A quick hodgepodge mess somehow related

So for all you marketing majors, advertising works. Yep, much as I hate advertising, watching them, reading them, we are stuck with them.

I was reading (skimming) an article the other day about the demise of Quiznos. Yes, Quiznos (?sp). First of all I am not much of the sandwich connoisseur when it comes to fast food restaurants. I will force myself to eat Subway if there is nothing else around, maybe one of the other chains if there is nothing for hundreds of miles. And oddly I do like these various chains’ food, but just do not want to spend money on a sandwich. I spent years taking my lunch to work and yes you guessed, it was primarily sandwiches so the thought of eating out and buying a sandwich, no matter how much you can flavor it up so to speak, it just isn’t a choice. So I may have eaten at a Quiznos maybe once or twice, maybe. What caught me was the fact that I didn’t miss them. And why had I not missed them, because I had not see an ad for them in years so they faded into the background and I had no idea they were not around anymore. Yet when I read the article I remembered the brand. Strange.

Have you noticed the Dallas Stars and Dallas Mavericks have both played in two championships, each have won one, even the Texas Rangers have played in two World Series since the Cowboys last won a Super Bowl? Yet when you think of Dallas Sports Teams, which one comes to mind first. Brand recognition you say, and I say probably correct. And what makes the Cowboys more recognized, well a variety of factors, but one is the advertising the NFL and branding the NFL has developed. Football took over Baseball as the national pastime sport so to speak in the 1960′s when television became the mainstream form of entertainment in this country and what brought us all this, advertising. We could watch endless hours of TV for “free” because of advertising. The other sports have been playing catch up ever since. Somehow or another football jumped onto this way of bringing us free entertainment and the unholy marriage on Sunday afternoons took flight. Now the ads are rated, liked and critiqued as much as the big game each year. 

And as the largest hater of advertising this side of Manhatten you might  imagine I stream some nowadays. And as a very frugal (cheap) individual though I still watch regular TV and if possible will record it so I can fast forward through the ads. This works well for regular season sports games, for the playoffs though, you have to watch it live, which means suffering through the ads. Not pushing buttons to turn 3-5 minute of mostly inept commercials into thirty seconds hurts, but you got to watch the playoffs live. Too much at stake not to. And to be honest because I grew up with TV, I have seen ads that work or companies that do a damn good job with the advertising. Coca Cola, McDonalds, Budweiser, Miller Lite are some examples of historical marketing campaigns that have worked. As much as McDonalds food is bland their advertising at times is remarkable. Some campaigns can get replayed in my head if a certain phrase is said or other trigger happens, amazing but true. Other campaigns have left me on the precipice of madness they were so bad, yet for some reason those sometimes are remembered. Whether I like an ad or not has no bearing on whether I buy the product. 

So what gives this evening? I am not sure, but it did hit me that a company had grown to be so big and then completely disappeared and the only way I knew of their existence was advertising.And once that stopped, it was gone even in the memory cells until the article came about.  I cannot remember one person ever recommending to eat there. 

Companies will still come and go, but to all the marketing majors etc who put this together, it does make a difference if you do a good job, maybe not with me, but I can tell the public eats it up. 

Cheers

Living wage, the micro and the macro

So I am riding on an airplane, can’t remember exactly when, late 90′s early 2000′s and you are sitting next to a self professed successful small business owner. He spends the flight telling you about a pretty important decision he has to make about hiring someone. At the end of his discourse, I make the off hand remark and I guess somewhat impolitely since he had really laid out his dilemma, you really should pay her more money. 

Seems like the right answer to this day, however, I really should have laid out why just paying her what he was going to was not enough. 

A bit of the back story because he wasn’t a louse about this, he was in a position to do some good and thought he was trying. And this post will involve a discussion of “isms” soon. Yet to get started here is a bit of his situation. And yes I do remember this very well because he did hiss me off with some of  his reasoning and the fact that later on, I realized I should have been more engaged with my answer.

He was looking to hire a young lady who was trying to come off welfare. And in case you do not know Texas, Texas doesn’t pay squat to those on welfare so any job is a major increase in income. And he was going to pay her significantly more than minimum wage at the time so he was not sure why she wouldn’t take the job. As a good Christian conservative he really thought he was making a fair offer. What he didn’t understand was there was much more of a trade off than just receiving more income. And at this time the media verbiage of “living wage” was not a buzzword, yet this was a living wage issue.

First of all a person needs to understand that young ladies with children on welfare in Texas do not receive much money at all. I do not know what it is now, but at the time we are talking only a few hundred dollars a month so going to 1600 or 2000 dollars a month might appear to be quite a bump.

