Retail Trends: Nordstrom

Fashion is fickle.  In recent years, it has become a market of retail niches:  high-end stores that cater to the smaller but richer upper class, discounters and big-box stores attracting many more middle-class buyers with competitive prices, and an ever-shifting roster of youth-oriented stores that cater to the fast-changing tastes of the young.  And each of these niches has multiple online competitors with greater selection than any bricks-and-mortar store can offer.

The old-line department stores where most of the people used to buy most of their clothes are in danger of losing their customers and their relevance.

Nordstrom is in this latter group.  Its sales have been increasing -- 2.2 percent in 2013 -- but not because of traditional full-line Nordstrom stores.
 
In fact, Nordstrom stores are becoming less and less of Nordstrom, Inc.  In 2013, same-store Nordstrom sales dropped by 3.3 percent.

The company's two newer divisions, Nordstrom Rack and its online sales, generated all of the profit in 2013.

The off-price Rack stores, pitched to value shoppers, reported 3.3 percent higher same-store sales in 2013, following 7.1 percent growth in 2012.

Online sales grew much faster, up 30 percent for the third year running, accounting for 14 percent of revenue in 2013, a trend that will surely continue.

Nordstrom Rack stores now outnumber traditional Nordstrom stores, 141 to 117, and the company has set a goal of 81 new Racks by the end of 2016.  By contrast, it plans on only three new full-line Nordstrom stores, including its first in Canada.  Nordstrom also will devote $1 billion over several years to expanding its online efforts.

The Sochi Closing Ceremony

We have had Olympic spectacles in our country in Los Angeles and Atlanta and Salt Lake City, with lots of flag-waving and "USA-USA" chanting.  I get it that this sort of thing can be seen as over the top to people from other countries.

But Sochi was different.

Sochi is in Russia, now a plutocracy led by its richest citizen, Vladimir Putin, the new czar who has much to answer for in Chechnya, in Georgia, in Syria, in Ukraine and, not least, in Russia.

In Putin's Russia, defined as a democracy, opposition journalists have been assassinated.  Mikhail Khodorkovsky, no candidate for sainthood but once the head of Yukos Oil and the richest man in the country, spent 10 years in prison as a warning to other wealthy upstarts.  The members of a girl band, Pussy Riot, were jailed for challenging the government in a concert in a church.  Khodorkovsky and Pussy Riot were released just ahead of the Sochi games on an order of mercy from the new czar.

Russians are better off now than they were under Stalin or even under the chaotic mob-dominated Yeltsin regime, but that is a low hurdle.  The economy relies mostly on natural resources -- oil and gas -- that enrich Putin's court but do not fund economic development.  Among the proletariat, opportunities are few, birthrates are declining and the average lifespan is significantly shorter than here or in Europe, a result, in part, of the anaesthetizing effect of excessive vodka consumption.

So what to make of the Sochi closing ceremony?  It drew on Russian heroes of the arts, in music from Mussorgsky to Rachmaninoff to Rubinstein to Horowitz, in ballet from Diaghilev and the Kirov.  Popping up on display were enormous portraits of the giants of Russian literature, including Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn.

The point, of course, was to affiliate the high ideals of great art with a low Putin-style Russian nationalism.  For Putin, the best government is run by a ruthless strong man willing to use his army and economy to keep the thoughts and activities of his people firmly in check.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author who devoted his life to battling Soviet totalitarianism, must be spinning in his grave.

Before the Olympics, Putin armed a Syrian government that now has killed well more than 100,000 of its people and turned millions of others into refugees.  As the Olympics were under way, Putin instructed his puppet-president in Kiev to send the Ukrainian army to attack peaceful protesters.  Former defense secretary Robert Gates got it right in his biography when he called Putin a "stone cold killer."

As the Sochi Olympic games drew toward their end, a French intellectual urged other countries to boycott the closing ceremonies.  I wish the American delegation had done so.



   

Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist whose work was mentioned here briefly last week, deserves much more attention than I gave him.  He is the most influential artist in China, and possibly the world, at this moment.

Now 57, he was born in Beijing and banished with his family to a distant province during the Cultural Revolution.  As a young man, he spent 12 years in New York City and returned to China several years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were quashed by a military crackdown. Naturally these experiences influenced his views of his country and of art.

