Archive for economy
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greg
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It’s no mystery, really, why the City of Detroit has no discernible public transit system.
Forget buses. Every city has buses. I’m talking about honest-to-goodness mass transit that puts a city on the cutting edge.
Detroit has no such animal, and it’s quite simple why that is.
Detroit is the Motor City. We put America on wheels. We love our cars. We don’t even like to car pool; you think we’re going to espouse mass transit that could harm auto sales?
I’ve long fantasized about a train that would take you from the foot of Hart Plaza to the tony suburbs of Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills, with dozens of stops in between.
But I knew that “fantasized” was the key word, because anything that would discourage the use of the automobile, read: wear and tear, thus necessitating the purchase of a new car, would be buried as a pie-in-the-sky idea.
That pie is about to fall to Earth.
The first hurdle has been cleared for Detroit to start working on its brand new light rail system that would run along Woodward Avenue. Phase I would begin construction in 2011 and would run from Jefferson to West Grand Boulevard (about 3.4 miles), and Phase II would carry the rail all the way to 8 Mile Road, and would be completed by 2016.
Mayor Bing’s Administration says the project could create as many as 10,000 jobs.
The hurdle was the federal government pledging to conduct an environmental impact study required for the plan to move forward.
The project is expected to cost about $450 million. So far, $125 million in private and public funds have been raised to complete the first phase of the project with the hope that the federal government will pick up much of the rest.
A sample of what a light rail train in Detroit might look like
The Woodward Light Rail Project would contain several stops along the way, including Wayne State University, Tech Town, Detroit Medical Center, Campus Martius Park, College for Creative Studies, the State Fairgrounds and the New Center/ Henry Ford Hospital area.
This is very exciting news.
This may seem cosmetic to some, but to be a world-class city, as Detroit claims to want to be, and to be more attractive and competitive when it comes to landing conventions and other business, having light rail in place is a huge step toward that goal.
It separates Detroit from other wannabes.
Not to mention the jobs the project will create, and the bounce back for local businesses.
Mayor Bing said, “If you’ve visited other cities as I have to see the impact of light rail, you see the development that it generates is equally important to the convenient transportation that it provides.”
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who was in Detroit Friday for President Obama’s tours of auto plants and subsequent speeches, said this light rail project will become a “model for the country” given the public and private partnership to raise funds for the project to see that it gets completed.
“Projects like this cannot be done just with public dollars,” LaHood told the press. “This will become a model for the country: public-private partnerships, foundations coming together with the state, the city, the entire delegation around the idea that if you build it they will come. I believe that.”
So Detroit’s finally on board—pun intended.
It’s about damn time.
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greg
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It sounds like the punch line of a Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield joke.
“Things are so bad, the mail is cutting back on delivery. Now they’re going to take one less day a week to not get your stuff there on time.”
Sorry, USPS people, but I’m a little annoyed.
The Postal Service wants to petition Congress to excise Saturday delivery, because of a—get this—$3.8 billion loss in the 2009 fiscal year. The USPS says it has already made $6 billion in cost-cutting measures, including lowering the payments it made for retiree health benefits by $4 billion in fiscal 2009.
OK, I get why this is; people are simply not mailing as much stuff anymore. Bills are paid online or via phone. E-mail has made letter writing archaic and quaint to the point of weird.
Seems that the only folks using the mail service anymore are those distributing junk.
But if there are fewer pieces of mail, why are they taking longer to reach their destination?
It’s not just me.
I’ve levied this complaint to friends and associates, and they agree with me. The mail is moving at a snail’s pace, befitting its derogatory nickname, “snail mail” — which used to be a term of endearment, to differentiate it from e-mail. But now, it’s taking on an all-too literal meaning.
As a freelance writer, I get checks mailed to me quite frequently. Some come from Boston. Some come from Tampa. In both instances, the checks are taking five-to-seven days to arrive in my metro Detroit mailbox.
The people sending me those checks empathize; they tell me that they, too, have experienced Pony Express-like delivery service. And this is all stuff zipping back and forth between the Continental United States. Sometimes less than half of it.
Boston-to-Detroit isn’t Moscow-to-Buenos Aires, but you’d think so.
That said, it really is still a bargain, to cough up 43 cents to send a piece of mail from anywhere from New York to Los Angeles. Just as long as there’s no sense of urgency for it actually getting there.
I don’t mean to tick off the good people who work for the USPS. But it IS a little confounding; less mail to move, yet it’s moving slower. Again, not just my perception.
But here’s something: the USPS has trimmed 40,000 jobs as part of its cost-cutting measures. So maybe that’s contributing to the slowdown. Yet there are still 712,000 employees on the books. The Postal Service also reduced overtime hours and lowered transportation-related costs.
