"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me."
-- Alice Roosevelt Longworth
"If Citibank and Bank of America were going under, that would be a problem," said Mark Blyth, a political economy professor at Brown and a fellow of the Watson Institute for International Studies. "The bailout was meant to deal with a global systemic crisis. It was not to make sure that some bank in Utah with dodgy commercial real estate would be okay."
As ThinkProgress reported yesterday, last week South Fulton Fire Department firefighters from Obion, Tennessee, stood by and watched as the Cranick family’s home burned down — which also led to the death of the family’s three dogs and a cat — because their fire-fighting services were available by subscription only, and the family had not paid the $75 fee. Immediately, right-wing writers at the conservative movement’s bulkhead magazine, The National Review, defended the county and argued that firefighting should not be a public service available to all, regardless of ability to pay.
Now, yet another major conservative has joined the defense. On his radio show this afternoon, leading right-wing talker Glenn Beck and his producer Pat Gray openly mocked the Cranick family. After playing a news clip explaining the situation, Gray adopted a southern drawl and began to mock Gene Cranick’s explanation of how the county’s firefighters refused to help his family.
"'That's not wrong. Those are the rules of the game,' he said. 'It's the survival of a company, the survival of a crucial industry is at stake in a vital market area. This is serious business.'"
The people who have been laid off and cannot find work are generally people with poor work habits and poor personalities. I say “generally” because there are exceptions. But in general, as I survey the ranks of those who are unemployed, I see people who have overbearing and unpleasant personalities and/or who do not know how to do a day’s work. They are people who create either little utility or negative utility on the job. Again, there are powerful exceptions and I know some, but when employers are looking to lay off, they lay off the least productive or the most negative. To assure that a worker is not one of them, he should learn how to work and how to get along — not always easy.
Deborah Poplawski still gets angry about her arrest in Minneapolis last year over an old $250 debt. During her night in jail, she worried about abandoning her 15-year-old dog, Nina, in her apartment.
. . .
It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.
Not every warrant results in an arrest, but in Minnesota many debtors spend up to 48 hours in cells with criminals. Consumer attorneys say such arrests are increasing in many states, including Arkansas, Arizona and Washington, driven by a bad economy, high consumer debt and a growing industry that buys bad debts and employs every means available to collect.
The HP board of directors asked Carly Fiorina to resign last week, ending the six-year reign of the highest-profile woman in American business. HP's dismal financial results provide the easiest explanation for the dismissal: while its revenues are climbing slowly, its stock is down 50 percent since her tenure began, and her poorly conceived and contentious takeover of Compaq has done little to strengthen HP's balance sheet. (The poor performance perhaps justified the board's particularly harsh public statement, which didn't contain the usual excuse of a suddenly demanding family.)
But the problem wasn't just the substance of Fiorina's leadership--it was also her style. She had plenty of it. Fiorina brought panache to HP: she combined the showmanship of Steve Jobs with a dash of Donald Trump's ostentatiousness. Instead of working quietly for the first few years to fix the company, she believed that building buzz for herself--including appearances in early TV ads--was key to re-energizing staff and exciting customers. Tech CEOs named Jobs, Ellison and Gates can get away with this; as founders, they seemingly have more leeway in cultivating a cult of personality. But Fiorina's style clanged dissonantly off HP's wonky products and the staid corporate culture that HP founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard initiated 65 years ago in a Palo Alto, Calif., garage. Some employees loved her--but many disliked her and were no doubt glad to see her go. Last week, interim CEO Robert Wayman told NEWSWEEK that senior executives "were very pleased with the reaction of the employees to all the communication. They were way more comfortable than [senior execs] had worried they would be."
Today, Americans are concerned about keeping their jobs. They're concerned about keeping their homes; about the rising price of food and fuel. They are concerned about whether they will able to find and afford the right kind of health care. They are concerned about whether they or their children with have the skills and education they need to compete in the 21st Century.
