Packaged Foods

It is handy to have some packaged foods around.

A lot of people complain online about how tired they are - "too tired to cook!" - so they send out for food with DoorDash or a pizza.  $20 later, they are stuffed full of carbs and sodium.  Hey, I'm not taking a piss on bad food here - we all eat it on occasion.  But as a steady diet, it will make you ill, over time.  Ask me how I know.

Fresh food, particularly fruits and vegetables, are better for you. But since they have a fairly short shelf life (in many cases) you have to go shopping more often, which is time-consuming.  And having groceries delivered is expensive.   If your refrigerator is empty, well, it is tempting to go to a restaurant, order carryout, or order delivery food, which is expensive.

For example, a new sub sandwich shop opened up here on the island, advertising "giant subs."  The subs are not "giant" but OK.  The prices, on the other hand, are indeed quite large.  A 12" sub with chips and soda, plus a 15% tip, is close to $20.  Granted, that is enough to feed two people, but it is a long way from the $5 foot-long of yore.  One of the cheapest items on the menu is a Gyro, which can be split in two, but still costs $10.20 with the 15% tip and tax.

Now, granted, we live in a tourist area, and people are staying in hotels and can't open up a of beans and heat it on the television.  So the restaurants have the customers over a barrel.  But even on the mainland, prices aren't much cheaper.

Traveling by RV, we often end up in places far from grocery stores, so we have to plan in advance our meals - and also keep a supply of "packaged foods" ready to supplement our diet.  These are foods that often do not require refrigeration and thus have a very long shelf-life.  It is handy to have these in the camper - or at home - to prepare a meal on a moment's notice, even if the refrigerator is bare.

And the cost is pretty low, too.

For example, Mark picked up this Betty Crocker pasta salad kit for $1.25 at the Dollar Tree.  "Serves 2" the package says.  They recommend adding something like tuna to it and a can of that runs $1 to $1.50 at the wholesale club.  So, for $2.50 you have lunch for two - and quite a filling lunch at that.  Maybe it ain't health food, but it is a meal, for cheap, and always ready to go and requires no refrigeration.

Beats spending $10 or $20 on lunch.  That's a huge savings.  If we ate lunch at restaurants every day of the year, and spent an average of $15 on lunch, the savings of making something like this every day would come to.$4500.  Bet you didn't see that coming!

Of course, you can "doctor" these kinds of things up - add some sliced peppers or celery or whatnot, or serve a salad on the side.  Healthier and the cost is still well under $5.

There are a lot of packaged foods like this out there.  You can buy canned chicken, cooked and ready to eat.  We even found canned beef in sauce - just dump it over a plate of egg noodles, heat and serve - instant beef stroganoff!

Of course, the granddaddy of all packaged foods is canned soup, which has fallen out of favor with the new generation (according to some marketers).  Back in the day, I always had a half-dozen cans of store-brand soup in my cupboard.  When I was in school, I would buy things like that (and a bag of rice, pasta, peanut butter) when I got paid, so I would know I would have something to eat until next payday.

Back then, soup was three-for-a-dollar.  For some reason, they have decided to make canned soup "gourmet" and ask $2 a can for it.  It no longer is the poverty bargain it once was.  But sometimes you can score a deal.  Dollar tree - before it was $1.25 tree - had clam chowder for a buck.  Not a lot of clams in it, but for a second buck, they had canned clams.  Another buck for crackers and you've got a New England dinner!

"But Bob!" you say, "That takes time to prepare! And I'm too tired to cook!"   Maybe true enough (or you are just lazy!) but Mark boiled the water for the noodles this morning while we were making breakfast - so the whole thing was done and in the refrigerator.  If we were still working, it would be a simple matter to put it in a tupperware and take with us.  A lot of hassle?  For $4500 a year, not really.

To those making $100,000 a year, who say, "Well, I can afford to eat out for lunch every day!" I say three things.  First, even if you could afford it, could your waistline afford it?  Over time, you will accumulate weight, just as people accumulate debt (or wealth if they are smart).  And one way to accumulate wealth is to not spend $4500 a year on forgettable junk food.

Second, $4500 a year is still nearly5% of your income - that's a big chunk.  But worse than that, if you subtract the taxes you owe, your rent or mortgage payment, your car costs, and other "fixed" costs of living, you may be lucky to have maybe $10,000 in discretionary spending - money that you can invest, or buy something for yourself, or splurge on a vacation or whatever.  Now think about it - $4500 additional would be a 50% increase in that discretionary spending - enough to take a nice vacation or help fund your 401(k).

Or, you could spend it on a pile of hamburgers.  Your choice - and America is all about making choices, good and bad.  And you can see, driving down "the strip" in your hometown, all the bad choices you can make.  Buy-here-pay-here used cars.  The mattress store.  Rent-to-own furniture.  Payday Loans.  Title Pawn Loans.  Fast Food.  Convenience Stores.  Nearly everything you see, particularly things advertised with bright logos and light-up signs, is a shitty bargain.  The shiner and flashier the sign, the shittier the bargain generally is.  It is a pretty good "tell" if you think about it.

But young people don't see that - they see glitz and glamour and a chance to practice "adulting" and do what they want to do.  As a kid, they begged and screamed at Mom to stop at McDonald's on the way home from the mall.   "No, we have peanut butter sandwiches at home!" she says, and you melt-down in a full-fury temper tantrum.  Shitty peanut butter sandwiches!  When I grow up, it's McDonald's every day!  And many young people - or even middle-aged ones - live that "dream" for years or even a lifetime.