The move to drop Saturday delivery would save $3.5 billion, according to USPS chief financial officer Joseph Corbett. But even a 5-day delivery schedule won’t be enough to put the USPS into the black, Corbett said. So the agency will also propose to Congress that it reduce the $5.5 billion in annual payments to pre-fund retiree health benefits that it is slated to make until 2016.
This marks the third straight fiscal year that the USPS has posted huge losses.
And these numbers, to confirm my suspicions about mail volume: The service’s total mail volume plunged by more than 25 billion pieces, or 12.7%, to 177.1 billion pieces. That drop was twice as much as any mail volume decline in the Postal Service’s history.
But less volume isn’t equaling faster delivery. How come?
Now they want to cut out one day of delivery service, or 16 percent of the days they deliver.
NOW how long will mail take to “get there”?
Maybe we should ask the junk mailers, or bill sender-outers, for their secret. Their stuff always seems to get to its destination forthwith.
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greg
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The haircut is dying a slow, shaggy death.
Say goodbye to another of our traditions: the lazy, chatty time spent in the barber’s chair.
If you think our depressed economy hasn’t cut through several swathes of Americana, think again.
“People wait longer,” my barber Vito told me last time I was in the chair. “Instead of six weeks they might go eight, or longer, between cuts.”
It should be noted that Vito told me this as I was a few weeks tardy for my own shearing.
It all adds up. More and more people waiting longer and longer between haircuts, and the corner barber shop starts feeling the pinch.
Vito’s been cutting my hair for several years, over at Filary’s on Dequindre in Warren. He gained me as a customer after the previous owner died unexpectedly.
Vito’s a Brooklyn kid, though he’s no longer a kid, I suppose. He’s been here long enough to call himself a Detroiter, though.
A year or so ago, Filary’s started closing on Wednesdays, in addition to the traditional “barber’s weekend” of Sundays and Mondays off. Slumping business was the impetus behind that decision.
So it’s a four-day barber, and when did you think you’d ever see that?
It’s not just Filary’s.
“I have friends who are barbers and they’re hurting too,” I remember Vito telling me. “Some don’t even go to a barber anymore. They’ll do it themselves, or have a family member cut their hair.”
Here’s another thing that I didn’t think of right away.
“No one’s going on job interviews anymore,” Vito said, and he’s right. “So that’s one less reason to get a haircut.”
The trickle down theory of economics; but you know what else trickles down, don’t you?
The barber shop used to be a place to find the pulse of this country. All over, from coast to coast, on Saturday mornings, you could do a better, more genuine poll of this country’s politics in the barber shop than anything Gallup could come up with.
When I mosey in to Filary’s, there’s rarely anyone ahead of me. Vito is almost always “between” customers.
Didn’t used to be that way. Saturday was usually the day you avoided if you didn’t like crowds before your haircut.
Now, Saturday isn’t all that different from Tuesday or Thursday or Friday. And that’s not a good thing.
In fact, the next time I see Vito, he’s going to need himself a lawn mower, I think.
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greg
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In this day of rising inflation, I suppose it only makes sense that companies no longer nickel-and-dime you to death. Some are quartering you to the grave.
Take fast food giants Burger King and McDonald’s, for example.
Apparently we’re all a bunch of dipping sauce packet abusers, for BK and Mickey D’s are beginning to place us on rations.
Yes, despite the economy being in the toilet and other fast food players such as the submarine sandwich industry engaging in pricing wars, Burger King and McDonald’s are having some fun at our expense.
Next time you order some Chicken McNuggets or Chicken Fries or anything that requires dipping sauce, look for a handwritten or half-typed, half-handwritten sign near the drive-thru window or the counter.
It’ll tell you how many dipping sauce packets you get, free of charge, based on what you’ve ordered and the size, along with what it’ll cost you to dare ask for more.
No joke.
Dipping sauce packets are tiny things, perhaps no more than an ounce, ounce-and-a-half in size. Sometimes you can barely fit your processed food into the little tub, truth be told.
They can’t possibly cost more than a few pennies each to produce.
Yet BK and McD’s wants to charge us a quarter (!) for each packet that exceeds the limit that they’ve mandated.
Twenty-five cents?!
First, is there really such an abuse of the dipping sauce packet supply that we need to be rationing? It’s not like they’re freely available to the paying customers, like the hot sauce at Taco Bell—who, by the way, couldn’t care less how many you pilfer. Good for them.
We’ve always had to ask for dipping sauce at BK and McD’s, even before the rationing. And, frankly, usually the reason you would ask was so that you would get some to begin with!
How many times are the sauces left out of your bag? How many times do the cheerful employees forget to ask you if you’d like dipping sauce?
You’re looking at 50 cents!
The sauce distribution at McD’s was always curiously miserly to me. They were treated like gold nuggets. It was almost as if the folks working there hoped you’d forget about them, because they sure didn’t go out of their way to remind you.