At HP, Fiorina developed the reputation of a manager who knocked heads together—or who chopped them off. And there were massive layoffs during her tenure. In 2003, the company announced it would dismiss almost 18,000 people. (That year, the firm posted a $903 million loss on $56.6 billion in revenue.) When the outsourcing of jobs turned into a national political issue, Fiorina became the poster-girl for an industry campaign aimed at blocking any legislation that would restrict a company's ability to can American employees in favor of workers overseas. She and executives from seven other tech companies issued a report that argued that any such measures would hurt the U.S. economy. The best way to increase American competitiveness, they declared, was to improve schools and, yes, reduce taxes. At a Washington press conference, Fiorina said, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs." The remark did not go over well with critics of outsourcing, who have ever since used it as an indicator of corporate insensitivity.
In March 2004, after HP shareholders voted 1.21 billion to 925 million to expense stock options, she opposed the move, essentially opting to stick with accounting practices (that were used by other corporations) that did not reveal a company's true value. That same year, Forbes reported that Hewlett-Packard was "among many other U.S. companies that kept offices in Dubai and were linked to Iranian traders there." The article suggested that HP and other countries were skirting export controls to trade with Iran.
We have reached escape velocity and launched into the No-Consequences Economy. To pause for a moment of overgeneralization: America used to be about exceptionalism and optimism, a place where anybody could try anything and make it work. Across the business and political spectrum, it's now about entitlement, where everyone deserves a shot but no one gets blamed for screwing it up. Stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld said, referring to another affair with no consequences for the architects. (Read more about the consequences of no consequences.)
When Bob Nardelli said in September 2006 that he took "full responsibility" for manhandling Home Depot, how was he to know that he'd be kicked out four months later with an extra $210 million in the bank? Or that he'd end up at the wheel of an American icon, Stan O'Neal, who also mouthed the responsibility platitude, received $160 million when he was dumped after billions of dollars of bets went bad and word leaked out that he had toyed with selling the company without talking to his board.
Other disgraced Wall Street executives are hot commodities in the job market, valued for their perceived ability to walk through fire and survive. Private equity firms are turning away from deals signed mere months before. J.C. Flowers & Co. even managed to leave Sallie Mae at the altar and not pay the contractually negotiated breakup fee. Housing-industry shills who championed a rising market are keeping their jobs. Banks that made disastrous loans are cutting in line to borrow at below-market rates from the Federal Reserve. "It's amazing, the lack of shame," says Lawrence Mitchell, a George Washington University professor and author of The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry. "The guys on Wall Street claim they believe in free markets and are entitled to enormous compensation because of their risk taking. But when they lose, do they say to themselves, 'I'm going to take my losses'? No, they go running to Uncle Ben"—Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman—"and he, in a grotesquely irresponsible move, bails them out.
Fiorina didn't know the industry or the company, and she announced the day she arrived that she had her strategy.
On March 28, Circuit City announced that it was laying off 3,400 of its salesclerks. Not because they had poor performance records, mind you: Their performance was utterly beside the point. They were shown the door, said the chain, simply because they were the highest-salaried salesclerks that Circuit City employed.
Their positions were not eliminated. Rather, the store announced that it would hire their replacements at the normal starting salary.
What all this amounts to is a triumph of corporate and financial power, and of the conservative economics that shores it up. Once upon a time, American prosperity actually benefited Americans. From 1947 through 1973, productivity in the U.S. rose by 104 percent, and median family income rose by an identical 104 percent. Those were also the only years of real union power in the United States, years in which one-quarter of the workforce, and in some years one-third, was unionized. Apparently, this level of worker power and mass prosperity proved intolerable to our financial elite and their political flunkies.
Since the '70s, American business has generally done its damnedest to keep its workers down. Employers routinely opted to pay the negligible penalties for violating the National Labor Relations Act rather than permit its employees to join unions. In 1969, according the National Labor Relations Board, the number of employees who'd suffered illegal retaliation for exercising their right to join or maintain a union was just over 6,000; by 2005, that number had risen to 31,358. According to a study out this January from the Center for Economic and Policy Research, fully one in five activists on unionization campaigns are illegally fired. And as worker power declines, so do living standards. Secure retirement pensions are history; employer-provided health benefits are going fast.
