Monitoring the DEW-Line

Because that's just the kind of nice guys we are:
Starbucks realizes how hard these economic times are on the customer so they are offering special two-fers. $3.95 will get you a tall latte with a coffee cake, or, a regular coffee with a breakfast sandwich.

That's a good deal. We'll probably take advantage of it soon. But come on, isn't Starbucks itself the real economic victim that this new deal is trying to help?

We honestly thought you wouldn't notice:
Beware of ads sprinkled in with your CitiBank Account Activity. The Consumerist reports a user who saw line items which looked liked charges, but were really links to advertisers. Ninety-one percent of their readers who voted in a mini poll thought it was "very uncool". The other 9% are probably Nigerian telemarketers.

Why don't Saskatchewaners like summer?
If you're looking for one place where the economy has actually been growing, try www.saskjobs.ca . The Premier of this western Canadian province is calling Canadians to come for the jobs. I checked, and lots of those jobs are in mining, agriculture, and places named "Moose Jaw". But if you can stand the cold and like living in sparsely populated places, give it some thought. Oh, and Saskatchewaners don't like summer because it's two weeks of bad snowmobiling.

Side 2 - From the Folks who Love Reagan

If you missed the beginning of this discussion, you may want to read the Jan 30 and Feb 2 entries first. We're talking about opposing views on how to fix the economy -- ultra hands-on vs. ultra hands-off.

There's a blog I like to read by a guy who's so libertarian, I think he has a picture of Ron Paul under his pillow. What exactly does the Libertarian Party profess? You can look it up on Wikipedia, but personally *I* get the image of Jack Palance in City Slickers: a gun, a dog, and a "no government" wanted sign.

At the risk of talking about politics, to the left is the Nolan Chart, (courtesy of www.neo-libertarian.com) which may help to explain where we are on libertarianism.

Now erase politics from your mind and get back to economics. (Which is much more relaxing, anyway.) We simply want to find how a libertarian would fix this economy.

Don, my libertarian blog guy, calls the bailout, the power given to banks, and the government takeover of banks a "crime". I'm not sure which of them bothers him more. He calls our reliance on government an addition. He is bracing for hyper inflation. Here's his recipe for relief:

Get rid of most of government, stop all subsidies, and repeal all laws that allow off shoring (notice he didn't say make new laws to stop it). Don believes if we let the financial crises burn itself out, we can start anew.

Again, I like some of the things he says, but I'm of the school that not doing enough during the 1930s was what prolonged the anguish. I also do believe in regulations. Left to their own self interest people too often screw others over. Sorry, but it's true.

Side 1 - From the folks who love Roosevelt

I promised I'd write about two opposing views of the economy.

On one side are the people who want the government to be so small, that they could hold their Christmas parties in someones mom's basement. I follow a lot of sites run by people who subscribe to this feeling. To these writers, Ron Paul is a white-hatted underdog, Reagan was a genius and Roosevelt ruined the country with his social programs. This is the maximum free-market, minimum regulation credo.

On the other side are folks like Thom Hartmann, radio host and author of Screwed: The Undeclared War Against The Middle-Class, which I am currently reading. Hartman gushes in almost every chapter how Roosevelt's amazing foresight led us to be "a Great" nation, until Reagan killed the good thing and planted the seeds to kill America as we know it. Hartman isn't anti-free market. He argues that there is no such thing as a free market, and, if government didn't intervene in the economy, there'd be no such thing as a middle class either. We'd be back in the days where there were only the very rich and the very poor. Mind you those very rich today would not be royalty or the elite, they'd be corporations.

A quick look at Hartman's blog and you'll see his cure for the "financial crisis" is to tax stock buys and sells. Let Wall Street fund their own bailout. Let speculation be dampened and investing regain it's rightful place.

He also wants America to go back to the regulations we abandoned - the Sherman Act, Glass-Stegall, and to return to the roots of trade laid down for us by the founding fathers. He would like us to quit this "service economy" we have; it doesn't produce anything -- doesn't build real wealth, and return to the industrialized nation we used to be.

I do like a lot of things he says. But maybe I'm just a Baby Boomer longing for the simpler times of the 60s and early 70s. I would always like to see corporations held to better moral standards. I can't, though, get myself to agree with imposing limits on wealth, particularly for individuals as Hartmann states in his book. If someone is a billionaire, shouldn't they be able to leave that money to their children instead of having it taxed away to keep dynasties from developing?

Otherwise, I think Hartmann has some good ideas. And, being middle class myself, I sure would like to win this war.

Next: Details on the other side -- from the folks who wish Ron Paul were president.

Grimm's Tales of Grim Times

Wall Street bankers remind me of a particular fairy tale.

This couple live a meager existence until the husband saves the life of an elf and is granted a wish. He wishes he and his wife could be an Earl and Countess so they would have status and money. It's all good until the wife tells her husband he should have wished they would become King and Queen since he could have wished for anything.

The husband finds the elf and asks to change the wish. It's granted and they become powerful and wealthy. That is, until the wife decides that Emperors and Empresses have even more power and money and asks her husband to find the elf and change the wish again.

The husband does it and now they are rulers of the far and wide and mega-wealthy. But, the wife figures out that even the Emperor and Empress have to listen to the Pope, so she asks her husband to change the wish again.

