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Donny Slade

Opinion

Tulsi Gabbard would have made a fantastic opponent to Donald Trump

Note: you can read this opinion piece, even if you don’t align with my political viewpoints. If you disagree with me on politics, it’s probably especially important that you read it.

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An Important announcement from Tulsi Gabbard. That spells out a suspended campaign, surely.

Tulsi Gabbard bows out?

That’s the thought that went through my head when I saw it come up on my feed. Who is Tulsi Gabbard, you might ask?

Let’s give some background. I try to remain as unbiased as possible in my job – sales, with a side of writing.

I’m not a huge fan of Donald Trump, though, fiscally, I tend to align with his policies. His social policies on the other hand, I’m not always in love with. The problem with Trump isn’t that he’s confident. It’s that no one else can be right, even if they are right. I believe you shouldn’t be right unless you’re actually right. If you can demonstrably be proven to be wrong, even if it wasn’t your intent, or it is painful, you should make it right and admit you were wrong.

It bothers me that he cannot do that. Mostly because I think he could be a good leader. Not particularly based on what he ran on, but that he has the capability, if only he was flexible. Notice I didn’t say more flexible. He is stubborn like my brother’s teenage kids. They refuse to be wrong even with proof that they are wrong.

They want to be right for the sake of being right. It’s a teenager thing.

So of course, in my desire to retain my ability to say that I am truly unbiased, I like to follow both sides of the political spectrum. That, so I don’t get caught up in an echo chamber, despite my mostly leaning right on the political scale.

Here’s the problem. Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders aren’t likeable. Elizabeth Warren isn’t likeable either. Hilary certainly wasn’t likeable. Andrew Yang had no chance. Pete Buttigieg wasn’t mainstream enough for most of America, despite being pretty likeable. There are others that could have made sense if they had put in more pre-work.

Kamala Harris is too tainted from her time in California in various public-facing offices – she’ll probably never be able to run for President and do well, though I do like the idea of a woman of color being a legitimate candidate on the final ticket – as long as she has the experience and composure that a President should have (A female Trump wouldn’t be a good final ticket candidate in my mind).

Cory Booker wasn’t believable and didn’t command the same speaking prowess as is necessary. Amy Klobuchar was very likeable, certainly very human, but had no chance, and a realistic lack of experience in all the areas I personally believe need to be high on the list for a potential president.

Michael Bloomberg is way off on guns, he’d have too much pressure as a result. He also has social skills on the level just barely above Mark Zuckerberg. Buying $600+ million dollars’ worth of ads to prove a point puts him out of the realm of being able to connect with normal folks. He would have also set the bar pretty high for future campaigns on a spending perspective. A few Billion dollars would have been a minimum spend and completely ludicrous.  

Tulsi Gabbard said everything right for a moderate candidate. She looks the part. She’s graceful and distinguished, and it’s not hard to get fringe conservatives to agree with most of her positions. She’s like a democrat Rand Paul. And that ultimately is the problem.  She’s too eager to actually work at fixing problems, so her political warfare standard is lower than that of her opponents who are strictly there to garner political favor.

She is also willing to get serious when asking people to be accountable. She isn’t afraid to call people out, but she’s more respectful than most politicians.

Tulsi Gabbard doesn’t want to just run to war the first time we see aggression from another country. She wants to listen to what people have to say. She is a legitimate patriot and still serves in the Hawaii National Guard.

She has real chops in foreign policy, despite taking a lot of flack for having met with some controversial international figures. Think Syria.

She is a real person, who, if you give her five minutes to talk, she will have you actually listening.

She’s also the anti-Trump. So, she is a much more interesting matchup to the current president. Who in my opinion, if it weren’t for his ego, might not have done a very bad job What are your thoughts? Am I way out in left field? Did I get this one wrong? Did I say something too sensitive? Let me know thus far. It just doesn’t help that the guy distances himself from people every day trying to always be the only person who is right in the world.

I actually don’t have a problem with his record, as long as I don’t have to listen to him talk about it.

That said, I lean right, and I actually like listening to what Tulsi Gabbard has to say.

