social commentary – Page 31 – Hopeful Romantics

Starbucks Coffee Gets Roasted

Just about everyone now knows Starbucks has taken it on the chin, lately. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, to name a few, Starbucks reported a loss of $6.7 for the third fiscal quarter. That’s a lot of beans. Additionally, Starbucks is closing 600 under performing stores.

I am not sure what the mystery is here. If you overextend your brand and start putting up a Starbucks one right next to the other, sooner or later you will either oversaturate or people will grow tired of looking at you. It is like showing up for a party in the same dress. Dazzling for a minute, and then, doesn’t she have anything else to wear?

So usually, an online driver ed program is much more exciting than those classroom teaching courses because of cheap cialis australia the interesting materials available. You will find presently oral medicines accepted by the consumers of the Kamagra from every corner of the world. canadian cialis no prescription With this, whether bipolarity exists in children is associated with the cheap tadalafil pills nervous system, which is precisely come across ended up of your brain, nerves along with spinal cord grouping termed neurogenic. Hope you will follow them and keep yourself away from STDs and pregnancy. india online viagra The other thing is the expense of the coffee. As the comedian Jackie Mason reports in his hilarious piece on the Big Green Coffee Phenomenon, they serve a pretty expensive cup of coffee. With the economic downturn, and the price being what it is, people started to go elsewhere. To Dunkin’Doughnuts, for instance. Or MacDonald’s, where they now serve a premium cup of coffee. Hopefully, it is not too hot. Even Starbuck’s admitted in some significant way there normal brew is pricey. They started offering plain old plain old coffee at a lower price.

My friend Harris called it first. He got his two cents in long before all the pundits and predictions. In fact, some of the great stock tipsters and economic forecasters were predicting that Starbuck’s stock was going to rise as it spread its franchise to foreign shores. Not Harris. He thought it was a bunch of baloney. People he said, in tough times, are not going to stand in line and spend that dough for what he categorized as burnt coffee. Ain’t happening.

He was right. Starbucks should have gotten smart early and sat down with Harris and asked him his thoughts. They could have paid him for his consultation. I know this. It would have cost them a lot less money.

Out with the In Box, The Email Menace

I read an interesting article in last Thursday’s Los Angeles Times by Leslie Brenner. The article described how a growing movement says that email is out of control, a monster ruining our lives. A monster! Geez! Hairy and scary, I’ll bet, just like the evil troll in Hansel and Gretel, maybe. Or Godzilla, after they electrified his big reptilian ass. Couldn’t stomp on buildings no more, so he harnessed the electricity and delivers email. He is now the email monster. He is imprisoning us. Worse than drugs.

Okay, so Godzilla is probably not the email monster. With any menace, it is best to put a face on it. Maybe there should be a contest, Hey, Kids, Draw the Email Monster, the one driving Daddy and Mommy insane. As if they had far to go in the first place.

I admit I am old enough to remember sending letters. Snail mail to the modern world. Depending where you were, and depending where the recipient was squatting, that mail would arrive anywhere from one to seven days. And it cost money. And that is one the post office was functional. Well, almost.

Now you type a few misspelled words, all arranged with terrible grammar, hit send and off your message goes to any part of the world. How awful. So you reap what you sow. You get email. A lot of email You are overladen with email. It is stressful, your are imprisoned, as the article attests, you can’t resist responding to the constantly beeping inbox. It is no longer cute. It is no longer cyber macho. It is eating up your life and driving you to distraction.

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But, nooooo. As with all other evils of society we will moan and groan and ultimately do little or nothing about it. We will whine to anyone who will listen and claim the email has taken control of our lives. Like television, computers, the Internet, shopping, porn, and watching politically pundits give their painfully dull insights about the election campaign, we hold them to blame. Rather than ourselves. Instead of looking at email and all the rest, even porn, as either a convenience, entertainment or pleasurable even in some oblique way, we vilify the thing. We feel better about ourselves. It’s the thing; it isn’t us. We don’t have to be accountable for not turning off the beeper that tells you there is email.

The article in mention has tips from specialists that will help you wrangle your email and your email habit. I am sure there are more tips in the future. From more experts. I am sure if there is not already there will be a growing ancillary industry, curing people of their email Jones. Books will be written, and email therapists will help feed the endless appetite of cable TV.

Talk show hosts will interview email victims. They will tell their pathetic stories of how they were consumed by the email monster. There will be contests, and the email victims with the most pathetic stories will win trips to the distant parts of the world where email is not available. There will be email farms, like weight loss farms. There will be demonstrations, junkets and support groups.

All will be invited. And those that are there will text message those that can’t make it. Until text messages like some telecom Golem, will turn into “The Monster.”

