Boomer Woman Blog

27 April 2009

Free piece of chicken. But which piece?

UNTHINK
FREE
That's the full-page ad inviting us to eat KFC today—one free piece of grilled chicken. No purchase necessary.

Looks like 2009 will be the year of food-giveaways. Interestingly, this is the 3rd time I have thought long and hard about KFC in this calendar year. That's unusual because in at least 40 previous years of my ilfe I never thought about KFC. It was just there with original, then crispy, chicken. And the cole slaw that admittedly I didn't eat until I was in my 30s. And the mashed potatoes, which always satisfied.

Suddenly, this year, my boomer friends and I are discussing KFC.

A month ago a boomer woman friend actually phoned me to warn that KFC's value menu was slight and not worth driving out of the way for. This was probably in response to my blog about the increased number of value and dollar menus at our drive-through fast food chains.

A week ago I visited a KFC for lunch with another boomer woman friend. I noticed the grilled chicken on the menu and commented that I hadn't tried that. She dismissed it with, "We're not going to eat that today." (And she was right. Neither of us did.)

So, will any of us locate a KFC today (Monday, April 27 only) and ask for a free piece of chicken?

If we were to do that, what piece would we receive?

Well, to paraphrase my friend, it doesn't matter because we're not going to do that today.

© 2009 Mary Bold, PhD, CFLE. The content of this blog or related web sites created by Mary Bold (www.marybold.com, www.boldproductions.com, College Intern Blog) is not under any circumstances to be regarded as professional, legal, financial, or medical advice. Or education advice. Or marital advice. Or even a tip.

24 April 2009

Play room at the Colorado Welcome Center

Boomers travel. Or if they cannot travel, they wish they could. I'm in the category of having a flexible schedule and the ability to travel (as long as I maintain access to the Internet for work).

Of late, I've been noticing new things in interstate highway rest areas. In 2008, I saw tornado shelters and wireless Internet in Texas roadside stops. In 2009, so far my new find is this children's play area stocked with toys. It's at the Colorado welcome center on I-70 (east side of the state next to Kansas).

The play room is about 20 x 20, which you cannot tell from this corner shot. What you also may not be able to see is the decorative image at the top. It's a cattle drive.

20 April 2009

Disappearing Brands in the Great Recession

We can/should distrust too many economic predictions especially seeing as how our own investment advisers didn't see the Great Recession coming. Still, when it comes to seeing a list of brands predicted to disappear, I'm drawn to it.

The current list comes from 24/7wallst.com and it covers 12 brands across several categories of goods. Auto, no surprise. Mid-scale clothing stores, um, little surprise. Airlines, well, logical but still a surprise probably because planes are so big and when we are in them we put our trust in them. It's then unbelievable to think something we put trust in (with our lives, after all) cannot stay in business. Purely psychological, of course.

The list is called Twelve Major Brands That Will Disappear.

17 April 2009

Someone Else's Personal Technology

Another boomer cut the cord this week. My sister-in-law emailed friends and family that she canceled her land-line. That represents a savings of $45/month that used to go to the phone company.

She's part of the growing group of "older" Americans (that's in marketing terms only) who are pushing telephones to the tipping point. If you think 20% is a meaningful percentage, you'll see it as a major part of an expected ripple effect whereby a fifth of Americans cancel home phones and rely on cell phones instead.

Age is important in the equation. In the early 2000s, the people who gave up their land-lines tended to be young and/or poor. As we march through 2009, the proportion of cancelers who are middle-aged and retired will go up and presumably turn the ripple into a wave.

The cancelers are gleeful at reducing their monthly bills. But some will replace that bill with another communication charge. The replacers are more likely to be the boomers, not the young or the poor.

13 April 2009

Household Pets Doing OK in the Depression

The only thing more amusing than the existence of John Deer Fruit Flavored Snacks is that I almost bought a box of them. Happily, I remembered that I could simply photograph the box in the store and that Sherman (dog) has no need for Fruit Flavored Snacks.

Sherman is in the story because he is sporting a John Deere dog collar. Not because we are John Deere fans but because it was on sale at PetsMart. And it came in handy last week at the dog park when a boxer bit off Sherman's previous collar. I know that sounds unlikely but it happened.

So, what's the real story here? Americans may be budgeting and cutting back—but not on purchases for their pets, at least the house-sized ones. News reports are picking up on horses that cannot be supported but the smaller animals are doing just fine. It seems that humans will cut back on their own groceries in order to continue purchasing specialty dog food and other pet supplies.