What isn’t factored in when you make this transition from welfare to worker is the cost of living. A young lady on welfare usually does not have to pay for daycare, they receive food stamps, they usually do not have a car, and get around on minimal bus passes, so does she have to buy transportation if there are no bus routes to the job, gas and maintenance then?, food since she will become income ineligible for food stamps, health insurance for her and her children and even if the employer offers health insurance she has to pay her portion from her check, co-pays medicine etc...which while on welfare she receives various health subsidies for the children or in some cases complete medical coverage, she will probably be income ineligible for rent assistance and then there are miscellaneous expenses anyone that runs a household budget knows exists and can bite you at anytime. 

A simple explanation and run of the numbers would have helped this person much more than my off hand comment, yet my comment was based on my knowledge of people on welfare’s situation. I was inadvertently withholding knowledge I had to help him make a better decision. A few years before this encounter I had a very strong indoctrination into the world of people on welfare and had started a Masters in Public Administration program and written some on the problem in our society of people on welfare, done some small research etc.. so my understanding of her predicament of having to choose more “income” versus a life she understood and took care of her and her children would have been beneficial to him. 

She wasn’t trying to avoid work yet that is what he thought, she was trying to figure out if she could afford to work. He had given me some of her reasons and I had a good idea of what she was going through in the internal decision making process. She needed more money and she was smart enough to realize it. He had said she wanted the job so he just couldn’t understand why she wanted to commit.

So this is small micro example of what people are really looking at when we think about a living wage in today’s world.

And for both sides there was a “good” being developed. I could see the programs in my head she must have applied to get to the point where she could get off welfare if the circumstances were right and here he was trying to help her become self sufficient. His goal was admirable and again I should I have realized that at the moment and tried to open his eyes a bit. She didn’t get there by happenstance and had worked through some steps to get to the point where she could get a job, maybe GED, maybe training programs through the Workforce offices, venturing out into an unknown and alien world to her, relying on people telling her she had to do this and had to that, not something that happens overnight. And he was willing to take a chance on a young lady with to him a questionable past and no work history. Overall this should be a success story, both for socialism and capitalism. Well, quite frankly welfare isn’t socialism it just has some socialist programs, but his company was capitalism and he was doing what I complain very little people do and that is find the balance of making money and respecting the people who help you make the money. So I failed him and her and it has been a nagging thought ever since.

And again the above is the micro example and you can flesh out the numbers yourself and see how much she might have truly needed, but the low $20,000 was not enough even in the late 90′s.

The macro though is a living wage for society in general and that encompasses quite a bit. I am not talking about each person in society having a living wage that is a different type of macro, I am talking about a living wage for society which includes everything from taxes to economic development to social security (again that socialism to hard right hacks) to education to national debt to a whole myriad aspect of what it means for a country to be successful economically. The micro example has to be understood to be able to understand what is needed to develop a living wage for society though.

What are the costs of childcare in general, education in general, retirement in general, health care in general, the ability to be upwardly mobile (God, when was the last time you heard that phrase, but it is still important), government spending in general, government taxation in general, investment in local government, investment in the local business structure, defense, and the list goes on. 

Yet, we need to understand what is the balance needed in society for a society to have a living wage or even the better goal of the society thriving. 

I always want to offer solutions when I bring up a topic where there are problems. Anyone can complain, yet the solutions are not one stop, each item from the list above affects other items on the list in different ways. I have written individually on some topics from that list including a better social security/taxation policy, education policy, etc.. so I am not going to try and rehash a list of posts instead approach the topic with what I consider one of our biggest problems and that is we do not look at the whole above. 

We have been so dominated by one solution thinking we have a patch work of laws and regulations that does not address the broad picture and hinders us from being able to find real solutions to a successful living wage at the societal level. Just like the woman above who has to consider a plethora of individual costs that add up to whether or not she can take the job, we as a society need to start looking at this same overwhelming list and start looking at how they interact with each other. She can make a one time decision, is the money enough. We cannot. Again a simple off hand comment, and again I stand by it.

And each new law only aggravates the real problem. This isn’t a quilt where different patches make a pretty whole. No, there needs to be a cohesive thread developed that when you add something it follows the same pattern. And of course the current political discourse is making this even more difficult to achieve much less have a constructive dialogue about it. 

I briefly mentioned the two big “isms” in American dialogue right now, socialism and capitalism. Neither works by itself and both if left to its own devices and supporters in and of itself have a negative affect on the society. 

