Bipartisan Sleaze

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Have you heard about the latest high-end scam artist?  No, not Madoff, but this joker Sir Allen Stanford who is accused of running an $8 billion fraud that on the surface sounds an awful lot like Madoff's scandal. Part of the emerging Stanford story is his soft money donations back in 2000 to prominent Democrats, and I think it's an important reminder because it reminds us that the sleaze in Washington is bipartisan.  The next time you hear someone slamming all Republicans or all Democrats but giving their side a free pass please remind them that the problem isn't the parties it's the politicians.  As a breed they make ambulance chasers look good by comparison.   

Furloughs at Journal Now Official

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Media General, parent company of the Winston-Salem Journal, announced today that they're requiring their employees to take ten days of unpaid leave.  Employees have to take four days by the end of March and three days each in the two subsequent fiscal quarters. I guess if you look at the glass as half full at least these folks are keeping their jobs.  For now.

Any suggestions for what these folks should do with their involuntary, unpaid "vacation"?  BTW, I've used quotes around the word vacation ever since my wife returned to work from maternity leave and received a heap of abuse from her boss who said she should be well rested from her "vacation".  In all seriousness I have some friends that work at the Journal and this stinks for them, but I am glad to know that they still have their jobs. 

Ikea Tricks

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Today Ikea opened their first store here in North Carolina, home of the furniture mart.  It's probably a sign of the times that the Lego of the furniture industry is opening a store here in the capital of the US furniture industry to great fanfare.

We had an Ikea just down the road from us in Northern Virginia and we frequented it quite a bit.  Given that we've lived here for five years you might want to take the following advice with a grain of salt, but I figure things haven't changed that much so what I'm about to advise is still fairly accurate.  That is:
  • The food in the cafeteria is pretty good and pretty cheap.  We used to pig out on the meatballs and they had some kind of crazy fruit soft drink that we all loved.  I think it was something like pomegranate, but whatever it was it was very light and un-syrupy.
  • If the store in Charlotte has a children's play area that allows you to sign your kids in for a 1/2 hour of supervised play time while you shop then you should definitely take advantage of it.  But be forewarned that within a week you're definitely going to be dealing with some strange illness that involves a lot of snot flowing from your child's nose.  Personally I always found it to be a fair trade.
  • If you buy any furniture that requires assembly, and I think that is all the furniture that Ikea sells, then you need to familiarize yourself with the metric system and odd looking tools that look like something out of a toddlers play tool set.  You also need to set aside triple the time you think it should take to assemble the furniture. 
  • Don't go if you don't like primary colors.  Ikea's big on primary colors. 
  • Finally, just because it's Ikea doesn't mean the other customers will behave any better than they do in other stores.  In fact in Ikea most people tend to get lost which means they act even worse than usual, so paste on the happy face and just roll with it.  If it helps just imagine yourself at the DMV before you enter which should get you in just about the right state of mind. 

Enjoy your shopping experience! 

Today’s Retail Rundown

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Two completely unrelated events from yesterday have me thinking a lot about local retail experiences this morning.

  1. Esbee's had it with OfficeMax.  She wrote a post yesterday about how on multiple occassions she's taken clearance items to the register only to be told that she can't buy them because they'd already been sold back to the vendor.  She reasonably asks why the items are still on the floor.  She also relates an unsatisfying experience with the manager there.  Me thinks the folks at OfficeMax have a wee issue with their systems and management that they might want to clean up, and if the comments on Esbee's post are any indication I'd say that lots of folks here in Winston-Salem share the sentiment.  I wonder if the manager is getting a call from corporate asking him why his dissed a woman who has about a bazillion readers?
  2. Celeste was in Costco yesterday and paid cash for our items.  The cashier didn't have change in his till so he called the manager to get some.  The manager came by the register and said that he was sorry but he didn't have any cash for change because the bank had not made its daily cash delivery for the third day in a row and he also wasn't able to get any from the nearby Home Depot or Lowes.  I'm not sure which bank Costco uses, but I find it a little disturbing that the bank is letting down what has to be one of its more prominent customers.  It causes me to wonder if there's a problem with deposits at the bank or if it's just poor management. Or is there a problem with Costco's credit?  Normally I wouldn't think much of it, but in this day and age every little signal causes me to wonder if there's something more ominous going on behind the scenes.  Oh, and in case you're curious Celeste was able to get her change when the customer behind her also paid cash and gave the cashier enough small bills to make change.