In The Future You Might Have To Drive The Car You Can Afford

I was reading in the Los Angeles Times where Chrysler would no longer be leasing cars through its in-house financial service. Wells Fargo, known for its auto leasing loans, among other things is also getting out of the auto leasing business. Ford took a write down on its auto leasing portfolio of over $2 Billion, which is a lot of money, even in this day and age.

The car makers who sell mostly trucks and SUV’s are being hit doubly hard as those that specialize in passenger cars, but with gas prices being what they are, coupled with the devaluation of leased cars, it is only a matter of time before other auto makers pick up their proverbial catcher’s mitts and trundle on out of the car leasing finance business. Tough break.

Once upon a time, the auto dealership could figure with some degree of accuracy the residual value of the car. That means at the inception of your lease the dealer would project the car would be worth a certain percentage of its initial value. Three year old cars in demand, Mercedes, BMW’s, Lexus, Hondas, Toyotas would be worth more, percentage wise, naturally, and the ones in less demand, Hyandai’s, Kias, stuff like that,would be worth less. This residual value was taken into consideration when they wrote up the terms of the lease. You would pay less per month for a car with more residual value, meaning it would be worth more at the end of the lease, and you would pay more per month for the car that nobody wanted.

Well, now every car dealership is getting killed on most lease returns. The Prius and a few others are the exceptions, but now the Blue Book Value, the estimated value of a car and the actual selling price are at odds. The car is worth less than the evaluation. Enough so that you see dealers who bought out the cars at lease closing now desperate to sell and offering the cars at thousands below Blue Book.

In fact, Santa Monica Lexus this weekend had its first ever “blow out” sale, offering its cars a thousands below the Blue Book value. I was struck by the number of Porsches listed in the ad. This is Southern California, after all, and at first glance one would think they were on the Autobahn what with all the German cars. A Porsche around here is like an entry level Lexus in a lot of other parts of the country. Nevertheless, there they were all models, all colors, just make an offer.

So what’s this all mean, besides the obvious? Well, have always been a country in love with its cars. We would joyride; we would watch movies in our cars, eat in them, have sex in them. They were an extension of our ego, a symbol of freedom and a measuring stick for our worth in society. Hundreds of sons were written about our cars and the things we did in our cars. We have auto shows, auto clubs, nostalgic reviews and television shows.

Once upon a time cars were affordable. Relatively speaking. You drove an American car and there were cool American cars and they didn’t empty your lungs just to buy one. And then as the world globalized we were introduced to the really sleek, cool, speedy, better handling foreign models. First they came from Europe, some vroomed and some sputtered, especially in the rain. Anyone who drove an English sports car in the sixties can tell you about his travails with the Jaguars and MG’s.

And then came the Japanese. First there were the cheap, tinny cars that no one wanted, unless you were too broke for the American car. But then the Japanese cars improved, and Toyota, Honda, Nissan, offered quality cars and premium vehicles with names like Infiniti, Accura and Lexus. As for the cheap part, well that went out the electric window.
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So…to have your symbol of freedom and the status and sex appeal it would bring you, you had to spend bucks. Bucks you couldn’t afford. Enter car leasing. For a lot less bucks you could drive the car you couldn’t afford for several years and then turn it in for its residual value. The auto maker would sell it off, make some more money on it, over your initial leasing fee, and the auto makers were happy as clams.

But now it looks like they will soon be getting out of the leasing business. That symbol of freedom will have to be something you can actually afford. Because you will have to actually buy it. Reality will need a radical adjustment. Your symbol of freedom may lack the sex appeal of the car you once leased. Or it may be a lot older than that shiny new car you drove for three years, put on thirty thousand miles, and then turned it.

Your friends may not envy you as much. Women may not swoon. Few men can ask a woman if you wants to go for a ride in a base priced Kia. Okay, then can ask, but who is accepting? So there you are, no longer in dream city but bogged down in the reality of the times. As for joy riding, forget that at $5 bucks a gallon. You ain’t even going to the movies, half the time. Pay per view and a pizza ordered from the shop where the delivery kid has to pay for his gasoline.

Online dating may end up being more “virtual” than first anticipated. Fashion companies could be offering attire and accessories for weekend phone sex. Pajama parties may again become the rage. Why? Because everyone will stay over for days, since they can’t afford the gas to go home. I suppose it is a good thing after all that drive-in theaters have long gone the way of the rumble seat.

If there is a silver lining, take stock of the car you will be buying and not leasing. The reason many expensive cars were expensive, besides their performance, sex appeal, and a mark of your status, is because they are made well. They weren’t made initially to be leased for three years and turned back in. They were made to be driven for years and years. They were made to go hundreds of thousands of miles, before dying an honorable death.

So if you buy one and drive it for the five or ten years, like the Europeans usually do, then the price of the luxury vehicle still makes sense. You can enjoy it, retain your symbol of freedom, sex appeal, and status symbol, albeit a little threadbare over time. You can enjoy the better cars for what they were made for–quality and performance. Or you can buy a car you can afford, get rid of it when the loan is paid and buy another, maybe an electric car. In the future.