He has championed "artists' efforts to challenge the definition of beauty, goodness, and the will of the times."  Another quote:  "I've always believed it is essential for contemporary artists to question established assumptions and beliefs.  This has never changed."

His work ranges from architecture to porcelain to wood joinery to photography, his reference points from traditional Chinese methods to contemporary exhibitionism to government action.  He mentions the French artist Marcel Duchamp as a major influence.  He has spoken his truth to Chinese power and suffered the consequences more than once.

There are several videos on YouTube that describe Ai, his works and his point of view.  In order, I would recommend

     -- aiweiweidocumentary, a BBC production entitled "Ai Weiwei, Without Fear or Favour,"

     -- a TED talk, "Ai Weiwei detained," of Ai discussing his use of the internet and Twitter to promote change -- freedom, basically -- in China and worldwide.   The talk was taped earlier and, at the time of its broadcast, Ai was imprisoned in China, ostensibly on a charge of tax evasion, and

     -- "Ai Weiwei: Life is in danger every day," Ai answering interview questions without illustrations on the Louisiana Channel.


   

A Jersey Lament

New Jersey license plates bear the motto "The Garden State."  What are some other options?

      (a) "Shut Up."

      (b) "Fuck You."

      (c) "Oh, Like Everyone in North Dakota Is Thin."

      (d) "Land of 1,000 Filthy Turnpike Rest Rooms."

      (e) "For $1,500, You Can Own Camden."

The above comes from "New Jersey: The Quiz" a humor column by Paul Rudnick in a recent edition of The New Yorker.

There are other quiz questions, and Rudnick seems to have hit all the highlights:  Trenton, Secaucus, "Jersey Shore," Teresa Giudice of "Real Housewives," "The Sopranos," Chris Christie's weight, Elizabeth, corrupt policemen.

Once you have spent a few years in New Jersey, as I have, you get used to all this and more -- slimy politicians, insane drivers on the Parkway and Turnpike, Newark, potholes, ugly diners with terrible food.  It never ends.  But, honestly there are many good people in New Jersey and even pleasant places to visit.

It's not easy living in a joke state.

  

Carjacking Update

Carjacking is on the rise again in New Jersey.

In our small town alone, there have been three incidents recently:

     -- the December theft of a Range Rover in a parking lot at the Short Hills Mall by armed thieves who shot and killed the car's owner,

     -- the theft one January night of a new Porsche Cayenne in a condo parking lot by thieves who beat up the owner and,

     -- most recently, the armed theft in broad daylight of a Mercedes Benz GL450 from a parking lot across the street from the Millburn train station.

Some years back, car theft was much more common in the state.  Thieves were assumed either to be joyriders or bad actors who wanted to use vehicles untraceable to them in committing crimes.  Cars of all types were taken; I recall reading that Hondas and Toyotas were the most popular brands.  Most cars were abandoned and then recovered not long after they were stolen.

Then the situation calmed down, and the number of car thefts declined for a period of years.  This may have been because manufacturers started installing kill switches and other theft-prevention devices in new vehicles.

Now car thefts are up again, and police agencies report that high-end luxury vehicles are common targets.

An unintended consequence of the theft-deterrent devices seems to be that car theft has become a violent crime.  Newer cars cannot be jump-started, and thieves need keys to drive the cars away. As a result, carjackers confront drivers with threats of violence to obtain the keys.  Quite often, the threats involve handguns.  The risk of injury or death has become much greater.

Recently, New Jersey authorities arrested and charged several people with running a fraud ring that bought stolen cars, replaced their VINs and then sent the cars out of the country on ships through the Port of Newark.  It is possible that other criminal groups are engaged in similar activity.

Those Wacky French

All my life I have heard how Europeans, particularly the French, scorned American food preferences. Everything from Velveeta to baloney to Jello was a subject of merriment to our Gallic amis.

Worst of all, of course, was the hot dog, an abomination washed down with Blitz beer at baseball games, sauced with ketchup in elementary school cafeterias and smothered with canned chili at greasy diners.

