'Trends' Archive
The answer appears to be “no.” The marriage in question is the 25-year partnership between General Motors and Toyota Motor in a joint venture, New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. — widely known as NUMMI.
GM this week gave out a brief statement that it could not agree on future product plans with Toyota. The NUMMI plant makes the Pontiac Vibe sport wagon for GM, and production of the Vibe is set to end later this summer — well ahead of the scheduled phase-out of the Pontiac brand.
GM said its 50% interest in NUMMI would stay with “Old GM” — the bankrupt carcass of bad assets and debt that will be left behind when the company emerges from Chapter 11, which could be next week, if the Obama administration’s auto task force can muscle the company’s case through bankruptcy court. “New GM” may be out of bankruptcy reorganization in 40 or fewer days, which would top Chrysler Group’s record of 42 days.
At the NUMMI plant, which is hailed as a highly efficient American implementation of the vaunted Toyota Production System, the UAW-represented workforce makes Tacoma pickups and Corolla sedans for Toyota to sell in North America. What happens to the NUMMI plant now is a big question for Toyota and its new president, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the automotive manufacturer’s founder.
As the global downturn in the automotive industry took hold last year, Toyota called a halt on completing its new plant in Mississippi, which was going to build the Prius hybrid. Rumors abounded that Toyota would convert NUMMI to Prius production in light of high demand for the third-generation Prius, one of the few car models in the world that’s garnering pronounced popularity. Toyota officially quashed those rumors, however.
Akio Toyoda has a thorny problem in pondering the fate of NUMMI. The factory has long outlived its purpose and value as an experiment in cooperative production. It’s not the traditional practice of the giant Japanese automotive manufacturer to shutter a factory, lock the doors, and throw away the key, as Chrysler and GM did with so many North American plants. (The sprawling NUMMI factory was a GM plant until it was closed in 1982.) Toyota doesn’t do big layoffs. NUMMI is the last car plant in California, it has a unionized workforce of some 4,700 employees, and it’s a highly visible employer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Pulling the plug on NUMMI would be a public-image nightmare for Toyota. Not that it would slow down sales of Toyota vehicles in the US any more than the recession already has, but it would be an international liability to the corporation’s image.
BTW, the NUMMI plant is a few miles north on the Nimitz Freeway from the Great Mall of the Bay Area — a facility that was a Ford Motor plant from 1955 to 1983 and which was redeveloped as a giant shopping mall in 1994. Maybe that could be the future of the NUMMI factory, as well, although the mall business isn’t what it used to be, either.
Drugstore operator Walgreen aims to redefine the term office visit by allowing you to visit the doctor at your office or workplace. After blanketing the nation with more than 6,900 drugstores, retail growth opportunities are slowing and the company is looking for new ways to expand. One area that Walgreen is giving plenty of attention is its Take Care Health Systems (TCHS) business, which manages more than 700 clinics inside Walgreen stores and at worksites. (Customers include QUALCOMM, Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Toyota Motor.) The company recently told Chicago’s Daily Herald that it plans to open “several thousand” work-site health clinics in the coming years to get in on the $7.3 billion market for employer-provided care.
With businesses struggling to reduce employee health care costs and the country on the verge of major health care reform, one could argue this is an idea whose time has come. The work-site clinics provide primary-care physicians (which I understand are in short supply already), nurse practitioners, nutritionists, and other health-related services. Walgreen bought TCHS in 2007 and made two follow-on acquisitions — I-trax and Whole Health Management — in 2008 in a bid to diminish its reliance on retail stores for growth and to diversify into health and wellness services. In January Walgreen launched “Complete Care and Well-Being,” a workplace program designed to cut costs for employers and improve access to health care for employees. The work-site health centers may be staffed by from one to 50 employees (depending on the size of the client) and be paired with Walgreen pharmacies and discount prescription drug plans.
This all sounds good, but I can’t help but think about the school nurse. Not to bash all school nurses, but the ones I encountered during my school days, and more recently during my children’s education, hardly inspired confidence. (My fifth grader swears her school nurse treats everything with a cough drop.) On the other hand, my employer Hoover’s already provides flu shots, blood pressure screening, and other health-related services at well-attended company-sponsored health fairs. It would be convenient to be able to get a throat culture or other simple procedure at work. But beyond routine services, there are privacy issues to consider and I’m not sure all employees would flock to a company doc.
On a related health care note: The world’s largest employer, Wal-Mart Stores, has come out in favor of requiring employers to provide health insurance to workers, much to the dismay of other retailers, large companies, and most Republicans. In a letter to President Obama dated June 30, Wal-Mart called for “shared responsibility” in the form of an “employer mandate which is fair and broad in coverage.” Wal-Mart, which for years was chastised as stingy when it came to employee benefits, has improved its benefits programs considerably. Still, the National Retail Federation, which vehemently opposes mandates for employers, said it was “flabbergasted” by Wal-Mart’s position.
Hoover’s is lucky to call Austin, Texas home and we are happy to share our fine city with some of the most talented, witty, and entertaining musicians in the country.
