Common Sense For Utah

In the movies Office Space and Superman 3, computer geeks siphon off millions of dollars by shifting fractions of pennies unused during payroll into their paycheck. It’s an unrealistic idea to think that the company would not notice large sums of money moving somewhere it didn’t before.

Our strategy when we shop for groceries at Wal-Mart is to stick to name brands that can be had for much less than the other chains and stay away from Wal-Mart house brands under the assumption that Wal-Mart makes less money that way. We like the prices but the service isn’t that great and the produce is generally sub-par. We make our trips monthly and usually fill a cart with 50 or so items.

After going through checkout my wife has a habit of checking the receipts to make sure we didn’t get overcharged. She’s taken up this habit because she’s been finding a lot of overcharges. It’s usually 2 or 3 products and always less than a dime but they are always there. She is determined not to be overcharged and will head right for customer service line and wait to get our 25 or 50 cents back.

I think it’s too much trouble for 50 cents and I’m sure I’m not alone. How many people never notice? How many people get to the car and say “It’s just a quarter, forget it.”?

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the land. Stealing pennies from every transaction scales very well when it’s thousands of transactions a day at thousands of stores. If you figure only one thousand transactions a day times three thousand stores for 25 cents each that is $750,000 a day. Multiply by 365 days and you get $273,750,000!

Two hundred seventy three million dollars! Earned by stealing pennies from nearly every transaction.

Now, those amounts are pure speculation, but, you can see how this all scales. Wal-Mart is well know for having one of the most efficient supply chains in the world. It makes me think pricing is not handled at the store level. It’s centralized then pushed out to stores. My wife has reported price discrepancies on the same items multiple times and it is not corrected. That shows a failure somewhere along the line or it shows intent.

Have you checked your receipts lately?

The website http://goooh.com/ proposes a system of replacing our current, career, Representatives with common people who nominate themselves and then are selected by their local GOOOH members to run against the current Rep.

It’s not a political party because the chosen GOOOH member will reflect local community values. A hard line conservative will not be chosen in San Francisco for example.

Currently lawyers and multi-millionaires are excluded because those are the types of people who are currently overrepresented in Congress.

Great Video about a fight to turn a failing high school into a charter school. The rhetoric from the teachers union is abominable.

Your government is subsidizing corn ethanol production. The net effect of this is:

• Your gas costs more

Ethanol is more expensive than regular gasoline and it doesn’t burn as well. That means you get less MPG so you fill up more often.

• Your food costs more

Corn is now in high demand. Corn is a staple food used for animal feed and is in nearly every food you buy. If it’s more expensive to feed cows then milk and beef go up in price. The most common sweetener is high fructose corn syrup so everything that uses it has gone up in price.

• You get to pay higher taxes

Utah taxes food by a percentage so if the food costs more then the taxes are higher. And since ethanol is not a cost effective replacement for gasoline, the ethanol industry is heavily subsidized. Without the subsidy the ethanol producers would not make money. Eventually all this extra cash ends up in the pocket of some Archer-Daniels-Midland executive.

• It doesn’t actually save the earth by being “green”

Corn ethanol production is a net loss for the environment because you end up clearing forests to plant more corn to make more ethanol so your boondoggle will pay off.

• It won’t make us energy independent

If we plow up all the land in the USA for corn we will only meet @10%-15% of our total needs. Assuming they don’t increase from all the extra agricultural activity.

After they pass this legislation, they stand around for photo ops congratulating themselves on how well they’ve screwed over the average Joe. Don’t forget, the Democrats own Congress right now but George Bush owns the Democrats.