So it was with some surprise that I read a recent culinary report in the New York Times:

"From restaurants to bicycle-pushed cars, purveyors all over Paris are embracing the humble hot dog, elevating it to something original and unexpectedly stylish."

Apparently the French have varied things up a bit with chicken and vegetarian varieties and different onion and mustard sauces.

But still.  The French are eating tube steaks.

Who'da thunk it?

The Rich Get Richer

Last week Harvard announced its largest donation ever, $150 million.  Of that, $140 million will go to scholarships.

The donor is Kenneth C. Griffin, the founder of the Citadel investment fund.  His net worth has been estimated at $4.4 billion.  Griffin attended Harvard on scholarships and with family help.

A New York Times article reports that Griffin credits Lloyd Blankfein, another Harvard alum who now runs a little bank called Goldman Sachs, with encouraging a financial aid-oriented donation.

The article says Griffin believes Harvard set him "on a path that has made him a billionaire."  The article went on to say, "He admitted that having a diploma from the college opened doors that would otherwise be closed for a 21-year-old undergraduate."

It is a little surprising that even an enthusiastic alum would identify Harvard as a college whose scholarship budget needs topping up.  The same New York Times report notes that 60 percent of Harvard students already receive enough aid to reduce their costs to an average of $12,000 per year, less than in-state undergraduate costs at many public universities.  Harvard students from families with incomes under $60,000 pay nothing.  Both of them.

Harvard already has by far the largest endowment -- $33.2 billion in 2013 -- of all American colleges and universities.  (Yale ranked second at $20.8 billion.)  Harvard's recently-launched campaign to raise another $6.5 billion "was kicked off with $2.8 billion already in the bank," again according to the Times.

A four percent annual return on the current Harvard endowment could fund $50,000 scholarships annually to more than 26,000 undergraduates.  Harvard College's enrollment is about 6,700.

Art Imitating Art?

Above is a photograph of an installation at Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) featuring the work of Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei.  The picture was taken at the beginning of an Ai exhibition in December.

If you were to visit the museum now, you might notice that the one of the colored vases on the stand has gone missing.  That is because a Florida artist, Maximo Caminero, smashed it on the floor last week to protest what he believes is the failure of Miami museums to feature the work of local artists.

In fact, Carminero said he was inspired by Ai Weiwei to smash the vase, and it is easy to see why that might be.  Hanging on the wall behind the vases is a photographic triptych called "Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn."  The man dropping the 2,000-year-old urn is Ai Weiwei himself.

The colorful vases in the picture's foreground are also Han vases that Ai has "dipped in industrial paints as if they were glazes," according to a PAMM description.  The museum says the works "challenge the viewer to consider questions about the authenticity and the value and meaning of an original work."

In fact, there seems to have been a whole lot of trangressive art action in recent years.

     -- In 2012 a famous Ai Weiwei work, "Coca Cola Urn," was smashed by the art collector who owned it.

     --Jake and Dinos Chapman, contemporary artists, have drawn cartoon characters on Goya etchings that they own.

     -- Last year a man glued a photograph onto a John Constable painting on display at the National Gallery in London.

     -- In 2012, a Mark Rothko painting at the Tate Modern in London was decorated with permanent-marker graffiti.

But back to Miami.  Carminero, the vase-smashing frustrated artist, was taken into custody and then released on bail.  If prosecuted he may face a prison sentence of up to five years.

Jonathan Jones, an art blogger for British newspaper The Guardian, took a jaundiced view in a column this week on the larger situation.

"So -- smashing art is interesting if an acclaimed global artist does it, and even if an art collector does it.  But the guy who walks into a museum and smashes it is a vandal," Jones wrote.

"Could it be," Jones continues "that smashing masterpieces is never interesting?  That this illegal attack on art exposes the shallowness of the high end of contemporary art, where it's cool to smash Han antiquities or doodle on Goya prints?"

Interesting questions.

Some Context on Facebook's Acquisition of WhatsApp

Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp is the latest, but likely not the last, major transaction in the evolution of the social networking.  