Sometimes they’ll ask, but I notice that they ask more now that they’ve put us all on rations.
So you’d think that BK would want to get the upper hand on McD’s. Well, not the location near where I live.
Yesterday I saw that the BK on 12 Mile in Madison Heights is now putting us on dipping sauce rations, too. Instead of doing the opposite—proudly declaring, “NO LIMIT on dipping sauces!”—thus gaining a competitive edge, that location is getting in on the gouging.
Think about this for a moment. Each of these dumb-dumbs have a dollar menu, from which you can order various things, including a cheeseburger. So is one dipping sauce worth 1/4 of a burger?
I wouldn’t be so cranky about it if BK and McD’s had been vigilant in the past about providing sauce and asking if you’d like some. Or if they had been providing it in full view, a la Taco Bell, and folks were taking 10, 11 at a time.
So depending on the size of the item you’ve ordered, you’ll be afforded one (or two) dipping sauce packets, tops. Anything beyond that? Twenty-five cents seems to be the going rate, per packet.
Maybe if the packets were larger, or if it hadn’t been such a teeth-pulling exercise to get them at all in the past, then maybe we wouldn’t be asking for so many.
And how can there have been an abuse of an item that has always had to be requested?
The submarine sandwich people are falling all over themselves right now, offering $5 foot-long subs and, in the case of Quizno’s, even cheaper sandwiches that are only slightly smaller. Those folks know when to strike when the iron is hot.
BK and McD’s?
Gouging us on one-ounce dipping sauce packets while the nation’s economy tanks.
I thought we “deserved a break today” and should “have it our way.”
Sure—for a quarter.
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greg
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Well, it’s been a few months now and I can officially report it.
I read newspapers, not facsimiles thereof.
I’m a Detroit Free Press subscriber, which means, thanks to cost-cutting moves by the two dailies in town, that I get a real-life newspaper delivered to my home on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays. After that I’m on my own.
Well, not entirely. I can “read” the newspaper online. It’s an option I haven’t exercised too often.
It’s not news anymore, as the Monday thru Sunday delivery of the paper hasn’t occurred in over three months now, but it’s time to chime in. The “virtual” newspaper has left me, basically, reading the paper on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays. Only.
Oh, I’ve tried the online version. At first, I thought it was a pretty cool novelty. The “paper” does, indeed, look just like a real newspaper. Articles are pretty easily clicked on and viewed — either with or without the photos and graphics.
As I perused the online “newspaper” in those early days, back in early April, I had much the same sensation as I did back in my college days, when I would traipse to the library at EMU and look at microfilm of archived editions of the Freep and the Detroit News.
The look and feel was the same, to me. Zooming in and out of stories. Panning to the left and right. Reading the newspaper font on a glowing monitor before me. I used to spend hours doing that, while researching papers and the like.
Today? Not so much.
I find that I don’t even bother with the online version on Saturdays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Hardly ever, anymore.
I work largely from home, which means I spend countless hours in front of a CRT and tapping on a keyboard, sometimes furiously. Like now.
It’s just not the same…
But it just never occurs to me — or at least, rarely does it — to visit the Freep’s online version. I mean, I’m probably not getting my money’s worth. Let’s put it that way.
But when a “hard copy” of the paper arrives on my doorstep, I make time to read it. Go figure.
I guess I just like the “feel” of reading a newspaper — with my hands, before me, or while I eat (Lord, how I love to read while I eat).
I’m probably a bit of an anomaly. Most folks my age (45) and below likely don’t miss a real newspaper as much as I do. They get into all that digital age stuff. And I do, too, to a degree.
But I’m an old soul, always have been. I tend to take the attitude of those 15, 20 years my senior in matters such as technology replacing newsprint.
I just can’t get into it. Doesn’t hold my interest very long, the digital newspaper.
Yesterday was an example.
I visited the website, “opened” my paper, and “turned” to a story in the sports section. But then I stopped and told myself I’d read it later.
So there the opened tab stayed on my browser, unread. All day, and night.
Finally, I clicked on the “x” and closed the tab — the sports story never read.
Had a real paper been at my disposal, it would have been unheard of for me to discard it without reading it. Unheard of.
The digital newspaper has turned me into a part-time reader now, and I don’t like it.
I know there’s tons of information on the Net. Tons of it. But I like my paper for local news, mainly. I feel disconnected now. Which isn’t good, when this blog partially relies on me being “up” on the news of the day.
Just gives me all the more reason to write about stuff of yesteryear, which gives me more pleasure anyway, truth be told.
Still, this part-time newspaper reading thing bothers me. I doubt I’m alone — even if those with me are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s.
Doesn’t do any good to bitch about it; the change is irreversible, I would imagine.