Another Reason to Set Up Online Tracking for Your Name

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In today's connected world one thing all of us should do is track our identities online.  You might think, "Well, I don't blog, or use Facebook or any of those other web things so it's really not worth my while" but I'll have to disagree with you and I have a real life story to help explain why.

This morning I was checking my Google Alert feeds.  I have several set up for various interests, like "winston-salem arts" or "forsyth county business" and I also have alerts set up for tracking blog searches for similar terms.  This morning I came across a listing for a blog that sent chills down my spine.  Essentially it threatened some people at a local institution with severe physical harm and it did so by naming them specifically and providing their home addresses so I thought it needed to be taken seriously.  I'm not going to go into any more detail than that because I don't want to give the threatened folks any more angst than they have already experienced.  I called security at the institution to give them a heads up and they gave me an email address to send them the URL of the page containing the threats.  I heard back from them about an hour later and they said that the page had been found by someone else last night and that the threatened parties had been alerted.  I can't tell you how relieved that made me feel.

But here's the point.  The people who were threatened could have found the same information if they had an alert set up for their name because their names were used specifically on the threatening page.  Even if the threat ends up being a false alarm they will have known about it even if someone else hadn't warned them.  Of course this only happens if you're threatened by name online, but there are other practical reasons to set up an alert system:
  • Someone might be saying nasty things about you on a message board.
  • Someone with your name might be doing nefarious things, and if they are you want to be aware of it so you can let people know it's not you. 
  • Documents that you might have thought were private somehow end up online.  At least you'll know about it and maybe you can take action to have them taken down.  
  • A friend posts pictures that have you in them and tag them with your name when they upload them. You may not have your friend remove the pictures but if you're uncomfortable with your name being attached to them you can ask them to remove the tags.

I think you get the point.  Anyway, if you want to set up an early warning sytem for yourself it's easy and free to do with Google.  Simply visit the Google Alerts page and follow the easy prompts to set up the alert.  You can set up the alerts to be emailed to you as they happen, which means any time your name appears online you'll get an email, or you can have all the alerts compiled and sent to you once a day or once a week.  Here's a helpful tip: use your full name in quotation marks, like "jane smith", because if you don't you'll get an alert for everyone with your first name and everyone with your last name.  By putting both names in quotes you can cut down significantly on the number of "false positive" alerts you'll get.

One last thing: it's kind of fun finding other people who have the same name as you.  I've found that there's a high school baseball player in Oklahoma with my name (seems he's pretty good too), and there's someone else here in North Carolina with my name.  I'm going to have to track him down some day.

Winston-Salem Might Be Barking Up the Right Tree

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For as long as I've lived here I've been reading about plans for revitalizing Winston-Salem.  The strategy seems to be to revitalize downtown, concentrate on developing a business community focused on what can generally be classified as the "creative and design industries", and to try and attract and retain young, well educated professionals.  Two items I've read over the last couple of days cause me to believe that the government, business and civic officials driving this strategy might be going in the right direction.  Here they are in no particular order:

  • An article in Atlantic Monthly by Richard Florida titled How the Crash Will Reshape America that focuses on the fundamental change wrought by the recession and the areas that will be winners and losers in the process.  To put it simply he writes that the areas that will prosper are those that effectively cultivate an economy based on the creative class, and not heavily dependant on manufacturing.  He also references research showing that cities with a greater population density of creative and professional types leads to more innovation which in turn spurs economic growth.  In the article he talks about mega-cities like New York, but there's no reason that similar formulas can't work for mid-tier cities like Winston-Salem, especially when they are within shouting distance of other hubs of creative and professional classes like RTP and Charlotte.
  • An article about the growth of Winston-Salem's downtown and it's potential to grow even more.  See the bullet point above for why this is important. 

While it might seem like things are moving slowly, what Winston-Salem is doing seems to be pretty smart.  If things continue to develop well then eventually the city will have a core comprised of a few square miles filled with what every city center needs: office space of varying quality and expense, restaurants, retail (need lots of work there), arts and other entertainment venues, apartments and condos.