It is only when you get older and realize the money train doesn't go on forever, that you start to understand what Mom and Dad were getting at - that spending a little extra here and a little extra there all adds up to a shitload of money.  Frittering away dollars on stupid things is fine - once in a while - but as a lifetime daily habit it gets expensive.  Better to put that money to better uses.

Of course, I say that and realize that many Moms and Dads today are those minivan kids of yesterday, and they learned nothing about financial responsibility.  They've remortgaged the house three times now, to pay off credit card debts - having learned nothing from the 2008 debacle (except perhaps, to blame Obama).  Their kids are spendthrifts because they are.  And when it all goes horribly wrong, they demand a bailout.  The sense of entitlement is strong.

Having some packaged foods in the pantry means you never get into a situation where "there's nothing to eat and I'm too tired to go shopping and too tired to cook!"   There is always something to eat, and if you have a power outage, you don't have to worry about the food going bad.

Our parents' generation always had some packaged foods around the house, and I recall on more than one occasion, having soup for dinner, with maybe a side salad or some vegetables.  Simple and easy to prepare and it's always there in the pantry.

And cheap, too!

Now, I'm not saying you should go on an all-prepared-food diet.  Geez, I hate it when people are reactionary like that or just play dumb to troll.  But a packaged-food meal certainly is no less healthy than take-out restaurant food.  And if you have a half-hour to wait for DoorDash or Domino's, well, you have more than enough time to boil water.

Choices!

Eve and the Apple

Why would an Apple get you thrown out of the Garden of Eden?

I was thinking about the creation story - the Garden of Eden, how Eve was made from a rib of Adam (the source of all Judaeo-Christian-Islamic misogyny!) and the temptation of Eve by a serpent with a freaking Apple of all things!  It makes no sense!

Unless you think of it as a prophesy.

Eve was walking in the Garden one day - not a lot to do in paradise, where you never die and nothing ever happens and you have no children.  She was bored, and a serpent in a tree hissed at her. "You want to see something cool?" he said, "Check this out!"

He handed her a small rectangular device, the likes of which Eve had not seen before.  "What is it?" she asked.  "An Apple!" the serpent replied.

"Oh, no!  God warned us about these things!  Take it away!  It is evil!" Eve retorted.

"You think so?" the serpent argued, "Didn't God make all the things here in the Garden of Eden - even you and me?  If so, how could he make anything evil?  And it won't hurt you to just look at it!  Check this out, a Tick-Tock Video!"

And the serpent swiped the device with his tongue and a funny video played with dorky animated music in the background.  Eve giggled, "let me see that!  That's SO FUNNY!" she said.  And before long, she was scrolling the Apple herself, checking out things like "Twitter" and "Facebook."   But it was the camera feature she really enjoyed, particularly once she discovered "selfies."  She ran around the Garden of Eden taking selfies of herself in various locations with various animals and then posted them online.  It was such fun!   And she enjoyed looking at her own image online.  She was a hot babe!  Well, maybe the only babe at this point.  And with "filters" she could look even hotter!

She ran off to find Adam to show him her new toy, and then got an idea to make a "prank" video of him!  She called out to Adam that she had fallen and was hurt.  And when Adam came running, she put out her leg to trip him.  He fell flat on his face and Eve laughed.  She posted the video on Tick-Tock and immediately got 10,000 heavenly followers, because, you know, angels have even less to do all day long than Adam and Eve.

Of course, this was more followers than God had himself, at the time, and when he found out, he was furious.  "Didn't I tell you not to be tempted by the Apple?" he shouted.  "I hereby banish you from the Garden of Eden!  Go forth and live in pain and suffering and take you stupid iPhone with you!"

And thus, all of humanity was cursed for all time.  Humans were turned into zombies, walking and even driving while looking at their stupid Apples, and of course, running into things. They spread lies and rumors and engaged in the worst forms of narcissism. God warned us, but we failed to listen.

Now you know why Steve Jobs named his company "Apple"and why their logo is an apple with a bite taken out of it - he made a pact with Satan himself!

Whatever Happened to Kindly Old Grandma?

Maybe she never existed?

I was reading an article online about an old person scammed into buying "Trump Bucks."  In case you missed the bus, the scam goes like this:  Some guys in Colorado (no doubt, "The Springs") started selling fake money with the likeness of Donald Trump on it.  For $500, you can buy a "$100,000 Bill!" and they claim you can cash it in at any Walmart (natch) or Bank of America.

But of course, you can't.  And you have to be pretty far into dementia to think you can "buy" a hundred grand for five-hundred bucks.  I mean, how would that even work?  If it did, everyone would immediately cash in their dollars for "Trump Bucks" and take them to the nearest Bank of America - and inflation would soar by 20,000%!

Anyway, this 77-year-old lady in Florida "invested" nearly ten grand in this useless paper and is blindsided by the whole thing.  One of her children admits that Mom was "political" which is a neat way of saying, a raging Trump supporter (which is a neat way of saying raging racist, xenophobe, misogynist, homophobe, conspiracy theorist, delusional, whacked-out, insane, mean-spirited, and fascist).

Whatever happened to the kindly old Grandma we were taught about in school?  You know, the one who baked pies and told you stories and was gentle and decent?  Well, according to George Carlin, she's now baking pies in hell, without an oven.  No doubt, Carlin is there with her, asking for another slice.