And while I make an effort to trim the pet budget (the collar was on sale and I would have purchased it with any other logo on it), I have to admit that I was ready to buy human snack food for a dog based on a logo affinity for which the dog has no awareness. Although I suspect he would have loved the sugar.

10 April 2009

Depression Talk: 30 Years Later

One week ago, Robert Reich blogged that we are in a Depression. He used a capital D, acknowledged that it's not a Great Depression, but moved away from the milder Mini Depression.

I am a boomer with a specific memory of not knowing what a Depression would mean in concrete terms. It was 1979 and Tom Bold and I were house-hunting. In one realtor's office, Tom and a middle-aged fellow exchanged these words.

Realtor: You want a mortgage that you can handle even in a depression.

Tom Bold: If we're in a depression, a mortgage is the least of my worries.

Realtor: Well, that's true.

And I just quietly filed that away. I was sure we'd never be in a depression because, after all, the Great Depression was something our grand-parents dealt with. It wasn't anything a modern society would allow to happen again. (You know, the same way we count on wars to never be repeated.)

But I still filed it away in memory. I was probably focused on the idea that Tom Bold had an opinion about priorities in a depression and I had no earthly idea what that might mean.

I mean I really filed it away. Tom was standing. The realtor was sitting. Tom had short hair (first year on the job). The realtor's was even shorter. They both wore white shirts and dark pants (1979, remember).

I am certain that in the next several years (early 1980s with their own impressive unemployment figures) I did not relate the conversation to personal finances. Other people might be unemployed but Tom was at the start of his career with options that included job choices and salary jumps.

Today? I am relating the conversation to personal finances. It's not the mortgage per se, as we've consistently lived beneath our means since 1979. Our housing is not a problem. But we certainly are touched by the current Depression, just as Reich describes his own and most Americans' situation. Retirement savings took a hit. Employment has been altered (Tom's lay-off). We're avoiding debt, just as Reich predicts. We see enough changes to make us cautious, expecting to hunker down for a couple of years.

With humility, we appreciate what we have and we sympathize with people who better fit what Tom described to that realtor. People for whom the mortgage is the least of their worries. In a Depression, the worst worries are much worse than making the mortgage.

06 April 2009

Readiness for PHR, Personal Health Record

A few months ago, I commented on this blog that I wasn't ready to create a personal and electronic health record on the web. Yesterday, I found a change in my thinking and went so far as to log-in to an established Patient Center under the auspices of MinuteClinic. (That's the walk-in health facility housed in many CVS Pharmacies.)

PHRs (personal health records) will be a commonplace item in just a few years, largely due to the federal administration's inclusion of the technology in stimulus funding. Has the national discourse on health care and PHRs influenced my thinking? Assuredly. What was a vague idea a few months ago is now a likelihood for me and millions of others.

What prompted my new action, though? It was a second visit to MinuteClinic (minor ailment) in which the sign-in screen (all electronic at this efficient work station) asked me to permit a default option of follow-up email about a web-based health record. I simply let the default checkmark stand—and then entered my email address via the touchscreen. But the time I reached home, my inbox displayed a message with a link to the online Patient Center.

The self-service sign-in desk at MinuteClinic also carried a small, print flyer about the online option of health records. I took one of those. I didn't actually learn anything from it that I didn't already know. But that small piece of paper contributed to my willingness to follow the link that would soon be in my inbox.

I followed the email link to the Patient Center, where I "registered" with a few factoids and a password. I clicked through my records there. Two visits to MinuteClinic, 5 months apart. The records were identical to the print reports I was given during the appointments.

But I didn't proceed with the next step. That would be the optional "export" of the MinuteClinic records to a PHR at either Google Health or Microsoft HealthVault. Both of those free services carry the word Beta in their logos. That's fair: they would have to be beta at this point.

News reports assure that we'll see a lot of changes between now and 2014 (target year for PHRs). I cannot imagine if the Google and Microsoft repositories will be in place 5 years from now, or what system I may use. Will I choose? Will my insurance provider dictate? Will networks of physicians lead me to a choice? I'm mainly just interested in my half-step yesterday. I think it might be classfied as readiness.

03 April 2009

Personal Technology: Air Card for Internet Access

Air cards are getting smaller and not so card-like anymore. Last month, I picked up a USB air card. Slight contradiction in terms there. This non-card slips into a USB port to provide Internet access for a computer. The technology adds a dedicated cell phone to your computer for use on the 3G network, assuring faster-than-dial-up web access.

