Book Review: The Power of Leadership Skills

Title: The Power of Leadership Skills

Author: David Hathaway

Date: 2025

Quote: "What sets this book apart is its unique approach."

By "unique approach" is apparently meant that this book won't tell you one dang thing you've not read before. And it reads as if it was written by a computer, though, to be fair, general advice on how to frame a dreary middle management job as "leadership" read very much as if it had been written by a computer before word processors were invented. All of its sources (except for a painting, cited as a source of inspiration but not reproduced in the book) are online.

Usually books of this type can at least boast of a few new stories but the closest this book comes to telling new stories is to mention the names of people and companies that have been in the news recently.

And, before the end of the book, the author seems to have realized that the audience would be drifting away, adding a sort of intercalary chapter urging readers to "Take a Break and Write a Review."

This e-book is recommended to students in business management courses who want to list it as a book on corporate "leadership" that they've read. Since its advice is unoriginal and Delphic, it won't tell you how to succeed in business, but it could be fairly described as a summary of several cubic yards of similar books for which too many trees used to die.

Do We Have Good Places to Eat in Gate City?

Over the weekend someone who'd grown up in Gate City, but lived in a nearby town as an adult, gave me a shock. "Apart from McDonalds Gate City doesn't have anywhere to eat any more, do they, except Taco Bell?"

Well.

As an alternative to McDonalds, in the same shopping plaza, there's that Subway where a sponsor of this web site, long dead, used to take me for lunch and discussions of bill reading strategy. I loved that dear old man in a niecely way, and haven't gone in there often without him. I think Subway is too much a big chain, not willing enough to let people forego the sauce and have more cucumber and tomato in their salad, but they used to do good gluten-free salads. 

Now in my personal opinion, our best restaurant--the all-around winner--is technically outside of town, but it's not in any other town and it gets its mail through Gate City. For quality and variety of food, cleanliness of building, period charm and atmosphere, fairness of prices, and a credible attempt at a Real Salad Bar, you drive briskly through Gate City and keep going west till you come to the Hob Nob diner out on Route 58. They used to grill the meat to your taste and have no problem serving just the meat and the veg on a plate. The menu had a nice selection of sandwiches from hamburgers to ostrich meat, side dishes including chili and corn bread, the salad bar, pie and ice cream and milkshakes, and juice as an alternative to soda pop or water. (They served tap water, but tourists used to think it must have been bottled because our local tap water doesn't taste bad--and has, in fact, been filtered and bottled.) They even hired carhops in summer--cute little teenagers who scampered around the parking lot serving customers in the convenience of their cars. Everything was straight out of the 1950s except the ostrich meat (vintage 1970), salad bar (1980), and, unfortunately, the prices. The prices were contemporary, but reasonable. That was before COVID. I've not actually been there post-COVID. That's a hint.

But if you're not driving and want to eat right in the heart of town, as it might be while you're dealing with the Department of Motor Vehicles, court, or some county office business, there are options.

Long John Silver's Seafood Shop was trendy in the 1970s. Meh. I have fond memories of eating there with a friend, also now dead. He was not much older than I and my feelings toward him were not niecely. That was before I went gluten-free. Just about everything on that chain restaurant's menu could and should have been gluten-free. Nothing, except the drinks, was gluten-free. Can't fix stupid. I've heard the restaurant's gone, or going, out of business. No loss. 

Hardee's...urgh ick...if they hadn't formed a solid clique of people who actually call themselves a club and get free meal tickets in the mail, that place would have died a long time ago. It's been long enough that I can laugh about it now...When I met the man known to this web site as my Significant Other, about twenty years ago, he asked, in the way of small talk, "What do you do?" I said, "I just got back in town and I'm looking for odd jobs." He said, "I can get you jobs...in construction!" It was a dare; he could tell that what I meant by odd jobs were things like teaching, typing, computer-ing, storekeeping, or tour-guiding. I said, "Yer on." So I signed on with a crew who were remodelling a house in Lee County. It was a delightful job. One day, I forget now why we were in Gate City early in the day, I was riding to or from work with the boss. He tried to maintain good relationships with all the other business owners in Gate City; he ate at all the restaurants in turn when he was in town. That day he wanted to eat at Hardee's. So I went in with him, looked at the menu, saw all the versions of meat and bread on it, and asked if they could do a sandwich without the bread, just put the meat and veg on a plate. They did. It wasn't great; it wasn't bad. I thought no more of it but the next time the boss was in Hardee's, he said, the help had said nasty things about being asked to prepare something different from what they always did prepare, by hand. They didn't want me to come back, he said. So then a few weeks later some other friend or relative wanted to use one of those free coupons at Hardee's. I looked at the menu. They were now advertising that they did special gluten-free meals without bread--for twice the price of the same meat and veg in the sandwich. I am not making this up. I seriously recommend that, while walking past Hardee's, all visitors make sure to spit ostentatiously on the pavement. But the place is still there. 

It should probably be required by law: Before opening a restaurant, the owner must demonstrate the ability to cook and serve anything on the menu "free from" any of its regular ingredients. And thank the customer for letting person try. Food bullies should not be allowed even to eat in restaurants.

Taco Bell. What can one say? Taco Bell is writer-friendly; there's actually a literary magazine for people who eat there to use the Internet, the Taco Bell Quarterly. Before glyphosate I liked the food, so now I expect I'd like the food again. Still...it's a big-chain restaurant sitting on the site of a delightful little old house-made-into-a-shop, which I miss. 

You're on Kane Street, passing the Hardee's and Taco Bell, Long John Silver's, Pizza Plus--I'm not sure about the status of Pizza Plus. All they used to offer were combinations of bread and cheese with various meats and vegetables on top. Some of my young relatives liked Pizza Plus and I nibbled on cheese-free bread sticks in there a few times. They had nothing to offer the gluten-free so I can't say I'l miss them if they're gone.

Then you come to a structure that looks like some sort of art, a building-sized concrete sculpture of a big carry-out box--in glen plaid?--with a hot dog, a hamburger, and a box of fries on it. It is an actual building. It's not a restaurant open to the public, but cars roll around it, order fast food on one side, pick up fast food on the other side, and park somewhere nearby while people eat. This is Pal's Restaurant, a locally owned chain. The menu is straight out of the 1950s. The hot dogs, hamburgers, fries, chili, shakes, and sodas are excellent if you like that sort of thing.

If you like that sort of thing but prefer to sit down while you eat it, on the other side of the street is the Campus Drive-In. It's not actually on the high school campus; high schools and colleges were a trendy decorating theme in the 1950s. My opinion is that Pal's and the Hob Nob do 1950s fast food better, but the Campus Drive-In is a local landmark and has its devotees.

Anyway, keep walking; better restaurants are ahead of you. There is a little place that used to be a gas station, on your right, just below the intersection with Jackson Street. They advertise barbecued pork as a specialty. They do other things. I've never gone inside the place but one afternoon, a few years ago, a friend who was a local business booster directed a friend of hers to fill a take-out box with a selection of chicken and vegetable dishes, take it to me, and get a verdict. They passed. 

If you keep walking, on the corner above the intersection of Kane and Jackson Streets you'll see what is now the Maple Tree Cafe. It's a sort of post-COVID makeover of what used to be the Roberts Family Bakery & Cafe where I used to write. If you're in town to meet with your lawyer, and your case does not involve pleading extreme poverty, the Cafe is a good place to have coffee and a snack. The post-COVID influence on the decor started out by building in more healthy distance by having a mini-bookstore in the cafe. Mini-mini...Booksellers are, traditionally, gentlemen and -women. We naturally prefer that you buy books from us but, if another bookseller has a book you want, we'll direct you to per store. 

Across the street is a murky place that attempts to appeal to Northern tourists with an Italian-type name (the place is owned by a woman with an English-type name), dim lighting, and cleaning-fluid-based beverages. For about twenty years those who want to attract more money have been saying that what Gate City needs is a place where alcohol cravers can sit down and drink alcohol with food. I've been saying that we need that almost as badly as we need another episode where a drunk driver runs over a Sunday School picnic. Italian food that requires the look of a Mafia den is probably dreadful. Good Italian food can be enjoyed stone-cold sober in broad daylight.

