Zero-sum shopping

The new CEO of the J.C. Penney department store chain, Ron Johnson, has publicly admitted that his store's prices were needlessly inflated and its frequent claims of special sales and discounts useless and misleading. As reported in a recent issue of Time:

"According to the management-consulting firm A.T. Kearney, more than 40% of the items we bought last year were on sale. That's up from just 10% in 1990. Penney has been a notorious discounter, with nearly three-quarters of revenue coming from goods sold at 50% or more off list price--whatever that is--and less than 1% from full-price merchandise.

Inspired by the no-gimmicks pricing that enabled him to make Apple stores a retail powerhouse, Johnson intends to recast pricing at Penney's along rational lines and treat the public fairly:

"Instead of facing infinite discounts and promotions--there were 590 different 'sales' at Penney alone in 2011--the department store's shoppers will now see just three price categories. One will represent discounted seasonal items that change monthly. Another is clearance merchandise marked down on the first and third Fridays of each month. But the majority of goods will be offered every day at 40% or 50% less than the prices Penney used to charge. In retail parlance that's called EDLP, as in 'everyday low price.'"

Johnson is betting that the public is heartily tired of the fact that "all those Sunday circulars, flash deals and holiday sales events--which seemed more intense than ever last year--have turned shopping into retail combat."

"Johnson believes Penney's customers will appreciate pricing clarity, not to mention sleeping in. 'I don't think customers like having to come to a store between 8 and 10 a.m. on a Sunday in order to get the best price on swimwear,' he said."

Laudable as this is, some doubt its practical wisdom:

"'My intuition is that, in the long run, the changes won't be effective,' says Kit Yarrow, consumer psychologist and author of Gen BuY: How Tweens, Teens and Twenty-Somethings Are Revolutionizing Retail. 'A discount gives shoppers the incentive to buy today. Without that, there's no sense of urgency for people to purchase things that, frankly, they probably don't need.'"

I have no doubt that Johnson's conscience will be as pure as that of an innocent child and that he will sleep the sleep of the just at night. I am about as sure that he may as well tell his employees to start looking for other jobs and expect to be employed elsewhere within a year or two. Amazingly for a retail executive, he seems strangely blind to the parts of human psychology that affect the shopping experience in the first place.

There are at least two major kinds of transactions in the way people interact with each other. One is open, non-competitive, and based on the idea of everyone getting a piece of the pie. We see this in toy drives for poor children at Christmas; in that context, the idea that anyone in a disadvantaged group should suffer a loss, strikes all of us as intolerable.

The other kind, much more common--and, indeed, the mainspring of business, politics, sports, and, in its own way, even academics--is competitive. Your loss is my gain. Your second-place finish leaves open my shot at first place. When I recruited teams to compete in trivia tournaments, I and my team were always quite sincerely encouraging toward the teams we beat; we wanted the excitement and suspense of close competition. At the same time, as I often reminded my team, "It only takes one point to win."

Shopping is, to a large extent, the second type of transaction, and probably for reasons that don't do most of us a great deal of credit. Look at the inescapable power of words, meaningless in their actual context, such as "Exclusive," applied to sales, or "Confidential," on the cover of a tabloid; each encourages the consumer to imagine that he is about to be the beneficiary of something not generally available. To be sure, coupon-clipping is a harsh necessity in our struggling economy and in fact, I can remember rushing into Target in the half-dark of a winter morning, years ago, to buy diapers for my as-yet-unborn son because of a "special" price.

But even without the goad of necessity or any personal animus toward other consumers, shopping is, for many, a competitive activity in which my gain becomes sweeter if it is achieved at your expense. Laboring under a vague feeling, through much of life, that we are missing out on what should have rightfully been ours, we welcome the chance to claw back some otherwise forfeited value by buying better things at lower prices than our neighbor, in "exclusive" deals that our neighbor was too dull or timid to take advantage of. Black Friday sales are not some sort of aberration but a sign of something deep in human nature.

