Pennies and sense

A recent news story about a human error using an online bill pay system got me thinking: a careless customer typed in $6716 instead of $67.16, and had to resort to a consumer watchdog at the local TV station to get a refund instead of the phone company's suggestion of prepaying for twenty years of service. In the article, she states that she is going back to writing paper checks.

As usual, when computers make mistakes, it's a problem with design (though there's plenty of that: pity the poor supermarket clerk who has to say, "press the green button" hundreds of times daily). But the design problem here isn't inherent in the online bill system, and it's not about a confusing interface. The problem here is a bigger system, one that uses hundredths. Pennies just don't make sense to most people.

Longtime readers are aware that I have little love for phone companies and their ilk - if a human of any intelligence and empowerment had been involved with processing of payment for more than 100 times the amount due, there would surely have been some sort of contact with the customer before the check had been deposited. (As an aside, there's no technical reason that a computer system shouldn't flag a gross overpayment, and a misplaced decimal point is easy thing to recognize, even for a stupid computer.) But they are a natural outgrowth of our bean-counting mentality.

But back to the pennies. I recall living in a pre-Euro France some twenty years ago, when the smallest coin minted was five centimes, but cash registers rang up single centimes. The French were simply used to rounding up or down as needed. But with the increasing adoption of electronic payment means, followed by the introduction of the Euro and its accompanying one Euro cent coin, that part of French culture has been lost.

Or has it? For this bit of culture survives, nearly universally, anywhere that people reign over institutions and machines. Accountants and banks seemingly live to count the minutiae, slave-like machines know no better. But where people meet face-to-face, the penny is irrelevant. I think of the farmers' markets the world over where the smallest change you'll need is a coin of moderate heft, not some lightweight copper. Real people simply can't be bothered with the pettiness of pennies; it's just so much easier and so much nicer (dare I say human?) to round down the amount or throw in a little something extra to bring up the value.

These odd amounts are the drops of blood extracted from stones by every layer in the (needlessly but profitably) complex systems that mark our modern world. And we do notice, tacitly, as our blood pressure subtly rises when we see the 99 cents tacked onto the price tag. As we generate staggering amounts of wealth from the cumulative effects of our decimal points, I feel an urge to resist, however petty the gesture may seem, to press coins in someone's palms instead of swiping my card.

Solid

I was reading through this month's issue of the PCC Sound Consumer (love the name, a play on words between our region, the Puget Sound, and the soundness of our consuming via a co-op), and a number popped out at me: "Only five retailers - Walmart, Kroger, Albertson's, Safeway and Ahold USA - control 46 percent of the grocery industry." Like any good researcher, I wondered about the numbers, as well as what they meant. So I started digging.

I was unable to locate the exact numbers cited in the article, but numerous other sources, the vast majority of whom were industry-oriented, paint the same picture. Most frightening to me is the hand-rubbing glee with which these kinds of figures are reported, as if industrialization of food retailing is desirable.

In all my digging, I found one table that very helpfully broke down top retailers by market. I like specifics more than general information, so this is a good thing. I'll disregard the fact that there's a market publication dedicated to the food and beverage industry, and share that I learned that the Seattle-Tacoma area ranks 18th in the nation as a food market, and that our best performers in 2006 and 2007 (in percentage of market share) were: 

Safeway                              23%    25%
Quality Food Centers          17%    19%
Costco                                12%    N/A
Albertsons                           10%    12%
Fred Meyer                           9%    10% (source: MMR) 

Well, you say, at least we appear to be bucking the trend: we all know that QFC and Costco are from right here, and Fred Meyer was founded in Portland, so things look pretty local. And Safeway and Albertson's are only one state away (California and Idaho, respectively). None of this national distribution stuff for us, no sir!

But the school of hard knocks tells me I should at least scratch the surface of the appearance. I know that rebranding is used extensively in the food industry. All you have to do is try to chase down some Salmonella-tainted hydrolyzed vegetable protein (yum!) to illustrate the complexity of the food maze, and how naming the same product different things doesn't make anything different--except the label, and perhaps the price. I imagine most people aren't aware that branding strategies are equally applied to supermarkets. So I scratch away.

Number one on our list is Safeway, headquartered in California, which operates "1,730 stores in the Western, Southwestern, Rocky Mountain, Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States and in Western Canada." (Quote from the Safeway corporate website.) Thirty-nine of them are right here in the Puget Sound area. A very helpful graphic at the top of the web page tells me their eight store brands are Safeway, Vons, Dominick's, Genuardis, Randall's, Tom Thumb, Pavillions, Carrs/Safeway. They also own a 49% interest in Casa Ley, which operates in Mexico.

