stable–which never happened. He had never married. Finally, in his seventies, he decided to return to his family. (His last employment before his return was raising and harvesting date palms; I don’t know whether he owned the palms or was just an employee.)

Shortly after his return, he moved in with his two widowed sisters who maintained a home together in Greensboro, N.C. He died some time in the 1940's.

The only time I saw him was in September 1939 just as Hitler had invaded Poland and World War II had begun. I remember him saying, "This war won’t last long; it’ll be over in ninety days." I don’t recall why he thought that. He was a Joe Blfstk (the Li’l Abner character who had a rain cloud over his head wherever he went.), who just couldn’t get anything right.

Monday, March 20, 2006

The drug scene redux (to my 3/6/06 posting "The drug scene"). Today (3/20/06) I attended the trial in the Federal courthouse in Baltimore of two Baltimore City narcotics detectives who were charged with keeping drugs and cash which they seized when they confronted drug dealers. A drug dealer testified as a witness, in keeping with a plea agreement in his Federal conviction in a case that was unrelated to the two detectives being tried; he was cooperating with the Federal prosecutors in the case against the detectives in the hope of getting a lighter sentence in his case. He spent almost two hours telling how, after being accosted by these detectives, he was used by them to lead them to other dealers whom they would confront. According to his testimony, for his services, the detectives would give him some cash and would sell him drugs at cut-rate prices for him to resell on the street at the going rate. Sometimes the detectives would actually arrest dealers and turn in the drugs seized from them, but frequently they would let them go but keep their drugs and cash.

A detective sergeant who was the supervisor of the two detectives testified at considerable length about the huge task that the police face in dealing with the drug traffic. The lawlessness includes not only drug dealing but murder of drug gang members by other gangs–Baltimore has between 250 and 300 murders every year.

All of the individuals mentioned above–the two detectives, the drug dealer witness, and the detective sergeant–were black. The witnesses gave first-hand details of the horrific drug scene. I feel particularly bad for the decent black people who have to try to live normal lives among this sordid scene.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

An amazing coincidence. Two former U.S. presidents died on the same day–amazing in itself but even more so given that the one succeeded the other in office. The second president, John Adams, and the third, Thomas Jefferson, were those men. But to make the event almost incredible is the fact that the day of their death was July 4, 1826–the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. While Jefferson had been the principal draftsman of this, America’s most treasured document, Adams was also involved in its final draft.

The following account of their deaths appeared in the July 15, 1826 issue of Niles’ Weekly Register* :

We had hardly announced the decease of the patriot who drafted the Declaration of Independence when news arrived of the death of his venerable compatriot, who, more than any other man, perhaps, urged the adoption of that famous measure, and supported it through every change of time and circumstance himself unchanged.

THOMAS JEFFERSON departed this life between twelve and one o’clock, on the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of independence, and nearly, if not precisely, at the same hour of the day, when it was first reading before congress; and JOHN ADAMS, who was also of the committee who reported that declaration, left us between five and six o’clock of the same jubilee-anniversary, at nearly, if not precisely, the very hour when the contents of that memorable paper were proclaimed to the people...

But "there were giants in those days." And none were more conspicuous for ardent devotion and unlimited zeal, fixed resolution and steady perseverance, than (Adams and Jefferson)...

Mr. Adams...after two days of suffering by an accumulation of phlegm in the throat, which he had not strength to throw off, he died...and consequently was aged nearly ninety-one years, being older than Mr. Jefferson by about eight years. A short time before his spirit winged its way to those of "the just made perfect," he was roused by the firing of cannon, and, enquiring the cause of it, was told that it was the 4th of July; when he said, "it is a grand and glorious day," and he never spoke more!

And Mr. Jefferson, on asking the day of the month, and being told that it was the third of July, expressed a desire that he might live until the next day!

The venerable fathers in the republic were gratified, and went to sleep on the anniversary of the great and glorious event that joyous millions were then in the act of celebrating and solemnizing...

* Niles Weekly Register
was a newspaper published in Baltimore from 1811 to 1836 by Hezekiah Niles, and subsequently by his son, William Ogden Niles until 1839. Afterwards it was continued until 1849 by two other individuals who bought it from Hezekiah’s estate (he died in 1839). Many issues of the paper were later bound in hardback covers, two of which–those from September 1815-March 1816 and March-September 1826–I found some years ago in a musty basement bookstore in downtown Baltimore. The pages have turned a light brown with age and the print is small, but reading them is not difficult.

Originally, Adams, a Federalist, and Jefferson, a Republican, were political opponents, but later found that they had many common interests and corresponded from time to time. (The Federalists were mostly found in the New England states; they dissolved as a national party shortly after the War of 1812. The Republicans later changed their name to Democratic Republicans and, still later, the Democrats, the ancestors of today’s Democratic party.)