Sometime in early 1992 I was driving alone from Los Angeles to see some friends and celebrate Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I remember a particular stretch of Interstate 10 as I passed down from the mountains of Las Cruces into the river valley of El Paso. Off to my right, on the far side of the Rio Grande, stood Ciudad Juarez. It made for a sorry cityscape, with acres and acres of dilapidated housing. By contrast, El Paso was positively sparkling. I wondered to myself how two cities...two cities so far from anywhere, could be so different from each other. And it occurred to me that the answers lay in Mexico City and Washington DC...in the Constitution and rule of law on the one hand and incompetence and corruption on the other.In our system of government nothing is more important than the separation of powers represented by the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judiciary.
If we lose those checks and balances it will only be a matter of time before we lose everything. There will be nothing to distinguish El Paso from Cuidad Juarez. Our country will lose its unique characteristics that have made it so successful.
If you look back across the past 80 years or so of the United States, what you see is that in the 1920s, we were for practical purposes still in the gilded age. That may not be the way the historians cut it, but in terms of the actual distribution of income, so far as we can measure it in terms of the role of status and general feel of the society, we were still an extremely unequal royalist society.By the time World War II was over, we had become the middle-class society that the baby boomers in this audience grew up in. We had become a much more equal society. That high degree of equality began to go away -- depending on exactly which numbers you look at -- during the late 70's, maybe a little earlier than that. And at this point we're basically back to pre-tax and transfer to the levels of inequality that we had in 1929.
So there is this great arc to the middle class, away from gilded age to middle-class society and then back to the new gilded age, which is now what we're living in. And there are really two puzzles about that. One of them is a political puzzle, which is why instead of leaning against these trends, politics has actually reinforced them. Why it is that U.S. politics moved left in the age of a relatively middle-class society, and moved right as society got more unequal?
The impact of left/right politics:
Okay, I think that what we can say is that the political climate matters more for the distribution of income than the economic models that we know how to work with and would seem to suggest more than our models capture. If you ask me practically what I want done now, I think that the most important agenda thing right now is, in fact, to work on the taxes and social insurance side, because that is concrete and you can get stuff.
But there is a lot of reason to believe that a change in the political climate in various ways can do a lot more than you would think just from looking at the taxes and social insurance. Let me give you two pieces of evidence that I looked at. One is that there is some really interesting, though intellectually disturbing, work by my colleague, Larry Bartell who is in the Princeton Politics Department and has just looked at what happens to income growth at different points in the income distribution under administrations of the two parties.
Now there shouldn't be a big difference really because at any given historical period, the visible policies are not all that different. Certainly there is a pretty significant shift from Clinton to Bush and there was, in fact, a pretty significant shift from Bush to Clinton previously. But it's in taxes and it really shouldn't be very obvious at pre-tax distribution of income. And yet what Bartell finds is actually there is a really striking difference. Inequality on average rises under Republicans. At least in the bottom 80 percent of the income distribution, it's stable or falling under Democrats. The top 1 percent just kept on rising right through, but there is at least a surprising, fairly robust correlation.The other thing I would say is timing. There's a very clear co-movement over time between income inequality and both the political polarization and the rightward tilt of our politics. It's pretty clear that the rising inequality over the past 30 years has been associated with a rightward shift of the political center of gravity, mainly because of the Republican Party shifting to the right.
You might say that's the causation running from income distribution to politics. But if you actually then just start to look at it through history, the timing actually seems to be reversed. The rise of an aggressive or rightwing movement and the rise of a really major assault on the New Deal great society legacy both come before the big shift in income distribution takes place.
And then, of course, there's the union busting.
Obviously, private sector unions were very important in the U.S. 30 years ago and have very nearly -- not completely, but very nearly -- collapsed, and they are down to eight percent of private employment. Why did that happen? You will often see people saying -- well, that's because of de-industrialization, and because of the decline of manufacturing. But that is actually not right. It's not right in two ways.
First of all, arithmetically, most of the decline in unionization is a result not of the decline in manufacturing share, but of the decline of the unionization of manufacturing itself. So the big thing that happens is that there is a collapse of unionization within the manufacturing sector and then of course also a smaller share of manufacturing in the economy, but it's much more dramatic on the collapse within the sector.
The other is that there is no law that says that unionization should be a manufacturing phenomenon. What it really is, to the extent that there is a story, is that large enterprises are more likely to be to be unionized. The reason why the high tend of unionization was also a period when manufacturing was the core of the union movement, is that at that time, large enterprises were largely a manufacturing phenomenon.