There is, however, a decent little Mexican place, further up Jackson Street, closer to the courthouse. It's changed hands a few times but I think it's still owned by real Mexicans. Food is cooked fresh, reasonably authentic, with a reasonable range of heat, and sold at quite good prices for that quality of restaurant food. They offer an authentic selection of Mexican cervezas and vinos. 

I, like most people in Gate City, don't really do restaurants. They're not an authentic part of our cultural heritage. Our ancestors raised most of their food on their own farms and cooked and ate it in their own 

homes. When they got tired of their own cooking, they visited friends and relatives and ate food cooked their way. The quality of locally produced food as served by local farmers or their children, even if they use the really old traditional recipes that over-cook, over-salt, and over-grease food, is much, much better than 1950s fast food. So who even needs restaurants, except, as a male client said to me a few years ago, as a place where people of different genders, who are married to other people, can talk at length and everyone can see that all they're doing is talking about business. And of course everyone knows that that tells us nothing about what they do next as they drive off, probably in separate cars, possibly to a motel in Kingsport. And there's a movement in the Baptist church these days for men to practice moral rectitude by not going to lunch alone with women, because of the possibility of going somewhere else after lunch. So we probably don't need any restaurants. 

But we have them. Lots of people like to cook, have been told they could open a restaurant, have opened one, and have found themselves fighting like cornered rats to keep the places open. Surely, they tell themselves, there must be some way to make their dream of earning a living by cooking pay...

So, back in the 1960s, the restaurant owners of then kicked, screamed, clawed, and bit when Route 23 was being rammed through the mountains. It would make it easy for people just to roll on into Kingsport and never shop or eat in Gate City, they wailed. 

(Route 23 is still here. Most of the restaurant owners of then had retired from thirty or forty years of working and saving to open their restaurants, and aren't even remembered any more, though I do remember vividly where the Mill House and Liberty Bell restaurants used to be. When I rented a store space on Jackson Street, in between two later owners' use of it, that store space was where the Mill House used to be. (I had lunch in the Mill House, the first time I ever ate lunch in a restaurant alone, on grade eight's "career day." I don't remember what I ate.) I remember when most of the restaurants that now exist came to town. The Campus Drive-In and the Hob Nob have been around longer than I have. Pal's existed before I was born, in Kingsport, but opened the branches in the giant glen plaid boxes only in the 1980s.)

Then in 1980 the first effort was made to shut down the Friday Market. People were coming to town to trade there and were ignoring the restaurants and the regular stores, the restaurant owners of then screamed. The market was declared closed. People announced a real boycott of Gate City's restaurants and regular stores. The market reopened in time for strawberries to be sold.

Nobody messed with the Friday Market again during the next forty years, but while writing in the Cafe I learned that the restaurant owners still resented it. They wanted something else to be done with the space, something good enough to make people forget the Friday Market. 

Hello? Gate City is a farm and market town. It made an heroic effort to be a factory town, a hundred years ago, and you can still see where one of the factories used to be, but they're all long gone. If and whenever the Friday Market goes, I said, Gate City will become...not quite so much of an historical curiosity as Bray, because we'll still have the courthouse with the adjacent law offices, but similar to Bray. Which is still an interesting place on a tourist's itinerary, but which will never be mistaken for an actual town.

COVID happened. Friday Market traffic dropped. Efforts to recover from COVID began. The Weber City Fire Department, which is technically in a different town but I've never seen a tourist notice the difference, bought a shopping plaza and opened a bigger farm-and-flea market. Friday Market vendors moved. (Except for me, of course. I thought seriously about renting a place in Weber City to store my merchandise, but nobody really seemed to need the money and in any case the people I knew who had suitable places weren't what you could call close to the market, at least not in terms of carrying unsold merchandise after six or eight hours in the sun.) 

The restaurant owners, and "boutique-y" store owners, pounced. Mrs. Roberts, of the Cafe, had gone to a "splash park" in Tennessee with her grandchildren and thought that would be a wonderful way to fill up the space where our own Friday Market belonged. In town council meetings people demanded that a couple of food trucks that had started rolling around town be subjected to extra licensing fees, to make sure they weren't at any possible financial advantage over the restaurant owners. I've even heard wild talk about free drinks or free children's meals being offered to splash park patrons to entice them into our restaurants. 

Well, y'know what? I had already explained to Mrs. Roberts, at length and in detail, why attacking the Friday Market was just wrong, unbefitting a good Carson Republican like herself, and also doomed. I had, meanwhile, been working on other plans. An open-air market is not actually good for books. I think Gate City needs its Friday Market, and will have its Friday Market. I always had thought I, personally, needed a different kind of venue. People had said "If you don't want to take out a loan and make a big investment, just take a few books into Friday Market," and when better alternatives were not available I did, but I never once intended to stay there for long. 

When Mrs. Roberts had bought, and rented to me, the space where the Mill House Restaurant used to be, she said, "You'll find out"...what she meant was why I wouldn't make money there, although as it turned out I did. Now I say to her, "You'll find out." The splash park will be fun for a year or two. It will be little used, since local people don't need to go into town and splash in the same water other people are using when we want to cool off. It will lose money. The expensive gadgets will break down. The town council will end up reopening the Friday Market as one of several steps it will be taking to pay for the splash park. It will all cost me absolutely nothing, and I hope those who will be involved with it will enjoy it.

I think Providence has actually provided them with an opportunity for a safe and salutary learning experience, while most of the people who were earning significant parts of their incomes in the Friday Market have an opportunity to work in a bigger market with more traffic.

But if the splash park won't boost Gate City's restaurants very far, what will?

"Try to keep the customers they've got," the out-of-towner said. "That convenience store" (that we had passed) "is next to where the power company's headquarters used to be. In the morning you used to see all the company trucks stop at that store while the men went in for coffee. Now, of course, APCo has moved their headquarters to Kingsport. But those men don't stop there any more for coffee even when they're in town."

"They can get coffee closer to their headquarters in Kingsport?" I guessed.

"They go to a gas station in Weber City. Because X never liked cleaning the bathrooms. When the COVID mess started, she was the first to ask, 'Can we close the bathrooms?' They kept the bathrooms open but X wanted to keep them locked in the morning and make people ask for a key. Wanted to lock them up, a few hours ahead of closing time, after the last cleaning and not give people the key. I've seen her not let old people who could hardly walk, even after they had walked all the way to the bathroom and then back to the counter, into the bathrooms. Well, maybe they would have left a mess in the bathroom. Maybe they went out and made a mess in the parking lot. And you know they would not come back. Probably not come back to other places in Gate City, either."

"I have never minded asking for a restroom key," I said, "but I know some people do."

"Those linemen wouldn't ask a young lady about anything like that. And what they do, first thing in the morning, is go to the bathroom, wash their hands, then get their coffee and snacks for breakfast. So X just got rid of them, and who knows how many other customers. Now she complains because traffic is slowing down at the store."

"That is not the only problem that store has," I observed. "Maybe they needed to do some remodelling, but they went too far. They've tried to become 'upscale.' A convenience store is by nature downscale, and I don't see anybody actually buying the fancy snacks they have put in place of the old favorite junk food people looked for. I don't see people paying the 20 to 50 percent surcharge they've put on to all the old favorite convenience things they still sell, either." 

We got into quite a discussion of things some stores and restaurants in Gate City could try if they wanted to keep the customers they have.

1. Always have a restroom open to the public. Unless there is a specific temporary need to keep undesirable persons out of the restroom, let it be locked only when it's in use.

2. If you want to be a storekeeper, you have to sweep and mop the floor all day because people are too lazy to wipe their feet, and clean the bathroom when men leave spots on the seat and/or the floor, and put things back on the shelves where slobs fail to put them back in their places, AND say "Thank you, Sir" and "Thank you, Ma'am" whenever people pay for things. Deal with it. 

3. Absolutely no gossip. People drive to Kingsport to buy things even when the same things are available at a better price in Gate City, just to avoid seeing people who they know will gossip about them after they've left the store. 

4. Respect and appreciate all the customers--especially the ones who are poor, or old, or confused, or funny-looking. Some of these businesses have employees who've talked back to me because I'm not rich or because I walked into town rather than driving. B'y h...I can at least give them what they've paid for. Some people can't. What store employees need to know is that comfortably retired gentlemen like this former resident of our town, and arguably overeducated idle writers like myself, and our rich friends from the city, also notice things like, say, a certain bleach-blonde Lee County wench calling one of my former teachers, who happened to have grown old while Black, "honey" instead of "Ma'am." We notice. And we want to pull every yellow hair out of your head by its black or white roots. And we for sure do not want to support your store. That kind of thing has in fact been mentioned when I've asked rich friends from Washington to visit Gate City and they've declined.