Has something changed in recent years?  Are old people getting not only more conservative, but outright hostile and mean-spirited?  It is hard to say for sure, but I think maybe our idealized views of the elderly are skewed.

My own Grandparents and Mark's Grandparents are a case in point.  My Grandmother Wiggins was a deep-South racist, and in fact, not more than three generations removed from slave owners.   She was a bitter, angry woman, who treated her own children like shit.  My Mother hated her and everything she stood for.   Grandma Wiggins would come to visit and put on a pair of white gloves and walk around the house, running her fingers over the tops of the door and window trim, looking for dust, and then castigate my mother for being a lousy housewife.  Grandma went to college and majored in Home Economics - she took this shit pretty seriously.  And nothing my Mother could do was good enough for her.

Punchline:  Grandma had a maid, a gardener, and a cook.  Pretty easy to get an "A" in Home Ec when you have your own entourage, eh?

Oddly enough, Grandpa (who was a New Yorker) was a big Democrat - a New Dealer, in fact.  However, bear in mind that back then, Southerners were still pissed at Republicans over the whole Civil War thing - believe it or not, Republicans were against slavery back then.  Today, they support child labor.  Oh, how times have changed!

Mark's Grandmother was a kindly old lady, but tormented her daughter in similar ways as my Grandmother.  She would write her initials and date underneath the "shelf paper" (a sheet of paper placed on shelves back in the day - Google It!) and when she came to visit her daughter, she would check the shelf paper in the kitchen cabinets and then castigate Barbara for not changing it on a monthly basis.  "Really, Barbara," she would say, "your standards are slipping!"

Women can be so cruel to one another.

When Mark turned 18, his Grandma told him how to vote.  "You just look for the (R) next to their name and then vote for that candidate!"    Again, maybe this is a remnant of old politics.  Being from Maine, the tradition was to vote Republican - pro-business, anti-slavery.   But times change and the parties change.   Old people are still conservative.

Why is this?

Well, as I noted before, when you retire, you want the world to stop.  You want Pepsi to stay a nickel and gas 25 cents a gallon.  You don't want things like inflation screwing up your life, or change in how things are done.  It is unsettling and unnerving.   It took you 60 years to figure out how the world worked - and then they go and change it all on you!  As an old person, you turn on the radio or television and you hear this noise they are now calling "music" - performed by people whose names you never heard of.

Back in 1964, I was just a kid when the Beatles came to America and performed on the Ed Sullivan show.  Looking back at those early songs ("She loves you yea, yea, yea") one does cringe and it does sound like so much noise - particularly when the young girls in the audience all SCREAMED at once.  I recall my Dad shaking his head, and my sister saying, "Dad, you just don't get it!"  She was 14 and enthralled - as were all the other girls in Junior High School at the time.

So fast-forward several decades and I turn on the television and see "artists" whose names I never heard of, screaming obscenities into the microphone (not even singing, just talking) and they don't even play instruments!   Just noise, I tell's ya!  What's got into those kids these days!  And of course, the "star" then has an interview where they talk about their drug addiction, legal troubles, rape accusations, and prison time.   We used to be ashamed of such things, today they are lauded - or at least a prerequisite for stardom.

Of course, maybe not much has changed.  The younger generation always has done things to be "different" just like their peers, and often, being "different" means doing edgy things to shock their parents.  And yes, back in the day, celebrities did odious things, but were often not caught, as their misdeeds were swept under the rug.  Elvis dated underage women.  The President slept with Marilyn Monroe.  That sort of thing.

But today, it seems that hate is on the rise - and by design.  Hate is a much stronger emotion than love, and it is far easier to get people riled up with hatred than with love.  Love makes people passive and accepting.  Hate makes people active and violent.  If you want to achieve political power, you are better off tapping into hate than love.

Old people, are, of course, the largest audience for old-school media.   I noted before that newspapers, radio, and television are dead or dying media.  Newspapers, particularly home-town newspapers, are going out of business.  The few left are mostly right-wing nutjobs.  We have a local "paper" that they used to give out for free on the island.  It had ads for local businesses, articles about upcoming events, and not much else.  The publisher filled in the blank spaces with political cartoons - about sports!

Well, he got sick and stopped publishing.  A new publisher took over and now the whole newspaper is "opinion" pieces that are just slightly to the left of Adolf Hitler.  Another old man ranting about how the "younger generation" is going to hell in a handbasket.

What is it about the seething HATE some oldsters have for the younger generation - for their own children, even?  Again, we saw this back in the day.  When my eldest brother went to live on a hippie commune, my parents freaked out.  Kids these days!  I tells ya - just no good!    Today, we see the same thing, first with "Millennials" being rotten no-good sonsofbitches who were ruining everything with their damn avocado toast.  Then, they realized the "Millenials" were all adults now, so "Gen-Z" is tied to the whipping post for a round of derision.  They are all a bunch of namby-pamby transgender freaks!  Every darn one of them - even the ones marching in the Nazi parades!  No damn good!

I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's their world now, so why sweat it?  They have to live in this world another half-century or more, so let them do what they think is right.   Why are old people, who have less than a decade left to live so obsessed with "correcting" the behavior of subsequent generations?  Is it because they have nothing else to do with their time?  Or is it just an urge that occurs when you get older to want to keep things the same?