I’d be a voter that potentially moved my vote from historically Conservative to Moderate Democrat if the other candidate was Tulsi Gabbard.

But alas, it wasn’t to be. She bowed out gracefully and threw her hat in the ring for Joe Biden, who is cringeworthy at best.

He picks fights with veterans and lies about being arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela and has a problem with touching women awkwardly every single time he’s on camera it seems. He also says really ridiculous things. Like when he made a comment about working with the only Black female senator… when there was another one in the same room as him, and he didn’t even mention her name (Kamala Harris), on a national televised debate. Awkward.

He’s also a paper tiger. He doesn’t seem real. He seems miffed at the simplest things and always takes it too far for the sake of looking tough. It’s tiresome.

I’m not trying to tell you who to vote for or what politics to have, I’m just trying to say it would have been a legitimate fight if democrats could have coalesced behind a centrist type instead of a revolutionary hard progressive, or a socialist. Even better if they forgot to get behind the longest serving potential candidate just because he served as VP to Barack Obama.

Talk about milquetoast, with a side of cringe. That’s what I see when the chosen candidate is Joe Biden.

Tulsi Gabbard would have been female, strong willed, well spoken, proven in important matters and American as apple pie. She’s also not a weakling but answers and asks questions based on substance not talking points.

The fact that Biden has overtaken Sanders after a strong start for Bernie, makes me realize we aren’t ready as a nation for a self-proclaimed democratic socialist. That’s a sigh of relive for someone who believes the Constitution deserves to be conserved. We need a return to strong 4^th and 9^th and 10^th amendment stances. We need legitimate protection in certain areas against erosion of Second Amendment rights. You don’t have to agree with all my politics to agree with some of them. Remember that’s what elections and campaigning are supposed to be about.

I don’t like Tulsi Gabbard’s specific stance on the 2^nd amendment, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing that she was easily the best candidate to take out Trump for those who oppose him.

Unfortunately for those who want Trump out, no one is jumping from Trump to Biden or Sanders (who may not even be the chosen candidate in the end). Furthermore, if both of them enter the final ticket as potential presidents, say, if Sanders went to an independent ticket or something like that, then it all but guarantees a landslide by Trump.

I want to be clear: I am a conservative in all fiscal policies. I am also trending right on most social issues, with some exceptions.

That said, I am not for or against Trump.

I would rather vote for Trump than for a Biden or a Sanders. But I could have been swayed by a Tulsi Gabbard. I hope she considers running in the future and evolving on her stances to meet the needs of important historical documents that amazingly still have the utmost of relevance, but also the constituents of the United States of America.  

For me it’s not about Conservative vs. Democrat, it’s about who can best take us forward. And even if I liked Trump, which is up in the air as a politician (I’m not in love with him as a “persona” and I don’t’ know him personally to say whether he is a good person or not) I’m not sure he’s the right guy. Sometimes you need to change your mindset to serve people the right way – he seems resistant to change.

We have to stop looking at this political thing as ME vs. THEM and look at it as: where can we go from here with the right person, and how can that person best serve the collective of people in the United States?

For all that, I’m a bit sad today, as, even though she was a longshot with no chance of the White House this election (BECAUSE OF THE PRIMARIES – NOT THE GENERAL ELECTION), she was probably the best candidate that the Democrats have fielded, if even in passing, since JFK. And I don’t take saying that statement lightly.

What are your thoughts? Am I way out in left field? Did I get this one wrong? Did I say something too sensitive? Let me know.

The post OPINION: Donny Slade – Tulsi Gabbard was the best chance Democrats had – now what? appeared first on Easy Ad - Local Small Business Resources.

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Donny Slade

Opinion

The fallout of this COVID-19 thing is temporary, mostly

Sure, it’s disheartening in a culture that places a high level of importance on toilet paper, that thousands of your fellow citizens will have to go without while others are buying it by the truckload. I am imagining the living rooms full of toilet paper all over the Southern California landscape.