What will happen, as Time asks, when the novelty of Penney's reasonable and honest pricing wears off? Johnson hopes that shopper gratitude for the chain's straightforward approach will keep them coming back. I wish him well in that thought, but I think, rather, that he and his employees will find themselves in the position of the perfectly polite and well-groomed young man who finds, to his amazement, that even nice girls don't date him for long and turn, instead, to his tattooed, troubled, and footloose friend for excitement.

© Michael Huggins, 2012. All rights reserved.

You can't buy a reputation

Warren Buffett is on the cover of Time this week, while Newt Gingrich is attempting one of many comebacks. The world's second-richest man has designated 99% of his wealth for charity upon his death, drives himself in a 2006 car, prefers Cherry Coke to fine wines, takes most of his meals at the same local restaurant, and still lives in a house of quite modest scale in Omaha that he bought in 1958. The former Speaker of the House has a $500,000 line of credit at Tiffany's.

Buffett succeeded by focusing on fundamentals: as a "value investor," he picks underrated companies and holds them, as his profile says, "between ten years and forever." A single share of Berkshire-Hathaway purchased 47 years ago for $19 is worth $116,000 today.

Gingrich is perpetually at risk of destroying whatever he has achieved. Blamed for the government shutdown of 1995, he lost his "Contract with America" and was bounced from the Speakership a few years later over ethics charges.

Buffett can be justifiably proud of his achievements but is apparently a plain man. Gingrich presents himself as a pompous megalomaniac convinced that he alone can save the Republic from a dire fate. Buffett, wealthy enough not to care what anyone else thinks, speaks bluntly about the dangers of income inequality in our society and the bad example of the rich not paying taxes proportional to their wealth. Gingrich wants inner-city children to be put to work as janitors in their own schools.

Buffett married his wife, Susan, in 1950 and remained devoted to her until, late in life, Susan herself decided she needed to broaden her horizons a bit beyond what Omaha had to offer and moved, alone, to San Francisco, where she eventually died of cancer. Quite unconventionally, she actually approached another woman and brought her and Buffett together in a domestic partnership; the three even sent out Christmas cards as a group. Buffett accepted the arrangement but is still heartbroken over his late wife's death, according to the profile in Time.

Gingrich apparently broached the subject of divorce to his first wife while she was in the hospital recovering from surgery. Now, we learn from his second wife that he approached her about "open marriage." On that subject, a British woman, apparently a participant in a rather complex polyamorous arrangement, has weighed in via The Guardian. As she quite sensibly points out, Gingrich did not openly discuss his desire for a prospective new relationship with his then-spouse; he came to her after the fact and sought her acquiescence in a clandestine liaison that he had already carried on for some time. Whatever one may think of the unusual domestic arrangement of the Buffetts and Warren's new partner, it was undertaken honestly, without subterfuge and with the knowledge of all parties.

Forget Buffett's money; there is something in the character of such a man that is forever beyond the likes of Gingrich. Newt can fume about the media all he likes; in the end, one is reminded of a passage from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure:

There is a kind of character in thy life,
That to the observer doth thy history
Fully unfold.

© Michael Huggins, 2012. All rights reserved.

"Damn'd be him that first cries 'Hold! Enough!'"

Lev Grossman's cover story on Mark Zuckerberg as Time's person of the year for 2010 pays due regard to Zuckerberg's intelligence and drive, both of which are considerable (though I wouldn't be too thrilled, if I were he, to have to admit that I had never heard of E.M. Forster) and even extends the wunderkind the benefit of a doubt: he's not opposed to privacy, you see; he simply doesn't get it, similarly, one supposes, to his reported colorblindness to red and green. Well perhaps, but if that be true, no matter how big his achievement and his personal fortune, it's a flaw in his makeup.

Grossman is sharp and perceptive. I think this paragraph nailed it:

"[Facebook] herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure."

"Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius," as Gibbon wrote. I'll never claim to have achieved the latter state but greatly enjoy the solitude of a lengthy walk along the Shelby Farms Greenline, something I have done for some weeks now, to the benefit of both my health and peace of mind. In fact, I do occasionally meet people I know, including, at various times, fellow trivia buffs Jennifer Larkin and Saravan Chaturvedi, and if I happened to have company and good conversation on a walk, I would welcome it, but I also like the way the setting erects a corridor so apart from the rest of life that it seems almost strange when you happen to cross a street traveled by cars. The interstate, with its frequent whooshing noise of cars, is literally only yards away for much of the route and sometimes visible, but often, the trees mask the sight and to some extent, the sound.

It would hardly have satisfied C.S. Lewis, who wrote, describing his ideal day:

"...by two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them. Our own noise blots out the sounds and silences of the outdoor world; and talking leads almost inevitably to smoking, and then farewell to nature as far as one of our senses is concerned. The only friend to walk with is one (such as I found, during the holidays, in Arthur) who so exactly shares your taste for each mood of the countryside that a glance, a halt, or at most a nudge, is enough to assure us that the pleasure is shared."

I thought today that whereas I welcome the very proximity to the interstate because the foliage defiantly filters it, as the foliage and the rushing fountain do in the lovely Meditation Garden on the grounds of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, the whole experience would have been destroyed for poor Lewis, who would have found the constant noise of traffic, even filtered, pretty well intolerable. How much our experiences and expectations change in just a few generations.

Once you've made yourself feel virtuous with a 10-mile walk on a winter day, you don't mind treating yourself to the perfect winter evening: a bowl of hot soup with a glass of wine, then a fire in the fireplace, a good book, and cognac. I'm finishing Peter Biskind's Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America (and no, it's not only about one thing!) and starting Livy's Early History of Rome, and I suppose two more different books could hardly be imagined, except that Beatty, like the legendary Romulus, is relentless in his purposes.

© Michael Huggins, 2010. All rights reserved.

The purpose-driven inaugural

Many in Barack Obama's base feel betrayed by the planned appearance of Rick Warren at the inaugural ceremony next month, though their candidate openly avowed his opposition to gay marriage in his appearance at the Saddleback Church last summer. My fellow skeptics of religion can hardly feel similarly hoodwinked, since Obama is openly Christian. I could wish, though, that the President-elect had exercised as much taste as calculation in his choice and avoided selecting someone who represents the MacDonaldization of religion.

I won't complain that Warren's appearance makes it doubtful that he has made much progress in the time-honored religious virtue of fasting, since my own waistline has been overdrawn by several inches for some years now. But I must wonder what the fortunes of his church would be if there were a prolonged power blackout. The ancient church sustained their faith in darkened catacombs illuminated only by torchlight; they steeled themselves against the prospect of hideous deaths or were transported by religious ecstasies at the prospect of the Savior's imminent return to judge the world. The modern megachurch, by contrast, would silently implode after 3 successive weeks without electric power; its kind of spirituality, lacking tongues of fire, is sustained only by flashing lights, PowerPoint, large display screens, and high-priced sound systems. Its culture invites the attendee to be seated, be entertained, and be generous in support of this institution so happily designed to allow the worshipper to bathe in good feeling about himself.

It so happens that Saddleback and its pastor are apparently among the best of the breed—Warren not only accepts no salary from the church but has purposely repaid every penny of salary he received during its first 25 years of existence; moreover, he lives on just 10% of his income, donating the balance to worthy causes. Neither a sleazy hypocrite in his personal life, like Swaggart or Ted Haggard, nor a severe ranter on putative damnation for trivial offenses, Warren has actively worked to highlight environmental and social justice concerns among Evangelicals, giving in support of AIDS relief and differing markedly from his compeer James Dobson in raising awareness of global warming.

All this is to the good. Still, what kind of recommendation is it to praise him on the grounds that he is simply not as objectionable as other instances of a phenomenon that is meretricious at its core? Should we admire Warren and his church members because they have finally acknowledged what the International Panel on Climate Change has been documenting for nearly 20 years?