Now we have a service economy in which there are a lot of large service sector enterprises. Not to put too fine a point on it, but why exactly couldn't Wal-Mart be unionized? It doesn't face international competition. There is no obvious reason why it wouldn't be possible to have a strong union in Wal-Mart and in the big box sector and other parts of the economy. And just think of how different the whole political economy would look if the service sector enterprises were unionized.
Not necessarily all the effects would be positive, but it would certainly be very, very different. What happened? Why did manufacturing unionization collapse? Why didn't the emerging service sector get unionized? And the answer is actually pretty straightforward and pretty brutal. It's politics and aggressive employer behavior enabled by politics.
I have seen estimates of a fraction of workers who voted for a union and who were fired in the early '80s. They range from a low of one in 20 to a high of one in eight. There is no question that aggressive, often illegal, union busting is the reason the union movement declined. And the change in the political climate that began in the '70s clearly played a role in making that possible.
I went back and was looking at what people said about executive compensation when it was low, just 40 or 50 times the average worker salary. [Here are] some quotes: "Managerial labor contracts are not, in fact, a private matter between employers and employees." "Parties such as employees' labor unions, consumer groups, Congress and the media create forces in the political media that constrain the types of contracts." And so on down the line.
A lot of discussion was of the role of the political climate that was basically hostile to outrageous paychecks and constrained it. Where are these quotes from? They are actually from [economists] Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy writing, saying people have complained that there are not enough incentives in executive pay. They are saying that what we really need is to have executives get more stock options and stake in the firm -- in other words, all of the stuff that has happened since then.
So back when executive pay was low, 40 or 50 times average pay, it was actually the defenders of higher executive pay that complained that it was actually non-market forces that were constraining executive pay. Now of course that disclosing of pay has happened, the same side of the debate says it's ridiculous to claim that social norms and political forces have any role in this. But I think it's actually quite clear that it did. We can argue about which is the natural market outcome. But the point is, in fact, that we had a society 25 years ago in which there were some constraints imposed by public opinion, by strong unions, by a general sense that there were things that you don't do.
And maybe that led firms to make a decision to think of there being a sort of tradeoff between a "let's have a happy high morale" workforce, or let's have a super star CEO and squeeze the workers for all we can. There were some things that tilted the balance in that decision.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Dick DeVos lashed out at the White House this week for not having set up a long-promised meeting with executives of the Big Three automakers, which are being squeezed by high healthcare costs and shrinking market share.
"We're being ignored here in Michigan by the White House, and it has got to stop," DeVos, who is challenging Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, told reporters.
"It is wrong, and the behavior is inexcusable," DeVos said in a written statement Thursday. "The president needs to meet with the Big Three, and it must happen soon. Jobs are at stake."
Bush himself made clear in January that he was not inclined to bail out troubled U.S. auto companies.
Last night, I wrote optimistically about the possibility of Democratic Party elites finally realizing the error of their ways in ramming corporate-written trade policies down the throat of average Americans. Though I noted that most of the key players are still comfortable in the minority, and still awash in Washington's pay-to-play culture, I cited some recent moves as evidence that they may at the very least realize that they no longer live in the go-go Clinton Era where rhetoric about the "booming economy" could paper over the very serious economic challenges faced by regular working folks.
Apparently, I was wrong. A stunning piece by Washington Post business reporter Steve Pearlstein today shows that the real agenda of these Big Money insiders is to pretend to care about stagnating wages, slashed pensions, and job outsourcing - but not actually be willing to attack the "free" trade policies that are causing those hardships.
Democrats now have a perfect opportunity to deliver what the business community wants -- and to demand in exchange programs designed to provide workers more economic security. But such negotiations will never succeed if influential Democrats give away the store in advance by signaling they support all trade liberalization, unconditionally.
No guarantees of health care, pensions, expanded unemployment insurance -- no more trade deals. It's a simple message even chief executives can understand. Voters, too.
The recent wage slump has affected a substantial part of the workforce. About 30 million Americans age 20 to 59 have a four-year degree and no advanced degree, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
The White House economists did not lay out wage trends for people with master's and other advanced degrees. But other studies have found that their inflation-adjusted wages were essentially flat between 2000 and 2004, and the studies have confirmed a decline for people with four-year degrees.