The thing is though, that the supply lines are solid. The factories are ramping up production. The retail stores are rationing purchase volumes. In about 2 weeks you’re going to have a lot of toilet paper you cannot use. I’m looking at you lady (the one who bought 12 cases of toilet paper from WinCo just before they implemented the volume restrictions).

But perhaps more importantly and more disheartening (at least I hope it’s more disheartening than not getting a package of toilet paper). Is that there are millions of seniors who live alone or have limited mobility that rely on deliveries for food, water, and toilet paper.

Wal-Mart shut down their online ordering capabilities for Hemet and the surrounding areas for more than a week. When I pressed several mid-level management professionals within the organization, they declined to give a statement about the matter. A couple of days later, we saw widespread senior specific shopping times, which does go a long way to helping the concern but doesn’t do enough.

A week without grocery pick up or delivery, in a city where Wal-Mart makes up about 25% of all grocery delivery is a big deal. Not all seniors (of which this region has a large number) have the ability to pay surcharges for Instacart, or tips. Having curbside pickup is valuable; having delivery is also important.

The most important fact is that companies weren’t equipped to handle this. Wal-Mart, by all accounts a capable and tech-heavy consumer giant, had to cancel millions of orders because of increased toilet paper and pasta orders. If Wal-Mart is suffering, so are the local businesses. Luckily for local businesses they have more flexibility and agility because they aren’t big.

None of the senior-specific shopping times allowed for private shoppers to shop for seniors who couldn’t get up at 6:30 in the morning or make it to the store easily. There should at least be provisions enacted to allow for that. It’s one thing that I’m willing to go to the store to get toilet paper and food for my grandma, it’s another if they won’t let me in because I don’t have her in tow. Certainly, there are ways to verify age and account ownership this day in age.

Having flexibility is a big deal during times of crisis. Half of the panic is induced by the fact that big companies are not easily agile (though the 24-hour news cycle helps increase panic a lot too).

But that sentiment doesn’t make up the bulk of the content for this opinion piece.

I stated the article title sort-of tongue-in-cheek as I sometimes do with my writing. Everything is temporary, except the problems that are uncovered by this viral outbreak.

We don’t have very good food security in the United States, thanks to some unique problems that we face as a country and geographically. More importantly, we have let large conglomerate industry leaders dictate how to do things when it comes to food supply lines, distribution and more importantly, delivery.

Note: I’m not anti-corporation. Quite the opposite, but reality begs to be told.

Food Stability in the United States

As Americans we live in a very large geographic area. We are spread out.

We have a lot of city hubs that connect via long stretches of highway.

We grow certain foods in certain places. Citrus in Florida and California. California based growers do 5.2 billion dollars’ worth of grapes annually. Lettuce and spinach and other greens we get from Mexico and Central California. We grow dates in the deserts of Arizona. Corn in Iowa. Potatoes in Idaho. The Midwest grows a lot of wheat. Notably Kansas grows more than 3 billion dollars’ worth of wheat annually.

Washington Apples, Vermont Maple Syrup, Hawaiian Sugar Cane.

I bet you didn’t know that Louisiana grows 512 million dollars’ worth of Sugarcane a year, about 7 times the production of Hawaii. Or that Georgia’s biggest export isn’t the peach, but the peanut? Or that Arkansas does big Rice en-masse. Arizona sells a lot of lettuce; New Mexico’s largest food production is in pecans, of all things. New Jersey sells more Blueberries than any other food product in their state lines – proving that the egos of the stars of “The Jersey Shore” weren’t the biggest things to come out of the Garden State.

Because we live so far away, and the climate and growing fields are generally optimized for regional production yields, we face massive difficulty to move these products, keep them fresh and get them to consumers. The trucks and fuel required; the distribution centers and cooling capabilities. The people who market the products, the truckers who drive them, the cargo planes that deliver the expensive perishable items (like Maine Lobster). This is a massive food economy that is quite fragile.

Restaurants are largely supplied ONLY by conglomerate food distributors, like US Foods and Sysco, etc. Many of those restaurants have exclusive contracts to keep prices slightly lower and get preferential placement in ordering queues.

