Greed uber alles

The idea that a major employer like General Motors is bound by some notion of "social contract" is as good as dead.

Greed is the ultimate value these days among the keeners coming out of MBA programs. Greed makes some people filthy rich. Greedy people can get rich enough to buy the people who make the rules. Then you've got a closed-loop self-devouring perpetual greed machine on the loose...


That can only end badly, as it is ending badly for those three thousand families in Oshawa. As it has for 16,000 Sears employees and their pensions.

A couple of greedbags were allowed to plunder CP Rail, destroying over five thousand jobs but walking away with billions for their efforts.

Meanwhile, our precious princeling billows progressive hot air into the heavens in such volumes that we'll never meet our emissions targets, while simultaneously buying us pipelines, because the greedbags who own our oil demand them.

And don't expect to get the whole story from your friendly corporate news media; the greedbags own those too.

Lawnmower fear and loathing at Sears

So me and the Farm Manager have been on the lawn-mower hunt of late. Yup, the unit I bought at Sears not more than three or four years ago has done gone for a shit.

Craftsman. Used to be a good name. Something that would last, if not a lifetime, at least a long while.

Three or four years?... get outta here!

So we do the circle tour; Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Home Depot... there's a reasonably good deal on John Deere riding mowers at Home Depot.

I'm a little ambivalent about the riding mowers. In my world, or at least the place I've thought of as my world, a riding mower signifies that you're a fat old guy who is afraid of actually pushing a push mower around the yard because it's an all-too-obvious invitation for a heart attack.

This is of course a self-defeating proposition. You think you're a fat old guy at risk of a heart attack, so you avoid exercise? Hello!

So I've always taken a certain amount of pride in being the fat old guy who pushes the push mower around his half acre of lawn. God damn it, I'd rather die getting the exercise than avoiding it!

I've got some reservations about even stopping off at Sears, because even if that three or four years was actually five or six, it's not nearly enough, but we stopped in anyways. They had a sale on the push mowers, and by God if that didn't rekindle my determination to push a push-mower for as long as I can before I decamp to the ride-on camp.

I was ready to forgive and forget the piece of shit they sold me last time round.

First thing the Farm Manager says when we meet the salesperson is "we've had a lawnmower breakdown and the dandelions are a foot high."

So we scope out the selection on sale and, after a good half hour consultation with the sales team, settle on the model that's $100 off, has the big back wheels, and the premium Briggs and Stratton motor with 7.5 foot-pounds of torque.

Oh, we sold the last one yesterday...

No problem, I'll take the floor model.

Oh, we can't sell you the floor model; somebody could come along and want to see its features.

So when can you get me the mower you just sold me?

The sales team has a huddle and figure there might be a shipment on the truck that's coming in next Thursday, but they're gonna check on the computer just to make sure.

They disappear for fifteen minutes, and come back with the news that it'll take a week to ten days to get me the lawnmower they just sold me.

Huh?

Sorry, but by then the dandelions in the yard will be two feet high...

You can't sell me the floor model because somebody might want to see it... and what do you think will happen when you explain to them that they'll have to wait a week to ten days to get one?

They'll most likely do what I did; get their lawnmower somewhere else.

A day at the farm

Couple of years ago I bought one of those Craftsman socket sets when Sears had them on sale at a good knock-down on the regular price. Every socket you could ever want, in metric and imperial, plus three socket wrenches (1/4, 3/8, and 1/2 inch drives), plus extensions, plus deep sockets...

I was set for life!

Not that I haven't been set for life before. There was not a socket or a ratchet in that kit that I hadn't bought at least once before. But they get lost. They get borrowed and not brought back. They get misplaced.

My rationale for buying this kit was that I'd never have to look for a misplaced, lost, or borrowed socket again. Everything I could ever want was right there in one convenient package!

Plus, at 60% off, it was one of those deals you pretty much had to buy anyway.

So the other day I'm planning a trip into the woodlot with the Stihl and the wood-wagon to fetch a couple of weeks worth of wood. Gotta take care of a couple details first. The wood-wagon has been sitting forlornly behind the woodshed since July. The tractor has been parked in front of the garage since August. Gotta do some battery shuffling to fire up the tractor and get on with the day.

The Escape has been my main wood-fetcher for the past couple of months, but the battery doesn't want to hold a charge anymore. Gonna swap out the battery for the one in the F-150. It's got four flat tires but a strong battery. My original plan when I bought the Escape was to swap the tires onto the 150, and I think the reason that never happened was because it was just way too much fun to blast that Escape around the property... up and down the hills, over the fence-rows, donuts galore in the pastures; hell, I bought the thing for $400 thinking it was a great deal 'cause it had $600 worth of rubber on it, and then I got a bonus couple of thousand dollars worth of entertainment out of it!

