#4 – Line up Black Friday for a $1000 savings account?

If you thought the Black Monday stock market crash on October 19, 1987, got a lot of publicity, it paled in comparison to Black Friday – the annual day after Thanksgiving shopping frenzy.

“Black” doesn’t mean bleak or dark, in this case.  It’s supposedly a good thing.  It means the day when retailers go “into the black” -- or profitability -- for the year.  If sales are good.  (Note that means they are running at a loss for nearly 11 full months of the year…what’s wrong with THAT picture?)

I am drawn to this phenom like road kill.  It is fascinating yet repulsive at the same time.  I don’t seem to be able to stop myself and look away.

For days and even weeks, it seems, news interviewers (I hesitate to call them journalists) are featuring Black Friday specials and strategy tips.  Duluth-born Comedienne Maria Bamford is pumping herself up for a two-day shopping work-out at Target, in quirky ads (love them or hate them) where she is sporting sweats and high heels and doing sit ups on the red cement ball outside a Target store.  Kohl’s ad folks unwisely chose to remake Rebecca Stone’s insipid “Friday” song into a “Black Friday” ad.

2008 Black Friday should be remembered as the year an obedient Walmart employee unlocked the doors at 5 a.m. and was promptly trampled to death.

2011 Black Friday should be remembered as the year it was actually Black Thursday --  Thanksgiving itself -- when some stores opened at 9 p.m. Thanksgiving night.  Others waited til midnight, rather than 4 or 5 a.m. on Friday.

Even if Thanksgiving isn’t your favorite holiday, or your family can’t stand the sight of each other or turkey, it still is so crass to start the mad rush to shopping on the actual holiday that it could only happen in America.  This is what we fought for freedom and independence, to have the right to be crass in the face of a national holiday, tripping off a mad, crass rush to the next national holiday, without which retailers across the country simply could not exist.  If everyone was a Grinch and did not shop, the U.S. economy would simply dry up.

So, in our best patriotic effort to boost the economy, we are trampling minimum-wage employees at 5 a.m. to get to a cheap TV.

And never has Black Friday been so “successful.”  Sales were up almost 7% nationwide.  Some stores were up by 24% or more.

News reports said 15,000 people lined up early to get into the massive Mall of America in the Twin Cities at midnight.  A total of 210,000 people shopped the mall that day.  That’s up from 200,000, meaning 10,000 MORE people showed up this year.  The increase alone is a little less than three times the population of a town in which I have an office.

Same number (10,000) waited for the flagship Macy’s store in NYC to open its doors at midnight, the earliest time ever (how they had time to clean up after the Thanksgiving Day parade I will never know).  While some were heading for the $199 white gold diamond stud earrings, others waited for hours for the privilege to buy Justin Beiber’s fragrance set, which came with a holiday CD featuring a very, very special bonus track.

Electronics are always the most popular and heavily discounted items.  Best Buy had people in milder climates camping for weeks to get a $199.99 42-inch Sharp LCD TV.  This takes a great deal of planning because, to my knowledge, Best Buy does not provide portable toilets in the parking lot.  It should. 

It should also remind customers that not everyone in the line will get a $199.99 42-inch TV, because there are limited numbers of the featured “doorbuster” item.  No rain checks, either.

Even though nearly every large retailer does this, it seems a little bait-and-switchy, if not cruel and unusual, to me.  People are incited to come out for the right to buy something dirt cheap that they may not have the chance to get.  This leads to rudeness at best and danger at worst.

This competition, in turn, incites violence, albeit most of it at Walmart, which apparently attracts a higher proportion of shoppers with abysmally bad manners.  This year at various Walmarts around the country, all kinds of nasty things happened, even though no one gave his life for the right to shop cheap.

This year, pepper spray was used on shoppers in two Walmarts.  In California, a woman wanted an X-Box 360 gaming system so badly that she pepper-sprayed her fellow customers so they’d get out of the way (they did – she paid for her items and walked out of the store, though she later surrendered to police).  In North Carolina, a Walmart security guard thought that there was a fight at the cell phone display – into which someone had fallen during the rush – so he pepper-sprayed the customers.

Also in California, a man who got his Black Friday shopping done and was taking his treasures to the parking lot, was shot and robbed.

Lovely.

I know of only two times otherwise reasonable people typically showcase downright animalistic bad behavior that they would never display otherwise:  during divorce proceedings and on Black Friday.

At least in divorce, presumably you could blame jealousy, anger, hurt or the welfare of the children as making you temporarily insane.  On Black Friday, there’s only one motivation:  greed.