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As a side note: From an economy perspective, did you know that in the United States, there are some very alarming pieces of data to deconstruct.

In Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia and Hawaii (we are only to the “H”‘s; there are more than a dozen other states which list this as the largest export by dollar volume) the most important export for these states is tied to the aerospace industry, specifically to commercial and military aircraft. At a time when the planes are effectively grounded, can you imagine the long-term impact that COVID-19 could have on the economy?

A final word outside of the food industry, Washington D.C.’s biggest export is ammunition. I. Did. Not. Know. That. Did you?

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Back to food: We are reliant on processed foods made by large manufacturers with strategic marketing and distribution footprints. Certain things are simply not within our control.

Chinese companies own a large percentage of meat production and dairy production in the United States. This isn’t a piece on commercial industrial sabotage, espionage and warfare, though there are people who might think that means it’s a realistic danger (simply that China has its hands in our food supply).

Speaking of Dairy, we have seen multiple bankruptcies in the past 3-4 years from top tier volume producers. The industry is forced to consolidate amid sales shrinkage. The Oat Milk market is booming, but the production is not at the capacity it needs to be to service even 1/25^th of the US population, never mind that the acquired taste is not there for many Americans for oat-derived dairy alternatives.

If a major disaster happened in a major interstate corridor, we’d be out of luck from a food perspective at least as far as food diversity goes.

There are so many other smaller issues we face as a result of the way we have structured our food economy in the United States that I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, dive into it in a piece this short. Suffice it to say, these are just a few of the bigger concerns.

Good luck finding toilet paper, and other staples. Because just like food production, these are regionalized, and the top makers are all conglomerate corporations that have specific needs that don’t always align with the consumers in the USA.

We need to address these concerns through effective campaigns that promote whole approach farming – where applicable; better transportation reliability and better grid management to ensure that massive events cannot tumble food security easily.

Education Delivery is likely to fundamentally change

Kids are probably not going back to school until Winter. Oh, yeah, sure, the school district says otherwise (currently they speculate school’s being closed until April 30^th in our area), but I have the benefit of an opinion platform, so I can speak more freely. Gavin Newsom mentioned the same sentiment yesterday – kids are not going back to school anytime soon (that’s not a direct quote, but he certainly implied it).

Gavin Newsom is the Governor of the most populous state in America. A country of 335+ million people. In case you didn’t know, that means something. His casual mention about return dates will have a dramatic inference to the actualization of modern schooling, post Coronavirus.

We’ve had this internet thing for a long time now, at least in a technology sense. Some life cycles in technology are less than 6 months. The Internet has been in widespread use since the early 1990’s.

Distance learning has been gaining in popularity with the huge increases in school tuition, a growing gap between educational degrees and certifications and actually landing at good paying jobs, and the fact that schools are increasingly difficult to run administratively.

Some people won’t attend certain universities because they are too political as an entity. Some students feel pressured to conform or be ridiculed and ostracized. That’s a topic for a different day though.

Some students simply can’t afford to get into a lifetime of debt to improve their overall base pay by 25% or less. Actual real world experience is trending-up, degrees and institutional letterhead is trending too, but in the other direction. It just doesn’t make as much sense for a lot of the workforce to consider “higher education” in the traditional setting: a classroom.

Sure, Lawyers are still going to want to attend Georgetown and Columbia and Yale and Stanford and of course Harvard. Top medical Students will still flock to Tufts and Johns Hopkins, etc.

MBA seekers will still covet places like Berkeley and BYU and other even higher ranked schools. I don’t need to mention all of them more than once.

But for technology driven careers, you’d be better served in Linked-in Learning, or PluralSight or Udemy in some cases, than you would be obtaining a degree at a sit down, day-to-day campus style institution. This is especially true with the fluidity of technology of late and the return to legacy code languages like Python.

I spoke with a high school kid who laughed at me when I told them that this would fundamentally change the way they seek education going forward. If the COVID-19 situation lasts more than 6 months it will. There is no way that colleges, even those with massive endowments and huge demand will be delivering as much in a classroom setting after November as they have in the past. So, mark my word if this pandemic lasts until then, you will see very big educational institutions all of the sudden getting very agile.

