Tag Archives: consumer

Questionable indicators…

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The cool thing to do now is bitch and complain that inflation has made everything too expensive. Social media is full of discussions about the cost of everything. It’s one of the news media’s favorite topics when they have a few extra minutes or column inches to fill. I can’t remember the last time I went a day without seeing at least one passing reference to inflation and “out of control prices.”

Everyone is bitching that everything is too expensive, but every time I leave the house, I find that the shops are packed. The restaurants are packed. The roads are packed. There are scads of people crawling all over everything from morning til night. It doesn’t feel like the kind of behavior you’d see if everyone was trying to watch their pennies.

I’m left to wonder if it’s just the “very online” people who are broke (or at least keeping the narrative alive), because the sentiment isn’t matching my lived experience and personal observations. Given that Cecil County isn’t exactly an economically well-off region you’d think it’s something that should be noticeable. Maybe it’s just me being unreasonable, but it seems to me if there’s no money and everything is too damned expensive, more people would stay home.

It feels like consumer sentiment might just be a shit economic indicator. Chalk it up to another reason why I just don’t trust people as a group. I’ll be a lot more worried about the economy when people stop buying $1000 cell phones and I don’t have to wait in a line ten people deep at the local fast food spot.  

The future of mindless scrolling…

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I recently bit the bullet and signed up with Mastodon. I’m not saying it finally happened because Elon Musk went through the convolutions of trying to rebrand Twitter overnight and he’s increasingly using the platform as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, but it’s absolutely a contributing factor.

I’ll freely admit that I have gotten spoiled by Twitter’s ability to aggregate most of the information that I want – especially in the breaking national and international news and pop culture categories. Whether that ends up being enough of a reason to stick around remains to be seen. 

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my screwing around trying to set up my account on Mastodon didn’t raise (or reinforce) other, larger questions about my consumption of social media. I wonder if there’s much actual value beyond self-advertising and self-aggrandizement to compulsively flicking from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to Threads to Mastodon – especially as the social media universe further fragments. I wonder if perhaps it’s time to descope my online presence rather than continue to add to it. Of course I’ve been wondering about that for a long while.

It’s a question of value added. Am I getting more out of these platforms than I’m sinking into their upkeep and maintenance. With a little honest self-reflection, the answer to that question is probably no. They’re all burning up time that I could likely reallocate to some higher purpose.

I’m not going to launch into a screed about mindfulness or any of that nonsense. There are times when pure, mindless scrolling is precisely what’s called for… but maybe it would be for the better for me if it were happening just a little less frequently. Whether I’ll do anything about that or just let inertia carry me along, though, remains to be seen.

Skipping just in time…

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I was being trained up as a logistician just at the tail end of the transition from having mountains of spares, repairs, and stock items piled into warehouse to “just in time” delivery. In theory, JIT reduces operating costs and usually comes with a minimal risk of going “stock out” or not actually having what you need. It’s a system that works very well, right up until the moment where it stops working. Then there’s hell to pay while everyone scrambles. 

I’ve never been the guy who thought he needed a lifetime supply of rice and beans stashed away in the basement. Nothing in the pandemic has changed my mind on that. I think JIT is probably still a valid approach to just about everything we use on a regular basis. In all but truly exceptional circumstances, supply chains work exactly the way they’re designed. 

I’m not running out to buy a 50-gallon drum of rice or ordering the 1000-serving Costco bucket of mac and cheese. I am, however, making a list of those items I’ve needed to order that ended up being stock delayed in the face of extreme demand. History tells me that having received an extreme demand signal for these items, there are factories and plants around the country rushing to fill the gap. When all this is over, demand for most of these items will drop just as quickly as it surged – and there will be a lag as material continues to surge through the supply chain towards the consumer market. 

So, I’m making a list. Fortunately, most of what’s gone backordered or been delivery delayed are things that can sit for years without going bad. When these formerly hard to find items are swamping the marketplace and being sold off at a discount, that’ll be the time to step in and stack ‘em deep against future temporary supply disruptions… You know, assuming I survive the Great Plague.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Trust. I’ve always been very open about the fact that I’m a cynical bastard. Even so, I’m always amazed at the level of trust people have in others that they really don’t know all that well outside a very narrowly defined context. Anyone can open their mouth at any time and tell you any manner of thing you want to hear… which is why I get immediately suspicious when they’re pitch is something akin to “Oh no, don’t worry about a thing.” There are a few exceptions to this rule, but it only applies to a select few who I’ve known for a decade or two.