Irony of irony, the holiday for which this greed is unleashed is about giving, not getting. 

If small businesses really are the powerhouse that energizes this country’s economy, I’ve never heard of small businesses being able to offer incredibly low-low-low doorbusting values!  (Their wholesale buying power isn’t that strong.)

I know, I know, it’s not all bad.  Not everyone is a rude pig.  Some families or friends make an outing of it.  Now starting the shopping season this day is a beloved tradition.

But we should quit using over-shopping as recreation, just as we have to stop over-eating for entertainment or emotional fulfillment. 

As bad as this sounds, this country ought to be incented to SAVE, not spend.  (Blasphemy!) 

Savings rates typically go up during and after a recession – because people are scared and know it’s not smart to spend more than you earn. 

According to the US Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis, the savings rate went up after the Great Recession of 2008-09 to the highest it had been since the mid-1990s. 

Not anymore.  It’s way down -- again.  I’m guessing it will be even lower come next month when the credit card bills arrive. 

I kind of liked the analogies during the Great Financial Bailout to where we could have given taxpayers x number of dollars (lots!) rather than bail out, say, Bank of America or AIG. 

So I’d like to Black Savings Friday:  every bank in the country can deposit, say, $1000 per person bailout dollars to anyone old and literate enough to sign their name and open a savings account. You’d have to agree to spend only half of it in the first year, and add to it the second, something like that…

Save time!  Open the account on line – Cyber Savings Friday!

Got a kid or two or five?  Open them for them as well – Happy Holidays!

Lines around the block for your free $1000 savings account???  Can’t play a video game in it.  Can’t sparkle with diamonds in your ears.  Can’t smell like Justin Beiber.

OK, maybe not.

In fact, next year, let’s get stores to stay open til, say, noon on Christmas Day.  You can still buy presents for people you won’t see until Christmas afternoon or evening.

Say, help me out here:  where do you buy pepper spray, anyway?

#3-Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Skiiers

Snow is now on the ground where I live in beautiful Duluth, Minnesota.

And the 16-year-old needs new ski gear this year.  Lots of it. 

He does not ski competitively, just for fun on weekends and vacations, sometimes after school.  Duluth has a very nice, very picturesque ski hill, where local kids spend school breaks and hang out.  It’s good for him to get out from behind the video games, good to have real social skills, and good for him physically, to learn a lifetime sport. 

I just wish it didn’t cost so much.

I know, the local hill is a bargain.  And it’s not as expensive as, say, hockey, where you need skates and pads and pucks and sticks and, probably worst of all, ice time, which must be rented.  But downhill skiing is an expensive sport.

I am not inherently cheap.  I was trained that way.  I had two Depression-era parents who, as long as I could tell, never had a fun day in their lives if they had to spend a nickel.  When I grew up, they vacationed at my grandparents’ cabin.  This probably didn’t cost anything except the time and gas to go up and rake the leaves in the fall -- about which they complained.  We didn’t go anywhere else.

So, it’s not that I don’t want my child to have fun, and have friends.  Both are essential to a fulfilling, well-balanced life.  I’m much more balanced in that regard than my parents.  I thank my lucky stars for friends and recreation that has made my life rich.

But enriching experiences don’t have to be enjoyed only by the rich…or those with plastic.

Here’s his estimate of the cost of outfitting himself this year:
Skis - $250 (“A really good pair would cost $400 or so.”)

Bindings - $80

Poles - $40

Boots - $40

Snowpants - $80 (I checked, and was told the kind that is necessary to have NEVER shows up at the Thrift Store, “oh, pleeeeease!”)

Jacket - $160 (he would have preferred the $220 one; “this will last forever.” Sure.)

Hat - $20

Gloves - $25 (not including the heat packets to go in the little pocket that holds them)

Helmet - $40 (no complaints here, don’t want him ending up like Sonny Bono)
Goggles - $40

Layers - $60 (I have no idea what that is, unless it is that “wicking away” underwear)

That, plus gas money, just gets you outdoors at the top of the hill.  If you want to go down the hill, then back up, then down again, over and over, it costs $160 for a ski pass (and that’s very, very reasonable; imagine if we lived in Colorado!).

Total (he did the math, I’m trusting it to be): $995.

Mind you, my teen is not a fashion plate who requires designer name brands.  But apparently there are certain basic minimum standards so you don’t get laughed off the mountain and the Target or JC Penney house brand doesn’t cut it.  They don’t even make the type of specialized gear that is necessary, he assures me.