In any event, your car, after being driven awhile, like quality clothes made from quality fabric, will develop the one thing it doesn’t have now. Character.

Happy motoring.

Johnny Edwards, We Hardly Knew Ya

Okay, so by now unless you were living in a cave in Mynamar you would have read or heard about how the National Enquirer, cornered former Presidential Hopeful and Democratic Vice Presidential nominee, John Edwards in the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Apparently, the media gang from the Enquirer chased poor Johnny around the hotel in some modern version of an old Marx Brothers movie. From the different reports, the very bemused hotel guests watched the impromptu floor show.

John Edwards ran for his life, or, rather, for his career, while the Enquirer gang gave chase. They cornered him in a bathroom, where reports are the ever intimidating hotel security guards–you have seen them–allegedly threatened to break heads and cameras. The Enquirer reporters are said to have filed a criminal complaint with the Beverly Hills Police.

I mean you have to admit this is pretty funny. No matter what side of the aisle you rest your laurels, if you don’t look at this with humor and irony, mixed with the usual disgust and admonition, then you are lulling on the ice floes with respect to the cultural and political zeitgeist of the early 21st Century. When you are worth hundreds of millions and your are a very public figure, in fact one that is being considered for the Vice Presidential role, again, or as a cabinet member, you have to feel pretty stupid when you are cornered in the hotel bathroom by a horde of reporters. The only thing worse would be that while you held the door against the narrow shoulders of the reporters, you discover Senator Larry Craig is tapping his lascivious foot at you from inside a bathroom stall.

You have to be an idiot. I’m sorry, but whether or not you want to wax moral on this, and there is plenty of wax on this one to make enough candles to light a sensual sex scene, the morality to me is not the major issue. The issues is whether you are smart enough to run this country. If you can’t take care of your extramarital affairs without getting caught by the media, then how are you going to outfox the Russians, the Iranians the the lineup of “evil doers” you will be dealing with on a daily basis? I mean, how cool can you be.

All right, so up comes the name of one William Clinton. But with Clinton it was different. The women in one form or another ratted him out. He wasn’t caught near in flagrante as was John Edwards. His girlfriend of the moment either talked to the press or talked to her girlfriend who talked to the press, depending on what girl of the moment we were talking about.
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Look, I’m sure there are good qualities about John Edwards. And I’m sure with his wife, Elizabeth, being so ill, there are pressures most of us can’t imagine. He has had his share of tragedy in his life. It is the kind of tragedy that no money nor political or social status will ever fully surmount. You can’t have a child die and a wife that is dying and not be in the need of some relief. Anywhere.

But not here. Not now. That is, if you really want to be considered for Vice President or a cabinet position. If Edwards is on a secret self-destructive bent for one reason or another, then he is certainly in the groove. But I don’t think that’s the case with Edwards. He is far too ambitious to dwell in the world of secret self-denial and self-destruction.

Look, he is definitely an intelligent man, although I don’t care all that much for his personal style. Between the newscaster’s haircut, circa 1980, and the ersatz folksy, populists jingo he spouts from time to time, He is hard to embrace. I see him more as the calculating “Goober Boy,” than as a viable Presidential candidate. I made up my mind on this when asked during one of the oh so scintillating presidential debates what he considers his personal flaw. In fairness, Barack Obama was the only one who gave an ingenuous answer. The rest decided to shuck and jive. But in Edward’s case he “aw shucks” it for a moment and then announced his flaw was that he cared about America “too much.”

I would rather he would have told us he was haunted by unseen and indeterminate demons who, despite what I believe is his genuine love and concern for his wife, he is forced to go seeking solace in the arms of a Santa Barbara MILF where, together they have produced a love child as a result of their passions. Then I would have thought, okay, it’s an imperfect world and it least he isn’t trying to feed me the kind of line you feed the last drunk at closing time.

It least he wouldn’t be living in denial and forcing us to do the same. He wouldn’t sound like Larry Craig.

Does This Painting Remind You of Anybody?

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Besides conducting background checks and corporate research, I am still an author and am fairly versed in the arts. I had the fortune of seeing this painting on display in the Los Angeles County Museum of Arts, known as LACMA around these parts. It is a most compelling work. It attracts your eye from way across the gallery. This piece was painted in the twenties by German Expressionist, Magnus Zeller. Germany was experiencing a few speed bumps at the time, following the debacle of the First World War, or “The War to End All Wars,” as it was called then. It is a term we view today with more than its share of irony, if not dark humor. But I digress.
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Cast your eyes on the painting and think your thoughts. History does repeat itself, or as the French have been rumored to say, “The More Things Change, the More They Stay They Same.”