When wages for people with bachelor's degrees declined in the 1970s, the cause was a flood of baby boomers entering the job market.
This time, economists say, much of the blame goes to trends familiar to workers with less education, who are now creeping up the wage ladder.
Offshoring, which has shifted manufacturing and call-center jobs to such nations as Mexico and India, is increasingly affecting white-collar sectors such as engineering and software design.
And companies have continued their long effort to replace salaried positions with lower-paid, nonsalaried jobs, including part-time and freelance positions without benefits. Those contingent positions make up nearly half of the 6.5 million jobs created since 2001, said Paul Harrington, a labor economist at Northeastern University in Boston.
Harrington said the number of salaried jobs increased an average of 11.5% during the last five economic recoveries, compared with 2.5% during the current recovery.
"There's clear deterioration in the college labor market," he said. "The American economy just does not generate jobs the way it has historically."
Here's what happened in 2004. The U.S. economy grew 4.2 percent, a very good number. Yet last August the Census Bureau reported that real median family income — the purchasing power of the typical family — actually fell. Meanwhile, poverty increased, as did the number of Americans without health insurance. So where did the growth go?
The answer comes from the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, whose long-term estimates of income equality have become the gold standard for research on this topic, and who have recently updated their estimates to include 2004. They show that even if you exclude capital gains from a rising stock market, in 2004 the real income of the richest 1 percent of Americans surged by almost 12.5 percent. Meanwhile, the average real income of the bottom 99 percent of the population rose only 1.5 percent. In other words, a relative handful of people received most of the benefits of growth.
There are a couple of additional revelations in the 2004 data. One is that growth didn't just bypass the poor and the lower middle class, it bypassed the upper middle class too. Even people at the 95th percentile of the income distribution — that is, people richer than 19 out of 20 Americans — gained only modestly. The big increases went only to people who were already in the economic stratosphere.
The other revelation is that being highly educated was no guarantee of sharing in the benefits of economic growth. There's a persistent myth, perpetuated by economists who should know better — like Edward Lazear, the chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers — that rising inequality in the United States is mainly a matter of a rising gap between those with a lot of education and those without. But census data show that the real earnings of the typical college graduate actually fell in 2004.
In short, it's a great economy if you're a high-level corporate executive or someone who owns a lot of stock. For most other Americans, economic growth is a spectator sport.
In a speech at the Credit Union National Association, Greenspan today said that homeowners "might have saved tens of thousands of dollars had they held adjustable-rate mortgages rather than fixed-rate mortgages during the past decade." He continued: "American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage-product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage."
Short-term or variable rate mortgages are the better deal in an environment with sinking interest rates, such as what we had in the past decade. However, as the Bank of England has warned, many consumers are not aware of the risks posed of short-term debt exposure in a rising interest rate environment.
There are already numerous variable and short-term instruments available for the sophisticated (or naive) homeowners. Greenspan's speech is an encouragement to use these short-term instruments. As the Wall Street Journal comments, "It is almost unheard of for an official of the central bank to offer advice on interest rates, over which it has enormous influence."
We would go much further than this: unless Greenspan clarifies his comments, he must resign...
Greenspan has a track record of forecasting mistakes. For instance, in 1990 he said, "I see no recession on the horizon." That was just before a very tough recession. Also of note, in the early 1970's, Greenspan went on record as saying there was no reason for gold to trade over $32 an ounce. Gold subsequently soared over $800 an ounce.
Every forecaster makes mistakes. But now Greenspan is advising homeowners to play the interest-rate market by taking on adjustable-rate mortgages. He also stated that he's not worried about American household balance sheets, in spite of record bankruptcies, because rising real estate prices bolster consumer finances. That's the logic that produced the stock market bubble.
What if Mr. Greenspan is wrong again? What if interest rates rise? Home values will fall. And the burden of adjustable-rate mortgages will be huge.
A number of analysts have accused Mr. Greenspan of fostering a debt bubble in recent years, just as they accuse him of feeding the stock bubble during the 1990's. Just two months ago, Mr. Greenspan went out of his way to emphasize the financial benefits of adjustable-rate, as opposed to fixed-rate, mortgages. Let's hope that not too many families regarded that as useful advice.
