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The good, the bad, the ugly concerning snail mail’s demise

Each day as I work from my home office, it has always been a nice break to get outside and check to see what’s in the daily “snail mail,” usually brought by our faithful mail carrier around 2 p.m.

It occurred to me, in light of current news about the near demise of snail mail, that it might be interesting to think of it in terms of “the good, the bad, and the ugly.” So in no particular order or sense, here’s how I see the probably soon-to-end future of snail mail.

The Good: Email and other forms of electronic/digital/online communication are way easier and faster than mailing a letter. It’s a rare day when we mail a bill payment, or even go to a merchant/business to make a payment in person. Most of our bill paying is done online, or occasionally via telephone. Great time savings and ease of use compared to snail mail. And have you tried to buy a stamp or even find a mailbox lately? In our neighborhood, the nearest mailbox is almost a mile away. Our city’s main post office is actually slightly closer. Oh, and did I mention that the lack of direct mail marketing brochures and packets, political propaganda, etc., will NOT be missed in our household. Cutting down on the snail mail throw-away pile will be great!

The Bad: Heck, no one wants to see a traditional institution like the USPS go under. And that would also put a lot of people out of work, which is one more blow to our very-slowly-recovering economy. Besides, for actual communication between people on a one-to-one basis, a handwritten letter or thoughtfully selected card beats email hands down. And, of course, not writing letters is one more opportunity for everyone’s nearly illegible handwriting to get even worse.

The Ugly: Although electronic/digital “sp*m” is much easier to delete quickly or filter out than is snail mail sp*am, it probably will increase about a million-fold when snail mail is gone. And, of course, the more business dealings and purchases we make online when snail mail is gone, the more we open ourselves up to the risks of identity theft, fraud, scams, etc. Then there’s the increased risk of social embarrassment, alienating friends and family, and all that when we fire off hasty emails and regret later how quickly we click the “send” button. At least in the days of snail mail letters, we are less likely to rush with something we’ll later regret.

That’s it. The good, bad, and ugly of snail mail’s demise as I see it. How do you feel about it?

Changes in newspapers, gadgets reflect radical changes in today’s careers

When we see the way newspapers and other print media are changing radically, we see a reflection of the radical changes in all jobs and careers in our times.

What did you want to be when you grew up? What have you really done and what are you doing for your job or career right now? See what I mean?

Not only are newspapers disappearing — and print magazines and books declining in sales and readership — the very nature of what we do to be informed and entertained looks almost nothing like it did even 20 years ago. And the changes since my childhood 50-some years ago are even more radical.

When I was a lad of 8 or 10 years old, I would never have dreamed of such a thing as a career where I could earn my income (well, okay, only a small part of it right now) by writing on the Internet.

In simplest terms, I might describe my main job or career this way:

“I’m a blogger and affiliate marketer on the Internet.”

If I were to explain that to someone from the 1950s in terminology they might understand, I would need to say something like this:

“I type words on a typewriter that sort of magically stores those words electronically, while displaying them on something resembling a television screen. After those words are stored electronically, there is another nearly magical electronic network of such machines linked together, through which I can almost instantaneously broadcast those words in a way that hundreds of millions of people can choose to read the words.

“In addition, they can make purchases from merchants who are connected to that instantaneous-electronic-broadcast-network and, because of the way I am connected to that network, the merchants will know whether those purchases were made by people who came to them as a result of my words — and the merchants will pay me a small commission of real money for those purchases.”

Never in my wildest science fiction/fantasy besotted little mind in, say, 1957 (when I turned 10) would I have thought about a job or career doing anything like that.

So — what do you think your KIDS will want to be when they grow up??

Even packaging must be ‘eco-friendly’ or some won’t buy

I’m sure every little bit of “eco-friendly” products and packaging we can create in this crowded world is a good thing. But I was very surprised to read an article recently that suggested many women are evaluating their skin care and beauty lotion products not just on how well they work — but on how eco-friendly the packaging is.

A survey found that “20% of women 25 to 34 years old believed that a body lotion’s ‘eco-friendly packaging’ mattered as much to them as the product’s anti-aging properties.”

Honestly, except for a general concern about plastic in packaging and containers is bad for the environment, I never really thought about creating or buying products specifically because of eco-friendly packaging. (I don’t know why, but I really dislike that made-up word — but I don’t have a better one for it!)