Success needs a structured balance of competing forces. The micro example touches a bit on the interplay, both people were coming from good intentions, yet the big picture wasn’t clear enough to both of them for both their goals to work. She needed more money, but didn’t understand there were going to need to be more sacrifices for her to work through this change. He needed to realize she had to meet certain obligations in making this transition that were probably foreign to him. If only today we had their problems in developing a living wage for society. Now we have to work just to get back to that point. 

We need to change the dialogue about many topics in this country, and the idea that a living wage is broken down to a dollar figure is one that needs a complete overhaul. The world is never that simple.

And on a side note of one of our living wage issues, maybe we should reduce student debt by a percentage rather than a single dollar figure. I have also introduced in prior posts a different way to offer student loans going forward than the current system that created this disaster. For now, reducing the debt by a percentage also might be a bit fairer when applied across the board to everyone.

Cheers all

Finally some good news

You may have already read this information, yet it is so good it needs sharing. Apparently on March 30th wind power made up 20% of the electricity in use for that day surpassing coal and becoming the #2 power source for the day.

Now if you say, only for one day what is the big deal? Any transition of such an enormous system always transitions slowly and there will be fits and starts as the change happens.

This day is proof the change is happening, unfortunately not fast enough, but is happening. 

Just think if ten years ago, coal company CEOs had a brain and understood what was about to happen and started investing their profits into wind power. We would be much further along and those companies would be viable companies going forward. They didn’t so they aren’t and it hurt us in going to renewable energy sooner. 

Capitalism can be good if applied with the big picture in mind and it doesn’t hurt if the people in charge aren’t a bunch of stuck in the mud oafs. 

Add in Trump thinking dragging us back to the previous century would make us great again and support a slower death for coal and we are still behind the curve. If we had jumped on the bandwagon sooner we would be leading the world into the 21st century. Now that would have kept us a world leader in energy and the modern economy which yes you guessed it, would have kept us great so to speak.

I have been touting renewable energy , mainly solar, since the 1970′s and yes was made fun of it for decades. Over ten years ago, I started this blog and put my thoughts into the public sphere where I have been encouraging going to renewable energy ever since. 

Originally my desire to change to solar was more related to reducing pollution, climate change wasn’t even on the public radar for decades, but I persevered. So today is or actually March 30th is a great bit of news to hear. Let’s hope that the fits and starts as we evolve into renewable energy pass us quickly and we prove that innovation and public good can work together to take us into a better brave new world.

Cheers

Whenever a CEO speaks on public policy...

 you have a good idea that the policy might be worth reviewing. Public policy is for the general good or should be if done well, however CEOS, only have a singular goal and that is the company’s bottom line.

Yet for decades the so called conservative ideology will back up the CEO’s point of view as conservative policy. Basically they should look at the policy and see how they can make it better for all and if there is truly an adverse affect on the business well address that also. And adverse affect does not mean that shareholder dividends will go down by a few pennies. 

Conservatives really do not understand that public policy can benefit them, businesses and yes even liberals if developed and applied well. 

Here is an example that shows conservatives do not think through what is in front of them. And this is an older ongoing issue, but it speaks to the problems conservatives create for themselves in public policy debates.

The issue is recycling. For years this was attacked as a waste of time and money by some conservatives and they didn’t want the government to get involved. At some point businesses started developing that could make money from recycling so slowly the mindset changed, however the fight against recycling at first was maddening. 

If anything recycling should have been a conservative issue from the onset. It would save taxes on garbage pick up or the recycling mitigates the expense of hiring people to drive through neighborhoods all the time, you do not have to constantly buy land for new landfills, nor staff all these landfills all which save taxpayers money. So you make better use of the same labor by having the garbage collectors collect trash and recycling where the recycling is bought by the companies that can reproduce the products so even though the expense is the same the local governments receive a return. And you do not have to go out further and further from the locale to buy new land for your garbage. So if conservatives want to say they reduce taxes well then why aren’t you finding ways to reduce costs to do what is right for everyone so we can reduce taxes. I think even liberals would be on board with that thinking.

Again this is an issue that has moved forward some and many products are being made to be recycled, but how many years did it take us to get here.

It sure would be beneficial if conservatives looked at the policy and understand the goals before deriding something because a liberal thought of it.

And going back to my favorite CEO this morning, maybe they should look at the greater good because if the populace as a whole is saving money or being helped in a way is it really bad for business or are you just excruciatingly greedy?

One day we all pray that conservatives wake up and realize doing what is right for the general good ain’t going to hurt them especially if they get involved to help make it work. 

Cheers