Yet another reason why they have an incentive to crush competition and keep setting the immoral standard for wages and benefits.

Don’t worry. The House plans on taking care of that.

After what I’ve seen from board members for seven student housing co-ops, I gather they feel like big boys wheeling and dealing with other people’s money.

Absolutely correct (that’s a hobbyhorse I ride regularly in real life, to the dismay of the people around me).

Did I mention that city officials tend to be dumb?

–alopecia

I used to work at Central Market in Austin, Texas. It was an enormous gourmet store with a produce section the size of a football field and was privately owned by Charles Butt. The business started with regular grocery stores— H.E.B.s. His was the only company that had ever (up to that point) beaten Walmart for a location. I was among the first employees who set up the departments, put shelves in, and organized the work crews. We were promised profit-sharing. A near miracle happened, and (we) they produced a profit in the first year. Then they decided to give raises instead of sharing profits. I don’t know how it turned out, but the company was sued.

Butt kept prices low with low pay for employees, volume/volume/volume, and leasing land from Protestant churches. His father (or grandfather) who founded the store had the kind of self-made man story that has got to be bullshit.

It seems most cities haven’t figured out that a sports franchise and a new stadium isn’t worth it either.

I think it was the old PBS series NOW that did a story on the games big-box retailers play with cities. One city manager, I think it was, said his city financed a new shopping center built to Walmart’s specifications (only one anchor store, for example) and gave Walmart a five-year exemption on taxes (specifically including sales tax). After four and a half years, the city was looking forward to starting to get some tax revenues on the deal. One morning, the area newspaper had a story that Walmart was closing that store and opening a new one something like five miles away in another city which had done the same for the company as the first city. It was the first anyone in city government had heard of this.

Unsurprisingly, this fellow phoned his contact person at Walmart and asked if he could come in and talk about the company’s decision. The response was, “Sure, we can talk, but the decision’s already been made. Your city’s store is closing.”

I’m proud to say I’ve never spent a cent in a Walmart.

From what I’ve heard, the (in)famous Google Interview is little more than a hazing ritual. Also, ironically, it’s no better at predicting mental flexibility or creative thinking than a standard, dull-and-boring interview.

–alopecia

Lovely, didn’t know they did that. We’ve had something similar happen here in AZ. The state and cities offer huge tax incentives for companies to move here but, of course, the talent base is not necessarily here, the infrastructure is too old, or the transferred talent hates living here and so the companies can’t make it or decide they don’t want to work here and they leave. So we never get any taxes out of them. I believe that’s what happened with Google. We were all so excited. They came, they tried to hire, hung out for a few years and then left saying we didn’t have the talent pool. I guess no one ever said that people had to be smart to work in government. Why can’t they offer the tax incentive but tie it to the company having to stay a certain amount of time and if they leave early, penalize the company in the amount of the taxes they should have paid. Now THAT is how you devise a darn contract.

(OT but….by the time Google left, I’d had a chance to experience the “Google interview” and thought they were complete snobs and jerks…to say there was no talent was to insult thousands of very good programmers that live in the Valley. They might not be able to calculate how many angels could fit on the head of a pin but they could definitely program. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say.)