Education delivery will be through things like the internet and IPFS (InterPlantary File System). We won’t fail to connect just because we aren’t in the same room, trust me.

Entrepreneurship should see a distinct rise over the next couple of years

There are legion failures surrounding this whole scenario. People who make good billionaires and visionaries don’t like to leave failure unchallenged. This is the rise of the next generation of innovation. People will look at why things failed and disrupt age old industries. Be prepared for a whole new wave of “intentional disruptive innovation”, as the late, great Clay Christensen called it.

Clay died only recently due to complications of leukemia. He was the author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, the seminal work on the topic that has become one of the most influential concepts in all of the business world in the past 50 years. He was also the Kim B Clark Professor of Business at Harvard Business School, and a General Authority in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Church has been among the most notably tech-innovation friendly religious institutions and has itself made major headlines in the past week with regards to COVID-19 (They suspended all services worldwide regarding group gatherings). Note the LDS church and its people are also notoriously good at food storage and prepping.

His point was, that innovation requires disrupting practices that have become stagnant in the face of a changing world. COVID-19 has uncovered some stagnant practices, without question.

Every kid that didn’t have toilet paper or had to eat beans and rice when they were used to other foods because of the problem of supply line (and hoarding) challenges in the US, will be thinking about ways to preempt those problems for their children.

Every parent that lost their job, despite being the brain trust of a small local business will likely innovate in some way to ensure they never have to suffer that again.

Every teacher who is sick of waiting for their school or school board to approve a solution for distance learning so they can help kids progress, is thinking right now, how they could be doing it better. Inevitably, there will be some of those that innovate. They will take the risk, because the risk of letting these failures happen in such a rampant way again, is far riskier than stepping outside of their comfort zone while they develop and launch an idea.

There is smart money waiting on the sidelines. People like Jeff Bezos are hiring people in large numbers while other businesses cannot even keep their websites running efficiently.

These innovators will have access to money. Trust me.

Hopefully Government grant programs focused on innovation will increase and competition style prompting by Government will be a factor going forward

Speaking of access to money… Innovation can be spurred on nicely by setting up competitions to solve big problems. Forget about throwing government money at green energy in the way it was done from 2009-1015. That way of distributing money isn’t in favor with the electorate anymore. How about offering prize pools to groups of innovative people that helps launch new ideas and solves legitimate problems?

The Government knows that when it allows the entire population to participate in big competitions that guarantee money, without all the bureaucratic hoops to jump through, problems get solved. Let’s hope this is the case in a “post-apocalyptic” landscape that will be existing if COVID-19 lasts through the summer or longer.

It’s worked in the past on a small scale, and large prizes fuel interesting ideas and complex strategic thinking from some of the best minds in the world.

How we think about the future is altered

We might be thinking about tomorrow, as in, Thursday, today. But when things are getting better, and they will. We won’t be thinking so “shortsidedly” (I’m pretty sure I just made that word up, but I’m leaving it) in the future. That is: we won’t always be panicking.

We will all probably become a bit better at buying gas for our cars; toilet paper for the closet and have at least a week’s worth of food on hand. In a land where we are all living in the top 5% of all the world, it’d be a crime not to think about being better prepared and taking better care of our families and selves through better planning and better purchasing decisions.

We all hold our purse strings a little tighter during times of crisis. But we also all understand when we go without, that savings and strategy are important going forward. Sometimes it takes a major catalyst.

This is likely the biggest event to happen in the lives of more than half the Country currently alive

Sure, there are those who were alive during the great World War, but they are vastly aging out and passing on.  

For anyone born after 9-11, this is the biggest event to ever occur in most of their lives. Even of those who were alive and aware of 9-11 as it happened. This is bigger. That isn’t to take away from the importance of that event, and especially the way we all came together in the aftermath of such a tragedy (stories of true heroes make me emotional to this day), but it pales in comparison to the widespread nature of this current event.

