This Is Not News

Me to Alex, as she’s in the middle of a project: Don’t make too much of a mess here.

Pattie: Let me amend that. Don’t make a mess.

Gotta admit, at 11 PM that’s a fairly rational amendment.

I’ve been watching the Saints destroy the Lions for the last hour or two and trying to figure out what to write. Don’t have the energy for much, but I’ve been reading about Penn Alexander, a school that the School District of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania run in West Philadelphia. Like Masterman High School, this is one of those success stories that Philadelphians line up to get their children into. (Literally, in the case of Penn Alexander – the registration line starts the night before signups begin.) The thing that keeps running through my head is, with examples of success stories in front of us, why aren’t we trying to apply those lessons elsewhere? It’s like no one knows how to learn from experience.

Anyway, here are some links I was reading tonight:

West Philly Local

Daily Pennsylvanian

University of Pennsylvania

CityPaper

These days, some people view holiday shopping as a sport or game: collecting the best coupons, sussing out the best deals, beating the crowds, picking the right stores at the right time, suriving the long lines without having to use the bathroom… It takes physical and mental strength, right? If shopping is your game, this is your season. So lace up your comfy shoes, fire up your shopping smart phone apps, and enjoy.

One thing I will ask you to keep in mind this season is that there are no extra points or bonus credits for ripping apart retail employees in the course of your shopping. They are not your enemy, there’s no need to treat them as such. I’ve assembled a list of five things you may not know about retail employees which I hope encourages you to spread a little more holiday spirit and little less retail rage when you shop this season.

1. Retail employees work insane hours.
In the somewhat fictional, sepia-toned time of Norman Rockwell’s painting of an improbably large and perfect Thanksgiving turkey, the only people working on this holiday were police officers, firefighters, hospital workers, and other essential workers, most of whom got holiday pay for sacrificing their “family time for the greater good. In our high-definition, modern reality, Thanksgiving seems to have become yet another meal we rush through in order to get to something else. That ‘something else’ being a sale on the latest gaming console at the local electronics store that requires you to line up at 5pm for the 10pm store opening. Think about it: if you’re in line at 5pm on Thanksigiving, and the store opens at 10pm on Thanksgiving, it means that dozens of employees who work at that store were there all day, stocking, cleaning, and getting the store ready for you. They didn’t eat Thanksgiving dinner and they will likely be there for most of the night and into the following day. For some, they’ll get six to eight hours off, to eat, sleep, change, etc. before they need to be back again for the next shift. No one gets Black Friday off, not if they want to keep their jobs.

And Black Friday is just the start. Most stores have extended hours throughout the holiday season. That means closing at 11pm, restocking through the night and re-opening at 7am for nearly eight weeks. If the person ringing up your purchase looks a little bleary-eyed, this is why.

2. Retail salaries are low, with very few benefits.
Sure the hours are insane, but retail workers get paid well to compensate, right? Wrong. Labor unions are non-existent at the major retailers these days so there’s very little pressure for national retailers to pay very much above minimum wage. That fact, coupled with high unemployment, means that there is no shortage of new workers to replace the ones who complain, burnout, or get fired. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average non-commissioned retail sales employee makes just over $9 per hour with few, if any, benefits to boost their overall compensation.

Most retailers manage their employee payrolls systematically to keep the majority of their employees just under the threshold for which the law demands that the employees be given medical and other benefits. So that means if you work full-time and have medical coverage, the person waiting on you in your favorite store works one or two hours less per week and gets none.

Most retail employees are eligible for a modest employee discount at the stores where they work, often between 10% and 15%. However, these days, any savvy online shopper with a good search engine can match or exceed that on any given sale day so can it really be called a perk?

3. Retail workers do not order stock or set the sales.
So your favorite store put ads out everywhere touting the fact that they will have half-price Whatevers on sale starting at 11pm on Thanksgiving night. Those Whatevers are sooooooo expensive and hard to find, so you get yourself there, line up in the cold, and have your credit card at the ready. But cue sad trombone, the ad didn’t exaclty say that each store was only getting two of said Whatevers and the extreme couponer in line ahead of you got them both. So what now? Well, if you’re like most people, you march over to the first store employee you see and you tear them a new one, right?