I’m thinking he could have chosen a relatively cheap sport, such as swimming laps! 

Not very social, maybe, but the cost of a day pass at the local fitness center is $6.50.  Add in a man’s swimsuit ($30 tops, a lot less if you pick up a used one at the thrift store, which males can do, or $70 if you are female), a couple of bottles of shampoo, a lock, and you’ve got miles of lap swimming fun, fun, fun for about $50, tops.  That even includes a clean towel, a nice, hot complimentary sauna and as much hot water as you want in the shower at the end.

In addition, you don’t have to stay all day and pay for lunch.  But, I suppose that is part of the fun…

But he needs fresh air, needs to be out with friends in the winter?  So, I suggested, then how about snowshoeing?  Even less expensive than cross-country skiing!  You can get a really decent pair of snow shoes for less than $100, and you can wear the same outside gear you need every day to go to school or wherever anyway!

(Personally, I think it’s a great activity.  You don’t need a groomed trail or hill, you can get way into the woods no matter how deep the snow, and it can be a huge workout.  Last winter I worked up a sweat and even tired out the two-year-old black lab, who gave up breaking trail after not too long and was happy to follow, rather than lead.)

“Oh, yeah right, Mom, that’d be great.  ‘Come on, you guys, let’s get a Snowshoe Team going!’  Right.  Uh-huh.  Yep.”

Why not?  You could take some really nice day-trips, that might cost a little in gas, see some beautiful country…

“Yeah, we could do ‘Extreme Snowshoeing,’” he mocked.

Yes, they could.  If they had the $40 helmet.

But first, it’s going to take a whole lot of mommies and daddies to create little snowshoers out there, starting before they can walk, committed to getting them outside and snowshoeing with them…and a whole group of friends growing up snowshoeing together to make it cool.  A lot of Tweets and Facebook pages and YouTube videos, for sure.

Then, it’s going to have to be a winter Olympic sport.

Finally, it’ll take a red-headed long-haired dude to be a star snowshoer. 

Too late for me and my child.

But two things are working in our favor:  he’s got a job – at the ski hill!  -- and I’ve got plastic.

#2-Where on Southwest Airlines (for $59) is Matt Lauer?

Matt Lauer, NBC Today Show’s germophobe host, just returned from his 10^th annual “Where in the world is Matt Lauer?” week of globetrotting.  Every day for a week, he anchored live from some exotic surprise locale.

This year, Matt went from New York to Namibia, Africa, then to Madrid, on to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, then halfway across the world to the Swiss Alps, then across the Pacific to Barbados.  There he met the Food Network Star Chef Giada De Laurentis, who is pleasant but disturbingly thin for a foodie.   Her skinniness must be the cause of the root word for her name, Giardia, which the CDC defines as “Giardia (also known as Giardia intestinalis, Giardia lamblia, or Giardia duodenalis) is found on surfaces or in soil, food, or water that has been contaminated with feces (poop) from infected humans or animals.”  (Imagine, the word “poop” actually shows up on the CDC website!)

I like this week on the Today Show because I have always loved to travel, and the affable Lauer makes it look simple and fun. 

In the midst of the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression, however, this is in bad taste.  The Today Show should be setting an example on budget travel, not flying Matt and his crew all over the world (wasting air plane fuel) in the private NBC jet.

So here’s my proposal on how to save NBC, oh, approximately $20 million a year.

Hire me! 

Matt Lauer makes $17 million A YEAR.  He’s got to go, too expensive for the times.  Put in Lester Holt, whom I adore.  He supposedly makes about $1.5 million.  I bet he’d be glad to do it for no raise, just to get off the grind of the weekend MORNING Today Show and the weekend EVENING news.  Poor guy, hasn’t had a decent weekend’s sleep in years.  And when’s he going to go to church, if he so chooses?

Then replace Ann Curry with ME!  Ann supposedly makes $2 million a year, maybe more.  I’d be happy with 1 percent of Matt’s salary, $170,000.  But New York is an expensive place to live, so I’m going to ask for $200,000, or 10% of Ann’s.

So far, Lester and I will have saved NBC $17,300,000.  Not including the travel and wardrobe budget (I’m going to shop cheaper than Ann, I can guarantee you.)

Then, we are going to do “Where in the World is Laura Zahn?” but we are going to do it on Southwest Airline’s $59 one-way fare sale.

As might be expected, cutting the budget is not without some necessary modifications to the usual Lauer stint (which, by the way, Matt has ended after 10 years...I’m sure because of the cost, though he hasn’t said that).