The husband finds the elf and asks to upgrade the wish to Pope (for his wife). To his surprise, the elf complies. The wife is now Pope and has power to dictate to millions of people. Financial tributes pour into her. But it's not satisfactory when she finally realizes that even the Pope has to submit to God.

So she asks her husband to ask the elf to make her God. They argue about it until he's worn down. He finds the elf and makes the request.

When the husband returns home, he finds they are back in the meager circumstances in which they started off. All the other wishes have become null and void.

The endless quest for more money, higher successes, and faster profits finally did in the economy. Yet, fairy tales seem to mete out more justice than does real life. In real life the leaders of our world wide economic Ponzi scheme are still earning large salaries, getting bailed out of their troubles, and giving themselves bonuses. What's the answer to this?

In the next blog entry, I'll tell you about two completely opposing views on how these economic ills can be fixed.

When I see something like this in the Cary News, I know the recession has officially come to Western Wake County.

Look at the first image. It's not just the price that screams Discount Bin, it's the kooky lettering, the giant $2, the fact that they didn't use the more sophisticated '$1.99'.

The last time I saw Valu spelled without an 'e' I think I was in a dollar store. The graphics on the second image are deliberately unfancy, purposefully plain to convey the image of thrift.

Morrisville is in a well-yuppized area, an area able to support more than a few upscale local magazines, restaurant chains, boutiques. We were a test market for the McCafe. You can find dentists with memory foam chairs here, spas with nationally-recognized accolades and $150.00 hair colorings.

My grocery bill went up about 30% when I moved to Western Wake county from Durham county. And now, have I finally seen the first hint of recession in Cary/Morrisville/Apex/Holly Springs.

Well, maybe the second hint. The first was probably when a new, state-of-the-art Kroger cried uncle in the grocery store wars last year and closed down.

What do you really value?

Let's look at a fun social/marketing experiment on value.

I'm playing a game on Facebook called "Hatchlings". You collect Easter eggs around the site which hatch into pets: colorful fish, cute pachyderms, googly-eyed chihuahuas. Each egg you collect makes your score go up, and you can watch how you do against the Facebook community. Some eggs are "limited editions" which, or course, are hard to find. As your egg count amasses, you earn credits to "buy" other limited edition eggs from a warehouse.

When my husband first heard of it he asked me what you got for your efforts.

"A picture of an egg." I told him. "And later a picture of what the egg hatched."

So why are more than 770,000 people are signed up to play a game that just gives you pictures? Some even paid to become premium members.

And why are so many advertisers paying to be patrons of the game? There are 26 pages of them. (When you patronize an advertiser, you get credits for warehouse purchases.)

Surely the players are getting something beyond colorful eggs and cute hatchlings. By figuring out what they get, we can tell a lot about value, not just for games, but for any purchase.

About half my Facebook friends play the game. Some are addicted (you know who you are). I'm asking if you'll comment on what you get out of playing. Here's things I can think of:

The Treasure Hunt
I play the game just to see what comes next. When will I click on a basket and find a Limited Edition egg? What will hatch from it? Last week I wildly ran my score up to 1000 shells because the Warehouse eggs that cost 1000 shells were grayed out and I couldn't see what they were until I had earned enough to buy them. When I got there, I gifted my purchase to a player who I knew would appreciate having it more than I would. Like a gambler, I just want to see what the next card, next spin, or next click will bring.

Pride in Gamesmanship/Competitiveness
Again, the game scores one point for each egg you find. It displays how you rank against all the players and against your own Network (you join a network in Facebook, usually your city but could be something like your school). There's something compelling about having a high rank, and even more compelling is keeping the high rank once you get it.

Seeking Fame
If you make the top ten in either the general community or your network, your name will show up on the list that every user sees when they look at their Hatchlings page. There's a real high in knowing you are on that list, especially when you know your friends can see your name.

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This application is popular not because of the its technicalities, but because of the psychology behind it. The developer did a great job building into it the things that make people keep coming back every day. By the way, when I checked the developer's profile, I couldn't see the whole thing, but I did see that he just graduated from high school two years ago. I'm sure he has help with this application, it's too big for one person to handle, but still, -- nineteen years old -- dawgs!

When I say "credit", you think of . . .

Yesterday I faced the familiar question at a checkout line: credit or debit? These days I suppose you could be more proud of using a debit card than a credit card. It would be like saying: "I don't have to pay later, I have the money for this purchase right now. I'm a responsible budgeter." But it used to be the other way around.

In the 1970s, (in Canada at least, where I used to live), debit cards came out specifically for people who were either so young or such poor money managers, that they couldn't get credit. Yes, there was a time before this credit crunch when financiers were picky about who they gave credit to. You couldn't get a card if you didn't work full-time and have a good relationship with a bank. You couldn't get a card if you recently screwed up. Back then, when you told the clerk you were paying with credit, you could be proud that a bank thought you were responsible enough to be trusted with a card.

And before that, it used to be the other way around again. Credit was for losers after the Great Depression. That era ended for my parents when they bought their first home in 1952. My father told the bank proudly that he never had any credit. He always paid in full.

"If you never had any credit, how do you expect to get a mortgage?" The banker asked him. Dad was forced to get a Shell Gas charge card to be able to qualify for the home loan.

And before that . . . well, I learned on PBS the other day that lending first became a big business in Europe in the 1600s in Venice. But, lending at usury was seen as a sin, so those of Christian heritage were forbidden to do it.