Really, why did Obama invite this man to be a central figure at his inauguration? It reminds me of what I wondered when I read an article in Time last week about the social contagion of happiness; I was startled to read that the odds of one's increased personal happiness were 34% greater if his neighbor were happy (and 10% greater if that neighbor's friend were happy, even if the neighbor's friend were unknown to the original subject!), the odds for happiness increased by just 14% if one's sibling were happy, and by only 8% if one's spouse were happy. One is tempted to leave that last point alone since, sadly, it isn't hard to imagine two married partners discovering that the happiness of each is inversely proportional to the contentment of the other, but still, you have to wonder. I suppose we must have evolved in such a way that whereas we assume a reciprocal commitment to each other's welfare in our relations with spouses and family members, we realize that our neighbor's benevolence is by no means so certain and, thus, feel an obligation to work harder to win his good will. If there is anything to that, I suspect that Obama is confident that his core supporters will trust the integrity of his voting record and formal beliefs, which are politically liberal, whereas he hopes to encourage Warren, a bellwether of Evangelical opinion, to lead his flock in a more centrist direction.

There's a great deal of political good sense in that, certainly, but as someone who declines to share Warren's metaphysics altogether, I still hope the day will come, decades from now, where a candidate for President, invited to come and be cross-examined at Saddleback or its like, will respond with a statement like the following:

Thank you for your interest in my campaign, and I welcome the support of all fair-minded voters. I will not accept your invitation, and I hope my opponent will join me in declining as well. I refuse not because I am uninterested in what your members think but because I cannot discover on what grounds a church is a fitting venue for examining the qualifications of a candidate for high office under the Constitution of the United States. I may happen to hold similar or even identical moral positions to those held by you or some of your members, but I cannot consent to have that agreement linked, in the public mind, to beliefs about a Sky Spirit that I simply do not share; in particular, I refuse to given even token consent to the very foolish notion that without believing in such a Sky Spirit, we would all revert to savagery. Those are your opinions, and you are entitled to them, but they have nothing to do with my ability to devise or implement policies that would make this country prosperous and safe. Instead of meeting in a temple of religious worship, I propose, instead, that we all gather in a more neutral environment where every voter of every shade of belief or no belief feels that he enters, and his opinion is valued, without regard to his views on matters that no one can ever prove.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Debris, diabolical and divine

I once corresponded with a prisoner and visited him when I could. Jerry was in for 12 years for DUI resulting in a fatality; his own wife had been killed when Jerry drove through an intersection at a very high speed. After a few years, he came up for parole, and I testified for him at his hearing. Jerry was released but soon violated parole and fled the state. Eventually, he was recaptured. From prison, he placed a collect call to an elderly widow that he and I both knew and asked her to give me a message: "Tell Michael to buy me a TV set." When the widow, who herself lives on a small Social Security pension, protested that I probably couldn't afford such a gesture, Jerry was undaunted and proposed that she and I split the cost.

I thought of Jerry when reading about the impudence of Rod Blagojevich. The late Frank Gorshin once defined chutzpah as a policeman writing you a traffic ticket and borrowing your pen to do so. The Governor of Illinois, who looks and comports himself like an aging 24-year-old detected in the act of shoplifting smutty magazines, is apparently so bereft of shame or sense that, incredibly, he had even talked to associates about a Presidential run in 2016, or perhaps an ambassadorial post, according to Time. At the rate things are going, I half expect him to end up like former Dyersburg, Tennessee Chancery Court Judge David Lanier, who, outraged that he had been indicted for corruption, went on the run and presently called the police who had a warrant for his arrest and warned them that he would give them just one more chance to stop pursuing him.

Equally lacking in shame or sense are Heath and Deborah Campbell of Easton, Pennsylvania, who named their little girl JoyceLynn Aryan Nations Campbell and their son Adolf Hitler Campbell. The dad, who touted the names as an indication of pride in his German heritage, took umbrage at the manager of a local ShopRite®, who refused to sell the Campbells a birthday cake bearing little Adolf's name, for his third birthday. (Again, this must go under the heading of things you couldn't make up!)

