Category: Business

Blazing new insurance trails

January 7th, 2010 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Government, Politics No comments

When my bathrobe belt got caught in the silverware drawer this morning, nearly giving me whiplash, it started me thinking.

Why isn’t the health-insurance industry bombarding us with new products? It’s clear that whatever way the wind ultimately blows, the days of “pre-existing condition” translating as “license to print money” are coming to a close.  Sure seems like an ideal time to drum up some business.

There’s nothing risky about blatant doom-based insurance marketing. When cancer insurance came out years ago, there was a collective gasp from those consumers who thought it opportunistic and macabre. But people got over their pique and bought the policies.

So, how about some coverage that meets untapped needs of aging boomers? Dedicated policies for deafness resulting from all those rock concerts? Stair-tumbles linked to depth-distorting reading glasses? I’m positive that many of us would jump at coverage meant to protect us from the costs of the inevitable carpal tunnel, blurred vision and squishy discs resulting from hunching over computers all day.

And, for sure, cosmetic-procedure protection would fly: Botox, lipo and eye lifts gone bad; sloppy tattoo removal, and please, please, please, some relief for those over-pursed victims of that lip-plumping, sheep-collagen injection nonsense.

Come on people, show some initiative. Those big ol’ insurance buildings and CEO salaries don’t pay for themselves you know.

Old airwaves

December 3rd, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, History, TV & Radio No comments


Whenever I read big news in the TV industry, I think back to the wild predictions made by my father in the 1960s.

He’d gone from radio (“The Night Owl Show”) to local TV (“From the Esso Desk…”) to management of local TV (a station wagon emblazoned with the NBC peacock) and finally to the nascent cable business, which his fellow New Englanders regarded as just to the left of Edsel manufacturing.

The early days were not exactly glamorous. I have fond memories of driving around with him while he craned his neck, looking up at power poles and cables. When he spotted someone illegally tapped into his cable service, he’d knock on their door and tell them to Get up that pole and disconnect it before I sue your ass. It worked quite well.

He could spin quite a vision of the future:

Someday, we’ll all have hundreds of channels to pick from. (This was in the days when NBC, ABC and CBS were it.)

Television sets will get really, really thin, like wallpaper. (Almost there, Dad.)

Every town will have its business on its own little channel. (We call it “local access.”)

I’m not sure what he would have made of the news today that Comcast is buying up, among other things, his old employer NBC. That’s such a leap from the early days of the television business that even he might need a minute to catch up.

There’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s a little like a phone company providing your conversations. All Comcast is NOT doing these days is leading me to the recliner and handing me the remote.

Naturally, this big-business buying up big-media makes me nervous. But one thing does hearten me.

First, despite the too-high rates and the Byzantine channel structure, I have to say that I always get very good customer service from Comcast. I periodically call to whine about the cost of this or that, or question some pay-per-view listing. (Really, I’m sure I only saw ‘Mall Cop’ once.) Each time I’ve gotten an articulate person who figures out how to solve the problem. No small feat.

So, maybe there will be a Nordstrom effect — other media companies, wireless providers, utilities and the like will have to adopt the customer-service model because the big kid on the block is doing it. We’ll see.

Look what you started, Dad.

You still working on that?

November 6th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Food No comments


New York restaurateur Bruce Buschel is this week’s hero.

His blog in The New York Times, in which he’s chronicling the planning and opening of his new eatery, does every diner in America a personal favor.

Buschel posted a two-part list titled “100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do.” True, by the time he gets to the last 40 or so, a reader is wondering where on earth he will find enough qualified servers. But a little overkill is fine with me.

Here’s why: I live in an excellent restaurant town–lots of good places, always new cuisines to try, original interpretations of old favorites, decent prices. And terrible server etiquette.

Servers here have a high need to interrupt table conversation to ask a question, and it is almost always a question that can wait. I have yet to try this, but I am quite confident that if I staged a weeping exchange with my tablemate at almost any restaurant in Portland, the server would still butt in and ask if I needed hot sauce.