The Life and Selected Writings of Jefferson, by Adrienne Koch and William Peden (The Modern Library, New York, 1944) contains twenty letters from Jefferson to Adams, dating from 1787 to 1825. There was a hiatus of such letters between one on December 28, 1796 and the next on January 21, 1812, the reason of which is obvious: Jefferson came in second to Adams in the 1796 presidential election, and thus became his (Adams’s) Vice President (although they not from the same party); Jefferson defeated Adams, who was running for a second term in office, in the presidential election of 1800 as result of a complicated system of vote counting which ended up with the U.S. House of Representatives deciding the issue. Jefferson then served two terms in office through 1808.

Jefferson’s last letter to Adams before the hiatus (the December 28, 1796 one, written from his home at Monticello, between the November 1796 election and Adams’s March 1797 inauguration) started out:

The public and papers have been much occupied lately in placing us in a point of opposition to each other. I trust with confidence that less of it has been felt by ourselves personally.

The next letter to Adams, dated January 21, 1812 from Monticello, some three years after the completion of his (Jefferson’s) second term as President, included the following comment:

A letter from you calls up recollections very dear to my mind. It carries me back to the times when, beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right of self-government. Laboring always at the same oar, with some wave ever ahead, threatening to overwhelm us, and yet passing under our bark, we knew not how we rode through the storm with heart and hand, and made a happy port.

Jefferson’s last letter to Adams was on January 8, 1825 from Monticello. In it he refers to a book that he has been reading, calling it "the most extraordinary of all books." It was written by one Flourend (no first name is given nor is he otherwise identified) and raised in Jefferson’s mind what becomes of the soul after death:

Whether... the soul remains in the body, deprived of its essence of thought? or whether it leaves it, as in death, and where it goes?

Realizing that the end of life could not be far away from either of them, he ended the letter by saying:

But all this, you and I shall know better when we meet again in another place...In the meantime...that the anodyne of philosophy may preserve you from all suffering, is my sincere and affectionate prayer.

Jefferson’s last letter, dated June 24, 1826 from Monticello–just ten days before his death–was to a Mr. Roger C. Weightman, who had written to Jefferson to invite him to Washington to participate in a celebration of the 50th anniversary of America’s Independence Day. In it Jefferson says:

I should, indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged there congratulations personally with the small band, the remnants of that host of worthies, who joined us...in the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country, between submission or the sword...

But he expresses his regret that "ill health forbids me the gratification of an acceptance."

It is, of course, possible that Jefferson wrote other letters to Adams in addition to those in The Life and Selected Writings of Jefferson. That even seems likely inasmuch as he was such an inveterate letter writer.

I wonder how these letters were obtained for publication. Since there was no photocopying or carbon paper in his time, did he make a copy of each letter for his retention? Or were the letters retrieved from Adams’s descendants (and descendants of the many other people to whom he wrote letters which are included in the collection)? The preface to The Life and Selected Writings of Jefferson states that its source was mostly The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, a set of 20 volumes published in 1905 by The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association; however, this still leaves unanswered the question as to how they were obtained for publication in the latter collection.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

What women in the throes of passion say in various countries:

In Britain: Oh, Roderick, my love, don’t stop, it’s heavenly!

In France: O, Pierre, mon cher, c'est merveilleux!

In Spain: O, Pedro, querido mío, no para, no para, es divino!

In Italy: O, Pietro, caríssimo, io sono in paradiso!

In Germany: Ach, Hans, mein Liebe, ich bin in Himmel!

In the USA: Melvin, the ceiling needs a paint job.

I have to give credit to my good friend Walt Weidler for the idea and the USA line; but please don't blame him for the other lines (Britain thru Germany)--I did those myself.
A nice guy in one role, a disaster in another: I believe if George Bush were my next-door neighbor, or the neighborhood hardware merchant, I would like him. He has some likable traits. I would probably like to have a beer with him–except he says he doesn’t drink.

But, as President I believe that he is a tragic misfit. I am afraid that, as a nation, we and our children will have to pay for his many misguided actions for a long time.

The following commentary on Bush's claim that his "faith" guides him in all that he does is well said:

...for a president of the United States who combines ideological extremism with intellectual laziness, and tops them off with serial dishonesty, this type of "faith" is a recipe for disaster. It is America's peculiar burden at the dawn of the new century that its citizens--a majority of whom did not even choose to elect Mr. Bush to be their president in the first place--must now reap what he has sown.