The first big social network, Friendster, launched in 2002 and attracted 3 million users in a matter of months.  The owners turned down a $30 million offer from Google in 2003.  Its American membership peaked by 2006, but it remained popular in Asia.  It was sold for $26 million in 2009 to a Malaysian company, which relaunched it as a social gaming site in 2011.

What ate Friendster was MySpace.  MySpace was introduced in 2003 and was a huge hit, initially among college students and then other groups.  By 2006, MySpace had 100 million accounts and Rupert Murdoch bought it for $560 million.   Membership peaked the next year and then began to drop.  Murdoch sold MySpace in 2011 for $35 million.

What ate MySpace was Facebook.  It overtook MySpace in membership by 2008, refusing buyout offers of as much as $1 billion along the way.  By 2012, Facebook had 1 billion users.  That same year it went public in an offering priced at $38 a share, suggesting a market value of $104 billion.  Facebook now trades at over $67 a share.

Facebook didn't want to be eaten by WhatsApp, which has 450 million members and the potential for many more.  Social networking users have been migrating for several years from computers to cellphones.  While Facebook has struggled to create a relevant cellphone experience, WhatsApp has succeeded.  WhatsApp presented an existential threat to Facebook.

Investors seem to believe that one day there will be a single enormous social networking platform dominating the world market and functioning like a public utility, rather like AT&T before its breakup or like Google today.  Facebook seems now to be that platform, but it cannot afford to ignore the upstarts -- Snapchat, WhatsApp -- that are nipping at its heels.

From the Nothing Is Easy Department: Rock Salt

New Jersey is running out of rock salt to spread on snowy and icy roads during this unusually cold and stormy winter.  As of early last week, the state Department of Transportation had used almost 50 percent more salt than in all of the 2013 winter season.  New supplies are needed, and fast.

As salt has became alarmingly scarce, weather forecasters have forecasted several more winter storms within a couple weeks.  Unfortunately, most rock salt is sourced in Latin America, too far for speedy shipping under the circumstances.

Then, felicitously, a salt company based at the Port of Newark reported that it had 40,000 tons of rock salt available in Searsport, Maine, and that an empty ship at the same port could get the salt to Newark in two days.  The N.J. Department of Transportation bought the salt on Feb. 7.

Then a problem cropped up.

The empty ship in Maine is not a United States flagged ship.  A 1920 federal law, the Jones Act, bans shipping to and from American ports by ships sailing other countries' flags.  Into American ports, fine; out of American ports, also fine.  But shipping between Maine and New Jersey is a no-go.

(The Jones Act's stated purpose was to assure that American cargo ships are available to support the military in time of war, but it seems to function mostly to protect domestic shipping companies.  In fact, most cargo ships fly other countries' flags, often called flags of convenience, perhaps because those countries' legal requirements are lighter than those of the United States.  Interest in the Jones Act was revived during the Gulf War in the 1990s, when there were not enough American shippers to support the American military effort.  Since then at least a couple of major shippers, Maersk and APL Marine, have established U.S. subsidiaries that are American-flagged but generally regarded to be run out of Denmark and Singapore.  Virtually every American president since 1920 has been an ardent supporter of the Jones Act.)

Faced with the Jones Act obstacle, New Jersey officials shifted their hopes to a second ship, American flagged, which was deployed from a port in a southern state only to be diverted off course well south of New Jersey by -- naturally -- a severe winter storm.

Last week, New Jersey asked the Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Transportation for a waiver of the Jones Act to allow the empty ship already at port in Maine to deliver the needed salt to New Jersey.

Here's what happened, according to the New York Times:

"On Tuesday (Feb. 18) Homeland Security officials said a waiver could be granted only if federal transportation officials confirmed that no vessels with United States flags were available to move the cargo, and if waiving the requirements of the statute was in the interests of national defense."

New Jersey is a blue state, and the national government at this time is also blue.  So New Jersey's two Democrat senators, Robert Menendez and Cory A. Booker, stepped up and sent a letter to the federal agencies involved.

It said, "We urge your agencies to continue to assist the State of New Jersey to help procure and deliver rock salt for the purposes of public safety and security."

Strong language, that.

