Category: Business

Wal-Mart coming to Oakland

Sometimes, when I have a blogging lull, it’s because there’s not much that I want to talk about. Recently, the opposite has been true. There’s a number of things going on that I want to talk about, but I’m not sure what exactly I want to say about them. So rather than sound insipid or downright wrong, I’ve been keeping my mouth shut.

Here’s an example. 11,000 people applied for the 400 jobs at a soon-to-open Wal-Mart in Oakland. It was front-page news in the SF Chronicle yesterday.

I had to run some errands around town last night, so I got to listen to two different KGO talk radio hosts opine on the subject. And since this is the Bay Area, it was pretty easy to predict what people were going to say about the whole thing: “Our economy sucks! Wal-Mart is evil! This is terrible!”. All of which happened as expected. Although it was funny listening to one host try to defend the concept that any time you have a willing buyer and a willing seller, the result is a “good job” no matter how crappy the wages and benefits are. I was tempted to call in and ask if that extended to things like murder for hire, but I figured that might not get past the screener.

So here’s some of what I think. On the one hand, although those job numbers sound bad at first, when you break it down, that’s about 27 applicants per position. Competitive, but from where I sit, not horribly so. Not after hearing stories of hiring managers getting flooded with hundreds of resumes for one job posting on Craigslist. Now, not being a tech hiring manager myself, I don’t know if those stories are still true, or if that was only in the immediate post-bust timeframe. Maybe I’m wrong and these days, getting 27 applicants per job is really bad. Or maybe it’s not that bad after all. Bottom line is, I don’t really know, and therefore have a hard time taking a firm stand either way.

Something else I thought about, but have been hesitate to talk about, is the intersection of race and class and hiring here — note this photograph of the new Wal-Mart employees. But frankly, as relatively privileged member of society, I don’t feel comfortable making a lot of points about race and class and employment. It’s not my area of expertise, and I run the risk of sounding clich

Interesting Mortgage Factoid

Seen in the SF Chronicle today:

Interest-only loans were the dominant home finance instrument before the Depression. Sharply declining property values, coupled with the fact that the principle was never paid down, contributed to widespread foreclosures in the 1930s. That led to the introduction of the amortizing loan, in which the principle is paid off during the life of the loan.

Interesting. And if you want more details on other things that happened to the mortgage industry in the 20th century, here’s a useful link.

Sweatshops at Sea

And the race to the bottom continues. One inventive company, recognizing that there are timezone, distance, and cultural difficulties involved in outsourcing programming jobs to Southeast Asia, is coming up with a creative solution:

Take a used cruise ship, fill it with programmers, and park it three miles off the US coast so that it is no longer subject to US laws and regulations (like OSHA rules, overtime pay, etc). Pay the programmers less than $22,000 a year and make then work 10 hours a day. And then say that since the ship is so close to America, that it’s really a way of keeping American jobs at home.

It sounds to me more like indentured servitude than a decent job opportunity.

  • Although the article says that each programmer will have their own room, what about spouses or children? I suspect they won’t be welcome.
  • They say that the pay is $1,800 a month, they don’t mention whether the employees will have to pay for things like laundry service, medical care, entertainment, or other amenities — it could well be that most of their cash will go right back to the employer.
  • The article mentions ‘shore leave’ for employees, but how often, and how much leave? And what happens if an employee decides to quit, or has a family emergency, or has some other reason for needing to get off the boat?

The telling comment, it seems, is this one: “The pay is about three times what they earn in India today.” That will make those jobs highly desirable to Indians if not Americans. And with the ship parked so close to the US/Mexico border, it doesn’t take much imagination to cook up a scenario where you import a boatload of programmers through Mexico, put them on the ship in international waters, and bingo, you have a totally unregulated sweatshop where the inhabitants cannot get away without permission unless they’re willing to risk a three-mile ocean swim.

It’s a situation bursting with the potential for abuse.

Hat tip to Kulam Yachad for the link.

Bummer

Starbucks Corp. will close all 17 Torrefazione Italia cafes

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Two of them are in SF and I really liked them. I guess I was one of the few who did though. Too bad.

Whither the Treo?

Russell Beattie has some interesting thoughts about the Treo, and by extension, the PalmOS world. His point that although Silicon Valley loves the Treo, it’s statistically nonexistant in the greater universe of portable devices.

It was empirically obvious, most of the people in the room had a Treo, so it must be a really popular platform, right? Wrong. If you’ve got a Treo you might be a cutting edge technologist, but you’re in the backwater of mobility. Trust me. (Actually, don’t trust me, just look at the frigin’ numbers.)

Now, I will admit that here in the U.S. Palm is doing better that its competitors. The numbers I’ve seen show that Palm phones actually outnumber both Symbian and Windows Mobile phones here by a double. But honestly, out of 170 million American subscribers, the total smart phone numbers are still ridiculously low, so I wouldn’t pay much attention to this. The fact is that Palm is a niche player in a niche market (there are more cell phone subscribers in China – 300m – than there are *people* in the U.S.) as time goes by they will increasingly become less relevant as a platform, not the opposite.

I think he’s being a bit too harsh about the potential future of PalmOS and the Treo, but he’s not completely wrong either. Given how much PalmSource is struggling to maintain any kind of relevence in the US consumer market, given the declining number of big-name licencees and the declining number of PalmOS devices available in the market, there’s signifcant reason to worry about the future if you’re a PalmOS aficionado.

And yet — people are passionate about their Treos for a reason. They’re great devices. My Treo 180 died over a year ago and I still miss it. If I could afford a Treo 600, I’d have one. The power of a small, yet dedicated market — especially when key sections of that market are VCs and other players — should not be ignored.

One Step Forward Two Steps Back

I was going to blog about this yesterday but I didn’t want to follow that upbeat post with something gloomy quite so quickly. Nathan Newman’s Labor Blog raises a host of disturbing points about the one-step-forward-two-steps-back Santorum minimum wage bill currently in Congress.

Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum is leading the charge for a GOP bill that would ostensibly raise the minimum wage by $1.10 per hour, but in reality would cut wages for millions of American workers and expand unregulated sweatshops across the country.

As a minimum wage employee myself, I have some strong opinions about how fucked-up the minimum wage laws are. I see up-close and personal exactly how difficult it is for people to make ends meet even on San Francisco’s generous $8.62/hr minimum wage.

In short, it’s hard as hell to make ends meet when you work for the minimum wage. One of my co-workers has 6 roommates. Another lives in a neighborhood so bad that she’s arranged to have her roommate meet her at the store to walk her home after dark. Another shares a one-room efficiency with his wife. That doesn’t sound so bad, but in about 2 months’ time they’ll add a baby into that one room. He has been apartment hunting, but says they simply can’t find something bigger that they can afford. Still another co-worker, a father with two young daughters, works 2 jobs and tells me that on a good night he gets 5 hours of sleep. Some of my colleagues are trying to go to school while they work but that presents its own set of challenges: the more classes you take, the less hours you can work, but the fewer classes you take, the longer it takes before you’ll finish your degree.

I could go on but I’m getting too depressed. I know I’m lucky because I have a husband with a decent job and thus am not relying on my minimum-wage plus tips income to the same extent that the rest of my co-workers do. That could change at any time, of course. If the last several years have taught me nothing, they’ve taught me to not make any assumptions about the permamance of any job. Every day Scott and I still have our jobs, it feels like a small victory.

And in related depressing news, the LA Times has put their entire series of articles about why American families are so screwed into a non-registration required special section. It’s also worth a read.