Um…why exactly? Let’s think about this. Did the store employee you’re ripping apart actually order the shipment of Whatevers from China? Did he or she actually decide that each store would only get two? Did he or she decide how much the discount would be? The answer to all of those is almost certainly no. Let’s get this straight, the people who make ordering, shipping, and cost decisions for major retailers make way more than $9 per hour, don’t wear logo imprinted polo shirts, and are sure as Hell not going to be in a store on 11pm on Thanksgiving night. Store employees, even store managers have no say in these decisions. The stores are expected to execute sales directives, make sales goals, and keep costs down. That’s it. Even if the employee you tear apart passes on your complaint to the “higher ups” it’s likely to get lost in the internal bureacracy because corporate offices never take employee complaints seriously.

If you have a complaint, make it to corporate yourself. Do it publicly on their Facebook page or to their Twitter account. The likelihood for real change or compensation is much higher.

4. If they could open more registers, they would. Seriously.
Long retail lines during the holiday season are a fact of life but isn’t it infuriating when there are eight registers and only four of them are open? I completely agree! Someone get me the store manager so I can tell him or her that this simply cannot be tolerated. Yes, the same store manager who has no power in the corporate structure and whose promotion to store manager likely meant that he or she gets to work twice as many hours for a fixed salary instead of an hourly rate with some overtime. The store manager who is given a strict holiday payroll budget in September which is based on maxmizing profits, not on customer service. Give it a shot. You can certainly make your opinions known. You can even yell or scream a bit. It’s not going to be the first time this manager has gotten yelled at today and it probably won’t be the last. It also probably won’t get any more registers open either. My advice, shop early in the morning or later in the day on weekdays, as store hours allow. The lines will be shorter.

5. Retail workers have not declared “war” on Christmas, they have to follow a script.
Thanks to the modern innovation that is mystery shopping, almost every second of your three-to-five minute interaction at the cash register of a major retailer is now scripted. They have to ask you if you found everything you need (even though there’s not much they can do if you didn’t), they have to pitch you on the store credit card (even though the last thing they want to do with a long line of customers is check your credit), and they have to give you a cheery greeting and farewell (even though they’re probably so tired they can’t remember what year it is). The fact that the last item may be “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” or whatever seasonal holiday you enjoy, is not their choosing. The corporate office likely wrote the script based on focus group research and whole bunch of other factors that have nothing to do with the person packing up your newly purchased sweaters. The employees have to follow it to the letter or they can be fired or, at best, lose any slim hope they have of bonus pay. So feel free to reply “Merry Christmas” in your snottiest voice at the employee who tells you to have a “Happy Holiday.” That embodies to spirit of the season and will likely make their day.

Or you could both just say “have a nice day” and mean it.

Bottom line: it’s all about profits.
I know it sounds like I’m going out of my way to make excuses for retail employees and I admit to being somewhat biased. I managed a retail shopping mall for three years. While there are lousy retail employees out there (I certainly fired my share), the vast majority just want to do their jobs well, earn their pay, and support their families. They don’t want to make your lives harder nor do they want to ruin your holiday. They rely on shoppers and need you to come back. Unfortunately, most of the key decisions that impact the shoppping experience are made by people who don’t set foot in the stores at all, let alone during the holiday season. Keep in mind, most major retailers in this country are publically traded companies. A successful holiday season for them maximizes profits to shareholders, not positive experiences for customers. It’s not likely to change until customers remind them, en masse, that the two are not mutally exclusive.

Happy Shopping!

On the way home from a walk the other night, I made sure to remind Alex that the fact that the Phillies have won the National League East in half of the baseball seasons that she has been alive should not, in any way, be taken as normal. I explained to her that I started watching baseball around Game 2 of the 1983 World Series – so I even missed the one game of that series that they won, along with the rest of that 1976-1983 run. So we’re trying not to take division titles for granted, even though I’d sure like to see Roy Halladay, Cliff Lee, Raul Ibanex and everyone else who joined the team after 2008 get their turn with a World Series ring. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m going to go back to pinching myself.

Had my sister and her boyfriend over today for pizza and a game of Ticket to Ride. Once again we relied on Alton Brown’s dough recipe from his grilled pizza episode, although we made the pizza in the oven. Nearly killed my mixer making a double batch of dough because I forgot to use the paddle wheel to mix the ingredients before switching to the dough hook, but we got through it. Pattie and Alex got to laugh at me putting an ice pack on top of the mixer, the pizza was tasty, and we have leftovers.

We also just finished up a batch of pork tacos using the slow cooker recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Everyday. I love this cookbook. Great salsa recipes. I’m trying to think of how to modify this recipe to make barbecue pork.

Not sure what the next major project will be, but it may be time for fried chicken before too long.

Read this story by Jayson Stark about how detailed scouting information on hitters in baseball is stored, analyzed, and disseminated. It’s a great piece of writing that dives into one of the big reasons that scoring in baseball is down. Teams now know so much about individual hitters’ tendencies that they can craft a specific game plan geared to exploiting each player’s weaknesses and getting them out.