First, we are going to have call it, “Where in the U.S. is Laura Zahn?” because Southwest, nice as they are, can’t get me overseas for $59. 

This is fine, actually, and what NBC SHOULD be doing because we need economic stimulus AT HOME.  We could stay in local B&Bs and eat at local cafés and still save a boatload of money for the network, stimulating the local economies first.  Jobs for Americans.

Secondly, I can’t quite get to five places and back to New York for $59 per leg, at least not in the research I did.  So the last leg is going to cost more -- $89 – and it’s going to get me to Newark.  So NBC is going to have to call up subway fare to get me and crew home.

Thirdly, I can’t do it in a week.  Most of these fares are available on Tuesdays and Thursdays, maybe Fridays.  So it’s actually going to take four or five WEEKS.  No sweat, though, we’re still saving big bucks!  And Lester can hold down the fort without me.

These are tough times.  We are going to have to suck it up and make some sacrifices.

Where can Laura go for $59 from New York flying Southwest’s sale deal?

First stop:  Baltimore, Maryland.

Not bad.  You also have to know something about Laura Zahn that Matt Lauer probably doesn’t share:  I love little off-beat attractions.  So we’re not profiling the usual tourist traps.  No way. 

So in Baltimore, we’re going to visit National Great Blacks in Wax Museum.   I have never been to a wax museum, and this one has an exhibit that all Americans should see on the Middle Passage – the slave trade where 3 million captives of the 15 million stolen did not survive the trip.  (Note that the Caribbean…BARBADOS, Matt…participated in this, which would have been more educational than seeing Giardia paddleboarding in a little swimsuit.)

Week 2 - From Baltimore we are going to…wait for it…Greenville/Spartanburg!  North Carolina!

Yea!  Here we are going to visit the BMW plant for $7 tours.  Didn’t know they were made in the USA, did you?  Then we are going to explore the incredible hiking and river kayaking North Carolina has to offer.

Week 3 – Birmingham, Alabama!  Of course, we’re going to do the Freedom Land civil rights tour, including the 16^th Street Baptist Church where four little girls died in 1963 when the KKK bombed their church.  Important stuff. 

On a lighter note, we are also going to stop at the Peanut Depot, which has historic peanut roasters used for 100 years, and the Ave Maria Grotto, where a Benedictine Monk worked for 50 years using concrete, bricks, “marbles, tile, pipe, shells and coconuts, to craft…reproductions of the major religious sites and famous buildings around the world,” the visitors bureau website said.  Now that is something to see.

Week 4 – St. Louis!  Yes!  My sister lives here, so we’re going to save a bundle by bunking with her in her condo.  She’s a good cook, too.  Retired now so lots of time to feed me and crew.

We will go out for Ted Drewes custard, however.  And we will be filming at Crown Candy Kitchen (candy AND ice cream AND sandwiches!) in Old North St. Louis and having something wonderful to eat in the Italian Hill District, probably a sandwich at Amighettis (whole one runs $7.89). 

Then we are off to the St. Louis Zoo, where the naked mole rat display is one of the best zoo displays anywhere.  I know, because I dragged my kids to zoos in Denver, Seattle, Washington, D.C. and more, and this exhibit was among the most fascinating.  It held our attention for a long, long time.  The little critters are fascinating, alone, and then they have tubes to run through.  And the Zoo admission is FREE (are you listening, NBC)?

#5 – NEWARK.  I’m exhausted.  But we’re almost done.

We might see a concert at the Prudential Center.  Or attend the symphony.  Mostly we are going to spend time in the Ironbound District along Ferry Street.  The website lists more than 30 Portuguese restaurants, as well as a long list of other ethnic restaurants, and about a dozen bakeries! 

I’ve never eaten at a Portuguese restaurant, and it’s about time.  I’m betting we can find a nice chef who will do as well or better than Giardia in cooking live, minus the gratuitous swimsuit shot.  (Come on!  Matt didn’t invite Paula Deen to Barbados…)

So there you go.  We took a little more time, but we stimulated the American economy, learned a lot and had some fun – all on a budget.  Matt can enjoy a comfortable retirement, as can Ann, and Lester and I clearly are the wave of the future.

30 Rock, I await your call.

#1 - Andy Rooney Is Dead

And who shall carry the torch?

