Great Expectations–Greater Failures

Last week while I was not around, Staples along with other companies reported their quarterly earnings.

Unfortunately, the picture is not pretty for really anybody. Staples, Walmart, Target, Abercrombie & Fitch, Sears and J.C. Penney amongst others reported sales that did not meet expectations.

So the real question to ask is: Are the companies estimating too high or are shareholders wanting too much?

The way I see it, it’s both.

It is important that companies make money, but the possibly of sales going up continuously is very much a misconception especially in this economy.

Sadly, shareholders are expecting much more every quarter as they want to see a better return in their investments. However, many of these shareholders probably don’t even shop at the companies that they hold shares.

This brings me to the point that many if not most of these shareholders are actually sucking money out of these companies when the money is much more deserving to the people who really deserve it: the employees.

Comparatively, many shareholders make much more than the employees that the company has. And for what reason? Just because they can or just because they are that privileged.

Companies like Sears, J.C. Penney, and Staples would not be tanking if investments were made to employees and not to shareholders. Unfortunately, many of these companies are clueless as to where their money is going and where it really should be.

Also companies are using gimmicks. Consider what Staples has done during the back-to-school season this year. They have their scam of the savings pass and this year they have decided to have greatly reduced items with a minimum purchase. No more free rides anymore with them. Given that the competition does price matching, there is no incentive to ever shop at Staples.

However, Staples blames once again their foreign stores for their problems, not the fact that realistically that their domestic stores are tanking. Ironically the stock price has lost better than 1/3 of its value since I sold all my stock 5 years ago and it has never recovered.

Ironically the story is the same at other retailers as well, just that Staples won’t admit to their real core problem. Instead they would rather fire full time employees for no good reason rather than man up to the real problems with the company.

Eventually, after all their full time employees have been fired, they will no longer be able to save money that way and inevitably have to start shutting down stores here in the United States and abroad. Other companies are already doing this to try to save themselves but are still failing.

My suggestions are to lower sales expectations for companies and lower stock ownership. Many companies have already had buybacks of their stock just for this reason. It will be just a matter of time when some of these companies will disappear completely because more was cared about the shareholders rather than the employees that they could have had.

The Day of the Lawbreakers

This week’s post is being posted in all my blogs as I feel it is that important to be presented everywhere. Enjoy this week’s post.

When I started thinking about what I was going to write about this week, I was pretty much at a loss, not because of lack of topic rather which topic I was going to discuss.

That was until this morning, when everything nearly came crashing down physically. If ever you thought that laws could be broken, today was the day and it happened in spades.

It all started around 8:30am this morning. I live down a dead end street clearly marked as such. I also live on a road perpendicular to a busy road where 18-wheelers drive down constantly. Usually everything is fine with no problems that was until today. Apparently, according to some GPS systems, my street is a shortcut pass-through to the place where these trucks are supposed to go, which is very wrong.

Today, one dumb truck driver ignored all the dead-end street signs and decided to travel down my street. The problem was that the driver was unable to turn is vehicle around given the brick business building across from my house. As ugly fate would have it, in the process of trying to turn his truck, he rammed the corner of the brick building significantly enough to knock several bricks out of the building and cause significant damage to it.

When the driver tried to straighten his truck, he moved the trash bins out for collection up further into our yard then proceeded to turn his vehicle up onto our lawn doing significant damage to that along with cracking our driveway. After the driver got out of my yard and parked his vehicle across the street on the side of the building, I went out to go over to the police car that was there during this entire incident. As I was approaching the police car, I saw the truck driver approaching my lawn to put the trash cans back at the end of our yard.

At this point, I yelled over to the driver on “who is going to pay for the damage done to our lawn?” Either the guy didn’t hear me or didn’t want to hear me as he stepped into his vehicle and drove away. I talked to the cop and asked him what I was supposed to do as this guy did significant damage to our yard. He refused to write up a report for the damage done. The cop said that it was OUR responsibility to contact the company for what had happened and to get a settlement from them.

