Wall Street Tells Us What to Buy
Just jotting down some thoughts here. I can only look at
things from my own perspective so here it is.
Wall Street has taken over the corner mom and pop markets. Local
business does not exist anymore and it's all Wall Street corporations that
provide our goods and services.
You'll see these malls and shopping district have popped up
throughout the country and they're all the same. You can go into a Target
in Wisconsin or California and it's the same building with the same
inventory in pretty much the same places. I can't begin to list all the
troubles with this but I'll give you one example.
Our local office supply store, where I grew up, was owned by one of
the cheer leaders parents. It was a local business that seemed to make a
good living for her family. They hired local people and even bought some
local goods. One of the products I could buy in their store was 14LB
paper. I would cut it up and make note books by binding it together with
glue and a 60LB paper cover. 14LB paper is thin and is like Bible paper.
The paper they sold was also durable, solid, so you could write on one
side and it didn't show through and obstruct the other side. They had a
variety of different types of paper.
Like a lot of people I started buying at Office Dept and Staples.
It soon became apparent that I couldn't get 14LB paper and the counter
clerks at Staples told me they couldn't order it. I noticed all the paper
they had was 20LB and it made lousy bound notebooks. I wanted to buy some
more 14LB paper so I went back to the office supply store owned by the
cheer leaders parents, but it wasn't there anymore. It had shut down and
gone out of business; put out of business by Staples and Office Depot.
Phone calls and letters to Weyerhaeuser, James River, Strathmore
paper company and other big paper manufacturers couldn't give me a source
for 14LB paper except in 12000 pound rolls. For all intents and purposes
it no longer existed in the American market place. No one was packaging
it for the consumer market.
My grandmother used to keep a stack of paper by the telephone and it
was 14LB paper. I somehow got the impression that her generation
preferred it because it was more compact. Now at the end of the twentieth
century you can't find it on store shelves anywhere. Is that progress or
control over our lives by the fortune 500 companies that rule the economy.
I think it's an oversight. Their statistics showed that consumers
wanted paper for their computer printers in the eighties and nineties so
that's what they stocked. They didn't take the time to think about other
uses for paper and cut inventory costs by no longer ordering the 14LB
paper - nation wide. Since their markets were so enstaunched
(entrenched), they long since gave up thinking about what the public wants
so they didn't bother to change their paper inventory. I mean give me a
break. Do people use computer printers anymore? But the big box office
supply stores still only carry 20LB paper - at least until their next
Harvard Business graduate genius decides to be a mover in the company and
order something different.
Here's another one for you. It's the 21st century, well into it,
2015 and I notice you can't buy guitar strings anyplace, around here
anyway. Target used to stock them but they no longer stock guitars or
related paraphernalia like guitar strings. Some Wall Marts do, I notice
online, but not where I live. It takes me weeks to get around to ordering
guitar strings online when I used to just pop into my local music store
and buy them, which unfortunately went out of business. Then for a while
I was able to get them at Target, which that was out of the way and now
none of the stores I frequent, within a thirty mile radius, stock guitar
strings.
One more if I may. People gladly give control of their lives to the
fortune 500 companies for initial comfort, ease of use and hype. They've
taken away your banking.
If you were a small business, it used to be, you made a deposit once in
a while to process monies received for your goods or service. You could
rest assured that if you sent a check of money order to a company online
they could process the payment. Now they can't. By signing up for an
online payment service the merchant is giving up rights to their bank
account. They can only deposit funds that have been processed by the
service that offers them the web space and merchant account. I'm amazed
at the number of people who think they're setting up their own money
machine by setting up an online business and then relinquishing control of
their payment processing the merchant service, usually sold to them under
the guise of security.
The power of wall street is like magic. They've taken control over
peoples lives, telling them what they can do or buy or sell and the people
don't even know it. We as individuals are worth no more to a billion or
trillion dollar company than a microbial bacteria is to us.
kb kbushnel.sdf-us.org/contact.html
Yea! So why do I put my contact here anyway. No one has ever
contacted me about any of these ideas, comments or quotes. What the heck.
You've all sold out to Mammon anyway so why do we even try. You're all a
bunch of self indulgent, self involved, experts and I'm sure I couldn't
tell you anything anyway or even start up a conversation where you don't
already know all the answers. Hello!
