This Should Make You Angry, But Not For the Reason You're Thinking

By now you've probably seen this photo floating around your social media feed. It's from a Best Buy in the Huston area taken sometime around when Harvey was set to arrive. That is 42.96 for a pack of water bottles. The memes all tell the same story: price gouging in a disaster by an evil corporate retailer.

But Best Buy issued a statement apologizing for the price. It boils down to this: because the store doesn't sell the water by the case, there is no pricing in their system for it, so an employee set the price by just taking the price of a single bottle and multiplying it by the number in the case.

"But why didn't the employee just create a special price for it in the system?" you're probably asking. I've worked and work for a big box retailer. I, or anyone that's been an employee at one can tell you why: the employee probably couldn't. In fact, no one at the store, even the managers, could have.

Big box retailing has some upsides: for example, it helps businesses expand and spread risk. So a store has lower sales for a period. Another store has higher sales, so the profits can be spread between them to allow them all to grow and prosper. The big dark side is the constant struggle between the needs of those local stores and central management's desire for control.

Whether the employees call it "corporate" or "the home office," that battle is constant and over everything: from what prices to charge for products, what products to carry. Even the ability to apportion hours to employees (yes, corporate rations out hours for store employees, another part of how they keep employee pay low), and even when employees should be scheduled. College students don't take these jobs anymore; middle-aged and older folk do. The college student can't get hours to work around their classes anymore. A hard working go-getter can't start at the bottom and work their way up because they'll be squeezed out of the bottom by economic necessity.

So we should be mad at Best Buy for this, but not because the water was expensive, but because they, and other big box retailers like them, foster a business system and culture where local employees and managers have little or no control over how to run their stores and serve their local customers.

Should you boycott the big boxes? That's almost impossible. Who should you boycott? Amazon. That site has yet to put forward a truly sustainable business model, but it is the one setting the standard these big boxes are trying to strive towards.

So what should you do? Shop at those big boxes. And then take the customer feedback surveys. Go the extra mile and mention a person that gave you a positive experience. Flood the big box's e-mail, and, if you're old-fashioned, snail mail with letters telling them that they need to put more faith in their local teams. Even offer this bit of advice directly to those CEOs: the cast of The Big Bang Theory took a voluntary pay cut for salary parity with their co-stars. Surely a CEO making 331 times what their average worker makes can afford a similar pay cut to provide their hourly workers more hours, better wages, and even provide for more full-time employees in their local staff.

Think about it. Who do you want helping you at a store? A worker on edge because they have to do 8-hours worth of work in 4 and knowing that they have to cover for someone who couldn't get scheduled that day in addition? Or someone who feels like the company cares and has plenty of support and back-up so they don't have to rush their job and can take time to help you?

Leave a comment, and I'll be happy to give you a suggested text for that e-mail.

To All Cops: Stop It!

This happened.

Listen, cops. I get it. you have hard, stressful jobs. The DAs offices and public policy force you to use all your resources arresting kids for drug charges while you have to ignore actual dangerous, violent offenders. In your training, you watch videos of cops being shot.

What makes you think men like Trump care about you? They actively resist paying taxes, which, incidentally, pay your salaries. They actively resist allowing you to be trained in de-escalation. Tactics, which, incidentally, cause you to not only shoot fewer people, which you have a bit of a PR image with right now, but be shot at and stabbed a lot less. They drain your departments dry with their "free market" behavior, then cheer you on while you use civil asset forfeiture to make up the short falls. And, let's be honest, pad the budgets where you can. How much of Martin, weasel-face Shkreli's assets have been seized in civil asset forfeiture? How many departments could his assets fund? I don't have the numbers, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot! Who's a bigger drain on society? A kid with a baggy of weed or an already billionaire who defrauds people for millions or billions more? Are your salaries so high that you think you're on the same economic playing field as Trump and his ilk? Trust me, they aren't.

You have more in common with the people you are gassing than with the people you are gassing them for. Wake up!

Fix Income and Job Inequality? Let's take a look at the service industry!

Been thinking about a couple things lately. First, income inequality. It's the worst it's been since 1928. That's a little scary, considering what happened in 1929. Considering what happened in 2008 and how we haven't yet recovered from it, really. And the fact that nowadays, FDR's New Deal would get killed by paid Russian trolls on the right and milquetoast pleas to a decades out of date economic model on the left.

Let's get a few things straight: manufacturing and coal jobs are dying, and good riddance. They weren't particularly good jobs, anyway. Repetitive motion injuries are a thing. In fact they may be a contributing factor in opioid addiction.