Stark is a longtime Philadelphia resident, so it’s not surprising that he uses an example that’s familiar to most Phillies fans. Ryan Howard had a couple of gigantic offensive years when he first became a regular. But as teams gathered more data on him, they realized what a phenomenally bad idea it was to throw him a fastball, so they’ve done it less and less often. They also move their fielders from where they traditionally would position themselves to the spots where Howard usually hits the ball. The result is that while Howard has had good numbers since his early years, they haven’t been as good.

As Stark says, more and more teams are using “unconventional” defense on more and more hitters. Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon sits down with an iPad each morning and combs through the statistics his organization has compiled in order to devise defensive positioning and pitching approaches for that night’s game.

There are a couple of things that fascinate me about this story. One is that I like the example of a way that technology has made specific information available and accessible. We hear a lot about how the Web and Google put a lot of general information at everyone’s fingertips, but this is much more detailed information than you find on Wikipedia or Retrosheet, and it’s easier for people to process because it can be presented using the iPad.

The other is that Stark suggests that even as Maddon’s Rays have shown a lot of success with their defensive shifts, many teams don’t replicate his aggressiveness because they’re too comfortable with traditional approaches. It’s an interesting example of how information can help you – if you’re willing to use it. That lesson applies to a lot more than just baseball.

I have spent the last several months tracking websites and doing research in order to buy a new computer this holiday season. I’m thinking that instead of ordering from a place like Dell, I’ll go with one of the smaller operations that lets you pick exactly what pieces of hardware you want. So I know a lot more about cases and power supplies than I did when the summer started.

As much fun as I’m having, though, part of me wonders if I need a computer the way I used to. I bought my current desktop in 2006 when I was finishing my dissertation and needed to use a desktop publishing program to lay out the whole thing. Since then, I haven’t really been doing the graphic design or image editing that would require a really powerful machine.

I still do a decent amount of writing and reading on the Web, but I am very fortunate to have a school-issued laptop for that. I also use it to do my grading using a program provided by the school – although that’s changing to a web-based app, so by next year I may only need a tablet with Internet access to do my grades. The major drawback with the laptop is that I don’t love the laptop keyboard. It reminds me too much of the keyboards I used in college, when I wound up with a very sore left wrist. I have an ergonomic keyboard on my desktop. Thing is, the desktop is downstairs. The laptop lets me hang out in the living room or the dining room and not feel like I’m ignoring my family. I’ve started using Google Docs to do some of my writing and record-keeping, so I may not even need to buy a copy of Microsoft Office anymore.

If push came to shove I could probably do a lot of the reading and writing with a tablet, but as much fun as the iPad appears to be, I haven’t found the killer app that’s the reason to pick one up.

If I’m honest with myself, there is really only one reason why I am even thinking about buying a new computer, and that’s computer games. I would need to do some major upgrading to my current machine to be able to play Mass Effect 3 when it comes out, so it makes more sense to buy a new one. I’m hoping that if I do get an upgraded desktop, I’ll try to do some video editing or other projects for school that will leverage all that power. I’ll probably pick up a Blu-Ray drive to see if that’s worthwhile. But right now, I don’t know if there are that many tasks on my To Do list that require all the computing power that Intel and company are making available.

Still, in the end, I guess I’ll think of something.

Started a new school year today, although the students aren’t back yet. That’ll happen over the next couple of days. But the start of the year has me thinking back. 15 years ago I started my senior ear of college at Fordham University. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I absolutely would not trade my college experience for just about anything. And since now it’s my job to help high school students prepare to have similarly rewarding experiences, I have to think about why it was so valuable to me.

Certainly there was an academic component. I built a strong foundation in my coursework that helped me get into grad school. I barely had any adjuncts or TAs in four years of classes. Heck, my roommate from junior year is a veterinarian, my roommate from senior year is a medical doctor, and two of my editors-in-chief from the newspaper went on to get doctoral degrees. Lots of my friends were no less brilliant for not getting time-consuming and expensive terminal degrees. (Some folks might say that makes them even more brilliant, but that’s just my student loan debt talking.) Rubbing against all that brain power in classrooms and in late-night conversations was a great experience that sped up my thinking and development on a lot of topics.

But the truth is, I was a humanities major. I could get Plato’s Republic out of the library a lot cheaper than I got it from the campus bookstore, let alone the tuition. With the Internet today making more video lectures and discussion for a possible, the truth is that someone who is truly interested in learning the material for the sake of learning the material, rather than getting a credential to tick off a box on a job application, can do so without the actual college experience.