With Internet everywhere, why would anyone pay for another route to the web? Here are my reasons:

1 - About half the time that I log into networks at Starbucks and Panera, either the connection fails or is not available at all.

2 - WiFi sounds attractive at airports but the hourly/daily charges ($6 - $12 seems to be my range) add up.

3 - Subscriptions to WiFi services become too hidden on the monthly credit card bill so that I'm not irritated enough at the number of places I cannot find the service. (FYI, I ended my $30/month service and that pays for 2/3 of my new air card charge.)

4 - Hotel charges for WiFi are the most irritating of all ($10 - $15 is the typical range I find). I applaud the hotels and motels that provide free Internet access. Of course, when the connections are weak or don't work, my applause quiets.

5 - iPhone web access is fine for a lot of things, but not everything.

6 - The great outdoors beckons, even though my friends and colleagues doubt that. But I have computed at dog parks. So, there.

7 - The USB unit can plug into any of my 3 laptops (includes a Mac). It may be the first thing I've plugged into the Vista machine that hasn't given me fits.

8 - My AARP discount from AT&T brings down the monthly charge to 40-something dollars.

9 - I have two client locations where using their networks is problematic. I can now create my own connection without fuss.

10 - I can download 6,000 songs per month without reaching the account limit.

30 March 2009

FAQs on COBRA and ARRA

I'm still not used to the new ARRA acronym (for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) but a year ago I couldn't have explained the meaning behind COBRA, either. (COBRA = Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985)

When the two acronyms come together, it is to describe the extension of health care benefits for employees facing lay-off. ARRA provides help in paying the premiums for people who lose their jobs in 2009 or (looking backward just a bit) in the fall of 2008. So, the span of September 1, 2008 to December 31, 2009 is covered. The support is meaningful: 9 months of reduced premiums that will allow many families to keep their insurance.

The U.S. Department of Labor has updated their web pages to explain COBRA and ARRA. I think the fastest way to read about the provisions is through Questions and Answers, and the Labor Dept does that well on their FAQ page. Note the "Printer Friendly Version" link. That permits you to move to hard copy and highlight the portions that apply to your situation.

On a personal note: For my immediate family, COBRA is a frequent topic. Tom Bold was laid off in Spring 2008 and so is on his last several months of COBRA coverage. He was not eligible for the ARRA provision but did receive 9 months of coverage from his former employer; we are humble about that, realizing that it's not the typical support of the newly laid off. I retired from a position in September 2008 and began paying for COBRA at that time. I am not eligible for ARRA support because my retirement was voluntary. One of our offspring was recently laid off and is covered by the ARRA support for COBRA. Our other offspring? Employed. Good!

28 March 2009

Weekend Readers: Your Personal Advisory

If you are reading this on the Saturday it is published, you are the intended recipient for this message: Boomer Woman Blog appreciates your dedicated attention. I track the stats and I know that the weekend readership represents the most consistent readership. So, you're the folks who will notice the change in publication schedule. (Figured I had better explain to you up front.)

Starting this coming week, Boomer Woman Blog will go on a schedule of twice-weekly posts. Look for new blogs on Mondays and Fridays. (Those happen to be the busiest days of the blog.)

Having been current with new posts daily for more than 8 months, Boomer Woman Blog has crossed the mark of 270 posts. That's an adequate backlog of searchable posts, which permits a change in level of entries. Twice a week posting will continue to build the repository at a satisfactory rate.

I could have simply gone to the new schedule and not announced it. But ignore the weekend readers? Heavens, who would dare?

27 March 2009

Personal Technology with Hyatt Technology

An unexpected extra night in Las Vegas led me to the Hyatt Place in that town. I had already enjoyed enough Strip for the week and the Hyatt provided well: straight shot up from the airport, free shuttle for airport transport, and convenient technology support.

Free wi-fi, nifty panel of ports installed alongside the flat-screen TV (see above), and easily accessed electrical outsets throughout the suite. (It's more than a mini-suite but the bedroom does not have a separate door.)

I was momentarily put off by the lack of room service but I ordered and picked up hot spinach and artichoke dip from the hotel lobby. It was worth the small effort and the service was exceptional even if it didn't extend to delivery to my room.

