Friday, July 09, 2004

THE 99 CENT ECONOMIC SURVEY In recent weeks I've noticed an important trend in the local economy: Customer service in the fast food businesses is on the decline. This is a sure indicator that a boom is in progress. I have two distinct memories that show the relationship between fast food employment and the economy at large. The first is from the winter of '91-'92. My mom and I went into a McDonald's in Brunswick, Maine and found that their entire crew was grown-up. I don't think any of the workers were under 25. While I didn't quite grasp the implications of this at the time (I was but 13), the memory was ingrained nonetheless. The second is from the '99-'00 time-frame when I was stationed in the DC area. Fast food service everywhere was horrible. One night at work my co-workers and I discussed this, pointing out that when unemployment gets low, the people getting employed in fast food are ones who would normally be either unemployed or employed on a "transitive" basis. We agreed that things would not get better without a decent recession (or unemployment getting so low that the fast food industry would be left with such lousy workers that it would be forced to do something unconventional to change that). Clearly, the quality of fast food service is inversely proportional to the overall state of the economy. After the Clinton bubble burst, I started to notice a bit of an improvement in fast food service. Not good, or great service, but acceptable (at this point I was living in Florida, a state which was one of the least affected by the slowdown). But now, I am happy to note that the quality of workers at McDonald's is on the decline again. May it stay that way for awhile. I invite others to share observations from their neck of the woods. NOTE: Before any fast food employees start plotting my violent death, I wish to point out that I was an employee of McDonald's in my younger days. It was my first job and our local economy in Virginia was in a bit of a slowdown, after one big boom and on the verge of the next. One night I was on quite possibly the smartest McDonald's crew ever, as it consisted of four members of the National Honors Society. Jackpotzrebie comment []4:15:27 PM   trackback []

TRANSFORMATION IN ACTION When discussing the military in the 1990's it was obligatory to mention the need to adapt to the needs of the post-Cold war era. There was much talk and little substantive action. The overall composition and deployment of forces in say, January 2000 was little different from that of say, January 1990 (although the size of the ranks was smaller). The tenure of Donald Rumsfeld has finally brought about the needed changes. A prime example of the transformation that is taking place in our military is the Navy's Summer Pulse '04 exercise. It is a dramatic show of the Navy's surge capabilities as it consists of seven aircraft carriers underway at once. This is impressive for two reasons. Not only can no other nation put seven carriers to sea at once, but no other nation even has seven carriers. The other reason requires a bit of explanation. In the past, normal deployment operations consisted of having two carriers on deployment at a time, one from the east coast and one from the west coast. The length of the deployments were fixed at six months (barring a crisis) and deployments were followed by a lengthy recovery period and training cycle to prepare for the next deployment. Because of this, our capability to deploy many carriers at once painlessly was quite limited even though we had thirteen (now twelve) carriers in our possession. For example, we had six carriers underway during Iraqi Freedom, but it took quite a stretch to manage that. The Abraham Lincoln had "completed" it's deployment and was homeward bound before it was turned around and ended up having a nine month long deployment. The Theodore Roosevelt and Carl Vinson were both deployed well ahead of schedule. Only the Constellation and Harry Truman were operating in a routine manner. (The sixth carrier was the Kitty Hawk, home ported in Japan, and operates in a different manner than its stateside counterparts). The operation put quite a short term strain on the Navy and soon afterwards we were left with only one carrier underway. The Navy realized it needed to change its ways and came up with the Fleet Response Plan which changed how carriers spend their time in between deployments. An immediate consequence of this was that deployments were no longer a fixed length, instead ships would go underway with the understanding that their deployment could be as short as three months and as long as nine months if necessary. The leader of the battle group I was in, the USS Kennedy, is part of this exercise, as are the Norfolk based carriers Harry S Truman , Enterprise, and George Washington. The west coast based participants are the Ronald Reagan and John C Stennis. Rounding out the group is the Kitty Hawk. Military comment []12:48:10 AM   trackback []