UULOC 3 : Business Is Usual …

(79) … Politics As Usual.


The only thing that businessmen care about is making more money, and politics is just business under another name. Do you doubt me? Let me put it this way. If a businessman doesn’t run a good business; i.e. if he doesn’t give the customer what the customer wants, then there will soon come a point that he is no longer in the business. The trick to master, is convincing the public that they want what you want to give them. It happens to be a trick that politicians seem to know quite well, and any big business owner knows it too.

Of course, the current political situation has brought this up, but so has a recent change in my store. We’ve recently gotten rid of our fabric, in our fabric and crafts department. What they’ll sell now is crafts and party supplies. What they’ll call it will remain crafts and fabrics, until we get rid of all the older associates who have ever known that we even had fabric, the way we do with the two year gone layaway section.

In someone’s eyes this is a good move for our store. I don’t know if this person is just out of touch with the customer base or they’re in better touch with our bottom line, but I can’t tell you how many sad people I’ve seen come in, step around the corner and just look lost. Not only are we based at the edge of Amish country, but we live in Bible Belt America, where quilting and crafting is a long running flea-marketable way of life. But in the words of one of my managers, the company “isn’t just looking at the moment, they’re looking to the future.” How I wish that were true.

I think the numbers are probably right in some ways. The Amish come into town twice a month or so, and I’ve yet to see the general small crowd that comes in and shops about the store. They didn’t just hit up the fabric; they get some supplies and toys for their children, so perhaps we will see them continue to come in. But I suspect their numbers will fall. So much of our base is a bit lower on the budget ladder; but like those who were hit hardest over the layaway jettison, I suspect our brass don’t really care for the dollars of the people who were making clothes just to save a few bucks. And when you look at the so called “big picture” isn’t it better for the company if those people spending ten dollars on fabric spend thirty on a pre-made shirt from Indonesia that costs our company five dollars?

The people most likely to lose the most are the buyers that got our store in such a mess with fabric in the first place. Friend Navy says that he thinks that was the problem in the first place. And he’s correct; our buyers would buy yards and yards of the oddest looking, gayest, silliest, shittiest cloth you could find. Big sheets of printed cotton with john deer tractors, lint fuzzed purple and pink striped tweed, circus tent striped wool… you name it our customers wouldn’t buy it. The basics always sold fairly well, but there would always be a long wall of “stuff nobody wanted”… things that would inevitably be marked down to fifty cents a yard, from a three-dollar start price. And we know our buyers get paid money under the table to order this stuff. One of our big chiefs got caught in a scandal that necessitated his departure from the company, with only part of benefits package intact.

Anyway, we get a lot of complaints and I’m sure we’ll be getting a lot more. It feels good to complain to somebody, on the spot, or why else would any of us write these blogs? The big thing in this case, is that these customers aren’t complaining to the right people. Our company has a nice 1-800 number that anyone can call for any reason, and I would believe that a huge number of customers calling from any given area would make someone at the switchboard sit up and take notice. But would anyone do anything about it? It depends. If cookie munchers can get Nabisco to bring back the much loved Hydrox, then surely other companies can be persuaded to give the people what they want. At the very least they might retool the department and bring the good selling basics back.

(Not that Hydrox will make a permanent come back. Nabisco doesn’t believe the interest is there to carry the torch against their nemesis the mighty Oreo. But they did say in national press that they’d make more for a few months…)

The truth of the matter though, is that in an effort to bring their image up to par to appeal with more customers who have more money, my company has continued to make more decisions based on that demographic. And in their ongoing struggle to continue to keep prices low enough to offer good bargains, the products we sell just keep getting cheaper. (Not cheap in price, but cheap in quality.) And despite these things, the customers just keep coming in the doors. I shouldn’t be complaining, because it keeps me in a job I (mostly) enjoy.

But the fact remains. We give you what you ask for, after we convince you that you need what we have to offer. And you buy it, expecting more for less while getting less for more. It is business at its finest, and where are you going to go to make it change? After all, we’ve already convinced you that you should settle for getting less…

Kind of like politics of late.

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I said some time ago that the Democratic Party ought to pull their heads out of their collective ass and offer up a Obama-Clinton pairing. It isn’t that I particularly like either of them that well, but with the drawn out to the max race this year, we’ve seen this one party go through what the whole electoral process has been pairing itself down toward the last few go rounds. Fifty-fifty, minus the few percents that can’t seem to either make a choice or force themselves to choose the stupid. Friend Otter says heaven help us as a country if we get the Dream Team, and many people outside the Democratic fence agree with that statement, because they just can’t stand one or the other or either but really seem to have it in for Hillary.

I personally don’t care but think it would be fitting if we got over the fist-fight. If half the party wants one and half wants the other, give them both. It used to work that way in this country’s earliest years, and couldn’t have been too much worse then than it seems to be now. Better still, there won’t be any disgruntled electoral groups hedging the issue by not voting for the party choice, still voting for the person their voters told them to vote for, or just plain voting for race or gender or whatever reason they have for punching their ticket.

And perhaps most important, if you are a Democrat, that vote you want to give for the gal that didn’t win won’t be automatically transferred to the guys you said you hated at the start of the whole shebang. You know, ala the whole “a vote for a third party is a wasted vote” scenario that so pisses people of my viewpoint off? And just maybe if we give all those people a hand in what they had voted for in the first place, they’d still vote in the primary election come November. Wouldn’t that be something?

But no. A “Dream Team” pairing would probably alienate both sides of the Democratic table, instead of pulling them together. (Incidentally, two things: Hillary is set to bow her head, but has met with Obama, and some voices are calling for that “okay let’s all us Hillary supporters get with the program and throw our support behind Obama.” This means that at this point, still, anything could happen.)

Now the only thing left for me to complain about (besides the lack of anyone I want to cast a vote for) is the fact that McCain and Obama will now commence to duking it out. How much have the Dem’s spent on the race that Clinton didn’t win? And how much are both parties about to spend for the next five months? I think anyone running for federal office should get a set budget and that’s it. Free airtime once a month (debate boys and girls!) and get themselves a blog with their own words (no speech writers for you!) and there you have it! Campaign finance? Oh hell no! Donate that to a worthy cause please. And if Joe and Josephine Public can’t make up their minds who to vote for by transcript, news broadcast and looking into public record over the net by November, well, either the candidates weren’t worth voting for, or they weren’t going to vote by knowledge anyway.

What would the change be, besides a lot less hoopla and money changing hands? But just like from my company, we’ve been convinced we need this junk at the price they’ve set. And in candidates, less worth must be worth more.

“Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon
Going to the candidates debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose”

Amen Paul. Amen.

k