“It's been just like a roller coaster,” Bridget [Edwards] says. “Our payments have been just up and down.”
Up and down, from $1,300 a month to more than $2,000.
The reason?
“We have an adjustable-rate mortgage,” she explains. “I really didn't know it would change like this.”
Today, foreclosure looms over their $129,000 home. That’s a problem facing a growing number of Americans, who are finding themselves one crisis away from financial ruin. RealtyTrac, an industry organization that maintains a nationwide database of foreclosures, says mortgage defaults between January and March of this year numbered 323,102 compared with 188,122 during the same period last year — an increase of 72 percent. [emphasis added]
Indianapolis leads the nation, with one out of every 69 homes in foreclosure. Atlanta follows closely at 1 in 70 homes. Then Dallas — where the Edwardses live — at 1 in 99. Memphis is fourth at 1 in 101. Denver rounds out the top five at 1 in 105.
Dear Lauree Bradley, Director of Product Information
Trader Joe's Company
538 Mission Street
South Pasadena, California
91031-6270
During a recent shopping trip to Trader Joe's in [location redacted], I observed a situation that imperils not only food quality but safety. I reported this situation to two store managers and my concern was received with total nonchalance.
I have been purchasing Trader Joe's frozen chicken parts for years. On Friday, when I attempted to take a bag from the freezer bin, I observed that the bags near the top were completely thawed. Other bags were thawed to varying degrees. I assumed that the freezer was broken and informed the first employee I saw. He assured me that it was a natural result of the defrost cycle of the freezer and began to remove the chicken that was completely thawed and sloshing in its juices in the bags. I asked to speak to a manager.
The manager also assured me that the situation was due to the defrosting of the freezer and said she was sorry that I "had to see that." She offered me a bag from the bottom of the freezer that appeared to be completely frozen. I said, no thank you. How could I tell what bags may have been reshuffled to the bottom of the freezer and refrozen? Depending on how completely that chicken has thawed, there is a serious risk of contamination, let alone the loss of quality caused by even partial thawing and refreezing. I was assured by the manager that it wasn't a problem, because the frozen chicken sells so quickly. I disagree.
After purchasing the rest of my groceries, and heading for the car, I noticed that I had been overcharged 50 cents for a bottle of Marsala wine. I went back into the store and located another manager, who checked the shelf and conceded that I had been overcharged and would be refunded. I took the opportunity to inform him of my disgust over the condition of the frozen chicken. He also assured me that it was just part of the defrost cycle and that it wasn't a problem, as the thawed chicken was removed when it was observed by staff or customers. This, I informed him, is not a system of regulation! He graciously refunded me the entire cost of my Marsala, which I now realize I have little use for, as I have no chicken.
I don't know what disturbs me more; the fact that I observed perishables thawing in the freezer bins, or the fact that store managers exhibited so little concern over a potential public health risk. Those bins also contain frozen prepared meals, raw shellfish, and stuffed meats. Such items are far less forgiving of thawing and refreezing than meats alone.
I have a small child. As of now, I am not comfortable feeding her anything from a Trader Joe's freezer bin. I cannot be as cavalier about her health -- nay, her life -- as the managers and staff of the [redacted] Trader Joe's.
I am left with a number of nagging questions:
1) Was an episode of violent nausea I experienced a couple of weeks ago after eating a meal including Trader Joe's frozen chicken caused by that chicken or some other factor? I consumed the rest of the bag without incident, so I assumed it was a fluke. Now, I'm not so sure. Perhaps I just got lucky.
2) How is it that my own freezer remains frost-free without periodically thawing out all my food, when Trader Joe's freezer bins are incapable of the same feat?
3) Is the management of Trader Joe's aware of the risk posed by food poisoning?
4) Can Trader Joe's afford to eat the profit losses caused by spoilage of its frozen food -- even if it is confined to those items eye-balled by staff and customers -- or are those losses being passed on to consumers in the form of price increases?
5) Why do East Coast Trader Joe's stores pale in comparison to the West Coast stores, in terms of inventory, customer service, price/value, etc? I realize that's a separate issue. I just needed to get that off my chest.
McDonald's director of global nutrition, Cathy Kapica, said its potato suppliers remove all wheat and dairy proteins, such as gluten, which can cause allergic reactions.