Ok, so if top gun Safeway is the big guy from out of town, how about QFC? We all know that it was founded just around the corner in Seattle--why, the original store is still operating! Alas, in 1997, QFC was sold to the Fred Meyer company in Portland, Oregon. Which explains why, when I search for QFCs in our area, they return results for both QFC and Fred Meyer, 50 stores in all. Portland is still kind of local, right?

Not quite. The history of QFC and Fred Meyer reads like a convoluted genealogy of mergers and acquisitions, and the final chapter in the story has QFC/Fred Meyer joining the Kroger family of "nearly two dozen banners, all of which share the same belief in building strong local ties and brand loyalty with our customers." (Thanks to Kroger for that marketing-speak.) At least they're clear about their goal: to sell their brand to you. Conspicuously absent is anything mentioning providing food that is good for people and the planet. But I digress.

With Freddie's now part of the Kroger family, Costco is next on our list. There are about 20 locations in the Puget Sound area, but that number is deceptive, as the word to comes to mind when describing Costco is big. They are refreshingly transparent in their corporate structure: when they aquire a business, it is rebranded; they don't carry competing brands; and their house brand (named for the suburb up the road where it was founded), often makes it clear whose product is being re-branded (or more correctly co-branded). But still, with a position as the third largest retailer in the US and ninth in the world, with stores on three continents, we can call Costco neither small nor local.

How about Albertson's then? They're from Boise, right? There are 49 stores in our area, and a visit to their website reveals that they are not immune to acquisition fever: A smilng woman with an armful of grocieries informs me the "As of June 2, 2006, your local store has joined the SUPERVALU family." To add to the confusion, a separate LLC was created to license the Albertson's name back to some (but not all) of the original stores. The Supervalu site boasts that they are number five in the US, and is emblazoned with 18 brand logos.

An aside: I start to wonder if it is purely coincidental that Kenny's in Blessington, Ireland was also dubbed Supervalu? No, in this case, my fears are unfounded: it is part of the retail franchise division of the Musgrave Group, Ireland’s largest grocery and food distributor. So Kenny's is big, but only in the Irish sense.

With online yellow pages reporting more than 800 grocery stores in the area (including gas station quick marts), it becomes impossible to determine who the fat cats are, and just where your grocery store dollars are ending up. Unless, of course, you shop at farmer's markets or at the aforementioned co-op, where food producers are readily identifiable, and the dollars you spend locally actually stay close to home.

Big brother

I was happily puttering in the kitchen this evening making supper (spaghetti day: plus sautéed fresh spinach and garlic and parsnip chips and hummus), when the phone rang. Nothing out of the ordinary about that, but the call was anything but ordinary.

It was a fellow from our local co-op, and he asked for me by name. Fair enough, I thought, I just wrote them a missive about some changes in the deli, and thought this might be a follow-up to my email. Though probably not, since I had already received a well-thought-out reply the same day to that one.

Nope, this cordial fellow wanted to let me know that the sun-dried tomato and chicken sausage I bought last  week--and ate last night--may have contained traces of turkey that were not included on the label. No problem here, no allergies to that particular bird. My guess is that they didn't clean the machine well enough between batches. Says the woman who uses the same workbowl on the food processor for slicing the parsnip chips and making the dip.

Even if it is kind of scary that the co-op knows that I bought it, but even that's not really scary, because I was using my member discount that day, so they scanned my membership card. So of course they knew. That they put together the data is nothing that mainstream supermarkets don't do when they extract demographic data to drive their marketing efforts by asking you to swipe your club card.

Of course, recalls were on my mind this week, as I just filed a spate of FDA recalls (and yes, Virginia, they are a daily occurrence, it's not just you). This batch featured a voluntary recall of Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP) tainted with salmonella that's an unlabeled additive in many items, including spice mixtures that are sold as is or contained in other processed foodstuffs. Already I've seen recall notices for bouillon cubes, pretzels, Pringles, ready-to-eat bacon, and a curry spice powder sold in bulk. More will come.

In this case, the apparent abuse of the voluntary nature of the recall system and the hidden nature of the ingredient (the FDA does not require disclosing it on the label) is a particularly nasty combination, and one that food writer Marion Nestlé blogged about this morning. Her piece quite rightly calls for a stronger FDA, one that does not have to beg manufacturers to do the right thing.

So it is a reaffirmation that the co-op is doing the right thing: calling me to check and make sure things are right when they made a mistake.  While it was good of them to call (wouldn't you call your friend if you found out something you made for them was bad?), I also applaud their use of media channels to get the word out: they issued a notice on their website, and used Facebook and Twitter to spread the word. All things that, by the way, cost them nothing at all to do. I got to thinking that this is probably what was intended when the system of voluntary recalls was developed. Unfortunately, like all reasonable institutions, it is open to abuse by those who play the system to their own benefit.

