Harbingers Of Doom

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about how Hush Puppies became must-have footwear in the ’90s, and attributed it to the decisions of influential “mavens” and “connectors” whose involvement helped make Hush Puppies a fashion trend.

But, what if the reverse were true?  What if there are people out there who have the opposite effect — whose tastes are so perverse, and whose decision-making is so out of line with the mainstream, that their decision to purchase a product almost guarantees that the product will crash and burn?

Researchers now think they have inadvertently found that such people exist.  As the New York Times reports, the identification of these Typhoid Marys of consumerism came out of patterns shown by six years of purchases by loyalty card customers at a national convenience store chain.  When analysts looked at the data, they found that about 25 percent of the people whose purchases were logged had a special affinity for buying products that ultimately turned out to be duds.  And if those particular consumers bought a product more than once, the product’s chances of success grew even smaller.  One of the researchers calls these people “harbingers of failure,” but that doesn’t seem strong enough to me:  these are harbingers of doom, so powerful in their wrong-headed buying decisions that their simple attraction for a product heralds its demise.

What’s more, when researchers started looking at this phenomenon more closely, they found that these harbingers of doom tend to cluster together, and that there are entire zip codes that can reliably be expected to reveal ill-advised products through their purchases.  The data also shows that harbingers who move also tend to move to other harbinger zip codes — where the property values tend to be lower, incidentally, than in neighboring zip codes.  What’s more, the data indicated that the harbinger of doom effect isn’t limited to consumer products.  When researchers tied the harbinger zip codes to political contributions, they also determined that the harbingers prefer to make campaign donations to failed congressional candidates.

And here’s the thing:  I think I might be one of these Grim Reaper consumers.  As a kid, I loved Quisp and Quake cereal, which were promptly pulled from the market.  In the early ’80s, when confronted with a choice between a VHS and a Beta video player, I listened to the salesman’s explanation and bought the Beta — just before the Beta product failed, they stopped producing Beta versions of videos, and I was forced to go out and buy a VHS machine.  I regularly like TV shows that are abruptly and mysteriously cancelled mid-stream, like Deadwood or The Borgias.

I’m a Harbinger of Doom, and I didn’t even know it!

Does Early Retirement = Early Death?

Kish and I turned 60 last year, and naturally the prospect of retirement seems a lot closer now than it was when we were in our 40s.  As we think about what to do on the retirement front, we’ve taken out books from the library and we try to read articles that look like they may have some relevant information.

Sometimes the articles can be a bit . . . alarming.  Like this one, which provides 12 reasons not to retire early and suggests that people who retire early often run out of money, are sick and depressed, lose the social network that they built up when they were working, and deprive themselves of a rewarding second career, which apparently involves happily picking flowers in a greenhouse.  The grim list of reasons is accentuated by even grimmer artwork of troubled seniors struggling with financial concerns and thinking longingly about the good old days at the office.  In case you’re interested, reason no. 12 cites statistics that indicate that people who work longer live longer and that there is a correlation between early retirement and early death, “even when lifestyle, health and demographic issues are considered.”  That final reason is illustrated with a nice picture of somebody placing a flower on a gravestone.  Yikes!

You kind of wonder who comes up with these lists.  Is the Social Security Administration, which would love to have people work longer for system solvency reasons, planting stories like this on websites?  Or maybe the Russians have pivoted from meddling with American elections and have now decided to meddle with the retirement decisions of hardworking Americans just for the heck of it.

Does early retirement = early death?  It’s hard for me to see how you could possibly control for all of the variables and determine that retirement was the ultimate cause of death for anybody.  And, these articles being what they are, there’s a little bit of inconsistency between reason no. 1, which says that Americans are living so long and life expectancies are growing so rapidly that people are likely to outlive their savings, and reason no. 12, which says that early retirement will produce a prompt visit from the Grim Reaper.

I know relatives, friends and former colleagues who decided to retire before 65, who decided to work until 70, and who wanted to keep working after 70 and enjoyed doing so.  They all seemed happy and reasonably satisfied with their ultimate decisions — and incidentally I’ve not noticed the early retirees keeling over, either.  Their experience teaches me that everyone just needs to make their own decisions based on their own circumstances, comfort levels, financial situations, desires, and dreams.  Scare stories don’t really advance the analysis.

 

Happy Birthday From Marlboro

Today my secretary walked into my office and said, “I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t,” I responded.

“Marlboro apparently thinks differently,” she replied with a laugh, and then handed me a black box that I’d gotten in the mail.

I looked at it, and sure enough, the return address on the label said it was from Marlboro.  I removed the black cardboard outer sleeve, and inside was a black flip-top box with “Happy Birthday” written all over it.  Not exactly festive birthday colors, there, Marlboro!  It was almost like Dr. Kevorkian was sending me birthday greetings.

And then I realized that, coming from Marlboro, black was probably a pretty appropriate color.  But what the hell kind of birthday present would Marlboro send?  A black carved wooden figure of the Grim Reaper?  A black cigarette lighter?  A black ashtray with a laughing skull or a blood red caduceus in the center?

Nope.  Underneath a card that showed a cowboy pitching horseshoes somewhere out west were some ear buds for an iPod, with different sized plugs depending on your earhole size.  Customized ear buds!  Pretty weird, Marlboro.  Pretty darned weird.

It didn’t make me want to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes, by the way.

When TV Towers Sprout, Bad News Is Near

When I drove in to work this morning and reached the heart of downtown, where our office is, traffic had begun to back up.  After I parked the car and walked to our building, I saw a TV station truck with one those spiral broadcast towers fully extended, looking like an alien invader from War of the Worlds.

As soon as I saw it, I got that familiar sick and sinking feeling.  If you live in an urban area, you know that seeing an extended TV van antenna always means bad news.  It’s like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the Grim Reaper standing in your bedroom, holding his scythe and pointing a bony finger at you.  You know that the spiral tower means somebody is making a live report, which means that they’re covering the scene of a crime, and they only dispatch the truck if the crime is a serious and probably deadly one.

Sure enough, about a block from our office a body had been found, of the victim of an apparent robbery and stabbing.  The remains were covered with a sheet and partially shielded by low fencing, of the kind you might see around a manhole when the Sewer Department is doing some work.  It was an ugly, shabby scene, a disturbing sight at the beginning of another workday.  When I saw the TV tower, I should have known, and I shouldn’t have looked.