Too Much, Too Little

It all depends on where you are when you reading this. If you're in the northeast, you seem to have enough masks and pork. If you're in the south, southwest or west, good on the pork, not so much on the masks. Elsewhere different items are either plentiful or verging on scarcity. New York needed ventilators a few months ago, now has an abundance, while currently Texas is in exactly the opposite predicament. And regardless of where you were, back in April the only thing scarcer than a vaccine was a webcam, and now one of those two items can be at your house by the weekend. Understandably, you'd really prefer the other. 

Because of the move to stay at home, so much of the usual supply chain has gotten completely upended. In some cases it was true scarcity, as demand far outstripped the available resources. It's not really surprising: the pipelines for hand sanitizer, cleaning solutions of all kind and PPE were never meant to handle a katrillion percent increase overnight. As such, on an ounce for ounce basis, Purell became liquid gold, worth more than the real stuff. You try and disinfect your hands with a bar of bullion. 

In other cases the scarcity was created because of the change in how we lived. As we hunkered down at home our cars sat in the garage. That meant less gas and its additives being used, including ethanol. As such, ethanol plants cut production, but that also meant a severely curtailed supply of one their other products, carbon dioxide or CO2. The gas is used in the manufacturer of sodas and beer, as well as the production and preservation of other foodstuffs. That drove the price of fizz up 25%, with the result that while your Mountain Dew hasn't yet gotten scarcer, it's gotten more expensive. 

And in still other situations it was not so much true scarcity as a different form and distribution model. We were really never in danger of running out of toilet paper: by and large the virus wasn't confining us to our bathrooms. Rather, we were all at home versus at the office, school and the mall. And so all the supplies that were manufactured in different forms and packaging to be used in those places had not evaporated, but were simply inaccessible through home-oriented channels. It took a little while for the manufacturers to retool their delivery systems, and redirect the goods to your local Stop and Shop, as well as cut down those tire size rolls to ones that fit in your powder room. 

The list of products affected under any of those scenarios is broad. Yeast has become a hot commodity as everyone is baking bread. Office chairs are tight, as lots of folks are setting up a home working space. With gyms closed, free weights are in demand for home fitness programs. Even leaving aside controversial possible treatments like hydroxychloroquine off the list, the usual drugs hospitals need to treat seriously ill patients are running low with the huge influx of those infected with the virus. And there is a garlic shortage because most of the US supply comes from China, and well, let's just say we're not seeing eye to eye with them right now. 

What this is also leading to is a contraction of the breath of items in a given category. In the beginning of the year you could have walked into your local grocery store and selected from dozens of brands and variations of frozen meals or peanut butter or potato chips. But with plants and stores streamlining operations for safety, it was prudent to limit the number of variations in favor of bulking up on core items. That means Frito-Lay is trimming its portfolio of products by 3%-5%, IGA grocery stores cut back their 40 varieties of toilet paper to 4, and even McDonald's is looking into scaling back their breakfast offerings, as fewer people are out that early since they're not going to work. 

Things might eventually return to the way they were before, or it may be that consumers find they are just fine living without Extra-Dark Low-Salt Whole-Wheat Sourdough Pretzels, and are OK with plain. Or maybe there will be an uprising if Skippy eliminates chunky to concentrate on smooth. Simple economics or a sign of the apocalypse: you decide.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford usually buys what's on sale. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Survey Says

Stop what you are doing this instant. Before you do anything else, answer this: how do you feel? What are you eating? Who will you vote for? OK, continue on with your life. And now, stop again. How do you feel in this instant? What are you eating now? Still voting for the same person? That's basically what happens with a poll. It's a snapshot of you and your thoughts at this moment. Not before, not after, but in that slice of time when the question is asked. 

Not surprisingly most of the polling these days relates to politics and all its corollaries. Who the respondent will vote for, to be sure, but what that person thinks of a candidate's plans, stands and personality are also subject to survey. While the battle for the White House is the main event, there are also 35 seats in the US Senate up for a vote, all 435 spots in the US House of Representatives, 13 state and territorial governorships, plus countless state and local level races and propositions. Of course, not everyone votes in every race, but even so it can be a full time job to keep track of all the ones in your jurisdiction and have an opinion on each. You might be at least a little conscious of things at the national level, but a little fuzzy when you get down to the race for County Commissioner in Codington, South Dakota. 