But that was then and this was now. I'm gonna swap in the battery out of the big truck, which was new just this past spring (the battery, not the truck). That's when I realized I need a 5/16 deep socket. That's because there's a battery tie-down secured by a couple of threaded rods that you have to undo before you can lift out the battery.

No problem! I've got that complete compendium of socket sizes just a sittin' in the pantry cupboard! I'm ready for any eventuality! THIS MOMENT is exactly why I bought that kit!

So I go to grab it out of that pantry cupboard...

Hmm... not there.

WTF?

Well, maybe I took it out, and although it's highly unlikely, maybe, just maybe, I forgot to put it back?..

So I check every cupboard in the pantry.

I check the wood-shed.

Been doing a bit of furnace maintenance, so I check downstairs.

I check upstairs too... not that I recall having the tools up there, but I'm running out of places to check.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

WTF? I buy this magnificent socket set so I'll never lose another socket again, and I've lost the entire kit???

How the fuck is such a thing even possible?

Let me tell you about my underpants

What?

You don't want to know about my underpants?

How is such a thing even possible?

I bet if my last name was Kardashian or Jenner you would have a keen interest in my underpants... especially if I wasn't wearing any!

Yup, that's what "Western civilization" has come to.

Frankly, I'm glad your're not interested in my underwear. I'm not interested in yours either.

Underwear is something to be worn, not seen.

I think that's the point that poor chappie down in Guelph was trying to make.

Unfortunately for him, the school board is now convening "focus groups" to get to the bottom of his barbaric misuse of language.

Once you've got a gaggle of sunshine-list education superintendents on your case, you're well and truly screwed.

And even though I'm sure you don't want to hear another word about my underwear, let me leave you with a tip.

Last time I was at Sears they wanted over thirty bucks for a two-pack of name brand undershorts.

Picked up a six-pack of Fruit-of-the-Looms, as good a brand name as brand names get, for $14 at the GT Boutique just yesterday.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Sears.

Hillbilly blogger gets serious cred upgrade

They don't make stuff like they used to. When we bought our Kenmore washer-dryer combo not five years ago or so, we figured it would be the last time that appliance purchase would have to be made. I mean really, a washer or dryer is good for twenty years easy, ain't it? By then I'll be sitting in a puddle of drool in the corner of the nursing home, waiting for somebody to change my diaper.

So last week the washer unit of our stacking combo goes for a shit. Hardly five years old. What the hell is that all about?

Damned right they don't make shit like they used to... now they just make shit!

The Farm Manager got right cranky about this turn of events. She was back at Sears with a bad case of appliance rage. I felt sorry for the sales folks... they were ducking for cover. Hey, let's not blame them. It wasn't some "sales associate" at your local department store that invented planned obsolescence.

But if you try to keep a positive outlook, you can find a silver lining even in a unmitigated piss-off such as this. As Junior and I were wrestling the defunct washing machine onto the front porch, I suddenly realized something...

I have now got, right as of today, on the front porch here at Falling Downs,  a broke-down washing machine!

I can't tell you how thrilled I am to make it into the hillbilly elite!

New Al Qaeda no. 2 bumped back to third after old no. 2 returns from dead again

By golly it's hard to keep up with the line-up in that Al Qaeda of of the Arabian Penninsula franchise.

Typically we get the top guy about once a month, thereby earning everyone else in the command chain a move up. Just like the 12 assistant managers they used to have at the K-mart where I worked. M-1 gets sent to head office and the rest move up a number.

Hell, maybe while the original 19 hi-jackers were studying up on how to fly jets these other guys were studying the K-mart management model at Wharton.

But here's where things get confused. Seems we just wrote about the last no. 2 being dispatched to his appointment with the imaginary 77 virgins, but according to Reuters, he's baaaack!

What this will mean to the chain of command remains unclear. I know at K-mart they'd have a "management trainee cull" every once in awhile. Send the hapless shits over to Woolworths or Sears with explosive belts strapped to their hips... metaphorically speaking of course!

Of course it may be too early to start up a new Qaeda franchise somewhere else. That no. 2 may be back, but he won't be back for long.

Those drones are busier than ever.

Even when it's a month late, winter is always a complete surprise

It's the last week in December. Out of nowhere there's a six inch dump of snow overnight.

Who knew? Snow? In December? Who has ever heard of such a thing?

Needless to say, no one is prepared for such a surprise. Every tire store in town suddenly has a weeks worth of backlog on having snow tires installed. Many of them are sold out. Even Walmart is sold out.

Remember when TSC was remaindering their last snow-blowers back in March, at half price? You thought about it. Scratched your head and thought about it some more. Nah... you decided against saving that six or seven hundred dollars. After all, what with global warming, maybe you'll never see snow again.

