I was scanning the Winston-Salem Journal this morning and noticed the same last name on two obituaries. It ends up that Mildred Newsom Hinkle and her husband of 67 years Sanford Oscar Hinkle Jr. died on the same day. Both of their obituaries contained the following words: "…also passed on Sept. 16, giving new meaning to "’ till death do us part."
Apparently it’s a bad week in the local newspaper copy editors union. Yesterday the Greensboro News & Record made a large gaffe when their very large headline stated an $85 million sum rather than the correct $85 billion, with a "b". Today we have a smaller, yet still embarrassing snafu at the Winston-Salem Journal. To the left you’ll see a scan of the sports section from today’s paper that landed in my driveway (click on it to see a larger version). You’ll notice that the text next the picture of the football player says "Write cutline here about what going on in this photo. Write it a bit more full." Don’t think that’s what they intended to print there. Wonder if that error appeared in every copy or only the part of the print run that I received? I’m also wondering what it means to write a bit more full.
Reynolds American is laying off 570 people and proving that its executives can mumbly-speak with the best of them:
“As we invest in growth to expand the business base of our operating
companies to innovative new tobacco products, we continually review our
plans to support that strategy and to strengthen performance in a
changing marketplace,” said Susan M. Ivey, RAI’s chairman, president
and chief executive officer."and
“Continued success demands that we fully align our plans, programs and
people behind the things that matter most to our future performance,”
said Daniel M. Delen, chairman, president and chief executive officer
of R.J. Reynolds. “The steps we are taking support R.J. Reynolds’
ongoing evolution to a ‘total tobacco’ business model that includes
both cigarettes and innovative smokeless tobacco products."
I don’t know squat about what’s going on day-to-day in Reynolds, and maybe they absolutely have no choice but to cut jobs, but for once I’d like to hear an American executive say that they realize that 570 of their people, the people who helped put them in their big house and nice car, are now scrambling to find a way to pay the bills, and it is at least in some part due to the executives’ job performance that these people are being put on street.
What really disturbs me about this is that I don’t get the sense that this is a "survival" move by Reynolds, but more a "we need to keep our profits up to satisfy shareholders" move. I mean this is a company that reported the following net income over the last four years:
Reynolds is no different than almost every other public company out there. The number one priority is doing whatever it takes to please the shareholders, and executives are compensated based on how well they do that. Still, it would be nice to see at least one Fortune 500 company put its people first and take a short term financial hit in an effort to build long term health for the company and its people. And if that’s not possible then it would be really refreshing to see an executive take a personal hit in acknowledgment of the fact that they are directly responsible for some of their people losing their livelihoods.
When is the last time you heard of an executive of a public company taking a pay cut in order to help save jobs? I sure hope someone can give me an example that I just haven’t heard of, but in my mind I’m thinking of the execs at Citi and Merrill Lynch who steered their companies from incredible profitability to massive losses and parachuted out with severance packages that Midas would envy. I’m also thinking about Delphi’s executives feathering their nest while also saying that they could save the employees’ pension plan if the union members would agree to working for about a third of their old pay. I could go on, but then this post would be interminably long.
I love business and I love free markets, but I also think that just because markets are free doesn’t mean that businesses and the people who run them are relieved of a moral obligation to their people and communities. The standard line from executives during layoffs is that their job is to look out for the best interest of the company, and by extension its stakeholders. While layoffs might be bad news for some it is better news for everyone else because the company will prosper and take better care of the majority. My response is that in cases where the company is about to go belly up and you have to drop 50 in order to save 100, then maybe so. But when a company is profitable and the only gain in dumping the employees is becoming more profitable, well then that is simply immoral. It shows a lack of leadership, a lack of ability to find a way to help employees adjust to the new strategic direction, an inclination to take the easy road. In short it shows executives to be short-sighted, self interested yellow bellies.
I can only hope that when the executives who make these decisions sit down to dinner with their families, they will think about those people whose sweat helped put that dinner in front of them and who now face a struggle to put their own dinner on the table. And if they do think about that then maybe they’ll think about foregoing a raise or a performance bonus, or maybe they will redirect that money to a program that will help place those lost employees with another company.
I’m not holding my breath.
Esbee has the virtual tour of the downtown Winston-Salem baseball stadium that’s being built. Actually YouTube has it and Esbee found and shared it. Whatever, it’s cool.
USA Today has an article about the decline in the amount of trash Americans are tossing out, and how that might be related to a down economy. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County construction waste is one of their examples:
•Winston-Salem/Forsyth County, N.C. The 19% decline in
construction debris in 2008 is "more likely related to economic
factors" said Jan McHargue, solid waste administrator.