Beside all this, the arrest of Bristol Palin's future mother-in-law on drug charges sounds refreshingly normal. If, as Dilbert creator Scott Adams suggests in his book, God's Debris, the Universe and all within it consists of particles of the Deity progressively reassembling themselves as the reinstantiation of the Supreme Mind, Blagojevich and the senior Campbells may belong to a class of particles that need to be vacuumed up, instead.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Apres moi le deficit

Convinced that a bailout is necessary, and it most likely is, economists across the spectrum are supporting it; still, like many kinds of strong medicine, this one can have unpleasant side effects, as Michael Kinsley observes in this week's Time:

...yes, there is a downside. Even though amounts this large inevitably seem like toy money, it's a real trillion dollars we are talking about spending. Even if we spend the money wisely (on bridges to somewhere), we or future generations will still have to pay it off, with interest. Or, more likely, we will inflate it away, along with the life savings of those who were foolish enough to save all their lives. It's just that the downside of doing nothing is worse. It's an easy choice, I guess. But let's not pretend that it's a happy one.

Too true. As Kinsley also tells us, Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw, who headed President Bush Junior's Council of Economic Advisors, found occasion recently to reflect on John Maynard Keynes, who made a considerable fortune through canny investments and dismissed concerns about deficit spending with the laconic "In the long run, we'll all be dead." Yes, Mankiw replied recently in The New York Times, but Keynes didn't have children.

Well if Keynes didn't, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. did, and their son is prepared to do what he can to repair the economy—that is, if he is not barred by the efforts of conspiracy activist Orly Taitz, who seeks legal remedies to prevent Obama from taking office in January on the grounds that he may have been born a British subject. So, as it turns out, were our first seven U.S. Presidents (the first one born after Yorktown had the foreign-sounding name Van Buren), but of course, Article II of the Constitution bars non-Americans from the Presidency.

Perhaps Ms. Taitz suffers from the same confusion that bedeviled the Rensselaer County, New York Electoral Commission, causing them to circulate 300 absentee ballots printed with the name "Barack Osama." Three sets of proofreaders missed it; the devil is, indeed, in the details.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court does not share Ms. Taitz's anxiety (never mind the irony of someone with the name Orly Taitz raising suspicions of anyone else's funny-sounding name), but if this issue raises general doubt in the minds of voters, the President-elect might follow the example of 19-year-old animal rights activist Jennifer Thornburg, who legally changed her name to CutOutDissection.com (in that regard, see Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" in the July Atlantic). Echoing one of his campaign comments, Obama might choose ItooBelongOntheDollarBill.com, or, as a desperate expedient, AlienYouCanBelieveIn.com. I say give him the benefit of the doubt; at least his name isn't Somchai Wongsawat.

In any case, if her cause fails, Ms. Taitz might devote her time, instead, to combating the worldwide plague of junk mail which, as Time tells us, consumes 8 months out of the average person's lifespan. And if junk mail doesn't interest her, she might address a problem for which no bailout will ever be available, the world's shortage of clean water. I don't know if the planet's 326 quintillion gallons were sufficient to lift Noah to the peak of Ararat, but they are sinking out of sight in Lake Mead and elsewhere, and in Harare, Zimbabwe, the government itself has cut off the water supply for lack of chemicals to treat it, and citizens are left to dig their own wells.

Or, if she wants to tackle the other side of the water supply question, Ms. Taitz might visit historic Venice, where Piazza San Marco was under 3 feet of water recently and police had to put up yellow tape to alert citizens where the sidewalk ended and the danger of tumbling into a canal began. Come to think of it, that sounds like an apt metaphor for the situation facing our government with regard to bailouts.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

The best laid plans of imps and men

St. Augustine's "mousetrap" theory held that the crucifixion of Christ was actually a clever trap into which Satan blundered, forever sealing his doom, when he overreached and shed the Savior's innocent blood. Osama and Bush both thought they were advancing God's work, but French critic and analyst of Islamic affairs Gilles Kepel argues that both repeated the tactical error of the Evil One. In Beyond Terror and Martyrdom: The Future of the Middle East, reviewed in the current Economist, he makes the argument that the policies of each would-be destroyer of evil has been chastised with a vengeance by the law of unintended consequences:

In Gilles Kepel’s telling, it is not only Mr Bush whose strategy failed after September 11th. Osama bin Laden’s strategy failed too. The Bush administration’s “global war on terror” encompassed not only the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq but also a project to spread democracy to the Arabs and remake the dysfunctional Middle East in America’s image. It was, in Mr Kepel’s phrase, “a vision of global rectification through violent means”. That was precisely al-Qaeda’s project as well. Mr bin Laden did not intend only to inflict pain on America and force its armies out of the Middle East. Martyrdom was also supposed to lead the Muslim masses to identify with al-Qaeda, to hasten a general uprising against “apostate” governments like Saudi Arabia’s, to precipitate the establishment of an Islamic state and destroy Israel.

In the event, as Mr Kepel demonstrates, both of these grand, transformative narratives “crashed against a wall of reality within the Muslim world”. Instead of throttling jihadism, the American occupation of Iraq recruited an army of new martyrs to the cause. But far from rallying the Muslim world at large to its banner, the murderous jihad in Iraq—and al-Qaeda’s killing of many Muslims in other Muslim lands—ended up repelling the very audience this epic struggle was intended to attract. Indeed, to the extent that radical Islam grew stronger during this encounter, it was not the Sunni zealots of al-Qaeda who benefited but their rival pretenders to leadership of the Muslim world: notably the Shia leaders of Iran and, after the 33-day war with Israel in 2006, Iran’s Hizbullah co-religionists in Lebanon.

So far, so good, but then, Kepel shows that no one can be so wrong as an expert, when he goes on to argue that Europe is the one place where experiments in cultural integration are working(!) and that its countries are an ideal venue in which to develop a unique deterrent against terrorism. I'm aware of the reputation of the French for sophistication and subtle wit, but this argument, as James I once said about a philosophical treatise by Bacon, is like the peace of God—it passeth understanding. (Of course I have to take the word of The Economist that this is what his book actually says; in any case, the reviewer politely comments that Kepel's ideas on this point seem "more wishful than professorial." Indeed.)

Kepel claims that polling data reveal that the Paris banlieue riots of 2005 had more to do with disgruntlement over poverty than an urge to wage jihad—yes, and...? Can Kepel really be unaware that the poverty and despair of the marginalized in any society are the very elements most likely to result in religious extremism and violence? One of the reasons that Europe is precisely not as successful in integrating Muslims as it ought to be is its lack of success in providing sufficient economic opportunity for unskilled Muslim immigrants. Americans may be reading Tim LaHaye and watching John Hagee on television, but anyone of any faith or national origin willing to put in his time at the cash register of a Circle K can have the same chance as anyone else to earn his flat screen TV. On the other hand, if he tried to knife a critic or stone an apostate, he would learn that this is not Europe after all, an aspect of life in which Europe is learning, to its sorrow, that "I'm OK, you're OK," is a maxim not universally applicable.

I'm not sure what Continental savants are reading, but if Kepel will check the website for Time, he can find an excellent article on India's Muslims, exploring the volatile relationship between poverty and extremism. In that regard, a Hindu colleague at my office insists that western media are exercising far too little skepticism toward Indian Muslim claims of oppression and failing to hold them accountable for their own shortcomings; see this article for a jaded view of Islam by 94-year-old Kushwant Singh, in the Hindustan Times. Similarly, Dr. Subhash Kapila of the South Asia Analysis Group argues that India's Muslims cannot progress until they free themselves of the burden of backward-looking leadership. Soutik Biswas, on the other hand, writing for BBC News, while duly noting the lack of credible middle-class leadership among India's Muslims is also willing to attribute part of their plight to the "apathy and ineptitude" of the government.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Extraordinarily popular bargains and the madness of crowds

How is it that 27 million people visited the 1893 Chicago World's Fair—716,000 on a single day, the largest peacetime gathering in American history—with no trampling fatalities, but Wal-Mart can't manage a crowd it has been expecting for weeks or protect its staff? Concerning the 1893 exposition, which took place, remember, in the same era as lynchings and gunfights, we learn that