You see somebody wandering around like a person who needs thick glasses and has misplaced the said glasses, muttering to himself, bumping into things, obviously no more aware that the prison pants fad is over than that it ever existed, but just not fitting into his clothes in the normal way, and finally stumbling into the bathroom, just too late by the look and smell of things...his name is "Sir" to you. And you thank him when he pays for a cup of coffee. And you shut your wretched yap-hole after he leaves, and keep it shut during and after the thorough cleaning the bathroom requires. Because in a place like Gate City you know that that wretched creature is somebody's grandfather, and he probably used to be a teacher or fire fighter or some such thing, too. Extreme respect.

5. In theory it's nice if you happen to "like" a customer. In reality it's not appropriate. The United States is a democratic republic where you, the store employee,  are considered the social equal of anyone else who is working for the minimum hourly wage at your age. At school you can sit beside people who have professional skills and own their own businesses. In social settings you can eat or play sports or watch birds with people who may even be rich. Your job, however, is not a social setting. On your job you need to focus on your work and not waste mental energy on emotional feelings about customers. Some customers, myself for one, don't want to receive special favors or attentions in a place of business. The ideal is not that you "like" customers, but that you wait on all customers, whether you "like" them or not, with equal honesty and civility. 

6. So, don't bother your head about who is buying what and why and for whom. If you think a product is bad, which is what I think about cleaning-fluid-based beverages, you shouldn't sell it. If you sell it, don't ask questions about people who are trying to help your business by buying it.

7. If you don't have wheelchair-using customers, hire a wheelchair consultant to show you why, and fix the problem right away. Wheelchair users should be able to understand that older stores have oldfashioned charm that should not be lost, even when it involves stairs...and store employees should be working to equalize the situation. If your store has lovely historic staircases and some of your customers love shopping on the upstairs and downstairs levels, for example, you might make those levels virtually available to wheelchair users via videos they can watch on the street level, sending you up or down to bring out whatever interests them for inspection.

8. Discrimination is not your friend. We are not a big enough town that anyone should even want to start excluding anyone else. "Oh, but isn't it nice to keep a store or a row or a whole neighborhood 'upscale' so that nobody really minds paying a little more...?" No. It is not. The nature of a business does tend to attract some types of people more than others. Bookstores don't attract a lot of coal miners but a good bookstore should be a place where a determined coal miner can educate himself to qualify for a different kind of job. A good hardware store should be a place where a rich lady feels secure enough to walk in and ask for PVC pipe, or a plumber's tool, or a plumber.  And a good town is walkable enough that, if people ride into town in a car and need to leave that car at the mechanic's garage for a few hours, they can still visit all the little "boutique" shops they wanted to visit.

9. Asking for protection from competing entrepreneurs is an indication that you don't deserve it. From the downtown merchants who feared competition from the Friday Market I heard, "But an open-air market attracts a different kind of people...they don't walk around town..." This is false. I worked the Friday Market, and I know. People buy food from a food truck rather than a big-chain restaurant because they don't like the big chains. They buy food from a food truck rather than a real, locally owned restaurant because the food truck owner has made sure to offer better deals on something or other. If you panic, "That food truck is going to destroy my business," you're locking into refusal to meet your customers where they are and offer them an equally good deal, so you can't keep a loyal customer base and probably won't keep a business. Getting rid of a modest, friendly, lovable Mennonite bakery truck will attract the attention of an unscrupulous foreign-owned ethnic restaurant chain, which will bury you. If you accept your restaurant's limitations and offer good deals on good food, on the other hand, you'll keep a loyal customer base. The food truck will take a few sales because it's offering something new and different, but then after a while your customers will want to see you and eat your food again. The food truck will probably build up a route that brings it here only weekly, or fortnightly, so there'll be business for all. 

10. No matter how righteous you feel about losing a customer, the bottom line is that Gate City loses customers because too many of us would rather feel righteous about losing customers than try to see their point of view and keep customers. Any customer you lose has relatives. Even if those relatives see your point of view at the time, they'll see the ex-customer's point of view, too. A lot of people stopped eating at Hardee's after that little display of stupidity on the menu. If you want customers, instead of going into ego defense mode about a request that you do something differently, take pride in being able to accommodate every customer's tastes or needs. Find topics other than religion or politics to talk about with people who disagree with you, too. And make peace with the grandchildren of your least favorite primary school teacher.

How Much Is Advertising Hurting Products?

"It pays to advertise," we've all heard. If products and businesses aren't advertised, how will people know they exist? 

Then again, how many people do you know who actually look at advertisements, or watch TV commercials? Can it really pay to be noticed...as a nuisance? Do you really want an image that subconsciously triggers people to reach for the remote control to get your product off the TV screen?

Some smarty-pants researchers will tell you that you do. For some audiences, it seems, shopping is mindless. The more obnoxious the TV commercial is, the more likely some people are to forget the commercial, remember the brand, and think "Hmmm...wanna try that," when they're wandering through the mall in a hung-over, Homer-Simpson-like state of consciousness. You could bottle sewage and label it sewage and at some times of day Homer would probably look at the bottle, say "Hmmm...sewage," and drink it. So in theory, if you annoy people enough with an advertisement for a box of old broken rusty nails that starts with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, what some shoppers have in the way of a thought process will go "Hmmm...Rusty Nails! Just what the living room shelf needs!" 

Those people are not writers. They are not artists. They are not the people who spend a lot of time using the Internet for things other than games and movies. 

Writers, artists, and early adopters of computer technology generally, have more completely developed brains and nervous systems than Homer Simpson has. They're the ones who either walk out of the store that sells Rusty Nails, or say to the storekeeper, "You're trying to sell old broken rusty nails that are advertised with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, now? What's wrong?" 

A majority of us are introverts. Introverts' social behavior, when it does not consist of moving away from obnoxious extroverts, is based on showing respect. We don't run up and chatter at people because our more completely developed brains contain a set of neurons that might as well be called a conscience, which tells us that people have their own lives and running up and chattering at them is disrespectful. Other people would have no reason to like us if they perceived us as pushy pests. What does that tell you about advertisements? 

And yes, we do remember it when we decide, even in grade six, to stop buying a favorite snack because we found a TV commercial that advertised it annoying. 

I am not making this up. My brother and I stopped buying M&Ms, which had been our treat of choice almost every time we went to the store, during the year he was in grade six because we thought that year's TV commercial campaign was insulting to kids.

People who spend a lot of time using the Internet for things other than games and movies have other things in common besides being introverts. Most of us are, or feel that we are, underpaid, so we shop mindfully and frugally. Many of us go online from work or school rather than having Internet connections at home; at work or school making an impulse purchase online might have repercussions, so a lot of us are never going to make an impulse purchase online. Many of us read Consumer Reports and check the customer reviews before choosing to buy things that cost more than, say, a dollar. Some of us don't buy things that used to cost less and now cost more than a dollar. 

Most of us are security-conscious, so forget all about "targeted advertising." It's true that people in cold climates buy more snow tires than people in the tropics do, that men don't buy a lot of bras, and that very few people whose title is "Rabbi" are going to buy pork sausages...but what you need to know is that security-conscious Internet users don't like the idea that you know which country we're in, unless we told you. Don't try to find out more information about us. The more you seem to know, the more we want to avoid you. If anything, advertising products that are not actually sold in our country gives me a pleasing sense that you're minding your own business and not meddling with mine. 

Less stalking, less of an attempt to get inside our heads and manipulate our thoughts, and more of a straightforward interest in making sure people know about your product, is generally good for your image. Don't try to tell us anything like "You want this" or "You should do this." That kind of message is disrespectful. Tell us what your product is. If you can tell us what it costs, with one price for everyone, that's a plus point.

In real life, promotions that offer discounts for people in certain categories--seniors, teachers, veterans, people who are willing to tell storekeepers if it's their birthday--can work well for stores. Online, that kind of promotion is very bad. It's disrespectful to try to find out whether Internet users actually are dogs. One price for all is the only rule that looks ethical to Americans.