But we all have opinions and thoughts on far more than who gets to sit in the big chairs. Over the years polling organizations have probed the American psyche on a variety of topics. Most questions relate to items of national import, and try to divine the mood in areas from birth control to guns to race relations. The results of those surveys both reflect the current state of play as well as help to drive policy. It's a tightrope to be sure: politicians and policy makers don't want to get too far ahead of public opinion, but neither do they want to be behind it. 

That said, not all polling relates to matters of earth-shattering consequence. In 2000 Gallup did a Halloween-themed survey of the populace. Not surprisingly two-thirds of Americans responded that they would be giving out candy to trick-or-treaters, and more than three-quarters said that kids in the household would be wearing a costume. Nothing really surprising in those results. But the survey also revealed that the percentage of American adults that believed in ghosts had increased over two decades from 11% in 1978 to 31% then. While no recent polling has been published on the topic, if that trend continued that means that today more than half of us are looking under the bed. 

More recently polling regarding our current situation has led to factual confirmation of anecdotal trends. While Americans usually eat out 4 to 5 times per week, the lockdown has unsurprisingly changed that. Now 60% report cooking at home more. At the same time, about 30% say they are snacking more, with 25% thinking more about food than usual. As to what else we are doing besides eating and thinking about eating, more than 50% say that their evenings are spent with family and/or watching TV. A few read (6%), a few do needlepoint (3%), a few play cards (1%). And perhaps unsurprisingly nearly twice as many men (13%) as women (7%) say their favorite thing to do in the evening is rest or relax. Note that Dad is likely snoozing on the couch while saying he is watching TV with the family, which screws up the results. 

Those findings are enlightening if not terribly specific. What we need are some more targeted polls that focus on specific parts of our lives. In that vein last year Harris conducted a survey on behalf of California Pizza Kitchen. While the topic may have been narrowly focused, there's no reason to think that the results themselves were skewed. So I'll take it at face value that 69% of Americans prefer to eat their pizza hot vs. cold, that 65% believe that pizza is an acceptable breakfast food, and that 25% of Americans would be willing to go a date just to have someone buy them pizza. And lest you think none of this involves social policy, it's worth noting that 38% of Americans believe that pineapple on pizza should be illegal. Movements have begun with less conviction.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford likes spinach on pizza. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Life Double

I thought I knew my wife. After nearly 36 years of marriage, I thought I had a pretty good picture of who she was. I had met her family and friends. I knew what foods she liked, the types of clothes she preferred. I knew the jobs she had, the pastimes she enjoyed and the TV shows she watched. But the composite view I had of her was obviously lacking. Or as Jess Rothenberg wrote in her book "The Catastrophic History of You and Me," "No matter how much you think you know a person — no matter how pretty they act, or how popular they seem, you can never know what their lives are really like." 

Turns out I didn't know my wife's stance on chickens.

Like many, I occasionally will type our name into a search bar to see what comes back. What pops up depends on a number of factors. To be sure, the linchpin is the name itself. Typing in "Bill Smith" results in 1.2 billion hits, from a well-known musician (jazz clarinetist who played with Dave Brubeck) to a famous engineer (the father of Six Sigma) to an assortment of high-level corporate types. On the other hand, typing in "Adele McGillicuddy" finds one woman in Canada who posted about a lost cat. In that continuum, we're closer to the cat than the clarinetist. 

The other factor relates to something about you or something you've done. An online mention of that gets scraped into the vast maw that is the internet. It doesn't have to be anything dramatic or earth shattering, just public enough to rate a notice. It might be a readily available record like a house sale or a family member listed in a graduating class. Maybe you've posted a photo online or given money to a charity. Or perhaps you've been quoted in a newspaper article or a press release. All you need do is post your recipe for Cap'n Crunch Brownies, and the net makes a note. 

The Venn diagram of your name and something related to it produces a listing that shows up for all to see. For most, those hits are innocuous, and produce a voyeuristic thrill that the world is watching. Of course most people outside of our own families don't look, or even if they do stumble across it, don't care. The hitch comes when that first tick point – your name – matches another. Then surprising things can be attributed to you, but not "you" you. The closer you are to the clarinetist, the more lost in the noise it gets. But the closer you are to the cat, and it can produce the confusion that I had about my spouse. 