According to the security department report, only 954 arrests were made over the six months of operation, 10 attempts were made to pass counterfeit coins, 408 people were able to get over the fence into the grounds, and only 33 attempts were made to gain admission on fraudulent passes.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, and Time printed a decidedly different account of the closing of Chicago's Century of Progress Exposition in 1934:

In the Avenue of Flags elderly matrons fought like savages for bits of bunting. For their backyard gardens housewives stripped the Horticultural Building of rare plants and flowers, some worth as much as $200 each. Roving bands of youths stormed the booths of concessionaires. A 13-year-old boy was caught by police lugging off two huge bones of a prehistoric monster, to feed to his dog. Recurring showers of bottles from the 64-story Skyride Tower grew so alarming that the elevators were finally stopped. Dancing feet stomped into ruin landscaped lawns. Into Lake Michigan went benches and tables, and when policemen sought to admonish the revelers, they tossed the policemen in, too.

On the night of those fateful events in Chicago, Sam Walton was just 16 and had presumably followed his normal practice of delivering surplus milk from the family cow to his neighbors in Columbia, Missouri that morning, so we can't blame everything on the man from Bentonville, whatever may be said about his company's emerging corporate ethics or labor practices.

But what was Wal-Mart management at the store in Valley Stream, New York thinking before they opened before dawn on Friday, November 28? (The peculiarly American touch of someone being trampled to death in a mall with the name Green Acres is something you couldn't make up.) According to The New York Times, Hank Mullany, a Wal-Mart regional vice-president, claimed the store had hired additional security guards and erected barricades that morning. Really? Where were they? Why was a temporary employee, Haitian immigrant Jdimytai Damour, delegated to be a human barrier, trying to hold two sliding glass doors secure against a surging crowd of hundreds? Was it because he weighed about 270 pounds?

Four shoppers were also injured in the melée, including an 8-months' pregnant woman, and Times reporter Peter Goodman was right to call it "A Shopping Guernica." It's heartening to read that union representatives are demanding an investigation:

"This incident was avoidable," said Bruce Both, President of United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 1500. "Where were the safety barriers? Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner?" asked President Both. "This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart. UFCW Local 1500 will demand a full investigation by all levels of Government to ensure both justice for the surviving family members and to ensure the safety of current employees and the general public. This can never be allowed to happen again and those responsible must be held accountable," Both concluded.

Director of Special Projects for Local 1500 Patrick Purcell called Wal-Mart's comments in response to the incident both "cold and heartless." "If the safety of their customers and workers was a top priority, then this never would have happened," Purcell stated. "Wal-mart must step up to the plate and ensure that all those injured, as well as the family of the deceased, be financially compensated for their injuries and their losses. Their words are weak. The community demands action," Purcell concluded.

Sympathetic Wal-Mart employees held a prayer vigil at the shattered front door for their hapless fellow worker. An employee in the store's electronics department offered a different perspective on the circumstances of Damour's death:

"It was crazy—the deals weren't even that good."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

What is Tagalog for "toggle"?

Typing the title of this post, I saw the words turned into apparently meaningless character combinations: &#2352,&#2381, etc. That had me scratching my head, until I remembered that I had turned on a setting that enables transliteration into Hindi. I'm all for promoting international understanding and am aware that Hindi is the world's fourth-most spoken language, but I still felt that I ought to click the new transliteration toggle on my toolbar (itself a Hindi character looking something like 3-T) and turn the thing off for now. English has been the language of trade and technology, but now, we have the launch of India's Chandrayaan-1 unmanned lunar orbiter, as well as China's Chang'e-1 space craft, which doesn't mean "change," but considering China's growing economic clout, might as well. I think Chandrayaan is Sanskrit for "We're catching up with you, USA."