2. Capitalism. I’m developing a rather intense hatred of capitalism, in which I’m throughly annoyed at the whole idea of getting up five days a week, slogging through traffic to arrive at work, spending 8.5 hours there, slogging through traffic to get home, going to bed, and then doing it all over again. Unfortunately, I have this insatiable appetite for “stuff,” which requires cash, which requires work. This is the 21st century. Why don’t we have robots doing all the grunt work leaving us free to not be bothered by such petty details as needing to trade time for money?

3. Seeing the bright side. Some people are hopelessly optimistic. They’d see the bright lining in a mushroom cloud. Sometimes, I don’t want to see the bright side. I want to sulk. I want to be annoyed. I want to be angry. and I want that feeling to spur me to action in a way that no amount of good feeling ever could. I’ve made plenty of bad decisions in haste and anger, but most of my best have also come from the same place. Even if it’s a mixed bag of results, it’s the spark that keeps things moving.

Misplaced outrage…

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I keep seeing how “outraged” people are that stores are opening ever-earlier on Thanksgiving day. Facebook and Twitter are full of posts demanding that retailers stay closed and calling boycott at every opportunity. That’s fine. Whatever helps you get your jollies.

One thing you can trust on is that stores like Macy’s and Kmart aren’t opening because their CEOs are philosophically opposed to Thanksgiving. They’re opening because there is growing consumer demand that they be open. If people didn’t want to start their shopping before the bird gets sliced, none of these stores would think anything of leaving their doors closed for the duration of the holiday.

Growing up in a rural, out of the way community I can remember a time when you were hard pressed to find a store of any kind open on Sunday. Later, most places had “limited” hours on Sundays, say noon-5:00 PM. Today, Sunday is just another day in retail. That’s not because the stores are evil, it’s because it’s what the consumer demanded. Despite what anyone thinks of its merits, culturally speaking Sunday isn’t generally considered a “day of rest” by anyone I know. It’s just the second half of a 48-hour weekend where we’re all trying to get done what we need or want to do.

I’m not sure why anyone thinks it would be any different with Thanksgiving. If you don’t want to be part of the crass commercialization, by all means stay home until 12:01 AM Friday morning. If you think you have a Constitutional right to observing a holiday on the day of the holiday itself, you might want to consider work that isn’t involved in a customer-service related field – oh, and don’t be a cop, or a nurse, or a soldier, or work for a power or water company, or, yes, in retail. I’ve had plenty of jobs where work rudely intruded on my days off, and while that sucks, sometimes it’s just plain unavoidable.

So maybe instead of railing against how “unfair” retailers are being, look around and see how many of your friends and family members are going to head to the stores before or after dinner on Thanksgiving Day. If the answer is more than “none,” go ahead and enjoy living in your glass house… and give it some thought next time you want to buy that discount mattress on President’s day or get the deal of a lifetime from the car dealer on Labor Day, or when you’re going to see a movie on a Sunday afternoon ensuring that some poor employee has to give up their Sabbath to sell you a ticket, make your popcorn, and fire up the projector on time.

Let’s be blunt for a moment: If you are legitimately thankful for your family and friends, does it make a tinker’s damn worth of difference whether you’re all sitting down for a turkey dinner at an appointed date and time or whether you nosh on eggs and bacon at the local diner at 3AM on any other random Thursday? I’m just having a tough time seeing the “so what” of all the commotion.

Go global…

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Say what you want about the evils of the global economy, but I’m an unabashed fan. Sure, it means we have to compete with countries that can manufacture just about everything cheaper than we can, but I think that misses the up side… Like being able to order something from Europe last night at 9:30 and having it sitting in Philadelphia 18 hours later waiting to clear Customs and get delivered to your door. I mean isn’t a little friendly competition a small price to pay for that kind of luxury and convenience?

I’ve traveled enough to know that the world’s too small a place to pretend that we can raise the drawbridge and keep everything out. By all means, we should regulate it, set the conditions under which it happens, and fight hard in those areas where we have a comparative advantage, but we can’t roll back the clock on international commerce any more than we can command the tides to go in or out. We need to encourage the kind of world where we can order anything, from anywhere and have it delivered in a day or two. It’s good for us as consumers, it’s good for them as merchants and manufacturers, and it forces us to take a realistic look at the kinds of things our own economy should be doing in the future. If going global isn’t a win-win scenario, I don’t know what is.