All right, I can go with that idea: Keep your packaging and containers for all products as environmentally well-behaved as possible. I’ll certainly consider all that when I make purchases. But, frankly, right now my purchases of all sorts tend to be based most on price. I buy what I can best afford to buy.

Plus, I try as much as possible to make sure a product’s shipping box is something I can open and get the product out of with a minimal amount of tearing, swearing, and poking with sharp objects.

My respect for these chain store customer service guys grew

I have to admit that I’ve never been a fan of a certain Big Box national franchise that sells electronics and entertainment products. (I won’t name them, but their store name rhymes with “Nest Guy.”) But I learned some new respect for the customer service reps at our local Nest Guy store this week when I watched them react to a minor emergency.

I was looking at some netbook computers. I discovered that if you have the luxury of time to visit this store on a weekday morning, you actually can find reps who will talk with you and answer questions. In the process of doing a good job with the questions I had about the computer, the rep and I glanced over at the next aisle and saw another somewhat flustered rep lowering a 40-something lady gently down to the floor. She appeared to be fainting.

The guy helping me immediately said, “Excuse me, sir, there seems to be an emergency here,” and dashed around the counter to help his colleague. Within seconds, someone called the store manager, they gently comforted the woman in question, and two other reps appeared with the manager. While the rep who had been helping me trotted off to get a bottle of water, one of the other reps hustled over to the office furniture area and brought an armed, padded desk chair to help the woman into.

All was resolved within a few minutes. After the emergency ended, my customer service rep walked back over to me with a polite smile and said, “Now, how may I help you again, sir?”

Kudos to the Nest Guy customer service people. I’ve been unhappy with them in the past, but they certainly earned some respect that day!

Consumer spending lags, but what about job creation?

Shopping, retail sales, consumer spending — all these things drive economic recovery. But the most significant crisis all of us get hit by during a recession is the loss of a job, or job cutbacks, etc. And until unemployment declines and job creation seriously kicks in, any economic recovery won’t mean much to most folks, will it?

In our community, the media was all aflutter yesterday about a company that announced it was adding 150+ new jobs in the next few weeks. BUT — most of those doing the rejoicing aren’t the people who will end up with those jobs. The company is a “calling center” for vacation telemarketers. Unless you’re on a sales job search, they won’t be jobs you’ll get excited about. (Ever work at telemarketing vacation timeshares? You probably don’t want to — trust me on that.)

Gone, it seems, are the days when American job creation meant jobs where people MAKE something. Jobs for assembling things, even, are getting hard to find. There are, however, quite a number of minimum wage jobs where you “flip” things (as in hamburgers) in lots of communities.

When the telemarketing and fast-food jobs are replaced with serious jobs, THEN talk to me about job creation. That’s when the economic recovery will start to swing into action.

Did shoppers do their job over holiday shopping season?

Did all you shoppers out there do what you needed to do during the just-ended holiday shopping season to get us out of this recession? Well, did you? No? Why not?

I’m beginning to think consumer spending and retail shopping numbers are about as worthless as wings on a caterpillar: If you put ‘em on, he’d just shed ‘em in a few weeks for natural wings anyway.

It’s exactly like that when you try to track retail shopping and consumer spending. Whether we’re talking about television sets, luxury cars, bicycles, gourmet food baskets, weight loss supplements, sofa cushions, or anything else, it all comes down to this — until consumers stop fearing recession and start spending money regularly again, we’ll never see the recover we need.

Does that mean we all need to get out there and spend, spend, spend? No, of course not. But it DOES mean those who have jobs and have money need to quit letting fear paralyze them. They need to get on with life. And then more of those who do not have jobs or spendable income may actually see jobs start opening up again.

Hey, I’m no economist. I have little or know investing “savvy,” and most of my income right now if from Social Security. So take most of my advice on such things with a big grain of salt, dose of skepticism, or whatever.

But I do suspect things will only truly turn around in this country when people start making decisions on jobs and on consumer spending based on serious reflection, not on fear and panic.

Oh, and my answer to the question in the title of this article — nope, I really didn’t do MY part to get out there and shop. Humpf — I couldn’t afford it!

Keeping busy for the holidays? You bet!