Servers also routinely try to take my plate when I’m done, despite the fact that my husband has eaten only one-third of his meal. (Why don’t they just hang a sign around my neck that says SHE EATS TOO FAST?)

They touch the rim of the water glasses. They stack every plate in a towering, precarious pile instead of clearing quietly or using a tray.

There are exceptions, of course. Places with good, professional servers. Interestingly, they are often very modest establishments. (See here and here for two such places.)

I’m tempted to print out the “100 tips” and start slipping it under the other tip…the 20 percent I leave even when the service is rotten.

“A (huge) jug of wine, a (giant) loaf of bread, and thou…”

October 28th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Ethics, Food, Government, Politics, Shopping & Necessities No comments

Some big dogs can learn new tricks, to wit: Costco has agreed to accept food stamps at most of its locations.

This is very good news. At first the giant warehouse store (headquartered in Issaquah, Washington) said no to the idea, assuming the $50 annual fee was too much of a deterrent to people getting government aid. (Store execs were probably also wary of dealing with the government paperwork involved, and it’s hard to blame them for that.)

It’s true that membership fees and big-discount sizes of stuff are tricky for thinner wallets. When broke, you often spend more to get less. You buy small sizes of things because the sticker price is lower. The fact that the $3 bottle of ketchup is half the size of the bottle that sells for $4 doesn’t matter. You have $3 today, not $4, and you need ketchup today, not the promise of cheaper condiments all month.

But this is not a hard-and-fast rule for poor people any more than it is for folks of means. Costco pilot programs showed a level of nuance in shopper trends that’s been overlooked. It seems that people on food stamps are indeed willing and organized enough (imagine!) to plan ahead, spend more upfront, and save money. People gladly get away from the $3 ketchup behavior if it is really worth their while.

The success of the Costco food-stamp pilots may also be helped by the fact that a $50 membership can be shared with another “household member” and Costco doesn’t check to see if that person with the extra card is really, truly your sister who lives in the attic. This benefit is already widely claimed by people not on food stamps, trust me.

It also helps that the visuals of giant-sized products are so enticing. There is something about the sight of 4 pounds of Rice Krispies and a half-gallon of shampoo that makes one feel somewhat more secure, as do the vats of red licorice and hunks of Tillamook cheddar cheese. If I have clean hair and snacks, all is not lost.

Given the huge amount of taxpayers’ money that has been handed over to banks and automakers to little positive effect, perhaps the feds should subsidize warehouse-shopping memberships and local-transit routes that serve Costco locations. (The stores are usually a long walk from the nearest bus stop, and you still see people climbing aboard with a shrink-wrapped raft-size cargo of toilet paper.)

Costco’s long check-out lines are full of well-dressed people pushing carts of fine wines, gourmet cheeses and premium meats. It’s a good thing to open the doors to people who actually need cheaper food.

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Publish: yes. Perish: no

October 9th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Books, Business No comments

There’s a book titled Gus the Great that I re-read every few years. Published in 1947, the novel was written by Thomas W. Duncan, who Time magazine called “a down-and-out ex-Harvard man.”

It’s the very engaging tale of a likable con man who runs a circus, and it made the author a dazzling $250,000 when it sold 750,000 copies and became a Book of the Month Club selection and a movie. The first thing the down-and-out Duncan bought was a new land-yacht of a Chrysler convertible, which is reason enough to admire him.

I’ve owned a few copies of Gus the Great over the years–they tend to wander off–and I buy them from Powell’s World of Books or search for a copy online. So far, I’ve been able to find a copy when I want one.

I thought of that book today when I read “A Library to Last Forever,” the op-ed piece in The New York Times by Google exec Sergey Brin. He’s not gloating, but Brin is clearly enjoying the fact that it looks like there will finally be an agreement between his company and the various groups of angry authors who challenged Google’s book digitizing project. (For a brief news story updating the lawsuit progress, click here.)

