Rainy Day Thoughts

I had a little bit of a conversation with my wife about economics.

We'd had lunch at her office -- I stopped by McD's and picked up some things -- and on the way out, we talked a bit about the proposed sale of the company to Hewlett-Packard. We wondered what kinds of changes would result. Almost certainly, HP would lay off people, and if there is justice in the world (which there isn't), they'd be mostly EDS people. We've all seen instances where one company buys another that does something that the first one does, and the first one decides to lay off its own people because the new acquisition can do it cheaper. The CEOs and such like to say that this makes good business sense, and I suppose it does, as long as you're willing to posit that good business sense does not imply, and in fact can be the direct antithesis of, common sense, human sense, all of that. The conversation led us to talk about the plans for Pennsylvania, and also for Harrisburg (the state capital) to lease out some facilities to investment organizat\ions. Both political entities like to say that this makes good business sense, win-win, and all of that. And I suppose that its possible that a private entity can operate something more effectively than a public one. But I would bet serious money that someone's going to lose out on the deal, and the chances are good that its going to be someone at the peon level. Folks who were counting on a retirement package aren't going to have one. Or perhaps the profit will come the way that New York City balanced its budget, years ago; by deferring recurring maintenance on bridges, tunnels, and roadways. They're seeing what the effect of that is, now, just as the organizations that take financial steps which end up screwing peons see the effect is of doing so -- loss of organizational integrity, for one; loss of talent, skills, and support, for another.

Why are we here? Because we don't see a profitable alternative. We don't seem to be able to make money the way we used to do it, and we're scraping the edges for pennies where dollars used to be easy to get.

Thats not to see that we're at the bedrock, across the board -- but I think that in a lot of ways, we are. We've pared and lopped and trimmed and right-sized and all of that, and we're pretty much at the point where this is the cheapest that we can do certain things without making serious structural changes -- whether thats not having flights between here and there on weekends or getting out of the line of business altogether. We're doing it as well as it can be done, and now we need to start thinking: whats it worth to us to continue? Are we willing to accept lower pay, lower profit, lower standard of living?

I know what the answer of the good people on Wall Street would be. I'd like to believe that there is a more palatable -- more human-- answer.
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Update: I realized upon rereading this that I had gotten off the track, not saying something that I wanted to, which is: now that we've done all this paring and stuff, I am looking for people to say 'hey, you know what? I bet there are people out there who don't necessarily want the cheapest airline flight, the cheapest bookseller, all of that'. I'm not saying there are people to whom money is no object (though there are, and wouldn't it be nice to be one of them?), and I'm not saying that people don't like saving money. But there are times when the difference between the cheapest and some other price is life-and-death to the people doing the selling -- and I would bet that its not that big a deal to the people doing the buying. If I can get what I want, and I think the price is fair -- not the cheapest, but fair -- and along the way, I think I'm helping a business I like to survive -- hey, not bad. I'll take that.