Not since perhaps, the Great Influenza scenario has an event of this magnitude occurred. It’s bigger than the catalyst of the assassination of archduke Francis Ferdinand that set off instability in Europe and beyond that still has underpinnings in contemporary settings.

It’s bigger than the Arab Spring.

It’s bigger than the Cold War.

And it creates something in common with everyone on the planet.

This is not about one nation against another. It’s about a race of people struggling to survive within a media driven panic-mode, against a foe that threatens to kill more than 3% of the population.

It’s bigger than gun control.

Gun Violence took the lives of around 3100 people in 2019. That doesn’t include suicides, but does include gang related violence in some cases, and does include officer involved shootings from both sides of the law.

That number pales in comparison to what we face from the Coronavirus. At a 3% mortality rate, if even 1 million people were infected, 30,000 would die. We have 335+ million in the USA currently.

Note: laws are passed every day to curb gun violence (the efficacy of which deserves its own opinion piece, and this author while slightly biased towards the Second Amendment, cannot help but smirk at some of the ridiculous measures we pass in the name of curbing gun violence).

This is bigger than that. But you won’t see a single law passed against any Novel Coronavirus strain.

And yet, this is the biggest thing that has happened to us as a collective community in most of our lives.

Conclusion

What’s all this mean?

While we may get through this personally unscathed, it will still be something we need to get better at. While we will certainly get through this collectively, though it will claim many lives, this is still a thing that does not die the moment it has passed through the old and the sick.

This is temporary, but it has uncovered some very important, long-term needs that this nation, and individuals within it must cope with to sustain the future endeavors of the collective group we live in that we call a community.

We are most certainly all in this together. Stay well, be smart, and realize that temporary comfort for you, may mean taking away some vital necessity from another, so reach out (utilizing proper social distancing techniques of course) and do what you can to make the world a better place in a time where a dark harbinger looms over us all to some extent. That may mean dealing with a two-pack toilet paper limit for a few weeks.

What are your thoughts? Am I way out in left field? Did I get this one wrong? Did I say something too sensitive? Let me know.

The post OPINION: Donny Slade – The fallout of this COVID-19 Thing is Temporary – Mostly appeared first on Easy Ad - Local Small Business Resources.

The author is responsible for the content. You may also contact the author directly. 

Donny Slade

Opinion

Billionaires aren’t as bad as you have been led to believe they are…

I’m not a guy who generally defends billionaires. I mean, they have their own, sometimes hired help, to make sure they keep out of trouble.

But sometimes this whole us vs. them, 99% against the 1% is overtly ridiculous.

It’s not as cut and dry as 140 characters or as an evening news sound “byte” and yet, here we are in a world that relies on a 24 hours news cycle and sound bites are all we get. Tweets in the form of “news” are the norm.

Whole Foods Employees

Last week, Jeff Bezos took some heat thanks to a story that broke surrounding the COVID-19 situation and how sick employees might be paid while necessarily taking off work due to having contracted the virus.

Firstly, as low paid as many service industry professionals are, they are essentially the lifeblood of the day-to-day needs of the people.

They have to be in the store, in contact with people who are sick, or we won’t get our groceries. They have to continue to ensure that we have a generally uninterrupted food supply, or we would riot. They are necessary parts to the system. And they cannot be replaced by robots yet. That means we are at the mercy of regular human ailments that can occur when in times of panic or difficulty like COVID-19 is presenting.

People are going to get sick. You couldn’t train enough staff or make a profit if you are in the midst of a panic, regardless of the benefits or wages. There are too many variables negatively affected in times such as these.

Even in a best-case scenario, the profit margins are generally lower than 12% on grocery across the board. That’s in a perfectly optimized scenario. The way the grocery companies make money is by volume. At some point volume is constrained by panic buying.

Now to the point of my opinion on this topic…

People don’t really get how things work for billionaires, business, or even benefits. So here are some facts, yes, facts, about the three above “B’s”.

