I used to be part of the once a month crowd. I would go to Walmart and stock up on all my canned and dry goods, lots of frozen stuff too. Then throughout the month I would hit my local supermarket for fresh meats and produce. That changed for me this past winter. Suddenly, I saw a big rise in prices, and many of the products I used were no longer there. It was very sudden too. I mean from one month to the next. It only took me one visit and I decided I could do better stretching my limited cash and newly awarded allotment of foodstamps at my two local supermarkets, as long as I shopped with the sale flyer in hand. I haven't been back to Walmart since for groceries.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Wal-Mart's core shoppers are running out of money much faster than a year ago due to rising gasoline prices, and the retail giant is worried, CEO Mike Duke said Wednesday. "We're seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure," Duke said at an event in New York. "There's no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact." Wal-Mart shoppers, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck, typically shop in bulk at the beginning of the month when their paychecks come in. Lately, they're "running out of money" at a faster clip, he said. "Purchases are really dropping off by the end of the month even more than last year," Duke said. "This end-of-month [purchases] cycle is growing to be a concern.
This is a compilation of three articles, shared by No Joke Broke, used by permission.
Get a job you f@@kin' bum!
That's what I hear all the time. That's the answer to America's financial woes. That's the answer when I complain about how difficult it has been to live on food stamps the past few months. Get a fuckin' job. Well let me tell you folks, I am one of the long-term unemployed for reasons that go well beyond my resume skills. I got my first real job when I was 14, I have some college, two professional licenses, and a wide variety of work experience from labor, to service, to management. Yet I have not worked full-time in almost three years now. I even dumped five grand on re-training. What a fuckin waste that was. I have filled out thousands of applications, made thousands of phone calls, forwarded my resume thousands of times. Not once, not even once did I get a call to come in for an interview. The handful of calls I did get were courtesy calls from companies basically telling me to stop bothering them because they were not going to hire me.
The other day I had some jagoff get wise with me and said that McDonald's was hiring. In fact they were. A huge hiring blitz. They intended to add a whopping 50,000 people to their national 400,000 person strong workforce. I was one of more than a 1,000,000 people who applied. Hoping, praying, that I would be one of the lucky ones who would get hired part time to scrub tables and mop out the toilets for a wage that won't even pay for the car insurance to get to and from that job. And like so many others, I did not get the job.
You can check out how Bloomberg reported on it at this link:
Half of new jobs last month came from McD's hiring blitz
Sounds to me like a huge, orchestrated public relations stunt. A conspiracy to lead average Americans to believe that things really aren't that bad.
Let's really think about this for a minute. Not only did this one-time hiring blitz account for half the new jobs created last month, but it did little to offset the increase in the official unemployment rate which rose to 9.1%. So these "added jobs" are still a net loss.
Add to this the fact that we are talking about minimum wage part-time jobs. Hardly the sort of job that someone can live on. Nevertheless, only 1 in 20 people who applied got the job.
Here is a link to the article of how the latest numbers are being translated:
After 'feel-good' hiring blitz in US, McDonald's to replace workers with touch-screens
You can bet your ass this will be coming to the U.S. sooner than later. Our supermarkets have already put a hiring freeze on cashiers as they replace them with automated checkout lines. So as it turns out, the April hiring blitz really was just another P.R. propaganda stunt in order to get people feeling better about the economy on the one hand, and giving an excuse to have no sympathy for the poor on the other, as the number of unemployed and food stamp recipients continues to swell nationwide. A band-aid on a bullet hole.
McDonald's to Replace Cashiers with Touch Screen Computers
McDonald's restaurants in Europe will soon be swapping the chain's legendary "service with a smile" with "service with a beep." European McDonald's restaurants are preparing to replace cashiers with touch screen computers at terminals where customers will be able to order up their hamburgers and fries and pay with credit cards.
About 7,000 of the fast food franchise's locations in the United Kingdom will be fitted with the touch screen technology, which aims to make the McDonald's experience more convenient and accommodating.
The touch screen method of ordering will improve efficiency and make the average transaction three to four seconds faster for each customer, Steve Easterbrook, president of the European branch of McDonald's, told the Financial Times. Easterbrook didn't provide a date for when the touch screens, which were inspired by a trip to Japan, will be introduced to UK McDonald's restaurants.
The new terminals will also phase out cash as an accepted payment method, as the machines will only take credit and debit cards. No word yet on whether McDonald's in the United States will be next in line to replace cashiers with computers, but the addition doesn't seem to be part of the ongoing $1-billion makeover of the company's U.S. restaurants.
