August 2008 – Page 3 – Hopeful Romantics

Just about everyone now knows Starbucks has taken it on the chin, lately. According to a recent Los Angeles Times article, to name a few, Starbucks reported a loss of $6.7 for the third fiscal quarter. That’s a lot of beans. Additionally, Starbucks is closing 600 under performing stores.

I am not sure what the mystery is here. If you overextend your brand and start putting up a Starbucks one right next to the other, sooner or later you will either oversaturate or people will grow tired of looking at you. It is like showing up for a party in the same dress. Dazzling for a minute, and then, doesn’t she have anything else to wear?

So usually, an online driver ed program is much more exciting than those classroom teaching courses because of cheap cialis australia the interesting materials available. You will find presently oral medicines accepted by the consumers of the Kamagra from every corner of the world. canadian cialis no prescription With this, whether bipolarity exists in children is associated with the cheap tadalafil pills nervous system, which is precisely come across ended up of your brain, nerves along with spinal cord grouping termed neurogenic. Hope you will follow them and keep yourself away from STDs and pregnancy. india online viagra The other thing is the expense of the coffee. As the comedian Jackie Mason reports in his hilarious piece on the Big Green Coffee Phenomenon, they serve a pretty expensive cup of coffee. With the economic downturn, and the price being what it is, people started to go elsewhere. To Dunkin’Doughnuts, for instance. Or MacDonald’s, where they now serve a premium cup of coffee. Hopefully, it is not too hot. Even Starbuck’s admitted in some significant way there normal brew is pricey. They started offering plain old plain old coffee at a lower price.

My friend Harris called it first. He got his two cents in long before all the pundits and predictions. In fact, some of the great stock tipsters and economic forecasters were predicting that Starbuck’s stock was going to rise as it spread its franchise to foreign shores. Not Harris. He thought it was a bunch of baloney. People he said, in tough times, are not going to stand in line and spend that dough for what he categorized as burnt coffee. Ain’t happening.

He was right. Starbucks should have gotten smart early and sat down with Harris and asked him his thoughts. They could have paid him for his consultation. I know this. It would have cost them a lot less money.

I read an interesting article in last Thursday’s Los Angeles Times by Leslie Brenner. The article described how a growing movement says that email is out of control, a monster ruining our lives. A monster! Geez! Hairy and scary, I’ll bet, just like the evil troll in Hansel and Gretel, maybe. Or Godzilla, after they electrified his big reptilian ass. Couldn’t stomp on buildings no more, so he harnessed the electricity and delivers email. He is now the email monster. He is imprisoning us. Worse than drugs.

Okay, so Godzilla is probably not the email monster. With any menace, it is best to put a face on it. Maybe there should be a contest, Hey, Kids, Draw the Email Monster, the one driving Daddy and Mommy insane. As if they had far to go in the first place.

I admit I am old enough to remember sending letters. Snail mail to the modern world. Depending where you were, and depending where the recipient was squatting, that mail would arrive anywhere from one to seven days. And it cost money. And that is one the post office was functional. Well, almost.

Now you type a few misspelled words, all arranged with terrible grammar, hit send and off your message goes to any part of the world. How awful. So you reap what you sow. You get email. A lot of email You are overladen with email. It is stressful, your are imprisoned, as the article attests, you can’t resist responding to the constantly beeping inbox. It is no longer cute. It is no longer cyber macho. It is eating up your life and driving you to distraction.

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But, nooooo. As with all other evils of society we will moan and groan and ultimately do little or nothing about it. We will whine to anyone who will listen and claim the email has taken control of our lives. Like television, computers, the Internet, shopping, porn, and watching politically pundits give their painfully dull insights about the election campaign, we hold them to blame. Rather than ourselves. Instead of looking at email and all the rest, even porn, as either a convenience, entertainment or pleasurable even in some oblique way, we vilify the thing. We feel better about ourselves. It’s the thing; it isn’t us. We don’t have to be accountable for not turning off the beeper that tells you there is email.

The article in mention has tips from specialists that will help you wrangle your email and your email habit. I am sure there are more tips in the future. From more experts. I am sure if there is not already there will be a growing ancillary industry, curing people of their email Jones. Books will be written, and email therapists will help feed the endless appetite of cable TV.

Talk show hosts will interview email victims. They will tell their pathetic stories of how they were consumed by the email monster. There will be contests, and the email victims with the most pathetic stories will win trips to the distant parts of the world where email is not available. There will be email farms, like weight loss farms. There will be demonstrations, junkets and support groups.

All will be invited. And those that are there will text message those that can’t make it. Until text messages like some telecom Golem, will turn into “The Monster.”