If I were a New Jersey Senator, I would drop by the offices of Transportation and Homeland Security to explain with some emphasis that the requested waiver was important to the safety of the citizens of New Jersey.  I would schedule a couple five-minute phone interviews with New Jersey and New York newspapers to express indignation.  That's what I would do.  But what do I know?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, has kept his mouth shut on this one. As unpopular as he seems to have made himself with the Obama Administration, it is probably just as well.

So far, Homeland Security has not responded to the New Jersey waiver request.  No doubt it will take a while to investigate thoroughly the "national defense interests" of sending a ship full of rock salt from Maine to New Jersey.

And the state of New Jersey, casting about for other solutions, has found a barge that conceivably could bring the salt to New Jersey.  The barge no doubt is much slower than an actual cargo ship, and it can only carry 9,500 tons at a time.  Completing the job by barge would take weeks.  By that point, if the state is lucky, winter will be over.

Newark's Prince of the Church

nj.com/news/index.ssf/2014/2/newark_newark_archbishops_future_retirement_home_valued_at_800g_undergoing_a_500g_addition.html

I don't know whether this guy has been a fine archbishop.  There have been the usual predator priest stories, but the church continues to operate elementary schools for mostly non-Catholic students in New Jersey's inner -city neighborhoods.

But that really doesn't matter.  At best it is tone-deaf, at worst a serious misuse of archdiocesan funds.

Words Only Journalists Use: Bolster

I almost spit out my coffee while reading a New York Times article this morning.  The provocation was this sentence in a story about a book recently pulled by Penguin Books India from sales in that country:

      "Its fortunes in the United States have been bolstered by the recent controversy."

When I see the word "bolster" I think immediately of a largish pillow on a daybed.  Except among seamsters and furniture salespersons, the word virtually never comes up in daily conversation.

But "bolster" is an unfortunate constant in journalism, ebbing and flowing like a dark current in a clear pool.  A brief internet search convinces me that its tide is rising again.

Here are some headlines:

     "New Technologies Bolster Shoe-Leather Journalism," a Stanford website, 2/5/20214

     "Split vote kills plan to bolster farm rights," Honolulu Star-Advertiser, 2/5/2014

     "State should bolster law about neglect and abuse," The Olympian, 2/1/2014

     "UN climate chief urges investors to bolster global warming fight," Yahoo News, 1/15/2014

     "Colorado bill would bolster reporter's(sic) shield law," The Coloradoan," 1/10/2014

                (Extra points should be docked for the misplaced apostrophe)

     "Portland-area high schools will gain equipment, teachers, industry contacts to bolster

       career and technical education," OregonLive, 1/8/2014 

I could go on, but you get the picture.  

Please, please contact all journalists of your acquaintance and share with them these helpful and more appropriate synonyms from a Google dictionary:  strengthen, reinforce, boost, fortify, renew, support, sustain, buoy up, prop up, maintain, aid, help, augment, increase.

Business Speak: Two Terms of Interest

WHEELHOUSE

Merriam-Webster gives the original definition -- "an area on a  boat or ship where a person stands to steer."

Sometime in the late 1950s, sportswriters began using "wheelhouse" to describe a batter's sweet spot, as in, "The pitch landed right in Casey Jones' wheelhouse, and he hit the ball out of the park."

In 2009, the term "wheelhouse" was used in the television series, "Glee,"  and it appears to have taken off from there.

Wiktionary now defines the term as "matching a person's interests or abilities well," and offers as a synonym the phrase "up someone's alley."

For several years now, "in the wheelhouse" has ricocheted around the business community.

        An advertising firm that specializes in consumer products might pitch for a shampoo account by saying that sort of promotion is "right in our wheelhouse."

        A banker who has underwritten mezzanine loans for restaurants might tell a pizza entrepreneur that such financing is "right in my wheelhouse."

Lots of wheelhouses out there these days. The word may be coming to be regarded as overused and a bit of a cliche.


STRAIGHT DOWN THE FAIRWAY

This is a golf term with a long history.  It is a complimentary description of a long, efficient drive off the tee toward the cup.

Until a few years ago, there seem to have been few non-golf uses, usually in sports contexts:

              A Cleveland Plain Dealer headline in 2009 combined it with a player's outlook in a sports headline:  "A low-key life is straight down the fairway for Ben Curtis as Bridgestone Invitational looms."
              A clothing firm named straightdown.com named one of its products the "Fairway fleece."