If we had been talking about two schoolchildren, one who owned up to making a mistake and did their best to make it right, and one who had obfuscated a deed for their own benefit, the teacher's course of action would have been clear: reward the virtuous child, and both remove the privilege of trust and require retribution of some sort from the other. To subject both of them to a harsher regime would be a mistake, and the fallen angel must have a chance to re-earn his wings.

Blurred lines

I signed up for Twitter this week, adding yet another social-media outlet to my stable. I realized that the line between my personal social media avatar and my professional persona is becoming increasingly blurred. Experts remind me that I must mindfully consider what information I share on which site; how personal disclosure may affect my professional life and vice versa.

But the cyber realm is not the only place where delineation is not apparent, and I’m not so sure it’s bad thing. As I juggle my roles as an office worker (in my own home) and Minister of Household Affairs (a euphemistic title shamelessly cribbed from a colleague), I often find myself moving from desk to kitchen and back. Today for example, my computer was clamoring for me to update something and reboot, so I decided to take an early lunch break while it went through its gyrations. As I passed the kitchen window with its view of sun and buds and flowers, I couldn’t help noticing what a lovely spring day was beckoning. Opening the larder for an onion, I was greeted by potatoes and garlic sprouted past edibility. So after my tasty lunch, I gathered up the sprouted wonders and headed downstairs again, only glancing at my computer screen long enough to determine that no clients had any fires to put out. Leaving the door open a crack for fresh air (and so the cat could join me), I spent a delicious hour getting my nails dirty, tucking the potatoes and garlic into the earth. Like the bulbs I plant in the fall, I know I shall be seeing them in the kitchen again at the end of the growing season.

And I realized that just as the line between my professional and personal lives is at times ill-defined, the delineation between growing and preparing food and eating and health are indeed blurry lines, if there are lines at all. The food from my garden came into the kitchen to nourish us; and that which we do not use in a timely fashion ends up back in the garden, either as the seed or the soil.

How wrong we are to think we have come so far, with our industrially-prepared meals and compartimentalized lives, where work is separate from “life,” and where the process of bringing living food to what goes onto our tables and into our bodies is obfuscated. How appalling that we not not seem to realize that we wound ourselves with our unthinking acceptance of being stuffed into neatly-defined cubicles? How artificial it all seems, and how utterly foolish of us to not reclaim and embrace the ambuguity of that whole messy thing called life.

Order in the universe

It has been a difficult week. We flew out last Wednesday to our nation's capital, and are all a little ragged from meetings and museums and jetlag. During the week we learned that a good friend was diagnosed with breast cancer, and another lost her child and home in an incredibly nasty custody battle. Little One getting sick on the subway (an apology here to all riders of Washington D.C. Metro) was just icing on the cake.

And it's only Wednesday. Last week on Facebook, a friend posted as his status that he saw "great order in the universe on spaghetti night. And I knew exactly what he meant.

Weary in my soul, frustrated by my inability to change the universe, and eyes puffy from crying, at least I know what dinner will be. I know that it's a meal that everyone will be here for--no orchestra or firefighter training or meetings or whatever. And I know everyone loves it, and that I won't hear any complaints about how someone hates this or this tastes icky, or I burned it because I was being pulled in so many directions.

I can put on music and enter the zone, creative and comfortable, and the kids seem to know that all is right with the universe when Mom is making spaghetti. It smells good, and they seem content that there is something they can count on. There are no complaints about homework, and they are miraculously not fighting.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason this week has been so difficult was because we missed spaghetti night last week. I can't help but notice that tonight we eat and we talk--and we linger at the table. We are putting the order back in our universe with spaghetti, and it will get us through the coming week.

Hail to the ch(i)ef

Newspapers the world over are hailing Michelle Obama for her frank talk on childhood obesity, its causes and what we need to do to tackle it.

"It's time we all had a wake-up call. Our kids didn't do this to themselves. Our kids don't decide what's served to them at school or whether there's time for gym class or recess. Our kids don't choose to make food products with tons of sugar and sodium in super-sized portions, and then have those products marketed to them everywhere they turn. And no matter how much they beg for pizza, fries and candy, ultimately, they are not, and should not, be the ones calling the shots at dinnertime. We're in charge. We make these decisions." (http://bit.ly/9u2K6j)

This kind of statement, at a prearranged press event, is inevitably followed by thunderous applause. But are we really in charge? Do we really make these decisions?