Granted, not all elderly people are conservative.  But even among "liberal" elderly people, I see a lot of conservative knee-jerk type thinking.  I've seen liberals mock "black" names, once the black people leave the room.  They also tsk-tsk the bizarre behaviors of the next generation, again, once that generation has left the room.  Same shit, different day.   Oh, and they love to run down their own children, too!

Maybe people of all political stripes get more conservative as they get older - and politics are like a fashion statement or habit they cling to.  My racist Southern Grandma was a Democrat, because all her ancestors were Democrats, going back to the Civil War.  Someone changed what a Democrat was, and forgot to tell her.  Mark's Grandma stayed Republican long after abolition ceased to be a plank in their platform.  Both Grandmas became more conservative and reactionary as they aged.

I should say, however, in Grandma Wiggins defense, that toward the end of her life, she admitted that the Black and Hispanics (she used different names, of course) weren't so bad after all.  When she went into assisted living, the people caring for her were largely Black or Hispanic, and they were kind and gentle to her, even if she arguably didn't deserve such treatment.  Jesus washed people's feet.  These folks had to wipe her ass - that's what it took for her to come around, at least somewhat.

But getting back to media, the prime consumers of traditional media are older people - and the primary channels of hate these days is in traditional media - cable television, radio, and newspapers.  On Rich People's Island, the radio blares a series of political ads for the station-owner's wife, who is running for County Counsel.  Her big gripe? Installing roundabouts on the island.  They're round!  Which way do you go?  Bring back the stop sign and stop lights!  Traffic jams are as American as Apple Pie!

She chose a weird hill to die on.

And you know the deal about Cable TV.  It's not just Fox News, but other right-wing outlets as well - often spreading scare stories and fear-mongering.  Your kids are being indoctrinated by books in your local school!  Never mind what they are downloading on their smart phones or streaming on the television.  Those darm librarians are turning 'em all into Commies!   It makes no sense at all.

So maybe that is the reason - a feedback loop.  Old people watch a lot of television, and it isn't hard to understand why they end up spouting all these Fox News Talking Points - they watch hours and hours of it a day.  If there was an ISIS channel they watched for as many hours, they would have turned into Islamic Terrorists by now.

But of course, none of this is by accident.  Someone, somewhere, decided to put this dreck on the air.  And maybe it is just ratings driving the whole thing - hate sells eyeballs, so they program more hate.  On the other hand, many advertisers are realizing that advertising with hate has a negative effect on their bottom line.  Tesla is now the second-least desirable brand in the country, and not because their cars have changed, but because the CEO has decided to go all anti-trans after his wife left him for a transgender person.  Doesn't take break-ups well, I'm afraid.   They call it a "dirty halo" effect, and it does stick to a brand over time.  Both Ford and VW (among others) have had to deal with their Hitler connections - either by sweeping it under the rug, or by making copious apologies.  But it never really goes away.

Compounding this is demographics.  Maybe putting on a news program that caters to people over 80 will generate good ratings - until that demographic up and dies on you.  How do you attract the next generation, who reviles your brand?  Moreover, the over-80 crowd isn't spending much on anything other than Insure and Depends.  Hard to sell a monster truck to the lost-my-license crowd.

Even the younger viewers among the hard-right are a hard sell.  Sure, you can sell them pallets of "survival food" and guns and ammo.  But they aren't about to buy a giant SUV - not when their 1993 Tahoe is still running good, with its "Sovereign Citizen" license plate.

Of course, the real danger to our society isn't angry Grandma - she's shuffling off the mortal coil as we speak.  What is scarier are the younger people - some in their teens - who think Nazism is "cool" and "edgy" and won't figure out otherwise until it is too late.

Odd thing, those kids don't seem to be programmed by those nasty books in the school library!  I wonder where they get these ideas from?  (Hint: You're staring at it right now).

Coupon Codes

Couponing is not an exact science.  But it can encourage you to spend.

I wrote a number of Patents on couponing techniques.  One was actually sold for a substantial sum, so I must have done something right.  It is a crowded field, though, and an interesting one.

In the old days, coupons were printed on paper and you could clip them from the Sunday Supplement.  Or you got them in the mail or with a product.  A box of detergent might have a coupon inside with ten cents off your next purchase!

But as I noted before, chasing coupons is often a dead-end.  Those "stunt buys" you see on television are just that - stunts.  Some flat-faced trailer-park girl walks out with three grocery carts of groceries and not only pays nothing, but gets money back!  How is this possible?  Well, not shown is the hundreds of dollars she spend over several weeks and months to obtain coupons, particularly coveted manufacturer's coupons.  And you have to wait for a product to go on sale and then go on double-coupon day and make a strategic buy.  If they are offering 50% off on expired crackers, and you have a coupon, they might actually be free.

But as a means of feeding your family on a regular basis, well, you have to hope they like crackers!  Doing these "stunt buys" is eye-candy for the television, but not a realistic everyday occurrence.  If it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.

The problem with couponing is you want to hit your target audience without any overshoots or misfires.  If you hand out coupons to something that the purchaser already had in their cart and was prepared to pay full price for, you are wasting money.  The purchaser becomes the incidental couponer - they will take the discount, sure, but you just gave away money for nothing.

It is like these Bank of America "deals" they keep offering me.  Get your windshield replaced at Safelite autoglass and save 10%!  Of course, I am not about to impulse-shop for a new windshield, and since I have already used Safelite on several occasions (they repair starburst chips for free, or at least they used to, if you insured with GEICO) I am already inclined to use them.  They also replaced a cracked windshield in the Frontier - for cheap, too.  So the "coupon" is wasted on me two ways.  It is not like I am going to run out and buy a windshield for the hell of it.  Moreover, if I needed one, I would be likely to go to Safelite as a return customer anyway.  10% in addition?  Sure, I'll take that!