Now the term has been adopted by the business community to describe risk-averse decision-making, often with a disparaging tone.

              "That start-up has potential, but the XYZ fund won't touch it.  XYZ will only look at projects that are straight down the fairway."

              "The other bankers probably would have done a better job, but the company played it straight down the fairway and hired Goldman Sachs instead."

Found on the Bathroom Wall at a Major University

I encountered this posting recently.  It provoked two thoughts:

1.  I cannot recall when I learned to wash my hands, but I am pretty certain that I mastered the procedure before I went away to college.

2.  If I ran a large university and were offered the choice of spending money on pasting such notices in every lavatory on campus or topping up the scholarship fund, I would choose the latter without hesitation.

Silicon Beach

Above is a photo of the Binoculars Building, designed by Los Angeles starchitect Frank Gehry for the Chiat/Day advertising agency and completed in 1991.  It is located on Main Street in Venice, CA, a short walk from Venice Beach.  Chiat/Day merged with another firm and moved out some years ago.

Google acquired Binoculars around 2011 as the signature building for a much larger development in the area. Since then, Googlers have been moving onto the growing campus, which is known locally as Silicon Beach.  

When completed, Silicon Beach will be Google's third national hub after the Googleplex in Northern California and a full city block in lower Manhattan.    

(All of these locations are expensive, but all are attractive to the young technical workers whom Google wants to hire.  And Google can afford it. Its balance sheet holds $58.7 billion in cash and marketable securities.  Company shares now are priced around $38 with a P/E multiple of almost 39, evidence that, big as Google is, the market believes it has plenty of room to grow.)

Venice itself has seen its fortunes turn in the last 20 years after decades as a downscale, high-crime Los Angeles neighborhood.  The once-rancid canals (which gave the area its name) now have water flushing through again, and canal-front housing prices have rebounded handsomely.  Fashionable, individually designed square homes are popping up on formerly modest residential lots.  Abbot Kinney Boulevard, which runs through Venice, is at the moment the hottest retail/restaurant street for millenials in all of Los Angeles. The Venice boardwalk -- still raffish with musicians, beggars, marijuana doctors' offices and Muscle Beach -- has become a destination stop for Los Angeles' increasing numbers of foreign tourists.  

The only apparent  drawback afflicting Venice is its inclusion in the Los Angeles Unified School District, an embarrasingly awful behemoth that just may be unfixable.  Most Googlers are assumed to be young singles, however, and so this may not be a deterrent to the company's Silicon Beach ambitions.

In the Venice and Santa Monica neighborhoods near Silicon Beach, real estate agents are salivating at the prospect of highly paid techies settling in the area.  Home owners receive regular solicitations to list their properties at tantalizing prices.  Values are estimated to have increased by a minimum of 10 to 15 percent in the last year.

A Google description of its Silicon Beach offices notes the usual company amenities -- "a game room, a climbing wall, a bike and surfboard station, a farmers' market and a large cafeteria stocked with locally sourced food and snacks, part of Google's pledge to be a good neighbor," in addition to a "gallery-styled commons area" featuring the work of area artists.

Local estimates are that the Silicon Beach hub eventually will employ 7,000 techies.  Google does not say directly how many people it has working there now, choosing to report it thus:  "Fewer than Nicola Tesla's birth year divided by three."

Google describes employment levels at other facilities in similar fashion:

     "Number of London Googlers: About three times the third perfect number"

     "Number of Dublin Googlers:  About as many as the number of zeros in a                   septingentillion"

     "Number of Mountain View Googlers:  About as many as the number of vacuum tubes in an ENIAC computer"

     "Number of New York Googlers:  About one-half of Kaprekar's constant"

How to describe the above?  Coy? Precious? Smart-alecky?  Certainly it is Googly and not "evil," but it is hard to believe that an efficient company would devote well-paid employees' time to coming up with such preening obfuscations. 

But Google is that rich.  Current expectations suggest that some of this wealth will slop over to the benefit of the general Silicon Beach neighborhood.