I’ve been inclined to buy into the image of Google-as-Goliath. The argument that the books would otherwise remain out of print (and hard for average readers to find) wasn’t quite persuading me that this monster-sized digitizing project was a good thing.

But now I’m converted. In the end, I think, readers will be the real winners. The way this has played out–helped by the noisy lawsuits by the Author’s Guild and the Association of American Publishers–means that authors and their heirs will get a piece of the action, and books now available only in academic or private collections will be within reach of regular folks. Even out-of-work, ex-Harvard men.

Want your cubicle back? Too bad.

August 17th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Economy No comments

A blog entry in The New York Times traces job losses for both wage-workers and self-employed types in 2008 and 2009. The pace of job loss has slowed for self-employed workers, and writer Scott A. Shane, a professor at Case Western, asks readers to theorize on why this might be.

Any minute now some government economist is going to declare this to be a good indicator that things are starting to turn around. I won’t buy it. and here’s why.

Before the Neo-Depression hit, we were a country increasingly in love with the idea of self-employment. Along with that Bill Gates/Nirvana model of a lonely genius or two and their potentially lucrative start-up, a lot of people just love the idea of escaping the confines of an office where a boss always looms, where time clocks and dress codes exist. (As a bonus, self-employed people rarely get charged with harassment or creating a hostile work environment by making an off-color remark.)

But self-employment comes with the downside of financial insecurity. When I worked for a newspaper, an unproductive week might have earned me a few glares from my editor, but I still got paid. These days, a slow week means no money and glares from my creditors.

In flush times, this no-money glitch drives a lot of us back to selling our souls to the company store. But in the current rotten job market, there are no easy ways for we PJ-wearing homeworkers to slink back into the 9-to-5.

Hence, we stay put, and that’s why that graf in the NYT blog item shows the job-loss rate for self-employed folks flattening out.

Discrimination in due-diligence clothing

August 7th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Ethics No comments

Employers are running credit checks right and left. Not just for money-handling jobs either. You wanna be a dog washer? A waiter? Movie-ticket ripper? Hair cutter? Willing to check urine samples or flip tofu burgers? Sure hope you’ve always paid your bills on time.

This has less to do with employer vigilance and more to do with how easy and cheap it is to do these checks online. It is also a sorting tool when 172 people apply for a $9 per hour job a company has posted on Craigslist. They pay someone $7.90 per hour to type names and Social Security numbers into a credit-check service, then draw a line through anyone without a clear slate.

News stories like the recent one by Jonathan D. Glater in The New York Times have begun to make the case that this probing creates a Catch 22: The guy out of work and behind on debts can’t get work because he’s out of work and behind on debts.

Even ignoring the thundering irony of worrying about worker-bee credit histories while bank CEOs blow their noses on $100 bills from your retirement account, I’m surprised that there isn’t more fury erupting over this practice.

I blame it on the fact that many job-seekers are unaware that supplying personal info on applications allows some stranger to look at their financial past. They assume such checking is meant to look for criminal activities.

A parallel problem is the huge increase in personal information floating around. My various gigs in Portland bring me into a lot of offices, and nearly all of them handle applications very casually. That Social Security number of yours is safer on the wall of the men’s room at the Greyhound station.

I can only hope that this will all follow the same trajectory as recreational drugs and tattoos in the workplace. Years ago you could not apply to be a cop if you’d ever been around anyone who even thought about smoking pot, now you can be a former stoner running an effective gang unit. Two years ago there were few salespeople with visible tattoos beyond the occasional rose-on-an-ankle. Yesterday I bought makeup from a personable young woman in Nordstrom with what looked like the Manhattan Yellow Pages inked on her arms.

So, hang on folks. Someday soon those old credit woes won’t stand in the way of getting a job. You know, the one where you call people and harangue them about unpaid bills?

How dry I am

July 15th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Shopping & Necessities No comments

Here at Type Like the Wind, we’re very cautious about product endorsement.

It’s a big responsibility, as well as a slippery slope. One glowing review here, another one there and — bam! Next thing you know, I’m sitting here with my PJs covered with brand logos, like a NASCAR driver.