We trust one another more than we trust you. We think the Internet is an ideal place for messages like "Don't buy Brand X cereal--I opened a new box and a live mouse jumped out of it." Don't try to oppose this. Use it. Let people see how seriously you take quality control. That mouse in the box of cereal doesn't have to destroy the brand if you recall the batch, close the plant for cleaning, and of course apologize profusely to the customer. If you don't do those things and your brand suffers, we figure you deserve it.

The appropriate response to the street phrase "Prozac Dementia" would have been to suspend sales of Prozac until it could be made to stop causing dementia. The appropriate response to Glyphosate Awareness would have been to pull all glyphosate products off the market. The appropriate response to the "vaccines cause autism" whine would have been to address the fact that vaccine reactions may include fever, which may cause brain damage, which may include autism, and level with parents about whether diseases like measles are more likely to cause autism than the vaccines are. Trying to censor the complaints, instead, has destroyed the credibility of the entire brands of Bayer, Lilly, and Merck. Their best move would be to pay all claims against them now and then either dissolve, or maintain a very low profile for the next thirty years.

Most of us are White but we are, or like to think we are, hip enough not to mind when disproportionate numbers of advertisements feature non-White models. However, most White people know that styles that look good on a Black person probably won't do much for us. Thousands of short, average-sized blondes may have deluded themselves in 1982 that what looked good on Diana Spencer might work for them, though most of them have learned something from that mistake, but they don't think that what looks good on Nicki Minaj will work for them. Quite a few Internet aficionados are Asian, and some are Black, so there's nothing wrong with designing and marketing styles for non-White people online. Just balance inclusiveness with practicality.

Some of us honestly don't notice or care about clothes as long as they cover as much skin as is required by local law. Some of us are fashion-conscious and may, if we're not thinking about something else, do detailed analyses of what is and isn't working for the celebrity or model on the screen. No, this does not mean that we're attracted to the model. Yes, in fact, any suggestion that we're thinking about the model as anything but part of a fashion image is likely to be offensive.

Even if the primary content is a football game you can never afford to assume that the Internet audience is all male. Even those of us who are male are likely to be in heterosexual relationships. Don't tolerate content, messages, or comments that offend women.

Be cautious even about things that are controversial among different social groups of women. I am a lady, and if you can't avoid calling me in public, the least obnoxious thing to call me is "Ma'am." (I don't particularly like "Ma'am," either, and if you are a store employee "My Lord and Master the Honorable Customer" might be more appropriate, but I ignore people who blat out my name in public and I think people who call strangers by what are generally perceived as terms of endearment need to be in prison.) I don't understand why some women who are not ladies wouldn't want to be included in the category of ladies, but some women don't. So how do you address the female customers in the audience? By showing a product that females buy, of course. Words like "dresses" or "lipstick" are personal enough.

A majority of Internet users, though only a minority of people in the real world, hold political views that could be described as left-of-center. Don't mistake "majority" for "everyone." Don't signal stupidity by participating in stereotypes about "conservatives" being racists or fascists. Don't show bigotry with stereotypes about "DEI hires" being incompetent tokens, either.

A personal site or social media page that shows no political leanings whatsoever loses credibility. There may be no need to endorse candidates or parties but readers will want to know what basis you have for whatever statements you make. Individuals have personal tastes and opinions. A majority of Internet users vote Democrat but those of us who are not in the Democratic Socialists clique, even among D voters, do look for evidence that the individual is observing, thinking, writing, singing, etc., about the real world rather than partisan rhetoric. Ability to work with Rs is a good quality for a D to have. Ability to like and be amused by D extremists like Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez is a good quality even for Rs to have, but seriously backing their bids for presidential campaigns raises questions of credibility.

A business site doesn't need to mention anything that's not directly related to business. A business can have a blog with monthly posts on topics like "How different are this year's blenders from last year's blenders?" or "How to change the ink cartridges in the Model XYZ printer," without losing credibility. 

Some specific rules for Internet advertising can also be included in the category of showing respect. Here's a short list of fifteen:

1. Don't show the same ad in the same place twice. That means that, if people are logged into sites like Youtube or X, you should ask those sites to make sure they don't show the same ad to the same account twice.

2. Require political campaign ads to focus on who the candidate advertised is, what that person has done in the past, and/or what that person hopes to do if elected. Don't focus on the opposition. Advertising tends to arouse reactions on a spectrum from skeptical to hostile, at best, and if a political ad tries to show "the worst of" another candidate the effect on voters can easily be, "The worst of Candidate B looks better than the best of Candidate A." Images showing a candidate shaking someone's hand, debating with an opponent, or posing for a family picture are acceptable as long as they make it absolutely clear whom they're about. E.g., if more than one face can be seen in a photo, be sure the candidate's face is front and center.

3. Don't advertise patent remedies for anything. Don't show or discuss any part of the body in health or disease. (Yes, you can advertise shoes without mentioning feet.) Anyone stupid enough to pay for an advertisement in the genre of "This product may cause blindness, cancer, projectile vomiting even in people who have not heard this advertisement, abnormal growths in bizarre places, and sudden death in people under age . Ask your doctor today whether this product is right for YOUR seasonal allergies!" should not be talking to adults outside the family without supervision.

4. There's nothing wrong with "funny" ads where people show how clueless and confused they can be. There's nothing wrong with ads where people proclaim in authoritative tones that "This product out-performed twenty other competing products at removing stains from a white rug" or "This product contains lavender oil." There is, however, a tedious and offensive stereotype about ads where a woman plays the clueless character and a man speaks with the voice of authority. Don't use that combination. 

5. Actually, considering the sensitivities of some Internet users, it's a good idea to try to avoid using images of living people in advertisements at all. You can display pictures of shirts on hangers, food on tables, cars on roads, etc., without showing a single human face. Try it! It saves the cost of paying models!

6, If you really want to attract the eye to an ad, turn off all the sound. People who are in the habit of ignoring commercial natter will look at the screen to see what's wrong. That's when they'll see your product and associate it with a feeling of relief--"Oh, it's only a quiet advertisement." 

7. One advertisement among fifty social media posts is acceptable. The current formula at X, e.g., is not acceptable. For me to go back to using X regularly I'd need to see a solid majority of posts from the free accounts of private people and a minimum of posts from corporations or politicians. That includes news headlines. I used to use Twitter for the news headlines but that was before the Trusted News Initiative. I don't want to support censored news sites in any way; until the New York Times has fully repudiated TNI and run whole front-section features about why people should not use those profitable products whose manufacturers wanted censorship, I'd as soon be seen looking at porn as looking at a NYT headline.  

8.. Up to two minutes of advertisement per hour of video content is acceptable, provided that the ad does not interrupt a speech or a piece of music. If the choice is between 2:01 minutes and 1:35 minutes, always go with 1:35.

9. Understand that, if you want to sell anything to Internet users, your best bet would be to discard the advertisements and pay Internet users to produce content about your products' reviews and ratings. The experience of reading those reviews and ratings in order to write an article or present a photo essay about what people who did use it liked about your product is more likely than anything else to make Internet users think thoughts like "I might find a use for a blender some day, and if I did Brand X seems to be a good brand." Sometimes it might even get your product onto an Amazon Wish List.

10. People who read other people's personal blogs will probably skip the product reviews. If they do read the product reviews, they're looking for a flippant, snarky tone, not a gush of praise that nobody's going to believe. The overall tone of a good personal product review is favorable to the product, but phrasings that show that it's an individual's thoughts NOT a Madison Avenue advertisement are also important. 

Seriously. As a bookseller I've found that sparing use of certain phrases that living writers don't like to see in book reviews consistently moves books:

* "I don't like this kind of thing myself, but some people do."

* "This book has a strong enough sense of place to make me feel glad that, whatever else may be going wrong, I'm not in the place this book is written about."

* "This writer completely misunderstands (women, vegetarians, people who buy canned soup) and shouldn't have tried to write about them."

* "There is some good material in this book. All of that good material is better expressed in other books on the subject, such as __, __, and __. What is uniquely found in this book is a load of pants."

* "The funny stories in this book didn't make me laugh, but some of the serious exposition did."