I still feel like I got a lot of value from college. There is a social element, of course. I met many of my best friends at Fordham, and 15 years ago I started dating Pattie. 12 years of marriage and one wonderful daughter later, that seems to be working out. College can’t help but introduce you to a bunch of people, and if you play your cards right you’ll find people you can connect with. There are lots of people in the world, though, so if you keep your eyes open you could probably make friends without college, too.

The thing is, it was easier for me to learn that material and easier for me to make those friends because the traditional college experience was, for me, its own little isolated world, a microcosm that brought a lot of people into a relatively confined environment and forced them to bounce off of one another. It accelerated the processes. And because it was a small world, I could explore many different sides of it. In college, I was an academic. I was a journalist and writer. I was a program planner. I wrote a screenplay; I co-wrote a play and got to have it staged. I lived on my own for the first time without having to worry about every single detail that being independent requires. I got to grow up, figure out who I wanted to be and build up some resources to help me become that person. For me, it worked, and that’s why I will forever be grateful to Fordham.

So, one day after extolling the benefits of my urban lifestyle, we drove two for two hours to Lancaster so that we could sit in a horse-drawn tour buggy for an hour. Due to a scheduling conflict, Alex missed her Girl Scout troop’s trip to Lancaster earlier this year, so we had promised her we’d take her out ourselves. It felt good to check another box off the To Do list for the summer.

It was also good to drive through the countryside and then get face to face with the animals that provide us with milk, butter and other dairy goods. Much as I like city life, it wouldn’t be possible without people doing the farm work, and it’s good to have a reminder that the Milk Fairy doesn’t come around to refill Acme’s shelves. The farm that we visited is an interesting mix of old and new . . . we passed one-room schoolhouses along with houses with solar panels on the roof.

Once the tour was over, we promptly indulged our consumer tendencies by visiting an outlet center so I could shop for a new year’s worth of clothes for work.

After satisfying our daily requirement of irony, we visited with friends of ours who are teaching at Franklin and Marshall College. It amazes me sometimes how many of my friends went into the education field, but I guess that’s what happens when you hang out with the people who like school.

So I’m trying to make a pot of chili. Because i like to make my life difficult, I made most of the chili Tuesday and then put it in the fridge so that the flavors would meld or deepen or do whatever they do. My plan tonight was to add the beans and actually eat some chili. But it turns out that in my infinite Daveness, I bought a can of refried pinto beans instead of whole pinto beans. So I walked around the corner, picked up the beans and a couple of other things at the local supermarket, and came home.

At which point my can opener promptly broke, leaving me with four sealed cans between a finished pot of chili and me.

OK, a couple of minutes to collect myself, and I went back around the corner. As I was walking to the supermarket, I saw that the door of Alex’s dance school was open and her dance teacher was standing there. So I crossed the street to make some small talk, and as it turns out the DVD of her dance recital was ready so I was able to pick that up. So, bonus errand done, I returned to the supermarket, got my can opener, and now I intend to see these beans stewing in a pot of chili soon after I hit Publish.

I live in a neighborhood that’s sort of a cross between a fully urban area and the suburbs. We have blocks of rowhomes, but also office parks and plenty of shopping centers/strip malls. It’s not fully walkable, but just being able to walk around the corner to buy groceries is something I value. That I can wind up unexpectedly crossing another errand off my To Do list during that five minute walk is a bonus that reminds me that life in a spread-out suburb is probably not something I’m cut out for.

I’m writing this on my laptop in the middle of the second power outage of the evening. Hopefully I’ll get power back so that I can connect to the Internet and posit it before midnight, but either way I’m going to count my post-every-day streak as intact.

We have enough candles to see in the living room, and for now we can use our cell phones and flashlights, so we’re not totally unplugged. Trying to keep a nine-year-old girl entertained without television, Wii, or Internet is proving to be a challenge. I can’t say that I’m providing a very good example, since I’m here using a computer. But once I finish writing this I’ll see if there are any puzzles we can work out by the candlelight. We may have to crack open the freezer and try to eat some of the ice cream before it melts. It’s a tough burden, but we’ll try to bear it.

The funny thing is, there are a lot of non-wired things I’d like to do; plenty of books to read or rough notes to write. They’re kinda hard to do at 10:30 at night, though. I’m definitely gonna have to give Mr. Edison some extra thanks when we do important inventions in World History this year.

(Note: Power’s back. For now. DUN DUN DUN!)