I don’t know about you, but these holidays (holi-daze??) times are keeping me as busy as a guy looking for vitamins for hair growth. Okay, I know that’s probably a lame analogy, but you get the idea — these are busy times.

The good news last week, of course, was the decline in U.S. unemployment numbers.

The bad news about that is, there are still a whole lot of folks out of work and in need these days.

I just stopped by to remind everyone who hangs out here — if you can, help someone in need these days. Give somebody a meal (there are some great community and nationwide programs to do that), give someone the gift of a helping hand. And, hey, if you can do it — try to help someone find a job.

As the old “Red Green” character used to say on PBS — “We’re all in this together.” So take some busy time these days, even with the rush of the holidays, to help someone!

Newspapers rapidly losing battle to online world

It’s no wonder newspapers are rapidly losing the battle to continue publication, when you consider how limited print media is and ask yourself why advertisers would want to pay for such limited exposure when the entire world can see their ads on the Internet.

I live in southwest Missouri, and the longtime daily paper we have here (for which I once worked as a copy editor) is not-so-slowly sliding down the tube toward extinction. It’s gotten so bad that their classified ad section, always the mainstay for daily newspapers’ revenue and ability to continue publishing daily, has become less than a shadow of its former self. Indeed, they’ve decided not to run employment/jobs ads two days of the week. (I think they’ve also limited their real estate classifieds the same way.)

The Internet, on the other hand, offers nationwide advertising, and much of the more popular online “classified ad” sites are free. Got a car you want to sell in Tampa? Put it on a classified site and someone from California might buy it. Seekin tenants for your Nashville apartments? Throw the info online and you might draw all the renters you need from either coast and all of the “heartland” in between.

Those of you who’ve grown up in a world where there has always BEEN an Internet have no real concept of how closed and limited our world and our culture were in those quaint “pre-Net” days.

You might be able to find out more, though. Ask your parents and grandparents about it. Those will be the folks sitting at the breakfast table reading a newspaper while they have their morning coffee. Maybe.

Health care battles remind me of my brief insurance ‘career’

All the sound and fury about health care insurance and health care reform takes me back to a younger, more innocent time when I thought it would be good to sell insurance.

This was actually part of a “multi-level marketing” company (called “network marketing” by many as a more politically correct or euphemistic name for it) which was recruiting agents nationwide. I THINK the company is still in business, though I suspect their marketing model has changed.

It was a legitimate insurance company, with agents actually hustling around to find legitimate life insurance lead and prospective customers. They required their agents to have valid insurance licenses in the state where they were working. (In my case, that was Missouri.)

So I went through an insurance agent’s class for several weeks to get licensed to sell property and casualty and life insurance. (But not health insurance.) I paid to take that class, and I paid for, took, and passed the state licensing exam. I was happily a fully licensed, legitimate insurance agent.

My “career” lasted something less than two months because I made a very quick discovery about my personality and personal value system: I would rather rip my own teeth out, perform my own appendectomy, or do a host of other excruciatingly painful things than glad-hand someone into buying insurance. In addition, I wasn’t just selling them insurance. Remember, this was part of an “MLM” scheme — I was first and foremost working to sign them up as potential “agents” to work in my downline. That was the primary source of income for me and for those in my upline.

Nope. Not for me. I’m perhaps the last person on earth who will ever again tale an MLM “business opportunity” — so be forewarned and please don’t waste my time asking me.

But that was one of life’s little experiences/experiments that left me wiser about myself and what I really enjoy and DON’T enjoy as a career.

Have you done that ‘early’ Christmas shopping yet?

I have one or two friends who are among those annoying people who buy Christmas presents as early as July or August. They keep sort of a running mental list in their heads alerting them to the interests and desires of family and friends and, if it’s July, August, whenever during the year — WHAM! If they find a good price on something matching their mental lists, they buy it.

I can certainly understand early holiday gift shopping if you’re talking about big-ticket items, from new cars to Samsung TVs to kitchen appliances. But if you are trying to find that special friend or family member one of a myriad of “small ticket” items, keeping mental shopping alerts active in spring or summer for holiday giving many months away — that sort of seems obsessive to me.

On the other hand, I suppose it’s no big deal. I mean, retailers in their desperation start putting out Christmas shopping teasers and displays before Halloween these days. Saw some at W*lmart just the other day.