Pay a Penny for Email & Eliminate Spam?

Would you pay a penny for each email if it eliminated all of the spam in your inbox? Target marketing columnist, Denny Hatch says "Happily!" Here's the business proposal he suggests to the US Postal Service. The Postal Service creates an email service that charges $7.95 per year plus one cent per email that is sent. For guaranteed delivery and return receipt, the fee would be two cents. All sent and received emails would be archived and there would be no ads. In Hatch's words, " If the message is so unimportant that it is not worth 1 cent to the sender for me to see it, he can send it to my Yahoo! inbox."

Hatch says that under this system, spam would disappear and cites a University of California study to back up his assertion: "A team of computer scientists at the University of California showed that it takes 12.5 million spam messages to sell $100 worth of Viagara. Spammers can't afford 1 cent per message." 

I think he is on to something here. Hatch describes his Yahoo inbox as a "vast sewer" in which he hunts through the contents for something that "doesn't smell." I wouldn't describe my G-mail inbox in quite those terms, but I know exactly what he means. I too would happily subscribe to a service that insures the messages I receive are worth reading, and eliminates spam.  

Artist Fred Stone to Exhibit April 27 & 28

Partners

Equine artist, Fred Stone of Agoura Hills, has a rare solo exhibit scheduled for April 27 and 28 at the Thousand Oaks Community Gallery in Newbury Park. Stone is world famous for his paintings of horses and horse racing themes. Among his credits is the world's largest equine mural in the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. But Fred Stone's best known work does not include any horses. It is a poster done to commemorate the heroism of the New York City Firefighters who died on 9/11. The poster, titled "Partners," has raised more than a half million dollars for charity and the families of 9/11 firefighters. In the words of local artist, Kathi Colman, the poster depicts a "weary and heartsick firefighter finding solace in the embrace of his loyal search partner -who has already experienced far too much for any one soul to hold." It is a superbly accurate description of the work, but, of course, the image conveys so much more. It is evocative of a moment in our history when all Americans felt a sense of loss, a sense of empathy and gratitude toward the selfless men and women who serve as our protectors, and, most of all, a deep sense of our connection to one another.

I encourage you to go see the exhibit on April 27 or 28. You will have a chance to meet Fred Stone and to see some of his remarkable work.

Statesmen and Scalawags

The printing industry has had more than its share of civic leaders, patriots and statesmen. Many of us in the industry like to feel that we are following in the footsteps of notable Americans like John Peter Zenger, William Bradford, Isaiah Thomas and, of course, Benjamin Franklin. We take pride in having chosen a profession with a rich history of community service and advocacy for justice and freedom.

Unfortunately, not everyone in our industry is a source of pride. Many of the nation's most notorious counterfeiters, Charles Ulrich for example, were printers. Recently another printer has managed to besmirch the profession with a seedy story of self-indulgence at the expense of the public. Mississippi State Representative Kevin McGee, from Brandon, has been fined $50,000 by the Mississippi Ethics Commission and ordered to repay $346,554.06 to the state for violations of state ethics laws.

The Commission found that since taking office in January 2008, Rep. McGee entered into 259 illegal service contracts with various agencies of the State of Mississippi. McGee is in the printing business and is an owner, along with other members of his family, of Service Printers of Flowood. To be fair here, McGee is appealing the ruling, and in a state as small as Mississippi, a printing company the size of Flowood is bound to secure some government printing orders with no knowledge or involvement on his part. Nevertheless, being in a position of public trust holds him to a higher standard. The Ethics Commission apparently felt that the evidence indicated clear violations of state rules. We hope there is a reasonable explanation, but it is difficult to imagine that a  potential, glaring conflict of interest was not clear to him from the beginning.

Driving the Creek Bed

Here in the Los Angeles metro area we sometimes get news stories that are almost impossible to envision in any other place - like stories about Mel Gibson’s personal church. Last Thursday, January 26, a story appeared in the news about a 53 year old driver who apparently mistook a service entrance to the Verdugo Wash as a freeway on-ramp. The entrance gate had been left open because a maintenance crew was working in the wash. If you are not familiar with Los Angeles, you need to know that this “wash” is a 9 mile tributary of the Los Angeles River that was lined in concrete for flood control purposes back in the 1930’s.

Image from Tropico Station

The driver apparently accelerated up to freeway speeds of 60 or 70 mph once she hit the floor of the flood control channel and did not stop until the car, a Mercedes Benz, careened down a series of steps designed to drop the flow to a lower level. After going down 9 steps, the car came to a stop just short of another drop in the channel. Fortunately, the driver was rescued from the flood control channel and did not suffer any major injuries. There is an excellent description of the event at Tropico Station, a Glendale blog.

The story captured my attention. In spite of its “laid back” reputation, L.A. does have its share of automobile accidents. Every so often, we hear of a Ferrari that flames out somewhere along the PCH or an SUV found at the bottom of a ravine along one of the more precarious canyon roads. But this accident was different. This involved one of the many long stretches of concrete in L.A. that is not a road or a freeway. This is a creek bed!

There have been numerous proposals over the years to turn some of these concrete creek channels into car or bus lanes. Now we have a driver who has taken the matter into her own hands. Personally, I think we should convert these channels back into real creek beds. Real creeks serve a lot of useful purposes for both people and wildlife. Moreover, it is very doubtful that a natural creek will ever be mistaken for a freeway.

  

Rewards Credit Cards

In a  January 16 article, the Wall Street Journal reports that credit card companies are increasingly promoting "rewards" credit cards to their business customers."It's easy to see why," they say. "About 42% of small-business owners carry a credit-card balance, according to July 2011 data from the National Small Business Association in Washington, D.C."

The article points out that the small business credit cards do not carry the same protection as consumer credit cards. "Small-business credit cards were excluded from the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 that outlawed random interest-rate hikes and other practices on personal credit cards." Small business people are usually held personally responsible for the debt placed on these cards. The WSJ urges small business people to consider how using the card might impact their credit score.

I have another beef with the "rewards" cards. The "rewards" offered by these cards are not paid for by the credit card company. Rather, they are charged to the company that accepts the card for payment and deducted from the sale amount as part of the swipe fees. "Swipe fees" are the fees that a credit card company passes on to the retailer who accepts the card as payment. These fees vary, but I have seen rewards cards with fees as high as 4.6% of the purchase.

The seller who accepts the card has no way of knowing what the fees are until he receives his statement from the credit card processor. Moreover, there appears to be no limit to the fee that can be tacked on to the transaction in this manner. The consumer or small business person is happy to use the card for payment because he is collecting a "reward." It is the proverbial free lunch. But the reality is that retailers, and now suppliers who sell to small businesses, are simply jacking up prices to cover the cost of the fees. In essence, even cash customers are footing the bill for these cards.

The main benefactor in this arrangement is the financial services industry and, to a certain extent, those who have strong enough credit to qualify for a rewards card. If more businesses use rewards cards to pay for supplies, in addition to accepting these cards as payment for their products and services, prices will inevitably go up.