Recession? What Recession?

This at online.wsj.com:

Macy's to Cut 7,000 Jobs

Macy's Inc. said it will cut about 7,000 positions, or 4% of its work force, and slash its dividend, as the retailer looks to lower expenses amid slumping sales.

The largest U.S. department-store chain also announced plans to expand a decentralization strategy that localizes store offerings.

...and so on. But just to show how weird the economy can be, the local Macy's store this past weekend had "we're hiring" placards prominently displayed near the entrances. No help to those 7,000 others, poor devils.

Kuttner: Amazon, Barnes & Noble Battle Over My Obama Book

Robert Kuttner in The Huffington Post in re his book Obama's Challenge:

Margo [Baldwin, president of Kuttner's publisher, Chelsea Green Publishers] negotiated a highly creative deal with Amazon, to offer readers the benefits of its new print-on-demand service. You order it, they print, and you get it two days from the time of your order. An Amazon discount coupon will also be in the packets of DNC delegates, alternates, and media. In the meantime, Chelsea Green is rushing out its regular print edition, which will be in bookstores after Labor Day. Or maybe it won't.

When the Amazon agreement was announced, Amazon's retail competitors pushed back big time. Amazon is of course the 800 pound gorilla of bookselling. What was an independent publisher doing in bed with it?

Barnes and Noble canceled its initial order and has decided not to stock the book in any of its stores, making it available only on B&N.com and by special order. Only one independent bookseller did likewise. In an open letter to the bookseller community, Margo appealed for perspective, and argued that the Amazon launch strategy was designed to build interest in the book initially, creating the demand that would result in strong sales in all retail outlets. With an expanded pie, there would be more book sales for everyone. And the market would hardly be exhausted in two weeks.

He concludes:

All innovators take risks. For a small publishing house that depends on the goodwill of booksellers, this was a huge one. The book could have a shelf life of just eight weeks. If Obama loses, this book will be a historic curiosity, and we will have a bonfire of unsold books. If he wins, maybe it will make a difference.
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Hardly makes one feel too much enthusiasm for spending money at Barnes and Noble, though, does it?

Promises, Promises

Some little while back I wrote about e-mail sent to me by Sprint upon my completing a customer satisfaction survey for them. In the survey I reported, truthfully, that I was dissatisfied with the results of an e-mail inquiry I had made of them previously (indeed, the survey was a "how are we doing?" follow-up to my e-mail query). (I wrote about that experience, too.) Anyhow, what they had to say at the time was this:

Thank you for responding to our survey. We are sorry to learn that you have an unresolved issue as your satisfaction is very important to us.

A Sprint representative will contact you via your PCS phone at no charge, within 3 business days to assist you.

Please do not respond to this email. If you have any questions please contact Customer Service or visit one of our websites:

http://www.sprint.com or http://www.sprintpcs.com

As previously reported, that e-mail came to me on May 15. Today is July 23. No message from Sprint, via PCS phone, e-mail, snail mail, or homing pigeon, these past two months.

File that under Don't Make Promises...

Anyhow, last night I happened to be in the Verizon store as my daughter had her phone attended to. She's already made the switch, obviously, and seems to be happy as all get-out with their service. (I should have pulled out my phone to see what sort of coverage I had in the Verizon store.) Anyhow, I've already packed our bags mentally as far as abandoning Sprint...after something like ten years. It's not as amusing as you might think to be in a public place passing the time watching other folks chat away on their cell phones while mine is doggedly Looking for Service. And since both my son and I do a fair amount of texting--often with one another--it's also a treat to see what the next phone bill has in store overage-charges-wise. (That issue, you may recall, was the genesis of my original e-mail to Sprint, the one that got responded to but not answered, which triggered the customer-satisfaction survey, which generated the above-mentioned e-mail, which did not produce the promised phone call, which lived in the house that Jack built.

But I digress.

It turns out that two of our three Sprint contracts expire in February, with the third ending the following October. That's a bit longer than I'd like to dally, but I'm unenthusiastic about spending money to get out of this indentured servitude. So it occurs to my to try a radical approach:

Ask them.

No kidding. I'm mentally drafting a nice, polite, even friendly letter to, say, the CEO of Sprint/Nextel. Something along this line:

Look, I've been a customer of Sprint for something on the order of ten years. If you haven't made a profit on me by now, you never will. On the whole I haven't been hugely dissatisfied with Sprint--it clearly was the best game in town when I first signed up--but lately it's been losing ground, at least in my area. Coverage isn't good. Calls are frequently dropped. Indeed, I was sitting at my desk on the second-floor of my centrally located home, chatting with my aunt, when suddenly I was talking to myself when the phone lost its signal. And then I had to wait for it to regain its senses, go into Analog Roam, and then finally find a digital signal again. Not good. Anyhow, with this and that my family and I are, as the song has it, already gone. We're not renewing the contracts as they expire. Given that--and given that two of our lines runs out in February--how about we agree to an amicable split? Let us out of our contract and we'll go try somebody else. No hard feelings. There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy; there's only you and me and we just disagree.