Since the Chamber of Commerce and local realtors recently blamed the drop in new development on onerous city development ordinances I’m assuming they’ll do the same here.
My buddy Dan sent me the link to that picture to the left. I love my Krispy Kremes. I love my cheeseburgers. I love my bacon. Mix ’em all together, though, and you’ve got one nasty looking culinary experience. Even more surprising is that the picture was taken at the Google NYC cafeteria. Somehow I always envisioned Googlers as the types who wear Birkenstocks, when they wear anything at all, eat tofu and get around town on Segways.
I’m thinking that Krispy Kreme needs to organize a contest and have people enter their craziest concoctions that use their doughnuts in the mix. It truly would be a win-win for them and their hometown (Winston-Salem of course). Think about it: they get plenty of PR and Baptist Hospital gets an instant boost in admissions. Heck they could even have the contest in Baptist’s parking lot.
BTW, this is the second Krispy Kreme burger story I’ve run and both came from Dan. The first was about the burgers being sold at a minor league baseball stadium, which honestly makes much more sense than Google’s cafeteria.
Remember the Chamber of Commerce and local realtors insulting our intelligence the week before last when they tried to justify calling for a moratorium on development regulations by, among other things, saying that the decline in zoning board cases was due to the "difficulty in doing business here" and conveniently forgetting that we’re in an epic credit crunch? Well, today brings us a whole new case of what I’ll call "Realtor Reality." From today’s Winston-Salem Journal article titled July Home Sales Fall:
In Forsyth County, the housing market is not as bad as some parts of
the country, said Julie Poplin, the president of the Winston-Salem
Regional Association of Realtors.She said that comparing July 2008 to July 2007 is skewed because last year was an abnormally good year for the local market.
"We are getting back to a more normal marketplace," she said. "We’re
flat, but that’s not a bad thing. The good news is that we are having
sales, and that’s great."At Allen Tate Realtors where Poplin is a broker, Poplin said that
brokers are active but having a lot of trepidation because of news
reports about overall woes in the housing market. But they are busy and
finding creative ways to market homes."They are really working hard for every deal," she said.
Poplin advises sellers to have their houses competitively priced and be ready to move.
"But if you are a buyer, you need to take advantage of these
interest rates before they go up, and they will be going up," she said.
I tell you what, they must be serving some mighty fine happy juice over there at Allen Tate. I mean what she’s saying is akin to saying, "Well you just totaled your car and had both your legs and one arm amputated, but we’ve seen cases similar to this where people have lost all their extremities and gone blind and deaf too, so in the grand scheme of things you’re not doing too bad."
If you want to be more honest about local real estate you should say this: "Well, in the Triad we’ve suffered through agonizing economic times while the rest of the country experienced unbelievable growth, thus we never had a real estate bubble. Heck, we didn’t even have a real estate burp so you could say that we didn’t have as far to fall. Yet we’ve fallen anyway. Yeah for us!"
Her statement that 2007 was an abnormally good year for the local market has me curious as to what her frame of reference is. Abnormally good compared to the last five years? Ten years? Twenty years? I mean we’ve been bleeding jobs around here for over a decade, and when the rest of the country had houses appreciating at incredible rates each year while ours inched up incrementally. Don’t believe me? Here’s a report on real estate from 1997-2007 prepared by Donald Jud, who was also interviewed for the story in the Journal (and I’d guess he wouldn’t necessarily agree with Ms. Poplin’s view of the situation). And I quote:
Since the 1st quarter of 1997, existing home prices in the Triad have risen at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, outpacing the consumer price index (CPI) which has increased an average of 2.5 percent annually. The appreciation of housing prices in the Triad has lagged substantially the rise in housing prices nationally. For the nation as a whole, existing home prices have risen at a 7.6 percent annual rate from 1997.1 through the 4th quarter of 2006, according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO).
In short our houses appreciated at less than half the rate of the average of the rest of the country. You don’t want to know how far we lagged behind hot markets like Washington, DC, California, etc. So if you want to say that 2007 was better than we’d had for the last five or ten years, then well I guess you could be right. Or not.
If 2007 was such an abnormally good year, how much better was it than 2006? Let’s see what the report says…seasonally adjusted home values increased 4% so that’s good, but on the other hand the number of homes sold decreased by .1%, the time on market increased by 9.8% and the spread between the list and sales price decreased .8%. Abnormally good?