Book readers will buy books, and other things, just to see which side of a difference they are on. If the product is salty garlic-flavored toothpaste, and some people say "That's a disgusting idea" and others say "That's a refreshing change from sweet mint- or cinnamon-flavored toothpaste," book readers will want to find out firsthand where they stand in this controversy. So don't be afraid to ask bloggers for honest product reviews, even if what they say about some products is "The product arrived with an important working part broken, and while it was on the porch the neighbor's dog expressed his opinion of the product in such a way that I've never actually used it as advertised, but it makes a nice $79 flowerpot." 

11. The key to using individual bloggers' research pieces about product ratings is to plan on a slow steady trickle of results. Many Internet users are poor; many are "retired"; many have disabilities. We aren't going to buy sports cars. We do, however, have young relatives who might be interested in such things. We can say to them, "Well, the Gran Gasto seems to run about twice as long on average as the Depense Extreme runs before breaking down. The Molto Costoso has a lot of transmission problems," and they pass this along to their friends, and the overall result may sell a few dozen Gran Gastos. If you are planning to downgrade the Gran Gasto once you've attracted interest to the name, you are not a nice person and we'll make sure everybody knows that too. Plan on at least a five-year sales cycle for the Gran Gasto.

12. There are brands that do "sell themselves." They sell the stores that retail them. Stores in my neighborhood don't hang out signs saying "Try 'Carhartt' brand workwear"; they hang out signs saying "We have Carhartt." I suppose there might once have been ads for Carhartt but the way people my age found out about it was probably going to a job site in some cute little outfit we had worn to a few college classes, and having a senior co-worker say, while snapping the cuffs up or down on his insulated coveralls, "What you need is a Carhartt." Or they read a report from some place that had had a problem with bogus disaster relief volunteers whose real interest was access to the contents of damaged houses in a nicer neighborhood than their own, and the writer said, "If you come around here offering to help rebuild houses, and I don't see your tool kit and Carhartt..." That is the kind of "advertising" Internet users trust, ourselves, and the kind you want to let us help you build...if your product deserves it. Be honest with yourself. The only way to get the kind of free advertising Carhartt gets is to deliver the kind of product Carhartt delivers.

13. If yours is one of the brands that advertise its retailers more than vice versa, consider whether cutting advertising expenses might be more profitable than any kind of advertising. The world does not need another Coca-Cola ad jingle. Most people can sing two or three different ones already. Coca-Cola might benefit from more sales, and at this point the way it could get them would be to stop advertising and cut the price of a 2L bottle back to 89 cents. What we all learned from the "make soda pop controversial and raise the price" campaign is that a lot of former Coca-Cola drinkers find that generic cola drinks aren't bad.

14. Unless your product is exclusively for some sort of minority lifestyle choice, avoid associating it with any specific lifestyle choice. People avoid buying things they associate with people they don't want to be like. They may give you credit for niceness if your ad for children's play clothes features a child in a wheelchair or even a child wearing glasses, but they'll buy the clothes modelled by a child in perfect health. Most men don't want anything worn or used by a male model shown touching another man, either--they don't want to invite that kind of attention. Relatively thin women don't buy things they've seen modelled by fatter women. Some people in their thirties even avoid things they've seen modelled by people in their sixties. And you do not want to put a spokesman for anything as controversial as, say, choosing not to homeschool when the choice was available, at the front of an ad campaign.

15. Music or words. Not both. Never, never, never keep a drum beating in the background while someone brays about your product. It sounds so much like an old-school used car advertisement that it would turn me off even an old-school used car dealership. Music playing while the words you want to associate with the product appear on the screen makes the important statement that you're a polite, respectful company. People talking--normally, never loudly, never using the imperative mood--can help clear up any confusion shoppers may have expressed about whether the garlic paste in the tube is meant to go on toothbrushes, on sandwiches, or both. But choose between words or music.

Book Review: Stop Living on Autopilot

Title: Stop Living on Autopilot

Author: Waleska Curvelo

Quote: "Why does it feel like no matter how hard I work, I can't make progress toward what I really want?"

In the 1980s the authors of books like this one had degrees in psychology, the books were called self-help books, and their content usually contained a lot of theoretical blather about the emotional roots of all of our problems. Some things have improved since then. The authors are now called life coaches and the content of the books is now frankly just inspirational pep talks. You can do whatever you want to do! If you make the right choices! What choices that are, only you can say! If you're wrong about the steps to take to get what you want, it's not my fault! 

I've certainly read self-help books that were worse than this one. Curvelo at least writes good clear English, instead of inventing a technical-sounding jargon all her own, as some of the psychological self-help guides used to do.

Better? What is better, in the context of self-help books? What is worse? Because these books try to be so open-ended and valuable to everybody, any of them might deserve credit for encouraging someone to run with a brilliant idea, or blame for encouraging someone to cling to a terrible idea. 

For better or worse, both when I've been pointed out as an example of success and when I'm probably being pointed out as an example of failure...the "just set goals and stick to them" approach to life has never really worked for me. The Bible advises us not to attach ourselves to "Tomorrow we shall go to a certain city, and stay there for so long, and do such and so," but to allow for the vicissitudes life tends to have: "If God wills we shall go to a certain city..." We can buy tickets with a certain destination on them, but if a snowstorm blows up in the way, we may be spending the night somewhere other than that destination. I suspect God has a big laugh at the expense of the very "goal-oriented" Type A who forms attachments to goals and steps. 

I even remember, in my early twenties, a few experiments with thinking the "goal-oriented" way. "I currently have this job, where I'm making this amount of money and can afford to use this much to pay off my college loan debt. I've applied for this other job, where I'll be making this amount of money, but I'll have these expenses, but anyway I should be able to set aside this much to pay off my college loan debt." I may still have the old notebook where I wrote that kind of thing down. So what happened next? In that particular case, I thought I had recovered from "chronic mononucleosis"; I was wrong. The disease flared up. I lost the job I had and someone else was hired for the other one. My college loan debt was eventually paid off, but not that year and not that way.

I do believe it's a good idea to have some idea where we would like to go in life, but it's also a good idea to notice how much our goals and steps have in common with sand castles on the beach.

You may have better luck than I had at "goal-orienting" Say you want a college degree. That's a nice goal that many people find achievable, although I didn't happen to be one of them. You want a college degree, so you enroll in a college, confer with an adviser, plan the courses you need to take, register for the courses, do the course work while setting aside enough of your paycheck to pay for them, or pay as much as you can of the cost of them...This feels good to the orderly and logical part of your brain, it's almost certain to be useful at some time in your life, and actually the odds are that you'll get the degree for which you're studying. Even in the 1980s most people didn't get "chronic mononucleosis," nor, when most people go back for a second try at a degree they didn't finish in their teens, do they find both of their parents in separate hospitals within the year. Most people who register for college courses and do the assignments will, in a few years, have a college degree. It's a good credential to have and represents valuable learning experiences...whether or not you ever work for even one year in the job that college degree was meant to prepare you for...

When I was growing up, detachment from career goals, specifically, was considered a wonderful thing for girls to have. Because of course everyone knew that most girls who prepared for jobs in teaching or bookkeeping or nursing or whatever were really going to get even better opportunities...what a wonderful surprise! how special!--to get married and have babies. And some of us are still today in denial about how much harm the idea of everyone having multiple babies has done to this world. 

But does that mean that it's good to plan our lives in any expectation that life is ever going to be orderly and logical? Meh. It never hurts to plan for the possibility that the chaos in our lives will subside enough for some steps we might take toward goals to lead us in the direction of those goals, but I think most authors of self-help books could be more realistic about the fact that life is chaotic. 

Curvelo does suggest, in a lovely tactful non-evangelical way, that steps toward goals should be congruent with being the kind of person you want to be. If you earn a degree that qualifies you for a job that ceases to exist as of three weeks before you receive your diploma, at least you learned things and you probably met people you appreciate having the chance to know. If, in the name of steps toward the goal, you told lies or cheated people, that will affect your self-image...

I think Curvelo errs on the side of sanctimony in saying that women shouldn't talk about the harmful consequences of a hundred and fifty years of preferential treatment for men. Of course all men are not our enemies. Of course most of us love our husbands and brothers and fathers and sons...though some of us have learned the hard way that men who behave well toward us, because they respect our physical relationships to them or our families' wealth and status or it might even be our characters, don't behave so well toward "outsider" women, or poor women, or younger women who are more easily intimidated. Of course we want, in any case, to help our men do the best they can. I don't think that means pampering their ego defenses. I think men need to face the facts: If you think your teenage daughter is in any danger of being raped, then you know, deep down, that a curfew on men would be a good thing. 