Other things are similarly incidental  And many of them are things I would never use - food delivery services, streaming services, online fashion and makeup stores, crappy fast-casual restaurants.  But maybe the idea is to just put the idea in your head so when you see that store, you'll think, "I get $5 back if I spend $100!  Let's go in!"

Maybe that is it.

Couponing serves a time-honored tradition in economics in the form of optimal pricing strategies.  When I was young and dumb and not paying attention to money (and making lots of it and spending it as fast), I would never look at prices of things and be proud of my ignorance of prices.  Stupid.  Too late in life, I realized money was your income, your independence, your life, and spending it willy-nilly was just frittering away life itself.  Save a few pennies here and there and it adds up - to wealth and independence.  Believe it or not, some people play with their money - gambling away their very lives by betting on stupid things that never pay out and will never pay out, as the house always takes a cut, over time.  But I digress....

Optimal pricing means you sell a product to the young idiot lawyer for full price, as he believes he is "rich" and doesn't need a trivial discount.  But the poorer person might not buy your product at the retail price as it is too expensive.  So you offer a coupon or sale and they bite on it - they can afford name-brand detergent!  And so on down the line - you have a price point for every buyer, and each buyer pays the maximum amount they are willing to pay, and you optimize your profits.  You sell the most amount of product and yield the highest possible price from each buyer.

If you just had flat pricing - like how we buy gas at a gas station - you would miss out on some buyers.  The "rich" buyer (not really "rich" just price-insensitive) would buy, but the poorer buyer might take a pass and go for a cheaper substitute.  So it is just basic good economics to offer products at different prices to different prospects - to optimize your outcome.

So couponing plays right into this.  Sally Pennypincher cuts a coupon and buys Tide detergent for less.  Mrs. Gotrocks pays full price.  Both are happy.

Speaking of name-brand detergent, we were watching Pluto TV, which is free, but with ads (it is part of Paramount).   It glitches sometimes and plays ad after ad, sometimes giving you literally ten seconds of airtime before going to ads.  We watched one movie and had to turn it off as the ads became obnoxious.  The next day, we watched the rest of the movie with no ads at all.  I guess Pluto felt guilty about SPAM-bombing us the night before.

What was interesting was the ads and the target audience.  Stripping away the ads for more television (advertising even the program you are already watching!) most of the ads were for name-brand laundry detergents and for-profit colleges.  The ads all featured African-American actors, mostly women.  A young woman is thinking of going to for-profit college so she can advance her nursing career and become an "administrator" and "straighten things out at the hospital!"  You want to scream at the screen, "don't do it!" because blacks are often targeted by these for-profit colleges and end up with massive debts and no way to get out from under them.   It is particularly obscene to entrap people this way, by attacking their very dreams.

The other ads for laundry detergents also featured black actors, and it reminded me of this urban legend of Tide laundry detergent being used as currency in the ghetto.   It is not a black thing, however, just a poor thing.  Poor people are more obsessed with the trappings of wealth than the wealthy.  Sure, rich people can afford an expensive car.  But the flashy cars - they are sold to the middle-class, the nouveau riche, and the very poor.  You see more Cadillac parked in the ghetto than at the country club.  Rich people don't put bling rims on their Mercedes, but a successful contractor who lives in a stucco-clad mini-mansion in foreclosure mews, he's got 'em!

So couponing serves another purpose - it allows the lower classes to buy brand-name status goods, and lets them think they are getting a "deal" in the process.  Nine times out of ten, however, the store brand product is cheaper, even if you apply the coupon to the "name" brand.  And many middle-class people buy these store-brand products because they really don't give a shit what some stranger thinks of them, looking in their shopping cart.

Kiosks are another way of distributing coupons, and I wrote some Patents on this as well.  You go to the store and enter your frequent shopper number and the kiosk prints out a sheaf of coupons, based on what is on sale and what you bought in the past.  If you bought store-brand detergent a month ago, maybe you are due for a new bottle of it, and it is an opportunity to get you to switch to Tide.  So it prints out the coupon, or today, transmits it to your smart phone (which may even detect you are near the store or even what aisle you are in!).

I digress a bit, but that is ostensibly another reason for couponing - to get people to switch brands.  A lot of people are obsessively brand-loyal, and once they latch onto a particular brand of product, they will stick to it for life - even as the price doubles and the quality goes in the toilet.  If you can latch onto their buying preferences early on, you may have a customer for life.  On the other hand, if you can get them to merely try your product, maybe they will switch, based on product satisfaction.

I say "ostensibly" as brand-loyalties, as I noted, are strong among the hoi polloi and thus hard to change.  Also, maybe it is just me, but unless a product really, really sucks, I don't see much difference between various brands, particularly with regard to things like soap.  The only laundry detergent I won't buy is the stuff from dollar tree, as it is watered down so much you are paying more for the packaging than the product.

Other products, I may be a fan of, until they raise the price and I find another alternative.  So the idea of brand loyalty, to me, is idiotic in the first place.  The idea that I will "switch brands" forever, because of a one-time coupon is even more ridiculous.  I mean, if store brand is cheaper, I will go right back to that unless they provide me with infinite coupons.

But that's just me, and others play right into the merchant's games.