(The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America, by Eric Alterman and Mark Green, Penguin Books, New York, 2004, p. 339)

Monday, March 06, 2006

The drug scene. How? Why? Why do we have the current drug scene, at home in the USA, and just about everywhere else in the world? Why did it all start some 40 or 50 years ago? Prior to some time around 1950-60 there was no drug problem to speak of in the United States. Yes, there were drugs in the slum areas of major cities, and perhaps in a few isolated other parts of the country, but they just didn’t exist anywhere else.

I can attest to there being no drug scene before that time. I was a high school and college student during the 1940's in North Carolina–drugs were nowhere to be seen. None of my friends used drugs nor was I aware of any others who did. After college, I lived in New York city in the early 1950's; again, no drugs anywhere around me.

I have never even smoked marijuana, something that it seems just about everyone from youths to middle-agers has. It was not because I was possessed of any more rectitude than anyone else–I certainly did my share of cigarette smoking, boozing, and beer drinking–rather, it was simply the absence of drugs in my younger years.

It is ironic that, preceding 1950-60, times were much harder for almost everyone than today: during the 1930's there was the Depression and in the 1940's we had World War II. Yet, then we virtually had no drug problem, and now we do–not only in poor neighborhoods but in affluent society, in suburbia, in small towns, in rural areas, everywhere.

In those earlier years, black people lived in a segregated society with very limited opportunities to better their lives–still, they were not plagued with the curse of drugs. Today, many young black men are involved in the drug culture–as addicts, dealers, or criminals serving prison time. Or worse yet, as murder victims; Baltimore has between 250-300 murders every year–the vast majority of victims are black males, most of whom are probably involved in the drug trade and die at the hands of rivals in that trade.

Worse still, is that respectable black families who do their best to live a decent life and teach their values to their children often suffer from the crime-related lawlessness around them–they are mugged, burglarized, and murdered just for living where they do. Two notable examples of these atrocities in Baltimore are:
-- a family whose mother and father and several children died in a fire bombing of their home a few years ago by neighborhood drug dealers in retaliation for the family having called police numerous times to report them;
–a woman whose home was attacked with Molotov cocktails by drug dealers, again in retaliation for her having reported their activities to the police (luckily, her house never caught fire).

In the early 1990's, during the Q&A part of a presentation by the then-Baltimore City police commissioner, I asked the same question that I pose above: why no drugs back then, but a plague of them now? His answer was essentially, "that’s a tough question"–a copout (sorry for the pun), I thought, for a man whose experience and position should have provided him with enough insight to, at least, have something in the way of an answer.

So, I still ask the question: why no drug scene before the 1950-60's, a plague everywhere now? I wish I could find an answer.

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Don’t just Google–cast a wider net. Google, during its relatively short life (started in September 1998 but only became up and running in mid-1999), has become the generic term for Internet web searches–much like Kleenex and Xerox for paper tissues and photocopying. One "Googles," the verb, or does a "Google," the noun. Google’s progress has been amazing inasmuch as there were a number of search engines in business when it was born–among which were Lycos, Alta Vista, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, HotBot. Yet, it has become the king of the mountain, apparently because of its wider reach for information being sought than the others.

But, as good as Google is, you don’t have to use it exclusively. Use "Webcrawler," whose website address is www.webcrawler.com. It simultaneously searches Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask Jeeves, and several others.

Recently, my daughter, while using one of the non-Google search engines, discovered a review of a book I had written in 1993. The book was Insurance in the United States: A Handbook for Professionals, which was published and marketed by a small London-based publisher of newsletters and books dealing with the international insurance market. (That publisher was acquired by Lloyd’s of London Press in 1995, who continued the publication and marketing of the book at that point.)

What my daughter found was a review in 1994 of my book in an insurance industry trade journal by a professor of insurance and finance at Illinois State University. Although I had seen several reviews of the book in US, British, and Spanish trade journals, I was unaware of this one. Through Webcrawler, I picked it up in Ask Jeeves (Google had never carried it).

So, as Yogi Berra might say, if you expand your vision, you’ll see further.
Name:
Location: United States

Mycroft Watson is the nom de plume of a man who has seen many winters. He is moderate to an extreme. When he comes to a fork in the road, he always takes it. His favorite philosopher is Yogi Berra. He has come out of the closet and identified himself. Anyone interested can get his real name, biography, and e-mail address by going to "Google Search" and keying in "User:Marshall H. Pinnix" (case sensitive).

Powered by Blogger

FREE hit counter and Internet traffic statistics from freestats.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Free Top Ten Search Engine Submission!
  • Excite
  • What-U-Seek
  • Webcrawler
  • NetFind
  • Lycos
  • Infoseek
  • AltaVista
  • HotBot
  • Goto
  • Northern Light
Site Title
URL
Name
Email
Free Advertising
 Blog Top Sites a href="http://www.blogtopsites.com/"> Blog Top Sites