Here is something I didn’t see coming. Coca Cola Enterprises lost about a billion and a half last quarter. Typically things like Coke, Fast Food do fairly well in a recession. That’s where the idea that you can always bank on “Cokes and Coffins” comes from.
I just don’t think its that bad. Call me crazy, but I don’t think that the recession is that bad.We are at about 7.5% unemployment, our equities have lost about 20% of their value, but it isn’t that bad. It’s not 1929…. Yet. Today I saw someone walking downtown with a sign hanging over them that said: “Graphic Designer For Sale”. It was an interesting marketing ploy, and of course I felt bad for him. But, if this was 1929 he would have had some competition. I mean we are talking about one person. One person out of thousands at work downtown. It is to bad, but that is capitalism. The free market system gets sick from time to time. We celebrate the upturns, but we loathe the downturns. We need to understand that this happens. Everything is cyclical and this just happens from time to time. The prudent thing to do is not to bail out the investment banks, or save the auto makers. No, let them go bankrupt. If their business model is not working then they will fail. Don’t save them. Let them fail. It is capitalism healing itself, just as mother nature does. Instead let others lend, or make vehicles, perhaps they can do it better. Check out these images from Foreign policy. I would argue that they really are not that bad. Just because we see a for rent sign on Madison Avenue doesn’t mean that the world is coming to an end. In fact, in may be just what we need to get better. Patching the problem now will only lead to more problems in the future.
Smashing Magazine posted some great points about managing corporate websites. This is a must read for anyone who cares about their web appearance.
One particularly bad site comes to mind. The landing page is ©1998, and the whole site looks stagnant to that year. The site title in Google result is their mailing address. Their lecture series links mentions events in the late 90′s and 2000. It’s time for an overhaul. About a decade overdue.
There is no doubt that crafting words sometimes is the best way to alleviate liability in a corporate setting. I do it all the time. But I have to say that I love the way that Google, Feedburner, Squidoo and other companies use succinct, plain English when communicating ideas to users. There is functionality in brevity. I have to take some exception to Jeff Barson’s post on simplicity, however. We cannot dumb down investment vehicles, loans, credit cards, and legislature to appease the lowest common denominator. In some respects it is simply enabling. There is nothing wrong with expecting people to educate themselves on adult matters, especially regarding finances. Perhaps a general lack of understanding and overall financial familiarity contributed to the current economic crises. I mean let’s face it, over the years the number of people over-leveraging themselves into homes and credit cards was fiscally unhealthy. In post WWII society, only so many homes held their savings in stock based equities. Over the 80′s and 90′s a tremendous amount of dormant wealth found its way into the stock market through boutique financial managers. Your grandmother probably didn’t do much investing in the 50′s, but by the 90′s she most likely had a few hundred shares of her favorite blue chip. This effectively inflated the market. Adults have a responsibility to educate themselves. Nothing pains me more than a college student who doesn’t understand stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. These are the same people who give little in depth thought to interest rate consequences and put zero percent down on ARM loans. No surprise that people under 25 make up the fastest growing age range for bankruptcy filings.
My shoes look great! Theo did a great job on them. And then he said I could decide the price. Just 10 minutes before I had heard him quote another customer 18 dollars. I gave him everything I had in my wallet, (which was more than enough). What do you charge your customers? Google tells me that sometimes he doesn’t charge at all. Of course people still pay.
I received an email today with a tag at the end advising me to consider the environmental effects before printing.
”Please consider the impact on the environment before printing this email or its attachments”.
This is being done in places of business which run through paper without thought at all. Is printing email a real problem? Is it pervasive? If you find yourself printing your emails at all there is a larger problem.Leave your self-promoting two cents off your signature line.
The writing was on the wall a few days ago when I did the calculation on Aubrey McClendon’s losses in his own Chesapeake Energy stock. After closing at a record low on Friday, it became public that McClendon was forced to sell “substantially all” of his stock in order to meet margin calls. Word on the street is that Anthony Petrello, President and COO of Nabors Industries (NBR), is in a similar boat. Seems margin calls are really biting the big boys, but its not just the men behind the companies who are hurting; it may be the companies themselves. The finance world seems to be buzzing about Chesapeake Energy’s corporate notes being called. Apparently they have been approached about paying down debt before insolvency becomes a reality. This isn’t even to mention that CHK may have some exposure to failed banking institutions.