The cost of my stay was reasonable ($109/night) for a very comfortable hotel with free transportation. No, it wasn't Las Vegas on sale and didn't compete with my rate at Harrah's ($85/night) for the previous 3 nights. I rationalized the extra cost with what I paid for cabs between Harrah's and the airport: $12/50 per trip.

The real highlight was conversation with a worker who told me that work was reduced from 40 hours/week to 32, across the board. And that 14 years in the industry was not enough preparation for the current economic downturn because this is a "slump" without even a prediction of an ending time.

26 March 2009

The International Symbol for... No Pigeons!

This image comes from a sign outside the McDonalds on the Las Vegas Strip.

McDonalds is committed to provide a
clean, sanitary eating area.
Please Don't Feed the Pigeons
Help us maintain a clean, sanitary
environment.

25 March 2009

Las Vegas Eateries: BLT Burger a Winner

Live long enough and you'll forget whether you ever knew that bars have built-in video poker.

Some things about Las Vegas I know have changed. From 30 years ago, there is no more 99¢ offer of steak and eggs. But a sign in 2009 promises the same for $5.99 between midnight and 6am. From 5 years ago, the cost of buffet is double or triple. I did not sample a buffet this trip although a young woman at a counter assured me that the Bellagio buffet is the best.

Our find on this trip was the BLT Burger (part of the BLT group and complemented by other versions, such as BLT Fish, in other cities). Installed in the Mirage, this restaurant has moderate costs, ample servings, and a great salmon burger. For the handiest assortment of affordable restaurants, the Mirage wins hands down (is that a gambling reference?). Besides BLT, we spotted California Pizza Kitchen (I think I took underage nieces there 3 or 4 years ago) and Carnegie Deli (surely that's new this trip).

There are more restaurants overall, both on the sidewalks and inside the casinos. I hesitate to suggest, but feel compelled to say, there appear to be fewer bars (with or without video poker).

24 March 2009

Penny Slots Aren't What They Used to Be

I am close enough to the leading edge of the baby boom (meaning, earlier in the 1946 - 1964 span of births rather than later) to remember the original penny slot machines in Vegas and Tahoe and Reno. They were no grungier than higher denomination machines (and most were pretty grungy due to the need to touch all parts of the machine to make it run as well as having to touch all the coinage going in and coming out, well, mostly going in) but the penny slots were almost always in a darker corner of the casino. And there were just a handful, seemingly just enough to serve the old men sitting at them. That's my memory: old men whom I might assume were penniless except they obviously had some pennies.

This week in Las Vegas, I cannot count the number of penny slots in the casinos. They are front and center. They are neon-lit and musical. And a wide demographic occupy the stools in front of the machines.

What I have not taken time to observe (because I have to get over to my quarter slot machine that has the spinning top piece for Bonus Spins, not to be confused with the Wheel of You Know What slot machines that beckon with their chimes but drive me away with their computer-generated crowd cheers) is whether casino waitresses tour the penny slot arenas offering free drinks. Surely that is the best measure of how the penny slot customers are valued by the management.

23 March 2009

Las Vegas: Crowds Returning?

Las Vegas is not the ghost town I was expecting this spring. Having heard from friends that in winter one could see across a casino for lack of crowds, I landed after a long and bumpy (and full) flight to a full hotel (Harrahs) for a conference.

The conference numbers were a little low (frozen travel budgets at many campuses will have an impact on this year's academic conferences, next year's, and then we'll see what happens after that). But the hotel had filled anyway. How can that be?

Well, Vegas is on sale but it's not a fire sale. Just enough discounts are in place to stimulate visitors to plan a trip. And advertising is up. In the month of March I have noticed more ads for city, especially for family-friendly vacations. I became alert to the family focus when I received an email promotion for package deals to Sin City. I mean to say, the text in the email referred to Las Vegas as Sin City. Now, I'm generally a fan of lively and humorous advertising but I'll admit to a double-take at Sin City.

The statue? Casino floor of Harrah's.

22 March 2009

Generational Views on "Be the Best Employee"

About every other cable news show includes a segment on how to weather the economic downturn. The advice is pretty standard: be the best employee in your company. Work harder, faster, and longer than everyone else. Make yourself layoff-proof.

I imagine most baby boomers react the same way I do. We know that layoffs are based on many things besides rankings. First, there's the impact your missing salary will have on the budget. Then, there's the economic outlook and how needed your position is in the short-, mid-, and long-term. Finally, there's the question of how dispensable your position is and how well-suited it may be to outsourcing. Notice we haven't yet begun to address how well you do your job.