Ha! Now you wake up with six inches of snow, that piece of crap 1980's era snow-blower you've been thinking about replacing won't start, and you hustle down to TSC or Sears or Walmart. Half price? No, in fact they're sold out and back-ordered. Really back ordered. If you put your money down today your snow-blower will be waiting for you mid-January.

In the meantime, you might as well pick up a snow shovel while you're there. You can't find the one you bought last year.

It's under the snow somewhere.

Kmart's never ending death spiral; an insiders account

By the time Sam Walton was born, Sebastian S. Kresge was one of the richest men in the world. If Sebastian had the slightest inkling that baby Sam would eventually erase Kresge from America's retail map, he would have found a way to strangle wee Sam in his crib.

This will come as a shock to the Falling Downs faithful, but I was once a Kmart insider. A very low-level insider, mind you, but an insider none the less.

I was a department head. No retail experience whatsoever. Down on my luck, but a fresh haircut saw me walk into a Kmart in the late seventies, fill out an application, and walk out as Manager of the Automotive Department.

Being a department manager had its perks and its responsibilities. One of the perks was access to the paperwork that showed the wholesale price of everything on offer in the store. We were selling twenty dollar items that cost us two bucks. Obscure automotive parts, but people bought them. No wonder Sebastian got rich.

Another perk was the perogative to arbitrarily create mark-downs. If one of my buddies came in looking for, say, a twenty foot extension ladder, we'd find a scratch on it, and voila, that hundred dollar ladder was marked down to twenty bucks.

One of the things I'll always remember is how many people were perfectly happy to screw their employer. The guy who ran the shoe department would wear a new pair of shoes home every day.

The part-time guy in the building supply department had a great thing going. He needed to call an assistant manager to open the shipping doors. Unlike the full time day shift "department manager", he wasn't entrusted with his own key. But once that door was open and the assistant manager had left, he'd be cutting the sweetest deals. Got your eye on a new bathroom vanity, regular price $399? If you've got fifty cash in your pocket it's yours while the door is open.

I personally take a dim view of stealing from my employer, but I admit I had a lucrative sideline. Medicinal herbs. It was an ideal setup. Kept a stash in my stock room. Folks always knew where to find me. Didn't have to hang out in pool halls and strip joints. Good for the customer too. They didn't have to venture to a pool hall or a strip joint. "Hey honey, I'm just going up to Kmart at the mall for a minute." Solved a lot of problems on both sides of the equation.

Alas, all good things come to an end. The downfall of my Kmart career can be attributed to a couple of young hotties in the pet department. In my relentless campaign to impress them, I'd have my 300 pound teenage assistant go down to the pet department and surreptitiously release a couple of canaries or budgies.

Then he and I would make like Stanley and Livingstone in the jungle, carrying a ladder and butterfly nets from one end of the store to the other. We even found some pith helmets somewhere. We'd zero in on the  awol bird, plant our ladder, and quietly hone in on it with the butterfly net.

This was a game you could extend indefinitely. Just make sure you scare the bird off with that net instead of catching it. To impress the gals in the pet department you'd have to catch it eventually of course, but this little gambit made for many fun days working at Kmart.

The management structure in the store was something to behold. Our store had as many as twelve assistant managers at one time. It was a company strategy, applied Darwinism at its finest. You'd have these twelve guys (I don't remember a single female assistant manager at the time) all out-doing one another to climb the corporate ladder.

When the big dogs from head office made a store visit, you had an absolute frenzy of ass-kissing. There would be a parade of vice presidents and regional managers and assistant managers snaking aisle by aisle through the store, everybody determined to demonstrate to the people further up the hierarchy that they were better than the person immediately ahead of them.

Given that my income from the sideline was several times my income as a department manager, I kept myself aloof from that sort of thing. I had purloined a TV and a Lay-Z-Boy recliner from the furniture department and had a little lounge area set up in my stock room.

One Saturday morning just after Christmas I was relaxing there, one of the pet department hotties on my lap, rum and eggnogs at hand, watching the Saturday morning cartoons, when the parade of management wannabes decided for some reason to tour the stock room. If memory serves, we'd just sampled some of the medicinal stuff moments before.

That turned out to be my last day as an insider at Kmart.

Little did anyone in that parade realize that Sam Walton was about to cut their grass. The carnage continues. Today Kmart announced the closing of another 100 Sears and Kmart stores. In a strategy that does grave disservice to wherever those Kmart managers get their MBA's, Kmart decided a few years ago to buy that other sinking giant of the post-Walmart world, Sears.

And here they are today, still retreating and regrouping and running from the Walmart juggernaut. Another hundred stores closed.

As for me, that was my one and only foray into retail. Much too old for it now. But I hear that there's a kid up at Walmart, in the automotive department, there everyday from five till closing, can fix you up with some primo medicinal herb.