“What torch?” my eldest son would say.  “Who cares?”  He is 20. About six or eight years ago, he flipped through the channels and caught Rooney doing his “60 Minutes gig.”  “Who IS this guy?”   He looked as if he had just opened the door of the dark farmhouse on the dead-end road and discovered the bloodspattered walls and butchered bodies.

That was another moment when I realized how truly old – if not by numerals, then by eras – I was.  Andy Rooney was something of a role model when I got out of college and started a career as a newspaper reporter.  Perhaps not as much as Erma Bombeck, because she was much funnier and she was female.  But both had managed to write and get paid – and get paid handsomely – for it.

My poor son did not see the point.  Here was an old man, with clown-like eyebrows that would scare the pants off children of every culture, probably complaining about something inconsequential like why cotton is stuffed into pill bottles.  Why on earth would a major network like CBS deem this fit to air, he must have thought.  Instead, we could be watching, say, videos of people being hit in the crotch by errant golf clubs, or reality TV show contestants downing live insects.

Is there a cotton ball torch that needs to be carried on after Rooney’s demise at age 92, less than two months after he officially signed off the air with his last essay? 

Certainly not that I would be qualified, either by gender or literary expertise.

First, there are no women in their 90s employed on U.S. TV newscasts anywhere in any way, shape or form.  At least in front of the camera, and, I am pretty sure, in any capacity behind it, as well.  If there were, she would have had to have not just eyebrows thinned, shaped and colored, but face and perhaps other body parts lifted.  Erma Bombeck never lived to 92, so she was spared this.

Also, while Rooney was praised for being “curmudgeonly,” a woman in the same position would have been called, to be blunt, which is precisely my point here, an “old bitch” (so don’t be blunt, galpals).  Women still aren’t supposed to have strong opinions.  If they do, like Hillary Clinton or even (not in the same league) Michelle Bachmann, they have to be very careful about how they present them.  In my current profession, aggressive male financial advisors are called one word:  successful.  Aggressive women financial advisors?  See the term above, and add “pushy” in front of it.

So I have spent a good deal of my adult life trying to NOT get myself worked up over things that might piss me off like cotton in pill bottles.  OK, you might get a good column out of it if you are Rooney, but it would just make me seem like a disagreeable biddy who is a Negative Nellie and will stroke out too soon.  There are bigger fish to fry if you want to bitch; you pick your battles.  So perhaps I will not be able to capture that curmudgeonly essence.

Nor do I have the national and international reporting background Rooney had.  For a short time, I was a small-time small-town newspaper reporter and, for an even shorter time, columnist.  I loved it.  I couldn’t live on the poverty-level wages, though. 

A friend I made at one paper 30-some years ago told me recently – as we, both in our 50s, had made the technological leap to corresponding on Facebook and writing for other media, after his long print journalism career had ended with the closing of the beloved and venerable Seattle PI – that I should write again.  Often.  I was good at it, he said, and it’s like being given a gift of a beautiful voice, you almost are required to sing.  You should write, he told me, in those blunt words.  (He’s a boy, he can do that.)

He’s right.  Not about me being particularly good, but about me writing often again.  Over the years, writing has been therapy, heartfelt communication with friends, a process that resulted in self-knowledge and self-expression, and a paycheck, al beit meager. 

It may be all or none of those things here, I don’t know.  But I bet I’m going to enjoy it.  Because, like Rooney, I don’t have to care if anyone else does, including 20-year-old kids who perhaps will never understand the importance good journalism and column-writing ever had to either this nation or the individuals in it who were lucky enough to be the beneficiaries of freedom of speech and barrels of cheap ink.

So, here’s the deal.  I’m going to write.  Because I want to.  And whether good or not, qualified or not, whether people think I’m riding on Andy’s considerable coattails to which I have no right, I’m going to be blunt and call it AndyRooney’sTorch.   Except it will have to be AndyRooneysTorch, without the apostrophe, because symbols like that throw the world wide web into a tizzy.  And that would have pissed Andy off and he would have gotten a column out of it.  Or two.

This will have to change, of course, when his estate sues me, or even threatens to.  But, til then, I’m going with it.

Andy Rooney, according to CBS colleague Steve Hartman’s report, did 1097 essays.  If I write one a week  -- though probably not as good, and probably not ever televised, certainly by a major network --  in 22 years I will have done more than he (I hope that math is right, I’m an English major). 

And I will not yet be 92.  We will see where my eyebrows will be then.  I am betting my psyche will be in a better place.  And my heart will be a little lighter, at least.

1096 to tie, 1097 to win.

(Any other writers out there care to join me?  Game on!  It’ll be a win-win.)