I enjoyed Curvelo's comments on social media, especially the advertising these days, from people whose thinking seems to go "After you used the 'skip' button to tune out my ad once and listen to what you wanted to listen to, I'll then leap in and interrupt what you were listening to, just in case you've changed your mind in the last five minutes!" Yes. Social media had the potential to do advertising much less offensively, more effectively, than television simply by recognizing the different conditions under which people use computers and watch television. Computer users may be bored but we tend to be awake, usually doing some sort of paid work, whereas TV watchers are often using TV as a sort of loud white noise and/or asleep, or trying to sleep. Being noticed as a vague annoyance by someone who's not thinking may sell a few more products than being noticed more consciously as having crafter a clever advertisement. Being noticed as an interruption by people who are working, or taking breaks from work, does not go so well. Youtube and Rumble could have opted to offer ad filtering in such a way that viewers never heard the same advertisement twice in a year, or that advertisements consisted of ten seconds of silence or instrumental music while the product logo or image was on the screen. Instead they've chosen to advertise more annoyingly than commercial television. Yes, we can all reduce the level of annoyance in our lives by reducing the number of videos we watch, or watching only the least popular channels on which Youtube and Rumble don't place advertisements. This will eventually be good for Youtube and Rumble, too. 

I think Curvelo honestly intends to coach readers toward success in life. Life and readers being what they are, sometimes she'll succeed, sometimes not. 

Book Review: The Mindset of Focusing for Succss

Title: The Mindset of Focusing for Success

Author: Jane Holder

Publisher: Mixed Bag

Quote: "Time killers are activities that distract us from what we really need to do ."

For some people it's enoough to tell ourselves "Finish trhis, then do that." For some it's necessary to isolate ourselves so that we can finish one thing at a time. For some, the whole idea needs to be explained in a book.

The trouble may be that people who need the explanation can't focus long enough to read a book. 

Holder makes it as easy as possible. This e-book is short. For some specific situations there are specific suggestions, like using apps that limit time spent on social media. Unfortunately the most helpful ways to focus, like getting the material to be learned taught in a completely different way, may be beyond the scope of this book. Still, these suggestions are worth trying. 

Book Review: The Shop Owner and the Billionaire Developer

Title: The Shop Owner and the Billionaire Developer

Author: Josie Frost

Date: 2023

Quote: "I dig in and begin setting plans for all the upgrades I hope to accomplish."

Harper has always wanted to keep the "dry goods and sundries" store that's been passed down to her through an aunt. She also wants a human partner (at the beginning of the story she has a cat). Paul seems like an ideal partner for life, but is he only a tourist? Or worse, is he planning to "develop" property on the edge of town in a way that will suction traffic away from Main Street stores like hers?

Paul is one of those men who have difficulty bringing up sensitive topics until they can bellow "This is the way it's going to be! End of discussion!" so it takes some serious character development on his part to allow him to confess to a mutual acquaintance that he wants to be Harper's friend after others have convinced her that he's her enemy. But this is a romance, and gone are the days when a romance could end with the characters separated by difference of opinion but still too much "in love" to marry other people. You know they'll work everything out. The only question is what the cat will do during the marriage proposal.

Billionaire "developers," and people who guide billionaire companies to invest in "development," don't usually read sweet small-town romances.  Perhaps they should. This book is brain candy for ordinary romance readers but it ought to be required reading for all MBA candidates.

Book Review: 8 Steps to Hire the Best Food Service Team

Title: 8 Steps to Hire the Best Food Service Team

Author: "Tuki Team"

Date: not shown

Quote: "This book is designed to provide you with practical tips and insights to hire the best team in food service."

And it's really a lot of work, so if you can't fit all of the steps they list into your busy schedule, they oh so sweetly insinuate, you could just let them hire a crew for you...

This is the sort of book the word "e-book" tends to bring to mind. On the "plus" side, perhaps: it's short. On the "minus" side, most likely: although it might list something you might have forgotten, it probably has nothing new to tell you. On the "plus" side: it's not controversial--it's a nice summary of the conventional wisdom. On the "minus" side: it all leads up to the punchline, "Or you could just pay me to..." 

If you did not go to business school, if you just saved up enough from running a snack wagon or doing a line cook's job to invest in your own little stall in a food court somewhere, you are going to be a bit of an "accidental manager" and you are going to need a book like this one. And you undoubtedly have the street sense to ignore the promotional content. So this book should fit into a market niche and serve some good purpose for the person who is currently in the place where my adoptive brother was, thirty-some years ago.

If you pursued an arts or sciences degree and think the whole idea of studying business in college, as distinct from getting an office job and learning from the boss, is deeply tacky, this book may be good for a giggle. Or for a checklist, if you happen to have a gig where you're asked to help hire people.

Book Review: 28 Days of Inspiration

Title: 28 Days of Inspiration

Author: Ravinder Kaur

Date: 2023

Quote: "Self-discovery is a journey that can lead to profound changes in your life."

This mini e-book is a short course in motivational psychology. Readers will be asked to reflect on who they are and how their current project reflects that (or maybe it doesn't, and they really want to do something else). They'll be prompted to outline what they know they need to do and how they'll cope with the most probable difficulties. 

If the idea of someone else, even a writer, telling you to tell yourself "I am resilient" does not make you look around for the nearest restroom, this book may help you motivate, organize, and inspire yourself through your next project.

Book Review: The Female Transformational Leadership a Pygmalion Effect

Title: The Female Transformational Leadership, a Pygmalion Effect

Author: Angelica Larios

Date: 2022

Quote: "I honestly believe that women and their leadership have made a complete difference."

That statement's not fully defined. Businesses have been made aware that overt discrimination against women is suicidal; they're not exactly rushing to hire women who don't completely fit a stereotype that includes "successful experience doing exactly the same job for another company where everyone was deliriously happy but she just took it into her head that she'd rather work here." Well, they're not exactly rushing to hire men either, but in any case the market for this book is probably limited to the relatively few individuals who have been promoted to "leadership positions" in corporations. The Waste Age is over and we're getting to a point where corporations can hardly afford to exist. Oprah Winfrey (profiled in the Spanish edition of this book, and probably by now in the English translation) became her own industry but, if she hadn't, she too might be fired because some innovative top management type wants to try replacing her with a computer.

I think we all need to be shaking off the science-fiction-fantasy aura evoked by the phrase "artificial intelligence," demanding that the plagiarism programs be identified as what they are--programs that compile and remix the products of human intelligence--and that the programmers pay the people whose words, pictures, etc., they're feeding into these programs. This can and should be done in a way that discourages the misbelief that business, or writing, or even military defense can be entrusted to computers. It's not my issue but it needs activists working on it now, before we blow up a friendly country's embassy because a military plagiarism-bot has stolen ideas from Bill Clinton, or some other awful consequence of imagining that computers have been taught to think rather than mix-and-mash.

Anyway...what can I say about this e-book? I think it was sent to me as a courtesy, for which I think the author, along with the Spanish version. What I received, in English, is completely unready to be marketed even as an e-book. It's incomplete--it cuts off at page 35. It's not been completely translated, and the translation reads as if it's not been fully edited by a human after being done by Google. American English and Spanish are sufficiently similar languages that automatic translation usually yields readable results. I didn't find any howling language mistakes in the English edition, but did find some cognate words--words like "biographical" and "biografica"--with the accent marks for the Spanish spelling still showing. The table of contents doesn't give page numbers for the last three-quarters of the book, which, after all, hadn't been translated yet. What I have is a very rough first draft.

By now the English edition has probably been completed, and if you are willing to read detailed discussions of business leadership but not willing to read them in Spanish, you probably should read this study of how women in top corporate positions, mostly but not all Spanish-speaking, are making employees feel that their leadership style is "softer" but not flabby. 

The English e-book I have contains only a general introduction to that study.

Book Review: Powerfully Likeable

Title: Powerfully Likeable 

Author: Kate Mason 

Date: 2025 

Publisher: Penguin 

ISBN: 9780593797228 

Quote: "We...must choose between being powerful and being likeable, and also...we're destined to lose." 