It seems incongruous to me that the wife of the president should be tackling the problem from the same side as the rest of us, when she presumably has access to the ears of one of the most powerful men in the western world. Think about it: if our kids aren't the ones deciding, then who is making these decisions? Are parents really the ones choosing "tons of sugar and sodium in super-sized portions?" Are parents the ones "calling the shots at dinnertime?" The answer is yes and no, for while we are the ones who have to say 'no' to pizza for dinner, we as a society have stripped parents of a great deal of authority over their childrens' diets. And we as parents must assume some responsibility for allowing it to happen.

But let me back track: the seeds of the decisions that are making our children obese are not being made at the dinner table. The decision isn't even been made when a parent goes shopping. The decisions aren't even being made by that supermarket manager placing the order to stock the shelves. The people were pushing the buttons and turning the nozzles and driving the forklifts in the food factories are also not the ones making the decision ( we could say they're just following orders). No, the decisions are being made for us all in board rooms across the country, by people who can afford to circumvent the system that they themselves have created.

A couple of months ago I ran across a photograph of a younger Barack Obama teaching a class. What struck me was not that he was free of gray hairs, but what he was writing on the blackboard in front of him. The title of his diagram was "Relationships Built on Self Interest." He already understood the powers driving much of our society. And during his campaign he was the one who dared admit to the revolving door between business and government regulatory bodies that was creating a web of conflicts of interest so tangled that he himself seems incapable of dismantling them. And he promised us that he would stop this revolving door, where former agri-business executives assumed roles of responsibility within government agencies charged with regulating the selfsame businesses, and where people leaving these agencies find themselves offered lucrative positions in the same businesses.

I took heart when he took office and his first appointees seemed to buck this trend, and was nothing short of thrilled when the wind seemed to be changing, bringing with it proactive recalls driven by the FDA, rather than the empty gestured voluntary recalls. But the fresh wind of change seems to have lost some momentum. Appointees from business made it onto his lists after all, and recall notices from the FDA are leaning more toward the characteristic language and patterns that we know all too well.

Michelle Obama is proposing saving our kids by re-empowering parents. Indeed, she seems to be thinking along the same lines I was 10 years ago, when I had a small child to feed, and was unsatisfied by the choices being presented to me. My decisions at the supermarket were already made for me, so I had to find some place else to assert my parental choice. For me, it was a step by step process: I started by shopping the outside perimeter of the supermarket, reading labels, and asking questions, and eventually moved outside of the big box altogether. The gradual evolution has taken me to the point where even the coop seems to be a bit of a compromise, as I find I much prefer to press coins in the earthy palms of farmers' hands than swipe my debit card through a PIN pad device.

I and many like me are essentially doing an end run against the food industry (and they don't like it, judging from the rules they keep trying to get pushed through--think labeling). We're shopping at farmers' market, signing up for CSAs, and even planting vegetable gardens. I am very glad that Michelle Obama has started this conversation. And I hope, from the bottom of my heart, that she, like all the other strong, thinking mothers out there, is having this conversation with her husband. Because only if both parents are pulling in the same direction will the children be healthy.

Ode to oatmeal

I have been a bit under the weather, tired, not 100%, not firing on all cylinders, if you want to reduce me to an internal combustion engine. I could be an uncurable optomist and note that the slowing economy has made it easy for me to get my work done, but alas, "refilling my tank" by taking naps only seems to make me come up with more brilliant ideas that need tending.

Part of the problem is information. It's everywhere, and it means that even if I decide to lounge in my pajamas for half a day and wallow in tissue and pity, I can still take in information that is seemingly unrelated, even if I'm not capable of stringing together a few words into a coffee break read for you.

This morning is the case in point: A cup of tea from my Darling Husband brought bedside was the harbinger of a Day Off. No, said he, they can sort bugs without me, I’ll drive carpool, you stay in bed and rest up. I was too tired to put up a fight, downed the tea, and resumed snoozing. Upon awakening, I had only to reach over the side of the bed, where the aforementioned Darling Man had placed my laptop. Once the wireless bars lit up, I eventually learned that life was marching on (I read the comics before the headlines), that I had somehow once again managed to miss all but one of the films nominated for best picture by the Academy (and that was only because they have doubled the number of nominees), and that Ani in England had had a bowl of oatmeal five minutes prior. You would think I would be more compelled by the TED lecture posted on sharing data on medical conditions or the news item that a citizenship request for a man who required his wife to wear a burqua was denied by the French. But I kept coming back to that lowly bowl of oatmeal.

And so I ventured out from under my warm quilt to the kitchen and found it. There, behind the instant variety that lures Little One out of his own lair, next to the tub of homemade granola: the yellow paper bag that made the trek from the Olde Country, Irish oatmeal. Which explains that steaming bowl of warm goodness that is warming my belly far more than the hot water bottle ever could.