Yeah, I know: I might as well go talk to the side of the Sprint/Nextel headquarters building. But you never know. Might be worth a stamp. Stay tuned for further developments.

Who Pays? Who Doesn't?

As Bob is my witless, I will never know why people say things like this (from yesterday's edition of the local rag):

In her letter in the July 9 Argus Leader, Lorri May praised Sen. Tim Johnson for voting to tax the windfall profits of the U.S. oil companies. Hello! Corporations do not pay taxes. They just pass the tax increase on to you and me with higher prices.

And so on. This is not the first person I've encountered who seems to have studied economics on the Bizarro World. Nor, I suppose with a sigh, will he be the last. Nevertheless, I posted the following pithy rejoinder to the rag's website:

So if we rely on this kind of muddled "logic," we would conclude that corporations also "don't pay" electric bills, water bills, phone bills, insurance, etc., etc....they just "pass it on to you and me with higher prices." Hello! Corporations most certainly DO pay taxes, and all of the above. (Except when they dodge their tax responsibilities by moving off-shore.) Does some of it get "passed along"? Of course! That's how the economy works.

I might have added that it's simple-minded to imply, as do the letter-writer and his ilk do, that the entire tax burden automatically is passed along to the consumer. That's ludicrous. If any corporation raised the price of its goods or services that much in one fell swoop, it would soon find itself bleeding customers. And it needn't be taxes, although that's the favorite bete noire of the right-wingnut crowd: The same is true if, say, the price for hand soap in the bathrooms: Someone gets the fun task of deciding whether and how much of the expense can/should be absorbed in the form of higher prices, and how much can/should be absorbed from profits. The idea that if Conglomeroid Company has to pay a dollar in taxes it will raise its rates to get back that dollar is addled.

I am similarly amused/amazed/annoyed by the various business types who warn against any proposed increase in minimum wages because it will "force" them to increase their prices or lay off workers or sacrifice a virgin over an active volcano or whatever the issue is supposed to be. Again, it's only their having to pay workers that will cause their business to teeter on the brink of bankruptcy...it's never the price of the goods and services they must buy in order to do business. (Damn that Abraham Lincoln for ending slavery! Just another example of the government butting in and crippling the small-business owner! They should let The Market decide what wages should be paid. If any.)

But now that the minimum wage has gone up, well, it develops that it wasn't such a big deal after all. This too from the daily rag:

Minimum wage hike won't have big effect
Many Sioux Falls jobs already pay more

South Dakota's minimum wage Thursday will rise 70 cents to $6.55 an hour, but it appears the increase will have little effect on most Sioux Falls businesses.

The South Dakota Department of Labor estimates that of Sioux Falls' 132,000 workers, only about 3,900 or 3 percent will be affected by the latest increase in the minimum wage.

Um...what?

No pandemonium? No rampage in the streets? Not even a little one?

Well, I could hardly let that pass unnoticed (obviously), so I posted this to Hearing Voices or In Your Voice or The Voice in My Head or whatever they call the comments section:

Golly...when the new minimum was being discussed awhile back, we were assured by several local businesspeople that it would be the end of civilization as we know if it they were "forced" to pay a semi-decent wage. Now we're told that it "won't have big effect" because "many Sioux Falls jobs already pay more." It's almost as if the sky wasn't really in danger of falling after all!

Personally, I'm of the opinion that a business, large or small, that "can't afford" to adequately pay its workers doesn't deserve to stay in business. Isn't that the way of The Market that we're all supposed to bow down and worship?

Just One of Life's Little Mysteries

This appears this morning on Bloomberg.com:

Sprint First-Quarter Loss Widens as Customers Defect (Update1)

By Crayton Harrison

May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Sprint Nextel Corp., the third-biggest U.S. wireless carrier, said it may sell some assets after its first-quarter loss widened and more than 1 million customers dropped their contracts.

The net loss expanded to $505 million, or 18 cents a share, from $211 million, or 7 cents, a year ago, Overland Park, Kansas- based Sprint said today in a statement. Sales fell 7.5 percent to $9.33 billion, compared with the $9.39 billion average estimate of analysts.

Sprint said it may get rid of assets to meet obligations to lenders. Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse is firing 4,000 workers, closing outlets and discounting wireless phone plans after the stock lost more than half its value in the past year. Nextel, which the company bought in 2005 for $36 billion, may be worth as little as $5 billion, according to some analysts.

"Sprint has had a really bad reputation for customer service,'' said Steve Clement, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities in Portland, Oregon, who expects the shares to perform in line with the rest of the sector. "They've struggled to figure out a way to market themselves, and I think they're still struggling.''

Do tell. Given my recent experience with Sprint -- and some not-so-recent experiences, like dropped calls, no signal when the guy standing next to me is happily chatting away on his phone, a web site that keeps taking you back around to the front door where you can log in for the eleventieth time, and invoices that are byzantine even by cell-phone standards -- the amazing thing is that Sprint's stock still has half its value.

Suggestion: Quit the gimmicks, improve the service.