Now in her defense maybe she was just referring to July existing home sales so if you go to this page on the Winston-Salem Regional Association of Realtors statistics page with links to all the monthly reports and compare all the July reports you can see that indeed July 07 had higher sales than July 06 by about 6%, and that 2006 was significantly higher than the previous few years and that July 08’s numbers are back in the range of 05 and before. Still, that doesn’t mean that 07 was great, just that it and 06 weren’t as crappy as the last decade or more. And that’s just looking at the number of houses sold, not things like price, time on market and spread.
The best you could say is that we might have gone from really miserable in the early ’00s to kind of miserable in the last couple of years and are now returning to really miserable status. Not a real comforting thought unless of course you live in Realtor Reality Land.
Disclaimer: I have a few friends who are realtors and brokers. They are smart people who see through un-tinted glasses and I hereby officially exclude them from the Kool-Aid bunch who live in Realtor Reality Land.
Sitting in the waiting room at WFU MRI Center and it’s 10 P.M. Some guy is telling everyone that will listen about his 200+ kidney stones. I quote: "The ones you pass are different than the others. The ones that set will make me draw double like a guy having a heart attack."
We’ve also heard about the belts he’s had custom made since his size is hard to find. Oh, and he’s been a furr-fighter, oh wait, a firefighter. I was worried there for a second
The TV is tuned to NBC. Worst reality show ever is on now (Democratic Convention) and the second worst just ended…some show that had normal people pretending they were on Deadliest Catch.
Now the guy is talking about Michael Moore’s health care movie (I believe that would be Sicko). Said it made a lot of sense
He says he’s been here for two hours. His wife girlfriend just got called back and set him loose on the rest of us
Now we’re hearing about the ills of health insurance. I’m with him there.
People are leaving and I might end up alone with him.
I’m trying to hide
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
Update: 8/26/08 – I received a follow up email to further clarify what they’d told me and you can see those updates highlighted in the bullet points below. It ends up that this will be discussed at tonight’s Board of Ed meeting.
Last week I wrote about learning that in some of my son’s middle school classes they don’t have textbooks for everyone, rather they have textbooks in the classroom, "classroom sets", and if students need to access them for homework they can do so online. As I wrote in my post this troubled me, so I emailed the powers that be in the school system and heard back from them late last week. Before I go on I’d like to say that they replied during what has to be a very busy time for them, it being the week before school starts and all. They told me they’re going to dig into the details and send them to me, but in the meantime they gave me the rough version:
They also said that they will review this policy at the end of the school year and if it caused problems they’ll determine what changes need to be made.
Like I said this is just the rough version and I’ll wait and see what the specifics turn out to be, but I’d say that in general it’s a good explanation. Those who don’t like this particular prioritization might want to speak up at future board of education meetings. I’ll let you know as soon as I get the details.
Okay, per my post yesterday about textbooks in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County schools I’ve contacted the school system and am waiting to hear back from them. In the meantime I’ve decided to do some research and on the school system’s website I found the Proposed Budget for 08-09. From their line item explanations I found this:
23. 2007-08 was the one year out of five
when state textbook funds are almost sufficient to purchase all new
textbooks needed. Social Studies adoptions occur in 2008-09, and to
purchase new books for each student will require increases of
$1,372,337.24. We centrally budget for curriculum and
instruction supplies, materials, small equipment, etc, for system-wide
instructional needs, including basic non-consumable supplies for new
classrooms to house the 555 projected new students, calculators
required for use with math textbooks, replenishment of larger cost
non-consumables such as maps and globes, plus a new $50,000 commitment
in 2008-09 to help bring the supplies and small equipment in
kindergarten classrooms up to the standards of newer school
classrooms. The overall increase needed is $283,130.
Item 23 is interesting because it says that due to Social Studies adoptions in order to purchase new books for each student will require $1,372,337 in addition to whatever was appropriated before. I need to clarify what "Social Studies adoptions" means, and are they implying that in subject areas that aren’t "adopted" they don’t need each student to have books?
I can’t find an actual budget on the website so I’ve gone to the county website to find their budget. The main budget page is here, and here’s a link to the PDF version of the breakout for the county’s education segment of the budget. In a nutshell here’s what I found:
So go figure, the only increase in payroll expenditures came in administration. Huh.
I’m still trying to find out if there’s a break out on the website of how the school system spends their dollars on such things as books, computers, etc. I can’t find it yet and I may have to get it directly from the school system, but once I do get it I’ll cover it here.
Befuddled 