Yet there are some products so superior that they simply must be singled out. Introducing DampRid by WM Barr. This busy little company, based in Memphis, makes stuff that does some utterly thankless work.

Its calcium chloride-based goods suck up moisture without machinery, toxic fumes or slurping sounds. This may not sound like a big deal, but if your closets smelled like a wet (and perhaps, ill) small animal when left to their own devices, you’d love DampRid too.

My personal favorite from the DampRid line is the Fragrance-free Hanging Moisture Absorber. This device is simple: a two-part clear-plastic bag on a small hanger. The top section has a chunk of what I presume is calcium chloride, a substance about which I know absolutely nothing except that it’s white and described in two words. The bottom bag is empty. Within about 3.5 weeks, that bag is full of water and the clump of white stuff is gone.

(That’s in my closet. My husband got the one in which it takes twice as long for the water-bag to fill. I’m sure he didn’t realize the vastly different moisture levels when he gallantly insisted I take the slightly larger closet. The one with the gigantic, sweating water-heater in the corner.)

Once I got over feeling creeped out that my clothes hang in the indoor equivalent of a protected wetland, I came to enjoy the Fragrance-free Hanging Moisture Absorber for its cool magic-trick performance. I don’t actually watch it work (that would be just weird) but I do check it every few days. When it’s full, I empty the bag and put in a new one.

(A true Portlander would use the collected water for plants. I pour it down the drain, listening nervously for the Eco-Police to pull up in their Prius, with solar-powered blue lights flashing.)

I order the Fragrance-free Hanging Moisture Absorbers directly from the company because no store in Greater Portland sells the unscented ones. Sadly, the “Fresh Scent” version turns the closet into a place that smells like an ill, wet, small animal who made a long stop by the perfume bar at Macy’s before coming over. I get a $35.95 six-pack every few months; probably the only six-pack of any kind I’ve purchased in 20 years.

I’m grateful that whatever it takes to assemble these products is happening way out there at WM Barr. That somewhere out there is a big, big pile of calcium chloride and people willing and able to shovel it into small bags, then send it across the country.

I worry about a lot of things: unrest in the Middle East, hate crimes, my own inevitable bone and memory loss; the fate of newspapers. One thing I don’t worry about is my closet. It’s important to take comfort where one can find it.

Taking it on the chin

July 11th, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, Economy, Shopping & Necessities No comments


I keep hearing and reading that tough economic times mean much lower profits for luxury and cosmetic services. This is good news for the little people: On the off chance that one of us gets called for a job interview, we can get a chic new haircut at the last minute, in time to sit down with the 12-year-old manager and enthuse about teamwork.

Evidence of frightened exfoliators surfaced here last week, when every house on the block got a discount-coupon from a posh new massage-skincare-haircut place a few zip codes away.

I’d say the 30-percent savings on chemical-facial peels isn’t going to spark much interest in this neck of the woods, but I could be wrong. For all I know, everyone will look fresher and younger the next time we meet for a day-long graffiti paint-out.

This morning I read that cosmetic surgeons aren’t letting any grass grow under their Guccis either. An article in The New York Times describes growing popularity of a kind of plastic surgery that should go a long way to make up for the decline in nose-job work.

The story is about Marcus Davis, a 35-year-old boxer and martial-arts ninja whose face has been stitched up 77 times. Bleeding profusely is not good in the ring; it stops the fight. Not only was Davis an easy bleeder–apparently just the sight of his waffle-textured mug made judges jump to the conclusion that he was the lesser man.

A Las Vegas plastic surgeon “burred down the bones around Davis’s eye sockets. He also removed scar tissue around his eyes and replaced it with collagen made from the skin of cadavers,” according to R.M. Schneiderman’s article.

We’re all making adjustments these days: cheaper grades of beef, fewer movies, stalling on car payments. We’re all a little scared. Even as I type this, somewhere in a medical-office building close by, there is a board-certified plastic surgeon poring over Boxing Monthly magazine and hoping for the best.