This book offers little in the way of useful tips for today's 25-year-old corporate-ladder-climber. I'm not sure that useful tips for her exist. There are not a lot of opportunities for anyone to climb any corporate ladders these days. 

Being female may actually work for today's 25-year-old more than it works against her, with employers and account managers trying to raise their "diversity" scores, but even when the people hired or awarded contracts are chosen for demographic reasons, being hired is no guarantee of being promoted and landing a contract is no guarantee that they won't back out of it. 

 Up to a point, Mason says, a young woman who pays attention to her audience may be able to impress some people as being likeable if she gains perceived "power" by being promoted, or even hired, much less by actually accomplishing something and getting a corporate superordinate to admit it. Everyone now agrees that women are capable of doing responsible jobs and earning good money. But, when they think about an individual woman, many people still choose envy over even the kind of philosophical support that might see her success as conducive to their own. The woman who jumps through all the hoops to qualify for the promotion isn't likeable any more. 

 A few of the things women seem to do with the goal of reducing hostility, Mason can point out as counterproductive. But everyone probably has a different list and, even when we agree that mannerisms are off-putting, there's no clear consensus on the relative badness of "upspeaking" (making each phrase? sound like? a question?) or using buzzwords. 

 The same off-putting mannerisms, Mason observes, still seem to be judged more harshly in female speakers than in male speakers, though generalizations are never perfectly accurate for individuals. Mason names a male TV speaker who says that nobody seems to mind his "fried" voice. Watching TV only socially, I don't recognize his name but, when the idea of "male vocal fry" was suggested, I thought of a game show host I've seen who is so not as easy to watch as Alex Trebek, Pat Sajak, or Steve Harvey. Yes, when a man speaks at the high end of his voice range, and grins too much, and generally projects "oh please like me," the hand does reflexively reach for the remote control gadget, though the behavior doesn't fit a traditional pattern when a man does it, and seems peculiarly off-putting. "Pathetic Jaleel" can be read as trying to project a nonverbal message like "Please don't hate me because I'm Black," and succeeding in projecting something more like "I am not qualified for my job. I'm not having fun and neither is anyone else. If I had any sense I'd go home." Would I call his voice "fried" or just "not ingratiating, but merely grating"? I'm not sure. 

I can say, though, that some of the mannerisms of insecure female yuppies are less often observed in men because they're more unfavorably perceived in men, such that few men are clueless enough to use them. Who ever saw a man wearing shoes that clattered on the floor, as if to say "I'm smaller but I'm just as noisy and clumsy as a literal bull in a china shop"? 

 Some things Mason suggests that women try only point up how subjective the whole topic is. When do women, themselves, feel most helpless and most powerful at work? It depends on whom she asks. Being the only woman in the room intimidates some women (they can't possibly fit in with a crowd of men) and empowers others (they can't be expected to conform to a group norm, they're supposed to stand out in the crowd). Some things seem like common sense and should work for anyone who fits them into her style of doing her job, whatever that might be. 

One of Mason's "\try this" points that I may have seen, but don't remember seeing, in a self-help book in the 1980s is: Call attention to other people's good work. Celebrate other people who are like you in some way. It's subtly self-aggrandizing (you're claiming the authority to recommend them), it's perceived as unselfish and therefore likely to be trustworthy, and it recruits the other people onto your side. When someone does it as a calculated strategy, it might be described as diabolical. If it's sincere, if you do like and can honestly recommend the other people, it's a total win-win, whether the goal is to make a very small business grow or to shoehorn yourself into a big one. 

Some of Mason's observations point up an ongoing conversation among different individuals, sometimes one that's been going on for a long time. Does the choice of expensive, "traditional," less than optimally comfortable clothes show respect for your job and customers, or does it merely suggest that you're lost in some previous decade you don't even remember? (Or worse. For a very long time my city had decriminalized prostitution; high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes do not only suggest "Why on earth would anyone be lost in the 1930s?" to me.) Are you showing sincere and appropriate deference to seniority or expertise, or screaming "I don't want or deserve any respect! Please spit on me!" with excessive displays of deference? Is your way of "being friendly" with clients an admirable revival of classic Dale Carnegie business principles (remember not only clients' names, but the names of their dogs), or an aggressive display of extroversion that really annoys and alienates clients? People don't always agree on where the line between these kinds of things should be drawn. 

Some of Mason's words highlight changes in word usage. The use of "role" to mean "job" may be a signal that the speaker belongs to the younger generation. Is it possible to "do a role"? Baby-boomers play roles. As Cub Scouts or perhaps as gymnasts some of us "did rolls." How, exactly, the young might "do a role," I'm not sure I want to know. Even "playing roles" in the workplace makes the speaker sound like a sociology major. This has nothing to do with race or sex; sociology majors are perceived as the lightest of the lightweights. If I used sociological jargon in the workplace it would be with a goal of signalling "I'm just a poor little rich girl whose parents sent me to college, but I wouldn't have had a chance in any of the classes you took." For me and probably for most of Mason's readers, this would be an outright lie. Calling their jobs "roles" may be trendy among the young, but it's the sort of thing that might elicit cutesipation from older people, whether the person talking about "roles" can be cutesipated as a girl or a boy. 

"Job," as the word for what people do for a living, is not as old as some older people may believe. In books from the early twentieth century "job" appears as a word for a specific task an employee might do in a position or situation of employment. In the late twentieth century, when "job" was the universal word for the position or situation, some people urged the young, "Don't just do a job--have a career!" and others favored "job" even as the word to use to summarize someone's career, because planning a career seemed arrogant and hubristic in subcultures that weren't dominated by the "aggressive salesmanship" mentality. There were also jokes about exactly what house pets' "job" was and, inevitably, about taking the dog out to "do his job" or "do his business." Then there was the hatespew directed at anyone whose primary occupation the speaker considered to be useless, unprofitable, or in any case too much fun to be serious work, "Get a job!" 

I can see how any of these phrases might motivate the young to want not to call what they do jobs. I just can't understand where they ever got the idea of calling what they do "roles." The ease with which people born between approximately 1965 and 1985 fitted themselves into the culture of people born between 1945 and 1965 used to puzzle some baby-boomers. When P.J. O'Rourke spoke on a college campus where even the slang was still familiar to him, he fantasized about going back to his own college, and the time when he attended it, and finding his school friends all lost in the 1940s. When "millennials" want to have their own subculture, any fair assessment of whatever slang and fashions they adopt has to conclude that, as long as they're staying out of political extremism and hate, they're doing well. However, my sisters' demographic group's tendency to try to blend in with the baby-boomers may have served them better than any new trends that make those of us who are still working, or the generation after us, feel "old." 

Mason's language, therefore, pushes an edge. As an Australian in the US she probably gets away with it; some people may see her word usage as exotic rather than trendy. Not all. We don't like feeling "old." Some of us wanted and expected to enjoy "seniority," the general condition associated with being 45 or 50 years old in the workplace, for another fifty years. When we admit to feeling "old" we usually mean feeling ill. This is not generally a way to build rapport. Possibly we should think about getting over it. As long as we can keep up with the young on a job, we probably should; not all of us can. There is some dignity about stepping aside to hand down responsibilities to the person we've taught as much as can be taught of what we know.

There is some pleasure, nevertheless, about reporting that although Mason has done a lot of research on the situation confronting millennial women at work, and presented a lot of new material, she's not really reached any conclusions that weren't familiar to Deborah Tannen, Suzette Haden Elgin, or even Joyce Brothers. Women in the workforce today have won various protections from misogynist practices of the past, a legal right to be as successful as we want to be. Rape-terrorism and the need to care for young children are nothing like the obstacles they once were, either. Women now face obstacles to success that are more similar to the ones men have always faced: our own fitness for the work we do, our own willingness to work in groups where "social loafing" and interpersonal relationships distract us, our own vulnerability to those social relationships. There will never be an end to communication problems, and while the abilities many women have to bog down in social quagmires of "I'm sorry I apologize so often" may always slow down scientific progress, (1) slowing down scientific progress may be a good thing, and (2) at least women's endless misunderstanding and rehashing and reconciling is unlikely to destroy the planet with a nuclear war.

Where Are the Roadside Vendors?