Leave it to long-time local folkies The Austin Lounge Lizards to perform a new song that lampoons the current economic mess we seem to have gotten ourselves into. (You see, The Lizards have made fun of everything from hillbillies to immigration reform since the group was founded in 1980). The band’s latest musical dig, Too Big to Fail, carries on the tradition of timely teasing to proclaim, “I wanna get what rich guys get/I wanna chef and a corporate jet/and a house in the Hamptons if it doesn’t upset Ben Bernanke.”
I couldn’t help but giggle when I first heard the track being played on a local radio station. Come to find out the song also has its own video featuring the band wearing nothing but wooden barrels. The track also will be available beginning July 1 as an iTunes download.
“The Lizards’ songs and their take on the human condition has given me new insight on how important it is to laugh at ourselves and life’s absurdities,” the group’s newest member and fiddle player, Darcie Deaville, explained on the band’s Web site.
The Austin Lounge Lizards probably aren’t the first and surely won’t be the last act to capitalize on or make fun of the state our economy. We all need a nice reprieve from all of the horrible news of late, so why not sing about how horrible things are. And at 99 cents per download The Lizards may have just found their latest cash cow. At least there is still a market for humor.
It’s only been a relatively few decades since credit has become ubiquitous and necessary to modern life. I know people who have abandoned cash in much the same way they have given up their landlines — with nary a thought. That annoying commercial about how people who write checks stop the flow of happy commerce? Yeah, that’s how we live now.
But it’s not just about the convenience anymore. Try to book an airline flight without a credit card. Try to order anything online. Yeah, there’s PayPal, but just try to order something from Lands’ End using PayPal. Heck, try to get decent insurance rates without your credit score being taken into consideration.
So the fact that credit card companies are cutting people off, scaling back on perks like miles, raising interest rates, and reducing lines of credit isn’t just inconvenient, it’s putting consumers between a rock and a hard place. We like to think that using credit is about prudence and we scorn people who can’t handle their credit responsibly, but because credit has become so intertwined in the way we live, credit is a necessity, not a choice. Even good credit card customers, the ones who always pay their bills on time, are being penalized by credit card companies. (It’s hard to make money on people who are prudent about debt.)
The new credit card laws will help, but gone are the days of easy credit. I don’t know if that means a cash economy is going to come back. Will paying with folding money take on a sort of retro cool? I just think that before we throw out the baby with the bathwater we take a look at how commerce has organized itself around the ubiquity of credit cards and dust off the old systems of payment — do you know where your checkbook is? — before the whole thing grinds to a halt.
One last note — a local coffee house gives you a discount if you pay in cash. It’s like they are living in the past! It’s refreshing. And it makes me feel just a little bit virtuous when I pull out a few battered ones for my coffee and scone. That’s the kind of happy commerce I like, and it doesn’t stop the flow at all.
The anecdotal consensus that blogs and social networking sites can give traditional news outlets serious competition was undeniably proven yesterday during coverage of Michael Jackson’s death. TMZ, the fairly trashy celebrity gossip site, was the first outlet to report that Jackson had died — many hours before old school media like the LA Times, CBS, and CNN had confirmed the King of Pop was gone. Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites were filled with news of his death throughout the early afternoon, forcing so many people onto the Internet that it slowed to a crawl.
I think my own steps toward learning of Jackson’s death displays the incredible speed with which our wired world moves.
- I saw a crawl on CNBC late in the afternoon that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital. People go to the hospital all the time and I’m not a Jackson fan or anything, so I didn’t think much of it.
- Right before I left work, I checked my Facebook page and saw many status updates from contacts along the lines of, “Is it true? Can he really be gone.” I thought, “Uh oh. Must be bad.”
- I headed over to CNN.com to see what was up, but all they had was the “Jackson rushed to the hospital after cardiac arrest” headline. No word on if he had died. I checked around to the other main news sites and they all had the same version of “Stay Tuned.”
- I pointed my browser at TMZ and they claimed, “Michael Jackson Dies.” I was shocked by this. Either TMZ had just scooped the big boys, or they were seriously jumping the gun. Either way, that’s huge from a journalistic standpoint.
- I then embarked on a bit of a morbidly curious experiment to see which news outlet would be the first to report that he was dead. I kept refreshing all the news pages to no avail before I had to leave work to pick up my kids.
- On my way home I listened to CNN on SIRIUS to see how much longer it would take before his death was reported. Unfortunately this meant listening to Wolf Blitzer — not to be confused with a reporter, he’s more an on-camera CNN promoter/cheerleader — bring on doctors to describe cardiac arrest and reporters who had covered Jackson in the past to talk about him, all while giving somewhat of a ghoulish play-by-play. “CNN has learned that he is in cardiac arrest. Now we’ve learned he’s in a coma. Now we’ve learned that the LA Times and CBS is reporting he has died, but CNN has not confirmed that.” (Presumably meaning it hasn’t happened.)
After about an hour of this, it was finally widespread knowledge that he had died. It was a strange journey through this new information age, with TMZ of all things at the head of the pack.
A weird end to a weird day.