THE RECESSION IS OVER???? WHO ARE WE KIDDING!!

SEPTEMBER 28TH 2010

Well I've been doing this blog for 6 months now, or at least close enough to 6 months so happy anniversary to me.

Let's review what I have done in 6 months .....

Job Interviews - 5

Jobs - 2 (see Car Salesman Entry)

Currently - working part time with no benefits for $10 an hour overnights, barely making my mortgage, car payment and insurance, selling stuff to help pay for the aforementioned, does anyone need a Wii? Why I didn't land those other jobs? Well I wish I knew, just got the whole, we are moving forward with other candidates with more experience, and that could be entirely true, it's still a buyers market out there, if I have 6 years of experience in something there is probably 3 guys with 10-15 years experience in that same area.

Still looking for that next career move, still hitting the job sites, the social networking avenue and all that good stuff.

So now that we got all that stuff out of the way, let's talk about the recession.

According to National Bureau of Economic Research or Idiots for short, the recession is over and it's been over for about a year, I am not sure what they are smoking but OK let's run with this.

Their factors are GDP, UNEMPLOYMENT and personal income figures and probably the fact that the government hasn't had to bail a company or a whole industry out for a few months now. And they are correct, unemployment has lowered in the last few months albeit at a snails pace, and we are talking tenths of a percent, and GDP has gone up, again slightly. Domestic output is up, rail and trucking is up, and it's all good.

Now let's get into the nuts and bolts here, yes many factors are up, but big companies are just doing more with less workers and bleeding their people for all of they are worth, how many of us know someone who is actually happy with what they are doing? I know of one, maybe two tops out of the hundreds of people I know. Companies have stopped paying bonuses and giving raises and if you don't like it you can leave because they have a hundred people lined up to do your job. Sure some companies are hiring, but they are hiring on a "temp to hire" basis or "part time" even if you work 40 hours that's how they get away without paying you benefits, trust me it's out there.

At one of my job interviews, the HR rep told me they had over a 100 applications for this position, I was honored just to get an interview. That's 100 people either not happy with what they are doing now or unemployed .... so there.

I read in the local paper this weekend that all of these companies are hoarding their cash, Best Buy my lovely past employer apparently has 845 million bucks in the bank, yet they've laid off thousands of people in the past few years, I am not sure what they plan on doing with that money, I can probably find out :0)

An interesting excerpt from Sunday's Star Tribune "Holding on to their money" article ....

• Minnesota's Roughly 100 significant public companies are sitting on $139 Billion in cash.....that's enough to pay more than 772,000 Minnesotans $60,000 a year for 3 years.

Currently the unemployment rate in MN is 7% according to Bureau of Labor, and that equates to about 370,000 people unemployed, makes the above number look even more interesting doesn't it?

PS - the new employment numbers come out tomorrow, so we shall see if the stock market reacts favorable or negatively to those numbers, and if the idiots still think the recession is over.

On the housing front, foreclosures are ugly, homelessness and child homelessness in MN is alarming, folks who have jobs but can't afford their mortgages as at an alarming rate.

The new census data that came out today*

• Of households that earn 75,000 a year or less, 48% of them are what are considered "cost burdened" meaning they can't really afford their house, and paying more than 30% of their wage monthly to live where they are (mortgage, insurance, utilities, rent, etc).

*America Community Service Data

Wow, almost HALF of Minnesotans, yikes! And I'd kill to make 75K right now ... no don't send me hit man contracts ... that's was a figure of speech.

Last quarter there were 6,300 foreclosures in Minnesota, according the Sheriff's offices, that's one quarter and that's just in Minnesota.

Should we even go into education? I think "Waiting for Superman" is taking care of that for me thank you.

I know someone who is a teacher, a single mother, getting barely any child support, who just had to quit her job because she didn't even make enough money to pay for day care, wow, maybe I'm glad I don't have kids.

I hate to post the doom and gloom here, but when I hear idiots who obviously have jobs on TV saying the recession is over, I'd like to personally invite them into my life for a week or two.

OK, enough venting for one day, but can you really say the recession is over, or depression if you ask me.

Recession over? HARDLY.

Perception Vs Reality - or how my old job seems to be affecting my search for a new job....

WED SEPT 15TH 2010

Well folks, here it is, I've been wracking my brain on whether to "go there" with this next blog, but since my supposed past has now apparently affected my opportunity at future employment, let's go there.

It has been a whopping year and a half now since I have worked at the world's largest consumer electronics retailer (you know who you are), and as most of you know who have read this blog, I've had some hardships in trying to land that next career role, I've had a few interviews but nothing has landed yet, it's a buyers market out there right now and one of the roles I interviewed for received over a 100 resumes for that position, yep it's ugly out there.

A couple of weeks ago, I had an opportunity to land a position that was well within my skill set, and had a couple of other folks even forward me the job opportunity, it was a contracting role and that's fine with me, it would get me back in the game, I had high hopes.

I found out that I was not granted consideration for the role due to an apparent "perception" that someone at this company has about me and my performance at my previous role at my former company. Now the person that voiced this perception is no one I even know, and granted it's a small world and some people will travel from company to company and at this point I am sure that I know or know of people at many of the big companies around town, but to have someone actually bring this up who again doesn't even know me, doesn't know what I have been through, and obviously believes something he heard from someone else (hey maybe he doesn't even have the right person!) .... well let's just say it's been deflating.

