Retiree Goes to the Grocery Store

This is so not the way I would spend $150 at the grocery store. For one thing, no matter how great a bargain any frozen food might be, I couldn't buy it--my freezer hasn't worked since the cyclone in April.

This is not the way Grandma Bonnie Peters would spend $150 at the grocery store, either. For one thing, she's not only gluten-intolerant, but also allergic to peanut butter.

Probably every budget-conscious person who reads this article will think of ways our shopping lists would be different from Yvonne Leehelen Dowell's. That's not the point I'm making by sharing a link to this article:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/7710134/groceries_are_cheap_not.html?cat=10

My point here is that there is something you can do for this retired individual. Since she's still a member of Associated Content, AC is still legally obligated to send her page-view payments that reflect every time we read one of her articles or poems.

Probably they're capping her payments. That happened to me during my last months of writing for AC. AC payments were my grocery budget at that point. I'd told others that I wouldn't try to depend on AC to pay any bills, but I found myself doing it. This happened to be the same time when Google announced that its new Panda software was going to place AC articles lower on Google searches. Of course AC writers switched, and advised our friends to switch, to Yahoo searches that still placed AC articles high. Some other writers complained that their page-view counts and payments had dropped. I started posting lots of book reviews, for the loyal local lurkers, and my page-view counts rose. So every month, when the computer showed that my page-view payment for the month was going to be $19 and then my Paypal account showed only $15 paid in by AC, I knew that the problem was in California, not Virginia. Yahoo's response when they were kindly notified of the problem was to e-kill me.

Has Yahoo straightened out its internal financial problems by now? Will Yvonne Leehelen Dowell get the page-view payments she has earned? Who knows? Increased government interference with the Internet, though inherently undesirable, may have some advantages.

At least, if we all continue reading AC articles, retirees like YLD will know that somebody out there is still interested in their well-being.