To Buy Or Not To Buy

Shop.

In recent weeks both Macy's and Penny's have announced store closures due to significant decreases in sales and general revenue. The store closures will result in the loss of thousands of jobs and likely have a genuine impact on the local, if not national, economy. 

In reading about this I realized that I am a part of this story. I used to shop at Macy's. A lot. And not off the sale rack. Just out of graduate school with my first consulting job I found myself not only with the need for a new, non-graduate student wardrobe, but also with the income to obtain it. So I shopped. I bought business clothes, flirty skirts and floozy shoes. I bought shirts that I new would be out of fashion in six months and pants that I would have to remain abnormally skinny to fit into. I bought four-inch heels and hats and belts and pretty much whatever I wanted. For the first time in my life I had expendable income and I was pretty much just funneling in into department stores. 

And then, I ran out of things to buy. I got tired of dressing rooms and muzak and lines and...shopping. It didn't take long, perhaps a year, for me to have caught up, so to speak. My kitchen was finally filled with decent dishes and appliances, I had shoes for every occasion, and I was bored. So I stopped shopping.

When the recession hit and I quit my job to dance and write, I shopped even less. Now I wasn't just bored, I was also poor. I turned to online shopping, snatching up last minute sales and promotions, and returned to vintage and resale stores. I never went back to the mall. It turns out, neither did a lot of people. For the most part I think this is a good sign, an indication of a shifting focus in how we spend our time and money. I worry though, that rather than an indication of social change away from consumerism, it is just a symptom of a massive shift in how we consume. Either way, it is a good reminder to be mindful of our time and money, and how we spend them both.

References/Picture:

http://money.cnn.com/2014/01/15/news/companies/jcpenney-jobs/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

http://chocolatemedals.com/tag/sex-and-the-city/

Will Tackle For Food

NFL.

Were you aware of the fact that the National Football League is a recognized non-profit organization with tax exempt status?  Did you know that many of the NFL's stadiums receive enough money in public funds to cover their operational cost, leaving all the revenue from ticket sales, vending, and advertising to go to training and salaries? This tax exempt status may or may not apply to individual teams, but since they have a non-disclosure policy when it comes to finances how much they pay to whom is not publicly known. What we do know is that while Food Stamps and student financial aid are on the chopping block there is no risk of the NFL losing it's public funding, at least not anytime soon. While I understand that the NFL does some amount of charitable outreach, it is by definition an entertainment organization, not a charity and from ticket sales and players salaries alone it seems clear that they can afford to build and run their own stadiums.

Greg Easterbrook has written a book about the impact of football on America and discusses the financial aspects of the NFL at length.  It's worth reading, especially if you pay taxes or watch football.

Like what you are reading?  Then support the Kickstarter for my book Girl Gone Wild- On Being a Woman in the Wilderness.  Thanks!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1731666363/girl-gone-wild-a-guide-to-being-a-woman-outside?ref=city

To hear an interview with the author:

http://www.npr.org/2013/09/24/225775287/nfls-a-nonprofit-author-says-its-time-for-football-reform

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://www.bettingexpert.com/blog/field-position-goal-expectation

Keeping Up With The Joneses

Stuff.

I have never really been a shopper or a collector of things and have never had the good fortune to be able to afford to conspicuously consume nor the bad luck to really want for things.  It has been at least a year since I have set foot in a shopping mall.  I personally believe that my car says no more about who I am or what I have achieved in my life than any other common object.  While I have always known about the American consumer culture and even had some idea of the extent to which it permeates our lives, it was only recently that I began to see just how invested people are in it.  Some part of me, while understanding the idea of car or house or clothing as a status symbol, was simply unable to understand the enormity of these things in determining the average persons sense of self, worth, and accomplishment.  But it really matters.  People go into enormous amounts of debt and end up losing their families and homes and ability to take out credit accumulating stuff and things.  People spend large parts of their daily lives shopping, preparing to shop, or thinking about the things that other people have accumulated while out shopping.  They sacrifice their family and leisure time for jobs they hate so that they can continue to afford to buy even more stuff and things.  They feel badly about themselves in the wake of other peoples stuff and things.

When was the last time you went more than 24 hours without spending money?  It's possible.

Photograph Courtesy of:

http://www.cambio.com/2012/04/25/keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-renewal-a-40-million-dea/

Risky Business

greed.

I am not a businessman. I’m not playing with gender here, because I’m not a businesswoman either, and even if I were, the last six months have proven to me that it’s being a businessman that really counts. I have never claimed to be a businessman, nor do I have any desire to be so, but in my line of work, being as tied as it is to the construction industry, there is an essential and growing need to “do business”. In fact, I, as I am nearly daily reminded by my boss, have no degree or advanced coursework in business. Aside from being reasonably good at what I do and able to write an articulate sentence and perform elementary math functions, I am almost wholly unqualified for business. However, being a geologist, this is not something that has typically been a problem. Until recently.

The recent economic crisis has left my place of work a barren wasteland of empty cubicles and lost bids. The men that remain are largely shells of their former selves, clearly having spent most or all of their adult lives defining themselves by their jobs and paychecks, they are now leading obvious lives of quiet desperation. What remains, before we’ve even seen signs of recovery, are desperate men clinging to the tenants of “business” and convinced that if they proceed exactly as they have in the past, using the same business models, something will change. By necessity, my education in “business” has been rapid.

What I’ve largely learned is this, honesty is not important, not to clients, but particularly not to staff. Neither is humanity nor compassion, employee loyalty is only valued in good times, in bad times, just cut them loose. Preserve, above all else, the profit margin for the owners and the inflated salaries of management. Claiming to be right is more important than actually being right, and the only people who are every really right are the ones with the least actual knowledge of the subject. Salaried and exempt employment in hard times is license to take over the lives of your employees, how about say, going to Texas, unexpectedly, with the flu, for many weeks, to work 90 hours a week and only be paid for forty? Hey, you don’t want to do it we’ll find someone more desperate than you who will.

They say in hard times you see peoples true colors, but in truth, with business there’s only two colors, red, and black. And as far as I can tell, real “businessmen” will do whatever it takes to stay in the black, as long as it poses no threat to their egos, salaries, or established operating procedures. And we wonder how we arrived to the place in which we find ourselves.

I invite everyone to take a moment to inventory your value system, and look hard at what really motivates your decisions and the way you treat the people that you work with and those that work for you. If it’s your mortgage, your car payment, the lifestyle to which you’ve grown accustomed, or professional ego, then the current economic crisis offers you an opportunity to tap out of the fight, implement a new business model, live under a new paradigm. It’s the only path we have to a sustainable economy.

Photograph courtesy of :
http://www.photomediacenter.org/images/Businessmen.jpg