So what industry is growing? The service industry. Now imagine if you will, a candidate, on either side of the aisle, coming out in their campaign and saying, "service workers, you do a fantastic job for America. I want to make your lives and those of your families better. What would you need?"

I have trouble of imagining it. But let's think about it.

The death of the labor union has set back the collective bargaining that helped keep those manufacturing jobs at competitive pay rates. But again, I'm not sure how well that kind of model would work for low-tier service workers. Considering that means, essentially, call center employees. A strike would be a joke. Call centers account for high turn over rates in their business models, anyway, because their turn over rates are so high.

What about a co-op model? I don't know. Co-ops seem designed around agriculture and manufacturing, industries already on the decline, where a small group of generalists has developed. In addition to front line workers, service industries require an awful lot of specialists to keep things running smoothly. You would need very robust in-house training and re-training programs to make a call center co-op work.

Why is there a resistance or lack of interest into looking at this seriously? Probably because we have a cultural expectation that low-tier jobs like that are "starter" jobs or "temporary" jobs. But there's another problem: because of the pay and benefit degradation, people are staying in the workforce longer. This means its harder (if not downright impossible), for lower-tier workers to move-up, even if they're otherwise qualified and interested in moving up.

So do you know anyone willing to take a long hard look at the service industry? Do you have any ideas on how to improve the lot of the people working in it? Leave a comment.

Something else to trouble you

So I called Ms. Reagan's office today to voice my concerns. They did explain that the only information being provided is what is available in public records. I understand, but countered that even that much still made me uncomfortable as an Arizona citizen. Let's face it, the least sinister use of that data is purging voter rolls between now and 2018 or 2020.

Anyway: have some unpaid debt? Maybe you did the right thing and declared bankruptcy to clear the slate? Did you know employers can use either fact to deny you a job?

Yup, even though the law is supposed to protect you from that kind of discrimination, courts have decided to reinterpret it to let employers use that fact against you. Incidentally, there's a problem: your credit report could very well have mistakes on it! Also, there's no research into whether bad credit affects your performance or likelihood to commit fraud.

Since federal law isn't stepping up (and isn't likely to step up while President Nonsense Twitterrant is in office), we'll have to go local. Nine states already have laws restricting these shenanigans. I'd love to increase that number to 50. Or, in lieu of that, just add your own city to a new list of cities and townships that disallow that nonsense.

By the way Arizonans, that list includes Nevada and California, our neighbors to the north and west respectively. I'm pretty sure we could get something like this on a ballot initiative. I can't do it alone, readers. If you're willing to help, post a comment!

Note: Special thanks to this Cracked article for pointing me at today's topic. A humor website nitpicking pop culture and sprinkling it with dick jokes CAN do good journalism, too. Especially this guy. Seriously just check out this video and this article.

Voter Fraud?

I'm going to open this post with a new linguistic initiative. No longer use "liberal" and "conservative." Use the proper terms: "progressive" and "regressive" to represent the actual social and economic directions those particular groups wish us to take.

Hopefully you all called your Senators to tell them to vote "no" on their ACA repeal/replace. Since they're delaying the vote like cowardly cowards, call them again. Think of it as a more patriotic activity than setting off fireworks for 4th of July. Something you ought to include for those freedom lovin' Republicans: they wrote this bill behind closed doors. Like Vladamir Putin would have done.

Here's the switchboard number: 202-224-3121.

Now I want to talk about Trump's administration launching an "investigation" into "voter fraud."

Seriously. Fuck this noise. Especially since Mississippi told them to go jump into the Gulf of Mexico.

But Michele Reagan, Arizona's Secretary of State, is deciding to cooperate.

So, let's look at some facts: Between 2000 and 2010 more people were struck by lightning than committed Voter Fraud. So why make accusations of wide spread voter fraud? Why to give you an excuse to disenfranchise voters, of course. Do any of you think Trump's handlers are looking for this data to sniff out real voter fraud where much more qualified people have failed? Or to gather data on the people who didn't vote for their boss so they can begin to systemically disenfranchise those voters of their voting rights?

Anyways, visit this site. Donate to them.

Also, if you're in Arizona, call Michele Reagan's office: 602-542-4285, or toll free: 800-458-5842.

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.

Interesting News

The ACA is safe. For now. I was wrong. Maybe. It still has quite a few problems that, don't get me wrong, need to be fixed. And sooner rather than later. But as Trump has decided to ignore it, odds are it won't be fixed any time soon.