But getting back to couponing, it has gone electronic and indeed, that is where I came in, writing Patents on this stuff.  There are all sorts of ways merchants can get inside your head and figure out what it is you really want, or worse yet, make you want something you had no real need for.  The best psychologists are working in retail - not as checkout clerks, but as executives at companies that sell consumer goods.

As more and more commerce goes online, so has couponing.  And "Coupon Codes" (finally got to the topic, eh?) are being used to give discounts to people to induce them to spend.  For example, I go to buy a pair of sneakers and they offer 15% off if I sign up for an e-mail newsletter.  So I do, figuring I can always mark it as SPAM later on and make it stop.  They give me a coupon code and I enter it and....

....nothing.  You see, the sneakers I was buying were "on sale" and items "on sale" don't qualify for the coupon code.  Tellingly, nearly every item on the sneaker merchant's site was on sale.  So the coupon codes were pretty worthless, unless you wanted to spend $200 on a pair of their more expensive sneakers.  But who does that, honestly!  A lot of people do - people who can least afford it, too.  Remember what I said about the poor and luxury goods.

As with paper couponing there is the risk of the misfire or overshoot.  When I check out on a site, I open a new tab and type in "SITEXYZ COUPON CODES" and usually get a number of sites purporting to give away coupon codes for SITEXYZ.   Of course, most of them are junk - claims of 70% off with a coupon code are nonsense.  Usually there is a 10% coupon for new customers or something of that nature.  These sites usually try to open a window for SITEXYZ so they get a referral fee.  .I usually close that window.

Sometimes these codes work, sometimes not.  Sometimes you can even spoof them.  I get a coupon code for "NEWUSER10%OFF" and try it.  It works.  So I try "NEWUSER15%OFF" and it works as well.  The game ends at 20% off - it never hurts to try.  Some wag opined that you could try "VETERAN" or "MILITARY" and likely get a discount.  I leave the morality of such shenanigans to you.

Again, this is a misfire.  I am taking a discount, not because I was lured to their site or because of a sale promotion, or because I signed up for the newsletter, but only because I plugged in about a half-dozen codes I found online and then took the one with the highest discount.  This is not how couponing is suppose to work.  I mean, I was prepared to pay full price for those sneakers and now they're giving me 20% off for nothing?  No customer loyalty, not brand-switch inducement, no optimal pricing strategy.  It defeats all of these couponing strategies.

Worse yet, most are not very good deals.  Like I said, the sneaker site only applied coupons to full-price items.  So they short-circuit the whole thing by offering nearly every product "on sale" - with no one ever actually paying the "suggested retail price" anyway.  The coupon code becomes a joke.

Online shopping does present challenges to retailers in applying coupons to a virtual world.  Since coupon codes are generic, they can be shared with an infinite number of people.  Of course, there are ways around this as well - you could make a unique code for each user.  However that would require a sizable "code" which would be a gibberish of numbers and letters and hard for the user to remember and type in, unless they could cut-and-paste it, or have it automatically entered.

Maybe couponing, as we know it, is dead.  Or maybe it will be taken to the next level.  I am not sure.  I suppose in a future world, your smart phone would show you (and only you) unique prices on every good in the store, with pricing based on your shopping habits, annual income, net worth, various other demographic data.  Already some stores are using QR codes in place of prices, so they can raise prices in real-time, without having to change placards on the shelves.  So it would not be hard to show different people different prices, depending on who they are and what their desires are.

For example, Joe Six-Pack is a Coors Light fan, and has been since he puked it up behind his high school when he was 16.  So he buys Coors Light and only Coors Light (even though they sponsor gay pride events!) his whole life long.   There is no need to offer him a coupon or discount on something he is going to buy anyway.  So he pays full price, a price just reasonable enough that he won't switch.  If the algorithm detects he bought a six-pack of Miller Lite last week, they might lower the price on Coors and send him a virtual "coupon" as inducement to get him back into the fold.  Or conversely, Bud Light might coupon him, trying to get him to switch brands.  It becomes a fascinating battle of wills, and perhaps Joe occasionally buys another brand of beer just to spoof the algorithm and get it to send him a virtual coupon.

People learn very quickly.

In a way, all of this is very frightening, as it involves using psychology to alter our behaviors - something the smart phone and Internet are already doing at an alarming pace.  I for one, prefer simple transaction - the more complicated you can make any transaction, the worse-off the consumer is.  If you can get people chasing discounts, they often forget about overall price. The local "fancy" grocery store relies on sales and "BOGOs" to bring in customers.  But even at the BOGO price, the goods are often more expensive than the everyday price at Walmart or the wholesale club.

Again, they get into our heads, and "Buy One Get One FREE!" resonates with a lot of people, as they believe they are getting something for free, and not just at 50% off a "retail" price that no one in the history of mankind has ever paid.

I am not sure what the future of couponing will entail, and in fact, I don't think the retail industry knows full well just yet.  Whether this becomes part of a dystopian future where we are all given tattoo barcodes or implanted chips and our every movement monitored and our behaviors induced to the greater good of humanity (read: the ruling class) or whether it will be a more benign method of inducing sales through discounts, well, that remains to be seen.  Already, retailers are offering minor discounts to shoppers if they in turn give up some of their privacy.  People claim to cherish their privacy, but will sell their soul for ten cents off a packet of Jello.

Myself, I will continue to seek out the simple deals.  You put a product on the shelf and put a price on it.  I decide to buy - or not to buy.  That keeps it really simple.