Putting our last name and her first into the search bar produced a top of the chart hit from the Waterloo/Marshall Courier newspaper in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. They recently ran an article about how the Planning Commission voted against a local ordinance which had garnered more than 200 signatures to allow residents to raise chickens on their properties. Opposing the petition was my wife. Or at least someone with the same name as her. Per the article "'Our community is different in the sense that we have a waterway,' commission member Susan Wollin said. ‘We cannot let manure fall into our drainage.'" 

I think I can speak for our family in that while I didn't know where my wife stood on chickens per se, I know where she stands on clean. She's for it. And so it certainly sounded like it something she could have said. Coupled with her many years of service in various public capacities, it was not beyond the pale that she could be involved with community planning. The only issue was that it was in a town a 15-hour drive west of us, so even those walks she's been taking during the pandemic would not have gotten her there and back without us knowing. 

Indeed, her identity doppelganger is likely similarly confused by the things my wife does which make the internet cut, both professionally and personally. No real matter: none of it rises to the level of concern. However, while she tends to favor salads, fish and vegetables, I did note that her name is also attached to a recipe for Pizza Meat Loaf Cups. But which Susan? I wonder what's for dinner.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford isn't hard to find online. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Paid to Not Play

A walk to the mailbox usually holds little promise of anything of value. A sale circular, a postcard advertising home repair services, a mailer offering an extended warranty on our car. There might be one of the few magazines we still actually subscribe to, maybe the local newspaper. When the highlight is one of those charitable solicitations with a memo pad featuring kittens or preprinted address return labels, you know the pickings are thin: bonus points if the labels actually spell our name correctly. 

So a piece of "official" looking mail is a notable if for no other reason than its rarity. There wasn't much to this particular one: just a regular white business envelope from our insurance company. While it could have been the occasional privacy notice or change in some obscure policy detail, it looked more one-off than those mass mailings. As I walked back down the driveway I tore open the flap and peeked in, not really expecting much, but loath to toss it without even checking. What I saw stopped me in my tracks: a check for $25.29. 

It wasn't the amount that did it. After all, that's barely half of a dinner if you're doing take out for two. It was the source of the check. Insurance is one of those black holes that we shovel endless amounts of money into as, well, insurance. We do so in the expectation, and indeed the hope, that we will never get anything back. That's because a payout means we've been beset by a misfortune of some kind. Hopefully it makes us at least partially whole for the expense, and then we move on. And I can tell you from personal experience it's usually an unproductive bit of fantasy accounting to total up all you've put into it over the years and see if you come out ahead. Odds are you don't. 

I rifled through the other detritus in the pile to find another letter from the same source, assuming it might contain some sort of explanation. It seems that the complete and total disruption to our usual routines has meant that, on the positive side, we're not exposed to all the usual risks. For weeks we rarely left our homes to go anywhere other than a quick local trip to get groceries or supplies. No trips to the airport, to the office, to grandma's. And so our car was safely parked in the driveway or garage, the biggest risk being when the garbage cans were dragged past it on the way to the top of the driveway. As such we were getting a rebate for an auto premium that covered us from a universe of hurt with which we were no longer engaged. 

A few days later, a similar walk to the mailbox produced a like result. Another small check from a different insurance company, this one related to health, with the same basic explanation. While pandemic related expenses have soared and placed severe stresses on the entire health care system, that has been more than offset by a drop in other medical expenses. People staying home aren't getting injured as much, and elective surgeries have been postponed. Yes, this all has a huge impact on the economics and employment in the healthcare segment, and that's no small thing. But at the other end it also means insurance companies are paying out less, and so they are giving some back. 

To be clear, all these amounts are small and unlikely to make a dent. And it should be noted that many companies have already filed for large increases for the next cycle as they anticipate expenses coming back as pent up demand returns and government support (specifically in health care) evaporates. Companies are in business to make money, not give it back, even if we seem to be in a period where corporate social awareness and responsibility is on the upswing. Still, one can be forgiven if the optimist triumphs over the realist in the hope that this kind of corporate largesse might be indicative of any kind of change in the system. Mitt Romney famously noted that corporations are people too. And while it may be naïve, isn't it nice to at least hope they could be moving away from Mr. Hyde and towards Dr. Jekyll?

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Marc Wollin of Bedford hates paying for insurance. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.