Now I decided to go back through my notes at my previous employer, hmm let's see, my performance EVERY YEAR was at an "above expectations" level, and I also have a list of 100 people (yes that's not a typo) 100 people who have told me and will attest to the fact that I was a complete partner when working with them, not to mention I have had several folks come forward and offer letters of recommendation or post something on Linked IN (which frankly I don't think does anything but hey that's a whole different blog). Now I am not one to toot my own horn, which even makes the above 'perception' even more puzzling.

So if my issues were not performance related which I doubt they were, maybe to someone it was personal...

I think my success at my former employer possibly ticked some people off, I can't help that in the time I worked there the Home Theater department kept the lights on for the company, and the project I was the PM on was the company focus and I got a lot of the resources.
It was a real thrill to be working on something that made a real difference for the stores, giving them the environment they needed to be successful, and of course that afforded me some praise and accolades.

Sure I was talking to VP's, SVP's and the like on a weekly basis, but I never used that clout to my advantage, but my "perception" is that it made some people spiteful and jealous which is too bad, but would also explain some things.

Every project I ever worked on was by the book, in my 5+ years as a project/program manager, our process and how we got things done changed constantly, besides the green belt project (and then black belt project) that defined my role, I dealt with constant new merchandising initiatives, a new "pipeline" procedure (that even the champions of this procedure were not sure how it was supposed to work) and a giant work stoppage of implementation of all in store projects while folks figured out what was happening and why, while all the time we had merchants screaming at us to put in projects or they would lose funding, it became a "who barks the loudest gets their project done" environment. Sadly the management team had their own agendas so they did not do much to support, I can't really blame them they were miserable too (2 of the 3 senior managers in the department I was in have moved on, including over half of the team itself).
Sadly the only loser in this game was the stores and ultimately the customer, the retail stores have no faith in corporate and can't you blame them, I didn't.

So there you go, I went there, it is what it is, I did my tour of duty and now I am trying to move on with my life, it's sad that someone apparently still has a problem with MY life.

MY LIFE AS A CAR SALESMAN ....

TUESDAY SEPT 7TH 2010

Well we gave it a shot ....

For the last 3 weeks plus, I gave the world of car sales a shot, let me tell you everything you have heard about the business is in fact true. Sadly the job itself was fine, folks would come in and ask questions, and I would answer them, we would go for test drives and people would ask you the usual "do you have this in red?" or "do you have one with leather" and stuff like that, and then people would get something called sticker shock and freak out. What I can take away from this experience is 3 things ....

1. People are idiots - so a guy walks in and looks at a brand new Tahoe, this is a 40k plus vehicle, he wants to put no money down and wants to know what his monthly payments would be, well most of us can do the math, it's gonna be around 700 a month even if his credit is good which affects his interest rate, he just about has a heart attack, he was thinking it would be more like 400 a month, well that won't get him a new Tahoe ... I tried to put him in something more in his range which was more like 28k - but nothing tickled his fancy, frankly I think he was depressed after not being able to afford the new Tahoe, and so was I for wasting about 2 hours working with him for nothing.

Maybe this is where I stop to say I worked at a "one price" store, meaning no haggling or negotiations, what you see on the sticker is what your price is .... I can't believe how many people after I told them that would still ask me what the best price was or could I go lower .... this goes back to point number 1 above. We were also not on commission, so it didn't matter what I sold you I'd make the same money, but I still had to sell SOMETHING to make money, and I didn't sell a thing (OK I sold one car to a friend but that doesn't count).

I could tell you about 100 more stories but I won't, they are funny and yet depressing at the same time, let's just sum it up by saying most people WANT to own a new car, and WANT to buy a new car but frankly most people can't afford it and most leave depressed and tell me a line like "I have to go talk to my wife" or "I have to go to work but Ill be back after" so they leave and they don't come back, it is what it is.

2. Sleazy old school car salesman still exist - now don't get me wrong most of these morons are gone but there are some dinosaurs left and they basically survive by their client lists, we have one guy that probably makes 120k a year and he is our best and sleaziest salesman, but he has been doing this for 24 years and he has a customer database a mile long, and since I started with no database, I had to rely on "fresh ups" meaning new people to the lot for a sale. Even if a customer was there 4 years ago and bought a car from someone else, I would have to split that sale with that person, that's a bunch of crap, they didn't even remember the salespersons name. In the time that I was on the lot, I saw guys run past other guys to talk to customers, even running up to their car to open the door for them, madness! Where I worked they had WAY too many salespeople, there were always about 6 of us standing around playing pocket pool, and that's another reason why I left, I stood outside one day for 12 hours and talked to one person, this store has no foot traffic, and there it is, not to mention most of the old geezers there were down right rude, seriously it was everything you hear of and more ...

3. I forgot what 3 was, but I think you all get the idea.

So I am no longer a car salesman.

So what's next you may ask yourself? Well tonight I start a new gig, I am working overnights cleaning airplanes for a wonderful little airline called Sun Country based locally. Now I could write a whole other chapter in this blog on the story of this airline, their owner is in jail for a ponzi scheme, they are in bankruptcy, but they are the little engine that could, the folks that work there took huge pay cuts to stick around, and they are finally out of the deep end and everyone I have met at this company are some darn positive and happy it's unbelievable. They really like where they are and what they are doing, well I've drank the Kool Aid so sign me up! DId I mention that after 90 days I can fly anywhere they fly for nothing???

I start tonight, yes overnight, which is cool with me because I can still get things done in the day time if needed like projects or a job interview (yes I am still looking for something in my expertise), and so there you go.

I think we will cut it here for today, the blog is back and I hope you enjoy it!!!