Chinese scientists, rather like the beings from the future obligingly reconstructing Frances O'Connor from a single strand of hair in Spielberg's film AI, worked from a single moon rock given as a goodwill gesture by the United States; according to Time: "China's true fascination has long been the moon--at least since 1978, when the U.S. presented Beijing with a 1-g (.035 oz.) sample of lunar rock brought back by the Apollo 17 mission. Chinese officials razored off half of that moon crumb and gave it to scientists to study. 'From that half a gram, we produced 40 papers,' space scientist Ouyang Ziyuan told the People's Daily."

Meanwhile, NASA left all its data analyses of moon dust on tape drives that could only be played on equipment last manufactured in the 1960s, and on my single visit to the Kennedy Space Center, in 1979, the tour guide could not say the word "spacecraft," which he continually pronounced spacecran. All I can say is that if I had to travel to the moon, which takes about 4 days, I would want to listen to this on the way, certainly one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

The AdSense ads finally appeared, though nowadays, any interval in which ads do not appear is more remarkable; I suppose I can understand the frequent ads for suicide prevention, since I mentioned the Jonestown suicide, though the frequent ads for removing belly fat, while certainly reflecting a private goal, don't seem related to anything I've discussed here. As I checked the single piece of spam in my G-mail inbox this morning, Google helpfully offered an ad for "Tasty Spam Crescents." It wouldn't hurt for the ad writers to avail themselves of a spell check utility; so far, I've seen "jewerly," "recieve," and "entrepeneur."

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.

Save the jobs; sell the walnut desks

Louis XIV was dying for weeks of gangrene, and no one thought to amputate. An article in this week's Time gives specifics on the ripple effect if GM is allowed to go under.

"Although the Detroit Three directly employed about 240,000 people last year, according to the industry-allied Center for Automotive Research (CAR) in Ann Arbor, Mich., the multiplier effect is large, which is typical in manufacturing. Throw in the partsmakers and other suppliers, and you have an additional 974,000 jobs. Together, says CAR, these 1.2 million workers spend enough to keep 1.7 million more people employed."

I'm not sure Time helps its cause by inserting a link to photographs of the "50 worst cars of all time"! The same article quotes Peter Schrager, of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, saying that GM's management needs to be dismissed and the company broken up into three separate units: Chevy, Buick-Pontiac-GMC and Cadillac-Saab-Saturn. Whatever else they do, I hope they at least keep making Saturns!

Henry Payne, of the Detroit News, writing in National Review Online, also notes the shortcomings of GM as presently constituted.

"It is an open secret in the Motor City that — even leaving aside its high labor costs, surplus of brands, and bloated dealer network — GM’s manufacturing culture is inefficient compared to foreign rivals Toyota and Honda. Conversations with numerous supplier reps confirm an antiquated Detroit culture that does not thoroughly engineer products before contracting production with suppliers. As a result, production runs for Detroit automakers like GM are frequently interrupted to change specifications. Those interruptions add costs — costs that Japanese manufacturers rarely incur. The problem is so prevalent that employees for JCI — major international supplier Johnson Controls, Inc. — often joke that their acronym stands for 'Just Change It' because its American clients routinely run up unnecessary costs by altering production contracts.

"Can a $25 billion taxpayer bailout help General Motors change its culture? 'No,' says one supplier executive. 'You have to burn them down and start over.'”

I wondered if I had received my own bailout, or at least its first installment, when I opened my mail last night and found a check drawn on Wilburton State Bank of Oklahoma for nearly $5,000, accompanied by a letter from Bravo Services telling me I had won a quarter of a million dollars in an international lottery. The letter was obviously a scam, but the check looked real. The first order of business was to find out if there really is a Wilburton, Oklahoma, and there is. Next, I wondered if there really was a Wilburton State Bank and yes, that is real as well, as is the prominently displayed banner, one of the first things you see on their web site, warning you that checks from Bravo Services are fraudulent. If Saturn goes under, it looks like it will be a while before I replace my Ion with a Bentley.

An ad from Hewlett-Packard in my e-mail this morning made me blink; it said "Experience the Freedom of Wireless Printing," and I thought it said wireless painting! I wondered if there will come a time where we can't do anything unsupported by technology.

© Michael Huggins, 2008. All rights reserved.