While it's wholly appropriate to debate the use of public dollars to entice businesses to move here or help finance ballparks, it's also important to keep in mind that we're lucky that city leaders seem to have a fairly coherent strategy for downtown development.  The city leaders aren't perfect, and not everything is working as expected, but I think we're in much better shape than many cities in similar situations because we are primed to take advantage of the direction the economy is heading in America.

Don’t Sell Me a Recession

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So, raise your hand if you aren't aware that we're in the midst of a recession of epic scale.  If you raised your hand then please let me know what cave you've been living in so I can move there with my family.  My point is that we all know there's a recession on and we're not likely to forget any time soon.

I confess to a morbid fascination myself, as is abundantly evidenced by my posts about the economy, real estate, etc.  I've watched with fascination as people started pointing fingers at each other in blame.  "It's the bankers' fault" some say.  Others blame homeowners, the media, the government, the…well, almost everyone.  Basically the recession is the most significant event since at least since 9/11 and it has had arguably a greater impact on our daily lives than any event for a couple of generations.  As much as we'd like to we can't escape it.

All this has me wondering: why is every company out there playing off the recession to sell their services.  Many seem to be using gimicky plays on the 'stimulus plan', as in "Come shop at ACME shoe store and take advantage of our toe stimulus plan!"  Or they come across with messages like "We know times are tough, that your budget's tight, so we're offering deep, deep discounts on…"  My problem with this approach is:
  • I hear enough about the recession on the news, at the water cooler, etc.  I don't need to be reminded of it by every merchant out there.
  • How is it effective marketing to remind me that I'm broke as you try to sell me your discounted wares?  The reality is that if I'm broke and if your product isn't a staple (milk, bread, eggs, Nintendo Wii) then I'm not going to be swayed by your discount.  In effect your discount is going to woo people who have money and still have their jobs so why create a negative association with the recession? 
  • If everyone else is doing it how are you separating yourself from the herd? 

My advice?  Go back to the basics and play up your strengths.  Better quality, better service, customers are treated like family, etc.  Unless you're Wal-Mart the likelihood that you'll win on price is pretty low, and who really wants to be known as the cheapest shop in town?

So merchants of the Piedmont Triad please, please, please do me a favor.  Don't sell me a recession, sell me what you've got.

2 for 1 at Carolina Kia

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If you live in the Triad you've probably seen the Caaaaar-o-lina Kia commercials.  Well, according to Ben they're running a commercial offering a 2-for-1 deal; if you buy a Sorrento or Sedona you'll get a Rio for free except for taxes and tags.  As Ben mentions there's nothing about it on their website, so I can't point to details, but if you're in the market for a car you might want to make your way to High Point to give them a look-see.  

One in Nine Homes Empty. Eternal Optimists. The Bottom Near?

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According to this story in USA Today one in nine American homes is vacant.  10.1% of rental units are vacant and 2.9% of homeowner units are sitting empty, and the total number is over 14 million units nation wide.  Housing units worth over $500,000 are just as likely to be empty as those under $100,000.  9% of units built after 2000 are empty compared to 2% of older homes.  In other words the units sitting empty aren't just squats in crumbling industrial cities, and in fact they are more likely to be developments that promised a piece of the American dream in the newly landscaped suburbs and exurbs.

But there are always the optimists.  Real estate licensing exams in New York still have plenty of takers. I like optimists because they're the engines that keep the country going.  I figure if these folks can make a go of it now then they deserve every success that comes their way.

Optimists also look at the glass as half full.  Just look at the recent foreclosure news here in the Triad.  One article in the Greensboro News & Record focuses on the fact that foreclosures in the Greensboro/High Point markets rose 28% from 2007 to 2008.  Yet in the Business Journal we find this article that tells us that foreclosures in the Triad are down 62% from January 2008 to January 2009, and that follows on the heels of a 23% drop from December 2007 to December 2008.  In other words we could finally be finding the bottom of the housing decline.  Guess which article the optimists will focus on?

As for commercial real estate. Ugh, let's just stop here and have a nice Valentines Day.