A Taste for Online Groceries?

A Taste for Online Groceries

About 800 words -- two pages; 
Keywords:  Amazon, Whole Foods

A Taste for Online Groceries?

An online mogul just bought a grocery store chain.  I have a story about this phenomenon.  Here’s how it goes.

Once upon a time I invested in Amazon.  I was in an executive MBA program, and my study group decided we’d all open up e-trading accounts for a cool five grand each (an education tax deduction at least).  I proudly researched and decided Amazon was a promising idea, so I bought in at the very beginning.  Even got the original coffee mug they sent out to all their early investors—when they made no money.   Well, they continued to make no money for so many years, I played the cold-hearted analyst and considered it sunk cost and sold out.  All of it. 

Note to Self, Number 1:  selling behemoth online retailer stock too soon may be unwise.

About that time Webvan comes along.  You do not remember Webvan, but it was an online grocery service that was a great product.  My wife and I were both working and liked good cooking.  That requires buying food.  We discovered the technology-disrupting Webvan.  Their website was stellar, you ordered all your groceries online, and you could even keep your usual order on file for a starting point the next week.  Plus, now get this:  they showed up at your door at the appointed hour, brought the groceries into your house and put them on the counter.   Let me repeat that.  Some smiling man in a uniform brought the groceries into your house and put the grocery bags on your kitchen counter.  One more time:  yes, from the van onto your kitchen counter, and no tipping accepted.  I was so impressed I bought 500 shares that day.   Webvan went bankrupt inside of two years.  The analysts said that this idea had been tried and failed before--back when you could phone in a grocery order.  Apparently, it just doesn’t take for some reason.  The analysts further said that there was no one with grey hair working at Webvan—only hot shot techno wunderkind who didn’t get how to organize and deliver a tangible product.  Oh well.

Note to Self, Number 2:  buying online grocery store stock too soon may be unwise.

All of this was around the turn of this century, and some bubbles were growing inside the stock market; the business professors were saying some fundamentals were being violated—something to do with dot coms.  During this time my newly minted MBA put me into a new job as a CFO in an expanding association.  One of my many duties was overseeing the association’s reserves of several million dollars.  The legacy investment advisor and I didn’t hit it off, so I had the portfolio turned into cash temporarily and put it on my to-do list to figure out how to reapportion the portfolio.   The to-do list however was huge, and I postponed weekly dealing with the portfolio, which was no real portfolio at all, just a pile of cash not doing much.  I was busy hiring, firing, procedure writing, and so forth.  I would get to the portfolio next week.    

Then, the dot com bubble burst, and there was a market crash.  The president of the association called in a panic, “How much did we lose?”  

“Lose?” I said, not sure what he meant.

“Yes, lose in the stock market tumble?”  Of course, he meant the reserves, which were a happy pile of cash waiting on the to-do list.

“Oh, well, sir, I put everything in cash a while back, and we didn’t lose a cent.  In fact, it looks like we’ve gained,” I said while quickly spying the balance. 

“You are an absolute genius,” he said.  I have kept silent about this fortunate investment strategy until now.

Note to Self, Number Three:  knowing when to do nothing can be very wise.      

There you have my story of the online moguls meet groceries. To me, the worst part of grocery shopping is driving to the store and hauling all that stuff to the car and from the car to the counter. But the time in the grocery store is not so bad, especially if there are little wine tastings, classical music, and some free pastry samples.  And, if you’re an old fuddy dud, you see acquaintances you haven’t seen in a while (especially at the grocery store on a Saturday night).  Younger types can see cute other younger types and also silently judge them by what they have in their grocery baskets. 

The moral (besides, of course remembering that past performance does not necessarily predict future results) is:  portfolio strategy is everything, timing a market is mostly luck, and sometimes you should just take good notes and enjoy the tasties--whether on your kitchen counter or at the store.  Maybe I'll see you there this Saturday.    

Nothing Swings the Pendulum

Key words:  theology, economics, politics     
About 750 words or two pages

I happen to believe that everything is ultimately theology, and what’s not is economics.   Let me explain.  Even if you believe in nothing, that’s still a theology (and then Nothing, I suppose, really is sacred).  I’ve been lucky enough to live in a couple of different “doms.”   I’ve lived in Islamadom, Judaidom, and what’s left of Christendom, but what I fear most is Nothingdom (it has the worst track record yet). 

Nothingdom is really a self-inflicted aspect of Judaidom and Christendom in that they allow for debates over pluralism, which can lead to some other “dom’s”.  They don’t like such debates in the other “doms,” especially Nothingdom.  This is what is not being appreciated:  the freedom of thought which is based on Graeco-Judeo-Christian civilization (and that is just a politically correct name for Christendom, by the way).   Even the mosaic American model must have a mortar board, and that mortar board is what we used to call a Melting Pot toward a common set of values, and that Melting Pot derives from a unique rabbi’s vision of an identity paired with peaceful inclusion, articulated a couple of millenia ago.  Appreciate what the world looks like now compared to what it might have looked like if that Rabbi from long ago had been a man of the sword instead of a man of peace.    

What’s also to appreciate is economics.  There is a debate now on what our national budget is to look like.  It looks like the current president has shoved out there--bare naked--the concept of here’s what we really have to pay for, let everything else speak its worth.  Now this makes a lot of well-meaning groups very nervous.  Some fighting mad.   Let us appreciate the fact that there’s an open season and curse not the debate.   A budget should have some relation to mathematical reality.  Do we want to fund Project X?   It’s a great project and the right thing to do.  Now, do we want to borrow money to fund Project X?   For that’s really the question.