Last month, I came to realize that a person of a different generation has a different reaction to the be the best employee segments. I was in a planning session that a Gen Y worker had asked to attend. He was volunteering to put in extra time at work to help with a project. I commented to him that he was really going the extra mile. He answered, "I want to keep my job."

I didn't contradict. I just said, "Good for you."

21 March 2009

Recycling on the road at Doubletree

I haven't been in enough Doubletree Hotels lately... the recycling bins in my room in the Claremont (California) property caught me by surprise. Sure, I can sort my trash. And thank you.

I also liked the door to the bathroom. Partially opaque glass in a pocket door. The sort that slides open and closed. Great design to protect against middle of the night bumps into doors. Yep. Twice in my adult life I have walked into badly designed hotel interior doors and ended up with a swollen lip. So, when I check into a room I immediately start planning how I will light the room and prop the doors during the night.

I suppose you already know how I'm going to end this review of the Doubletree. Indeed, the warm cookie was wonderful.

20 March 2009

Personal Technology: The Jitterbug of Search Engines

Search engines can be overwhelming. And while some people accuse Google of making us stupid, I think the opposite is true. Using Google well is no easier than using a library database well. Strategic thinking is required. But I will admit that sometimes I have wished for a simpler searcher.

And I think that's why so many people go straight to Wikipedia. They want a single source and they don't want the overwhelm of the Google results page. Sometimes, it's just clutter: extraneous sources, advertising, mix of page elements, and scores (or even hundreds) of Next pages.

Here's an in-betweener: a new search engine called duckduckgo.com. Simplicity is its middle name except that would make a really long and difficult URL. You know the Jitterbug commercials for the ultra-simple cell phone marketed to boomer and older generations? Duckduckgo is a lot like that cell phone.

The print is large. Your mouseover highlights the entire block of an entry making for easy clicking. There's no extraneous text on the page. An invitation to more... appears at the end of a short list of results.

The results themselves are pertinent, a lot with Wikipedia straight-forwardness. That's not surprising as Wikipedia is one of the frequent sources. Duckduckgo limits results to sources that are human-edited. So, you'll never (or probably never) find a computer-generated page of links with no content.

19 March 2009

Frugality tips, even though it's hard to impress boomers with these

If you're a boomer, you have probably read scores of how-to-be-frugal guides, starting in your salad days (which is what we used to call being young and poor) and maybe this year, too. So, it's hard to tell a boomer a new trick.

All the same, I recommend the list of 30 frugality tips offered by Ramit Sethi a few months ago on his blog. Sethi set out to find meaningful and useful tips, calling the project the Save $1,000 in 30 Days Challenge. No, you don't have to sign up for the newsletter. And, no, you don't have to watch the video, although I enjoyed it. Just scroll down to the list of 30 hyperlinked tips and settle in for a short surf.

Tips in the first half of the list come from Sethi. Tips in the bottom half were submitted by readers (and edited by Sethi).

18 March 2009

The paper is closing, the sky is falling

Or not. Newspapers are closing and it's easy to fall into, what we call in the trade, decline theorist orientation. That's the impulse and habit to exclaim that the sky is falling, society is going to hell in a handbasket, or people just plain aren't behaving.

The other perspective is called normative-adaptive orientation, whereby we observe societal change and correctly identify how humans and their environments influence each other. The transitions that emerge from that interaction are sometimes awkward. The eventual results are almost always benign. (Notice how I'm not predicting, promoting, or defending "progress.")

This matter of newspapers closing is not so different from the American car industry. (The trend away from print has been obvious for years.) Time to change. But it's much easier to defend the noble pursuit of truth through journalism than the ignoble pursuit of an SUV with a 8-cylinder engine.

And so, last month in San Francisco, at dinner with 4 GenXers, I held my tongue as they tsk-tsk-ed the possibility of the closing of the Chronicle, which lost $50 million last year and may lose even more this year. Well, I used to live in California and I definitely understand the concept of losing the Chronicle. But an old (very old) part of me returns to the first day of Journalism 101 at Syracuse University in 1970. The professor said, "what's the purpose of the newspaper?" And the answers were all that you would expect, including that truth thing. And then the professor chuckled and said, "it's an old joke but it's real: the purpose of the newspaper is to sell the advertising."

Oh, yeah. It's a business. And when a business trend meets an economic downturn, you're going to see change. I appreciate that a reporter facing a lay-off doesn't care a whit about my normative-adapative orientation.