All I know is, you’ll never see a pristine, untouched newspaper in this house. The fact that you can now only see them here on Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays is only good in one sense.
It’s less newspapers I have to load into the recycling bin every week.
Whoopee.
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greg
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The buttons and bumper stickers started sprouting up sometime in late-1974, early-1975.
They were designed to be a nationwide rallying cry–a modern-day version of jingoism.
Three letters, that’s all.
WIN.
It was a directive from the White House, disguised with a bunch of rah-rah.
President Jerry Ford, in October 1974, made a speech about the economy and then he got some ideas.
WIN.
We thought, back in ‘74, that the auto industry was in trouble. This was 35 years before their house of cards came down completely and the 11th Chapter was invoked by two of the (formerly) Big Three.
No, 1974 was child’s play compared to what’s happening now.
But we didn’t know that in ‘74. Detroit shed some jobs. Gas prices started to spike. Not only gasoline, but the prices of coffee, bread, meat–you name it–started to inflate.
That word, inflation.
So Jerry Ford makes a speech and gets the idea: what if we encouraged thriftiness and money-consciousness among the masses?
This inflation, Jerry said–it must be whipped.
WIN!
Whip Inflation Now.
The White House started it, and before long, the buttons and bumper stickers were done up.
Ford declared inflation as “public enemy number one” ten days after he made his economic speech to Congress on October 8, 1974. He asked the American people to come up with ten ideas for how to combat it, and send them to him.
So WIN was born–an appeal for putting money into savings and exhibiting smart spending habits, among other things.
It wasn’t received all that well.
Folks immediately began to ridicule the WIN buttons. Some even wore them upside down–so they’d spell NIM–and declaring that NIM stood for “Need Immediate Money” or “No Immediate Miracles.”
How little did some think of the WIN campaign?
In his book The Age of Turbulence, Alan Greenspan, as the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, recalled thinking “This is unbelievably stupid” when Whip Inflation Now was first presented in the White House.
We didn’t really “whip” inflation back in ‘74-’75. Not before it whipped us, anyway.
WIN ranked right up there with Nancy Reagan’s inglorious campaign against drugs–her advice to “Just Say No.”
Well, they tried, anyway. And that’s more than you can say for some of the goofballs roaming the Capitol nowadays.
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greg
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It had been, until last week to me, as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie.
No, not talking about Chevrolet–for they’ve been less and less American for years now. Just like their other Big Two-and-a-Half brethren.
Heck, let’s play a little word association.
What flutters through your mind when I say “Kellogg’s”?
Frosted Flakes?
Special K?
Tony the Tiger?
GrrrrrEATT!!??
Just some suggestions. Perhaps you thought, simply, cereal. Or Battle Creek, MI., where they make the stuff. The cereal capital of the world.
HA!!
Kellogg’s is off-loading the manufacturing of some of their product south of the border. And I don’t mean the Mason-Dixon Line.
My wife picked up a box of Special K cereal bars the other day. They looked yummy, based on the photo, though it was “enlarged for detail.”
And only 90 calories per bar. Not that I’m counting. With my waistline, you’d need a calculator if you wanted to do so. At the very least, an abacus.
These days, though, it’s not enough to just look at the yummy photo on the box cover.
You have to inspect the package for dirty little words–dirty to our family, anyway–like “Lite”, “Lo-cal”, “Diet”, and “Sugar Free.”
Dirty little words, indeed!
Or this one: Mexico.
Before I get a lot of angry e-mail from Mexicans, let me say firstly that my beef has nothing to do with you as a people. It’s your government and the apparently filthy way it handles food and water down there.
But there it was, in tiny little print: “Product of Mexico.”
Right above, ironically, the Kellogg’s address in Battle Creek.
Be sure to check out the fine print!
So we can’t make perfectly good cereal bars in the good ole U.S. of A.?
We have to export the work to Mexico?
What do they have there, that we don’t possess here, when it comes to making cereal bars–besides cheap labor?
Ahh, there’s the rub.
Naturally, we immediately grabbed every Kellogg’s cereal box we own and looked for that dirty six-letter proper name that rhymes with Texaco.
Again, no offense intended.
With a sigh of relief, it appeared that our Froot Loops and Special K (with strawberries) were, indeed, products of the United States. Battle Creek, I hope. Best to keep our status as cereal kings here in Michigan.
So now Kellogg’s, of all companies, is becoming less American.
First it was Kentucky Grilled Chicken. Now this, another food travesty.
Kellogg’s stuff made in Mexico?
Then I say we make their Jose Cuervo Tequila in Des Moines!
Build a Dos Equis beer plant in Lancaster, Pa.!
Can I get an Amen?
With all the folks out of work in this country–and especially here in Michigan–is it too much to ask that Kellogg’s, no less, make their cereal bars in the United States?
Apparently, the answer is….si!