  

A Mild Labor Action

I passed this sign outside the new Google office in Venice, CA, the other day and stopped to investigate.

In case you cannot read it, the sign says:  

LABOR DISPUTE (twice) and SHAME ON LARRY PAGE, CEO GOOGLE.

Standing behind the sign were two young Hispanic women who seemed to have limited English skills.

I asked the nature of the complaint, which union had a grievance and what it was, whether the young picketers were union members and what their names were.  They refused to tell me anything but smiled, giggled and gave me an information sheet.  My impression was that I was the only person who had stopped to talk to them in quite a while and that I had made them very uncomfortable.  So I took their piece of paper and walked on.

The sheet is headlined "SHAME ON GOOGLE For Desecrating the American Way of Life."
It has a picture of a rat chewing on a US flag.  The gist of the complaint is that the contractors Google has hired to work on its Venice project are using nonunion labor.  

The aggrieved union is Carpenters Local 1506, which wants people to call a person at Google  "and tell her that you want her to do all she can to change this situation and see that area labor standards are met for construction work on projects that they are involved in."  

Pretty mild stuff. 

The sheet also offers a phone number for Local 1506.  I called it and was told to expect a call back; three days later, nobody has called me.  According to very limited information on the union's internet page, it has more than 6,000 members.

The bottom line on the sheet says:  "We are not urging any worker to refuse to work nor are we urging any supplier to refuse to deliver."

Really?

I live most of my life near New York City, which leans left and is quite labor-friendly.  Los Angeles County also leans left, but I am not sure how strong unions are here, at least on non-government projects.

If a similar protest were mounted in New York, I am pretty sure that it would be manned by big, scary-looking men and, of course, a giant inflated rat.  Rocks and verbal slurs would be thrown at workers entering the building and at suppliers' trucks.

I have no dog in this fight, but I found the whole thing interesting.  

Cue the laid-back California jokes.

A Small Small Car

On this winter's visit to Southern California, our rental car is a Fiat 500.  We asked for a compact, but rental car sizes, like athletic shoes, tend to run small.  Technically, the Fiat 500 is a minicar.

And is it ever small -- six inches shorter than a Mini Cooper with an itty-bitty four-cylinder engine that puts out 101 horsepower.  If I were Fiat and looking to expand the market for the 500, I would offer attachments to use it as a lawn mower or household vacuum.

Fiat 500s are seldom seen in the Northeast, but they are all over Santa Monica and West Los Angeles.  Most if not all are driven by young people.

It used to be that California was the home of the car culture.  Californians were the early adopters of muscle cars, German sedans, two-seater sports cars and Asian imports.  My impression now is that young Californians favor minicars or, if they have more disposable income, Priuses.  Mercedeses and Porsches are for old rich guys.

I don't know what this suggests for America's automotive future.  Possibly that Millenials would rather spend money on technology than cars (or clothes),  perhaps also that we will meet those tightening CAFE standards after all.

The Fiat 500 is the company's first entry in the US market in many years.  Its predecessor, also a 500 known as the Cinquecento (cheen kwe chen toe to those of you who have not studied Italian), was marketed from 1957 to 1975, a remarkable run in auto years.  This newer model was introduced in Europe in the aughts and has been very popular, selling 160,000 units there in 2013.

(It might be useful to note here that Europeans also have been enthusiastic adopters of the Smart Car, which looks like a giant baby bootie on wheels.  Gas prices in Europe are even higher than in California, which suggests that fuel economy prevails even over aesthetics in buying decisions there.)

Anyway, in my experience, the Fiat 500 drives better than it should.  It is surprisingly zippy for a little car with an automatic transmission.  With the back seats pushed down, the hatchback will hold the contents of a good-sized Costco run.  In fact, there is no reason to push the backseats up; no normal human, child or larger, could fit in them.

The chief drawback is safety performance.  The Fiat 500 (along with the Honda Fit) got the worst rating on the "small overlap front crash test" by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.  This test involves driving a car 40 miles an hour into a brick wall.  This is not a problem in Southern California, however, because freeway traffic traffic here never reaches speeds as high as 40 miles an hour.

The biggest plus for the 500 in these environs:  You can park it anywhere.