Billionaires, Business and Benefits:

In a Friday March 13, 2020 article published by MotherBoard (VICE) and republished by Common Dreams (and other media outlets which aren’t going to be tediously listed here), a quote by a former Whole Foods Employee was highlighted for maximum effect.

QUOTE:

“You’ve got the richest man in the world asking people who are living paycheck to paycheck to donate to each other,” Matthew Hunt, a former Whole Foods employee who led a drive to unionize Whole Foods workers, told Motherboard. “That’s absolute bulls**t(word edited by this author). With the amount Jeff Bezos makes in one day, he could shut stores down and pay employees to stay safe.”

END QUOTE

Here are some problems with that line of thinking:

1. You’re doing it wrong. Jeff Bezos doesn’t make 215 million dollar’s a day, no matter how many blog posts you have read that say that. He averaged a net worth increase over a year period that equated to 215 million dollars a day. That means, that his value in all assets, liquid and ILLIQUID (a huge majority of that net worth) increased that much over the past year and therefore equates to a large sum of money “per day”. If the market is down on Amazon for the day, Jeff Bezos loses the equivalent of a certain amount of money. It’s not like someone comes over to his house and takes billions of dollars from under his mattress, or out of his bank account. It just means for that day, or week or month, the calculation of his annual, and by derivative, his daily “earnings” is impacted.
2. Shutting down stores doesn’t allow the business to continue to make money. Furthermore, during these times, the increase in sales that leads to barren shelves can actually hurt a business more from PR, and other intangibles more than the increased gross sales impact their bottom line in a positive way.
3. Paying employees to stay safe is not a business ideal in the most basic sense. Sure, you want employees to stay with you, be loyal to you, and be able to safely, securely perform the job, it’s a value to you to have good employees that can perform their job. But there are millions of people who would gladly take the job with zero benefits, or at a decrease in pay, simply to have some income stability. It’s a competitive market. Yes, employers should be good to their employees, but the market doesn’t factor that in very highly in the grand scheme of things, at least not at the lower level of service work, which includes grocery verticals.
4. The basic premise of this story and “reporting” was wrong. This wasn’t and still isn’t a Jeff Bezos decision/problem. The existing structure of the company, whish existed before Amazon, and by extension, Bezos, were affiliated with Whole Foods, had been adopted with buy-in from employees. This included the concept of contributing to a pool of PTO (paid time off) which would support sick employees through specific employee contributions towards it. It’s much more complex than this former worker, or any “reporter” is making it out to be.
5. Grocery stores typically have a realized net profit margin of about 2-15% depending on the type of goods they sell and the specific volume they deliver to consumers. This is not a market sector that makes a ton of money percentage wise. And during times of uncertainty, their entire year can be ruined by a month-long shutdown. Losing roughly 10% of their yearly sales because of a complete full-footprint shutdown, means that there are far reaching economic impacts, including investors selling the stock, devaluing the market capitalization and positioning the stock for financial weakness. This means that even if Bezos is making billions on Whole Foods yearly, which he is not (at least it’s not a major piece of his wealth architecture at this point – a topic in and of itself); he would be taking a loss during store closures, and even if the store does stay open during the COVID-19 disaster, it will be hurt in the long-term by investor sentiment and the broader market.

So is Jeff Bezos the new Lex Luther?

So, no, Jeff Bezos isn’t profiting like crazy during a time where the real CEO of Whole Foods (John Mackey), has suggested that employees donate their own PTO to other members of the workforce. An innovative policy that has been available to workers for years. This is not an Amazon decision, and not even a Mackey decision. The employees can, at their option, move PTO accumulated off of their employee record and donate it to a different employee to help that employee during times of need.

Whole Foods should be praised for innovative thinking with regards to Human Resources management and employee benefits. At any other time in history this is a story about innovative HR leadership, not harping on Billionaires loosely tied to a brand acquisition.

What about the schools that are out, that aren’t paying sick leave to employees? What about industrial manufacturers that cannot afford to pay sick leave just because of an event that they didn’t cause (like a pandemic)? Are we up in arms about that? Or do we just think Jeff Bezos and evil Amazon are the problem?