Isn’t it the police’s responsibility to collect information on property damage, not the citizen to having to deal with the truck’s owner? Apparently the cop was much more interested in the damaged building without caring at all about the damage done to our lawn. Is this what we really pay cops for, to let stupid people destroy people’s property with no ramifications?

This was just the beginning of just where the day went downhill with lawbreakers. The second one came from uncle.

For the first time in about 10 years, my aunt and uncle came to visit us from Texas. Apparently his wild cowboy ways has gotten the best of him. As first of all, he really doesn’t like wearing a seat belt while driving. Since we went several miles with him unbuckled it bothered me that we could possibly get stopped because of his ignorance.

To add insult to injury, he made a left hand turn on a red light onto a busy road. It is apparent that he has no respect for the rules of the road. Where are the police when all this is happening? Probably the cop was taking a break after the truck/building/lawn accident.

It seems to me that the police have their priorities all messed up as they don’t do what is important and do a half-ass job at what they do. It is not surprising that my day with my relatives ended 3 short hours after it began. I wish them good luck that they don’t get stopped by ignoring some simple road rule. It is no wonder why so many criminals get away because the cops don’t do their job.

Thankfully, I had enough time to write this post while staring out the window looking at our torn up lawn and the damaged building across the street. Who knows what tomorrow will bring…maybe that will be next week’s post.

Of Likes, Friends, and Followers...

This week’s blog post is being distributed to all my blogs as I feel that it is important information. Thank you and please enjoy it.

Yesterday in my Facebook inbox, I received what appeared at first to be a pretty nasty message from one of my Facebook friends. The person was angry of the types of things showing up within their News Feed sidebar of “People You May Know”.

Now I can understand this person’s frustration of seeing things that offend them. I have this same issue with other people as well. That part is the subject of a future posting.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely NO control of what you see in your feed. I can’t alter any of the settings to prevent you or anybody else from seeing it all. This is a sad bug to the privacy of Facebook as it allows everybody to see everything you do.

As this friend wanted to do was to unfriend me and then re-friend me to try to end this problem. Unfortunately, this would never be a solution as this will always come back.

So do I believe that I should take care of what I click on just to please others? My answer is definitely not. Realistically, people should just “man up” and accept the way Facebook operates works warts and all.

So let’s break down the 3 individual problems with the Facebook timeline.

1. Likes – As I writing this I have just a little more than 3400 liked pages. To many people, this may not be many or it may be excessive depending on their own Facebook usage. Unfortunately, my likes may never be the same as yours, but sometimes they still show up on friend’s sidebar just because I like them.

2. Friends – You don’t have to be friends with anybody else if you don’t want to. However, Facebook wants you to be friends with the friends of others. This can be bad if these others post things that may not be appropriate. As of this writing, I have about 950 friends so don’t be surprised if one or two may show up in that sidebar to be added to your friends. This to me is the biggest problem as I feel that others should not see who I friend as I don’t care who my friends decide to add as friends themselves. Hopefully, you are as confused as I am over all this.

3. Follow – This should actually be renamed “stalking” as it allows you to become friends with someone without getting their approval. While this feature needs to be enabled by the user, I feel that I would have no control over who sees what I post no matter what. I like to be in control of who are my friends and who sees what I write.

My bottom line recommendation is to do what I do: JUST IGNORE THINGS YOU DON’T LIKE!! Wanting to unfriend someone just ticks them off and doesn’t really solve anything.

So how did I handle the message? I just deleted it like it never happened as the person found their own non unfriending procedure. Good for them. Hopefully, I don’t get anymore complaints, but I expect it at some point down the line.

Special Notice: I have decided to reopen my Twitter account to everyone without getting approval. My hope is that I can get more followers as my follow numbers have been stagnant for months. I also feel that by reopening my Twitter account, I can get my messages out there much easier. However, if any harassment comes along, I will put a protection back on the account. I am hoping that I won’t have to do this again. You can follow me safely at @louisbrown.