But of course, if you offer "coupon codes" on your website, I will try to spoof those and obtain a windfall discount, if I can.

I mean, I'm not that stupid!

The Problem With China is China (The Problem With Russia is Russia)

When your country has a totalitarian government, you can't blame others for failing to engage.

(This image is banned in China)

A recent article online opines that Chinese "entrepreneurs" are being unfairly excluded from the lucrative US market because of racial prejudice and various laws or regulations enacted or proposed to punish Chinese companies. From the perspective of the Chinese, it is all America's fault for not letting them have a free hand to sell hardware and software here that spies upon Americans and takes away American jobs. Oh, and yea, when withheld in a diplomatic spat, can really screw up our supply chain.

But a quote from the article really tells the real story:

Of the seven entrepreneurs, three agreed to be identified by their English first names only while the others requested complete anonymity, all citing concerns about repercussions within China. They also asked that their businesses not be described in detail.

Funny thing, that.  American "entrepreneurs" might want to conceal trade secrets, but few, if any, fear repercussions from the government for merely talking to the press.  (Note:  This is not an invitation for whataboutism!).  Maybe this is the problem.

The Chinese "economic miracle" happened not by chance, and certainly not because the Chinese Communist Party lead it.  Nixon opened up relations with China in 1972 as a strategic move.  The Chinese saw that Communism had failed them - and failed every nation before them (and after) who tried it.  So, slowly, they let go the reins of totalitarianism and watched the "economic miracle" unfold.  But it was a "miracle" fueled by foreign capital and foreign companies - along with a lopsided trade imbalance with the West.  We reveled in cheap Chinese products and over time, closed more and more factories in the USA and exported production overseas, mostly to China.

And it is not just bargain-basement cheap junk they are making.  Some of the most expensive products with obscene mark-ups and profit margins, are made in China.  Yes, I'm talking about Apple, who uses basically slave labor in its plants in China to make cell phones for pennies and then sells them in America for dollars.  Oddly enough, "politically correct" American users see no cognitive dissonance in texting on their Apple phones about the exploitation of labor by Capitalists.  After all, Apple is a "green" company that treats its employees (in America) well, right?  Just export the slavery overseas where no one can see it.   Fuck Apple.  But I digress.  And no, no whataboutism, thank you.

So China has exploded, economically, fueled by exports to its number-one trading partner, the United States.  We created modern China, in effect.  But now we are in a bit of a pickle.  The Chinese Communist Party started to see its grip on the country slip.  No, not Tienanmen Square - those protests were, oddly enough, being made by recent college grads who were upset that economic reforms meant no guaranteed jobs under Communism anymore, for college graduates.

No, what scared the CCP to death were the newly-minted Chinese Billionaires, who were accumulating more power through capitalism than the party had through brutal military dictatorship.   And in recent years, these Billionaires are being brought to heel, one by one.   Many wealthy Chinese have tried to establish citizenship or at least own property overseas, which has distorted real estate markets in places like Vancouver and Toronto.   Many others have sent their wives to America when 9 months pregnant, so that their offspring could obtain US Citizenship and hopefully one day, bring their parents over from the old country.

In response to this diaspora of wealth, the CCP has established illegal "Police Stations" in many Western countries, including the USA and Canada, with the goal of intimidating Chinese Ex-Pats into toeing the party line or even returning to China "voluntarily."

America's love affair with China has cooled, directly in proportion to these clamp-downs by the CCP.  It is clear now that China is no longer a "friendly" trading partner, but a potential enemy in wartime.  China is reaching worldwide to influence politics in foreign countries, offering "loans" to struggling nations to build infrastructure (provided by Chinese companies, of course) with the end result being these third-world countries often end up hopelessly in debt.  Hey, that's our game!  No fair butting in!

But it was business that is the real deal - dollars and cents.  We may pay lip service to human rights violations in Hong Kong, or the plight of the Uyghur Muslims (what ever happened to them and when did we stop caring?) but the real deal is business, plain and simple.

In this era of "just in time" supply chains, we can no longer count on China as a reliable trading partner.  China may withhold products out of spite, or lock down an entire city due to CoVid and thus close factories.  You send over your best employees to straighten things out, and the Chinese are likely to imprison them as "spies" as part of their hostage diplomacy.  The CCP wants to drag China back to 3rd world nation status.  What's next?  A new Mao and the Gang of Four?   Cultural Revolution, anyone?  Or is that what is going on right now?   I think yes.

So companies are building plants in the USA to make semiconductors, not because it is cheaper or better (it will be neither) but when you shut down an entire car factory making expensive and profitable pickup trucks and SUVs because some Chinese supplier can't ship you one simple little chip, well, you can't do business with China anymore.   It doesn't help any that the chips in question all phone back to the mother ship in China with your data.

The Chinese method (or I should say, Chinese Government method) of fear, intimidation, and paranoia, is the problem.  You can't blame companies in America for refusing to deal with an unreliable supply chain.   They have a business to run.  Politics comes second.

Maybe if China just rewound things a decade or so - tamped down the government paranoia and let the market and its people a free hand, business might return to normal.  But sadly, the present government in China seems more interested in stirring the pot like some cheap North Korean dictator making empty threats.   They are shooting themselves in the foot and then telling themselves it feels good.