Another core piece to several of the posted stories comes in the form of a tweet by @KanielaIng from March 13, 2020 that reads:

If I were a billionaire right now, I’d “hire” and double the wage of any Whole Food employee who is willing to simply stay home for a few months. It’s hard to understand this grotesque level of greed.

Mark Kaniela Ing is a former Hawaii House House of Representatives member from 2012-2018. He is also a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist. That’s a presentation of fact not opinion or judgment.

Let’s unpack that one really quickly:

Firstly, with all due respect, that is probably why you are not currently a billionaire. With business acumen like that, you’d likely have trouble running a company spanning such a large footprint and having such low overall margins as must exist to be successful in the grocery segment. I don’t know if you are successful in business or not, and it doesn’t matter to me if you are – because statements that separate reality from emotion don’t have any real weight in the business world at this point.

Note: I’m not trying to flame you or start a fight, but billionaires don’t usually get to be billionaires by making poor economic decisions, like reversing the reality of wages.

That said, here are some figures:

Whole Foods has about 90,000 employees across all stores.

The average level of pay is $15.69/hour USD.

Let’s assume the average (across the whole company this would be conservative) is 25 hours a week. It is likely to be well more than 30 hours per week, but for the sake of finding baselines, let’s assume 25 hours.

Let’s also assume that we are not including the very smart executives in that pay average and forget about the profit raising leadership they have been in charge of.

So, you are saying that you would pay 90,000 employees for a few months, double their average pay rate just so they could stay home.

All of this, while you made ZERO dollars through sales of product, and alienated the vast food supply economy by not accepting vendor orders, not contributing to US food security, and not continuing contracts in place in order to accomplish this lofty goal.

As a Billionaire, you’d be spending approximately the following amount to be so righteous.

$423,630,000.

That’s almost half a billion dollars to be benevolent for 3 months.

All for what? The sake of saving face on a tweet or grabbing a few followers or likes? Let’s talk more about reality…

It’s noble that you think that way, but it’s impractical, even stupid, and probably accomplishes less in goodwill, than it causes in long-term problems for the overall economy, the people who need food, and the overall viability of several thousand vendors and the entire organization you are a head of.

Perhaps it’s a little bit easier to make that statement if you had 100Billion dollars attached to your net worth. Would you actualize that half a billion-dollar stock sale to get the money before or after the market dropped your net worth by 25%?

Would you say the same thing if you were only worth 1.1 Billion dollars?

It seems a bit unrealistic that you would. And no one would blame you for protecting what wealth you did have instead of following through on lofty promises based on garnering a few twitter followers.  

Some final notes:

You’re right to think that big business has faults – it does. You may even be right that Jeff Bezos is not a great guy, what do I know, maybe he isn’t a great guy? But to associate the idea that a billionaire is Lex Luther-ing all over the place while poor little paycheck to paycheck employees are suffering, and he wants to take more of their money so he can pad his status as the world’s current richest man – that’s kind of ridiculous.

Remember, at this point, we have no reason to believe that anyone/company/government could have controlled the outbreak of COVID-19 such that it wouldn’t have had such an impact as it already has had.

It won’t be Jeff Bezos who tells employees to go home and shuts down stores, it will be at the behest of the Government agencies.

Some basic economic principles and common sense should help you to understand how reality actually takes form.

As a final note: before this even came to “light” as a “story”, Amazon had stepped up and offered 2-weeks of pay to sick members (COVID-19 related) of all core and subsidiary businesses under the Amazon umbrella. It also had the following comment that conveniently didn’t run with the original posting of the “breaking story” across the internet.

QUOTE from Amazon/Whole Foods:

“This is a longstanding Whole Foods Market program from prior to the acquisition. Amazon is matching all funds to the Whole Foods Fund since the acquisition to support the team needs during this unprecedented event, and all Whole Foods team members have access to the 2-weeks paid time off related to coronavirus that was announced for all Amazon employees.”

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What are your thoughts? Am I way out in left field? Did I get this one wrong? Did I say something too sensitive? Let me know.

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