But this is a thing. I've tried it. It is as tasty as you'd expect. But eating did make me feel like a romcom protagonist at the end of Act II.

On to the main event: A grand jury totally called that seizure-inducing gif an asshole sent to Kurt Eichenwald a deadly weapon. I was trained as a paralegal, so this is interesting to me because it represents a big change in how we view online interaction.

Cyberstalking is one of these legal frontiers with only limited statutory coverage at the moment. Yet it has far reaching and troublesome effects for the survivors, but little or no consequences for the perpetrators.

Geeks may remember Gamergate. Remember, the people harassing poor Zoe Quinn, including sending posts with her home address and photos of her home, got away with it. Hell, I'm willing to bet dollars to donuts that any remotely geeky woman with even a minimal presence on the internet probably has similar experiences to relate.

Obviously it is bullshit that an obviously potentially deadly targeted attack on a man is the thing kicking the legal system in the pants to start fixing it. But it shows that we as a society are ready to start thinking about cyberstalking much more seriously. Injunctions against harassing an ex through social media. Criminal charges if you post someone's home address with death and/or rape threats. These might not be sci-fi things anymore.

Unfortunately, no ex-post facto means we can't go back and persecute those people that harassed Zoe Quinn, but I like no ex-post facto. And the asshole who used Gamegate to start a media career lost it after being outed as a pedophile. I shouldn't regard that as a plus, but we won't have to put up with his nonsense anymore. So there is that.

Goodbye, ACA.

So, UOAA finally did something about the impending loss of the ACA.

I don't want to sound too bleak or nihilistic, but this feels like the 11th hour rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic for healthcare reform. Where were you during the actual election, letting people know that the ACA and the benefits it brought people were on the line?

Another, much better author than me posted an article about how not to talk to people suddenly realizing that the ACA and Obamacare are the same thing and providing them with needed health insurance, and my question is very close to "What did you think was going to happen?"

While Trump down-played it, just about every Congressional Republican currently seated ran on a platform of repealing the ACA, calling it Obamacare. They've been running on that for the past 6 years or so. And winning! They've been sending repeal after repeal bill to the White House. Obama vetoed all of them of course.

But HOLY SHIT! He's not president anymore.

I think these bullet points for the UOAA offer a good point of discussion, though:

• prohibit pre-existing condition discrimination
• allow young adults to stay on family coverage until they are 26
• limit out-of-pocket costs for patients
• restrict lifetime and annual caps on benefits

I think only an absolute psychopath would think any of those are bad. But both bullet points 3 and 4 acknowledge an important fact: stuff costs money! Four is still good: it's concrete.

But bullet 3 is a problem. Because it's a nice generality lacking something all good policies involving money need: specifics. It's nice to limit costs to patients. But it's expensive to become a doctor or a nurse. It's expensive to develop medicines and medical technology. It's expensive run hospitals, pharmacies, and medical offices.

But you also have to be an idiot not to see that pharmaceutical and medical supply companies do make a ridiculous amount of money. Just a ludicrous amount. And, unfortunately, off of the backs of sick people. Frequently making them sick and poor.

So what do we do? Cap the prices of medical goods and services? Adopt a progressive income tax shifting the burdens off of the poor? I don't know. That sounds like socialism. Honestly, how else are we going to limit costs to patients? No really. Tell me in the comments.

UOAA, I get why you don't want to suggest it. Socialism-like suggestions will get you labeled as a political group, and you probably figure that issues of people's health shouldn't be political. You're right, and I agree with you. But, as I mentioned, private companies and individuals make a ridiculous amount of money off of healthcare. And they pay our politicians and media a lot of money to make the issue political. Hell, I'm guessing the UOAA gets a lot of money from companies like Convatec. And why not? Convatec's products do help people with ostomies. For money, of course. And why not? It costs money to make that stuff.

But still, UOAA, and any all organizations representing poor and sick people, nut (or ovary) up! Tell sick poor people what these people they're about to vote for are campaigning on vis a vis healthcare.

Don't get me wrong. You should still totally join the advocacy campaign! Granted, it seems we're having difficulty even reaching some Congresspeople right now. So far only Jeff Flake's office bothered to grace my e-mail with a robo-response. Granted, those Congresspeople might learn that their decisions aren't good with their constituents. And that would just be terrible, right?

Well, constituents, learn to keep that fresh in your memory. In two years, you'll have an opportunity to let those elected officials know about your displeasure by firing them from their job.