The problem with China is China - or more precisely, its government.  The problem with Russia is the same deal - the Russian government, which is basically one man.   That is the problem with totalitarianism and dictatorships.  When one person can control a country, that country will be enthralled to that dictator's wild fantasies.  These fantasies eventually clash with reality, and the fallout can be dramatic.

In North Korea it was the world's largest hotel - never finished, of course.  In China, it is the "ghost cities" that were never populated, but built to meet the party's demand for growth above all else.  Entire apartment blocks built, never occupied, and then torn down.  That's the basis of a rational economy, right?  In Russia, it is this wacky idea that they can take back all the satellite countries they had during the Soviet era.  All that has been accomplished is a lot of people killed, cities destroyed, and the Russian military exposed for the paper tiger it was.  When your "unstoppable" hypersonic missiles are all shot down, it doesn't make Russia look all that scary.

What puzzles me is why some on the far-right are so enthralled with Russia and Putin.  There seems to be this admiration of dictators - perhaps the motivation behind January 6th.  Trump himself expressed admiration for dictators, perhaps because he himself wanted to be one.  But as history has shown, dictatorship is the worst form of government as dictators and kings are rarely - if ever - the wise and thoughtful rulers that are described in children's bedtime story books.

No, usually they are unhinged from reality - as are the people who profess admiration for them.

There have been a plethora of people who have been found out to be literal agents of Russia.  It doesn't take much, I guess, to get someone to "flip" on their own country.  Just give them a few dollars or pay off their student loan debts and its "All Hail Putin!"

The latest example of this is this lady, who claimed she was molested by Joe Biden before he became President.  I mean, come on, if Uncle Joe wanted a side-piece he could do much better than that.  I mean, come on - there would be a line around the block of attractive women wanting a piece of Joe Amtrack, right?   Why would he stoop to banging a whale?

Well, surprise, surprise, she is now in Russia, claiming "asylum" from the Biden death squads.  Apparently, according to Fox News, Joe Biden is the poorest Billionaire on the planet.  He has raked in hundreds of millions of dollars from China and the Ukraine (odd bed partners!) but somehow has managed to spend none of it - not even on a new crib for himself.  This is, of course, because Fox News is a 100% bullshit channel that spouts only lies, even in the post-Carlson era.

This other lady (who does look "trans" but looks can be deceiving!) was also "outed" as a Russian agent who infiltrated the NRA (Gee, I wonder why?).   She's now back in Russia, too.  Hey Russia, can you at least send us some attractive chicks?  We don't want your rejects, thank you!

Russia, of course, is facing worldwide condemnation for invading Ukraine.  Nations in the former Eastern Bloc are concerned that if Ukraine falls, they may be next.  And many on the far-right in this country seem to think that would be a good thing - that we should just walk away and let Putin take over, and not concern ourselves with "foreign entanglements."   I wonder how much Russia is paying them?  And no, this is not another invitation to whataboutism with fake bullshit about Hunter Biden's Laptop and supposed millions in bribes that are conjectured.   Sorry, but you can't fight Russia propaganda with more Russian propaganda.

Russia, of course, uses the martyr complex that North Korea uses - they are "victims" of the Evil West, who for some reason doesn't want to use Putin's gas-station and thus fuel the fires of his invasion plans.  We've been down this road before - appeasing Hitler by letting him take the Sudetenland, then Austria, then Czechoslovakia, until we finally drew the line at Poland.  Well, when I saw "we" I mean Western Europe.  Once again, America had to be drawn into the fight, kicking and screaming, although we were the "Arsenal of Democracy" prior to that.

Russia and the US are fighting another proxy war, and the US will win, even if Ukraine loses.   Russia is already weaker, as a military power, and worst of all, it has been exposed as weak and ineffective.  When your best forces are a hired army, something isn't right.  And when your "state-of-the-art" weapons systems are blown up and shot down by a rag-tag army using borrowed weapons, well, that doesn't say much about your projection of power.

Some like to claim that Russia or China is poised to take over, militarily.  China now has two aircraft carriers - one being a rebuilt hulk they bought secondhand from Russia.  We have 11 nuclear-powered carriers and have the largest military in the world - larger than the next eight, combined.   Indeed, DoD is the world's largest employer - take that, Walmart!  So loaning a few weapons to Ukraine is hardly putting a dent in our defense budget, but trying to take over Ukraine is destroying Russia's economy.

Even if Russia "wins" they lose - that is how these proxy wars work.   You would think we would learn after Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  You'd think Russia would have learned after Afghanistan - a war that arguably brought down the Soviet Union.  And yes, we armed the "other side" during that war - to our later regret.

If you want a vibrant, strong, and free economy, you  have to allow your citizens some amount of freedom to work and produce and keep at least some of the proceeds of their labor.  China and Russia have failed their own peoples by suppressing their basic freedoms.   The same thing could happen here, if we let it.  Censoring school books and telling people and corporations what they can and cannot say, do, or think, is bound to backfire.  Already, the younger generation sees no point in playing our economic game, if they cannot advance, over time.

Sadly, there are some on the right who look at Russia not with revulsion, but admiration.  "If only we had a strong-man dictator who would take over!   That would be great!"  But look how things are working out for Russia, or how they went for Nazi Germany.    Sounds like a great idea, until your economy is shattered, your country is in ruins, and all your friends are either dead or in jail - or maybe you are, too.

I won't weep much for Chinese "entrepreneurs" I'm afraid.  They don't need to establish a beach-head in another country to do business with the US, they need to change the government in their own country to something that represents the people, not the leaders of the party.