And we should debate these things.  Perhaps it will lead us to come to grips with entitlements eventually--but as always, not now--if the next generation is to prosper at all.   My Social Security will need to be cut; I will not run from that math.  We can only hope facing those bare naked economics sooner rather than later may be today’s saving grace.  And if it is, my great grandchildren, whom I will never meet, will not read—if the written word is still around—of the current buffoonery in Washington but of the tackling of an impossible deal. 

There’s a lot of venom in politics these days.  We’ve seen this before, and frankly, I don’t care which side you’re on.  We’re better than this.  We really are.  If you need someone to blame for the increased partisanship, it’s really Ross Perot. I say this because Bush 41 was our last truly qualified president from a resume perspective; he’s the only one of the past several who would have been hired by a non-biased hiring board as having the appropriate credentials.  Bush 41  was handed a defeat by Perot who split the non-Clinton vote--Clinton being the first of the Boomers and relative to the Greatest Generation, somewhat of a dodgy character (and not just the draft).

That’s when the modern hatred pendulum really kicked up:  hatred from the right, and then hatred from the left, and so on.  The pendulum’s been swinging since—and blessed are those who are rational, non-hating, and guileless when the pendulum moves fro instead of to.  I worked for six years in the liberal arts academia during both Clinton and Bush 43, and the venom of the liberal artists and the conservatives (what few there were in the academia) was something to behold.  I have no baseline venom metric from which to analyze (it was in the liberal arts after all, which is based on opinion citing an earlier opinion), but my guess is there is plenty of nasty, self-serving serum to lubricate the pendulum at each amplitude. 

Maybe it’s the loss of the Greatest Generation that is the problem.  I have a 90-year-old neighbor, who’s now become a shut in.  He fought in the Pacific.  I’ve tried to get him to ride with the other few remaining WWII vets in the local July 4^th parade; he says maybe to the invitation each year, but always cancels.  He doesn’t want to make a show.  He served in a “dom” greater than Nothingdom, and it led to Freedom instead of Selfdom.   Something to appreciate while watching the pendulum swing. 

Catch a Perennial Miracle

Key words:  perspective, miracle

800 words (about 2 pages)

The Middle East is perennially in the news, and most of that news is not so good. At least that's what is reported to us; if it were normal and peaceful, we probably wouldn't hear about it. I'm reminded of a tour of the Gaza Strip I once took while working in the region:   one side of the street was a scene of burning tires, teenage protesters screaming, Israeli soldiers pushing, and CNN cameramen hurriedly filming. A block away sat our little group of local workers casually sipping Turkish coffee in a sidewalk café with our UN host. We occasionally peered over to see about the commotion. The cameras never panned to our end of the street - the non-event piece of the action. Scenes of peace in the middle of the storm frequently go unnoticed. Perhaps that's what makes those moments of tranquility so special. There is one I'll never forget. After several months in Jerusalem, setting up personnel policies for a department with a staff of about 30 (10 Arab Christians, 10 Arab Muslims and 10 Jews), I needed a break from the yelling and the tension. The YMCA in the region had a retreat cottage on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and I planned a weekend to chill out and relax.

It was about a three-hour drive to the Sea of Galilee if one took the safe highways through Israel proper. I was young, single and willing to take risks, so I decided to drive through the West Bank area (basically biblical Samaria)   to cut the trip time in half. I passed through the checkpoints where slovenly soldiers waved me through. I rode along the Jordanian border, the razor wire glimmering in the sunshine. I passed by minefields, roadside bomb shelters, fish farms and monasteries, and drove right up to the retreat center, Peniel ("face of God"), a rustic home set in a quiet cove of small and picturesque Lake Kinnaret, known to westerners as the Sea of Galilee.

The facilities were pleasant and simple, and quiet. The typical breakfast of olives, tomatoes, cucumbers and pita bread had been prepared the night before, and all I had to do that morning was retrieve it from the refrigerator and enjoy my breakfast on the veranda, which jutted out from the building over the water's edge. The bougainvillea and palm trees shaded the table from the early sun, just rising over the hills. The sunlight shimmered on the water and stretched to touch under the poinsettias growing wild on the bank, This was a peaceful place.

A loud voice pierced the air. It seemed it was coming from somewhere below the patio on the surface of the water. I got up to view the disturbance. Two scruffy men were in a rowboat near the shore. One was standing up and yelling toward me, and the other was busy with a green nylon fishing net.

"Adoni," he screamed up, using one hand to form a megaphone, "aifo ha dagim?" Translation: "yo, sir, where are the fish?" Is there no escape from the loud and pushy even here? I thought. I just wanted to be on the quiet side of things for a while. I reluctantly peered over the railing and looked at these guys, their boat and the water. I pointed to the fish. They were gathered quite orderly in a school not far from one side of the boat. The scruffy guy who was standing nodded, and they tossed their net deftly to where I had pointed.

The chill of goose bumps swept over me as I realized I had heard the elements of this scene before. It suddenly came back to me, a Sunday school story fuzzily remembered. I didn't recall the chapter and verse but remembered the tale as The Miracle of the Catch.With lots of hauling and the barking of commands to each other the two men in the rowboat caught a bunch of fish in their net. They dumped them in the boat and rowed away. I stood there, watching them disappear around the bend of palm trees; I hadn't uttered a word all morning.

Because of where I stood I could see the fish, and because of where the men in the rowboat were they couldn't; the perspective high on the patio was better than that on the water's surface. It seems sometimes all you need to do is find someone with a better perspective and be bold enough to ask.  That’s miracle enough.

A couple of loud, ill-shaven guys in a beat up rowboat had disturbed my quiet and civilized meal. They noisily enacted for me a great parable. I remember it well even though it was only a moment over two decades ago.  Or maybe it was two millennia—something perennial like that.

©Copyright 2017   John P. Harrison.  All rights reserved.