Do we want America back at work again? Do we seriously imagine that the corporations are going to replace every robot with a human? No, I didn't think you did. So we need to see a lot more roadside vendors, yard sales, and open-air markets. While licensing these micro-enterprises serves the valid purpose of preventing turf wars among them, this summer's licenses need to be issued with a clear goal of having a vendor on every roadside patch that offers room for one. 

 Will that crowd vendors too close together? If multiple vendors are selling similar merchandise, will they all lose money? There are two ways to address these questions: (1) let the marketplace settle it, or (2) try to pre-select for success of favored vendors. One of those options is viable. Attempts to shore up selected vendors by blocking others' access to the marketplace should probably be recognized as inherently discriminatory regardless of the particular basis for discrimination, and pre-criminalized. Any US citizen who is willing to engage in honest business these days should be specifically encouraged. 

 In more prosperous times, corporate investors were heard to whine that people selling fresh-picked vegetables out of the backs of cars had an "unfair advantage" over air-conditioned supermarkets. Corporate types need advance warning that such pleas for favoritism will not be taken seriously. 

Actually, successful corporations like Safeway and Wal-Mart rose to dominate the marketplace by gaining local people's sympathy with flea market space in their parking lots. It costs taxpayers nothing but a little display of their values and beliefs to demand that the big-chain stores do that again. Chain stores should be positively advertising the number of independent vendors they host. 

And restaurant chains? If a fast food store lacks a fruit stand outside, where people buy fresh produce they bring inside to enjoy with their burgers or fried chicken, something is wrong. The place of fried meat in a balanced diet is better understood as a hamburger on a plate with a whole fresh unsprayed tomato, a whole fresh unsprayed cucumber, a handful of whole fresh unsprayed green onions, and maybe a whole fresh unsprayed apple for dessert. The chain restaurants, even Subway, that try to get away with doling out a tablespoon of not-very-fresh veg in a pile of croutons and sauces, need to be hosting gardeners who can offer whole fresh raw veg for, say, a dollar per tomato or twenty-five cents per radish. 

Competition? Maybe. McDonald's needs incentives to offer people a whole big juicy satisfying tomato, not one or two paltry slices, with every hamburger. But there's no reason to expect that the incentives won't be positive. I would imagine that McDonalds would sell a lot more burgers on the days when they were blessed with garden-fresh tomatoes or corn on the cob in the parking lot. 

Restaurants have traditionally rounded out their "fat equals flavor" meat dishes with lots of bread, cheese, and condiments made of some combination of grease, flour, and vinegar. Of course, one of the little secrets of people who wear the same size clothes all our lives is that we don't eat those "sauces" and "dressings," the old European trick for disguising spoiled food that adds nothing to the flavor of fresh healthy food. When those of us who don't digest bread and cheese contemplate a bare-naked hamburger with two transparent-thin tomato slices and a wilted leaf of iceberg lettuce on the side, well, I for one do not feel that I'm looking at even one dollar's worth of food. What about a bare-naked hamburger on a plate with a garden-fresh, vine-ripened tomato, a Vidalia onion, and an ear of corn? Now we're talking about a five-dollar meal worth driving through town for. 

Non-retail businesses can benefit from working among roadside vendors, too. It's all very well for Republicans to hope that corporate investors will get a few people off welfare by "creating jobs." Sometimes that has even happened, but even when "job creators" are putting a few students to work, we all know there are people they're not going to hire. Specifically, they're more likely to hire a convicted felon than to hire someone who's had any experience as an independent contractor. Very well, let them see the independent contractors making them look bad outside the building. Let them watch that until they do deliberately hire the adults with independent work experience...having found that it's less embarrassing to watch a superior work ethic on the job in a back office than out on the street where everyone else can see how superior the independent worker is. And let the first whine of "S/He is good at her/his specific skill, but s/he doesn't have any people skills--nobody likes him/her!" be met with a frosty "For $250, which will of course come out of your salary, s/he might agree to give you a little special training in how you can learn to work wth people with actual skills and talents." The whole country badly needs for business to stop functioning as a support group for rich people's no-talent offspring. 

Low-risk, low-investment business s also a critical part of education. Every parent has a natural interest in encouraging the children to set up a lemonade stand or rake some lawns, when they want new bikes or designer shoes, rather than just asking the parents for money. Teenagers who earn their own money in legitimate micro-businesses are too busy to be juvenile delinquents. Teenagers whose legitimate micro-businesses bring them into contact with the whole community have an adult perspective on adolescent social dramas and aren't likely to attempt suicide over quarrels with school friends. Teenagers who work with their parents in micro-businesses aren't likely to forget that their parents are allies rather than enemies. 

The usual objection to roadside vendors has to do with traffic. I've never seen a roadside stand that created traffic hazards comparable with daytime road work, but, by all means, when stands do attract enough traffic to create potential hazards, municipalities should steer those vendors to larger, better placed lots. 

The owners and managers of bigger businesses who feel threatened by roadside vendors need public shaming. Have they learned nothing from the fall of the Soviet Union? When a handful of big businesses use big government to subsidize monopolies, neither the businesses nor the government can last long. Sensible shoppers, who know that diversity is strength, want to see the names of those who are not actively supporting micro-enterprise so we can avoid them.

Local government needs to safeguard Americans' right to earn quick cash without taking out loans--or committing crimes!--to finance legitimate micro-enterprises like bake sales, flower stands, produce stands, craft sales, and yard sales.  

Too Bad About Joann's

Joann's Fabrics stores are going out of business. Twenty years ago that chain was one of the Big Four retailers that together sold ninety percent of the needlework supplies in the United States, and now...

I was in the local Joann's outlet for the going-out-of-business sale. Would it be a chance to get a great bargain even on really basic yarn, like Red Heart acrylic? 

It would not. Even for the going-out-of-business sale, Joann's demanded more money per skein of Red Heart acrylic than Wal-Mart did. 

I'd have to forgive that, though I might not have felt able to justify buying any Red Heart acrylic, from a locally owned store. Joe's and Ann's General Store (Since 1920), if such a place had existed, would probably have been buying their Red Heart acrylic from Wal-Mart, and marking it up by only 25 cents a skein would have qualified as a sincere effort to keep their business real.

But Joann's was a nationwide, I think even continent-wide store, a serious competitor with Wal-Mart; Joann's had stores as big as Wal-Mart with only the needlecraft department, so Joann's could and should have offered all kinds of yarn Wal-Mart didn't have room for, at competitive prices...the way Michael's and Hobby Lobby have stayed afloat by doing. 

And did they? No. It's sad that Joann's went down but it's instructive to remember that why they went down is, among other things, that all they learned from Hobby Lobby was Hobby Lobby's big mistake. Joann's didn't sell specialty yarns but crammed their shelves with cheap store-brand substitutes...not for luxury yarns Wal-Mart didn't sell and most knitters couldn't afford, but for Red Heart.

Seriously.

At the time of writing, even with inflation, you can still buy enough Red Heart to make a sweater for an average adult for $10 or less. The world does not really need cheaper substitutes for Red Heart; they exist because other manufacturers keep trying to replicate Red Heart yarn and not succeeding.

For most of this winter I've been wearing a tabard I knitted for myself out of the cheap substitute for Red Heart Wal-Mart tried to offer. Whether or not you ever wear acrylic jackets, here's what you need to know: Red Heart acrylic jackets are indestructible. People dig them up from under cubic yards of mud after a flood, run them through the washer and dryer, and wear them again. The yarn bounces back to its original shape. The colors don't fade or run. Nothing made out of Red Heart looks posh to knitters who recognize it, because we all recognize the cheap blanket yarn dime stores sell for kids to learn on and crocheters to make tacky afghans out of, but you just about have to snip or burn Red Heart to make it look any worse than it always did. I'm not a snob; I don't think it looks bad at all.

I wore an over-dress made of Red Heart acrylic when it seemed necessary to run a few miles in heavy rain. It stretched, of course, as it got wet. I was holding the hem up around the waist and it was still a long dress. It looked ruined. I took it to the laundromat the next day. Pop through the washer, pop through the dryer...it was just the right length for me, same as it had been when I finished knitting it.

But I had bought a pound of this cheaper substitute for Red Heart at Wal-Mart for test purposes, so I made myself a tabard. A tabard is a personal blanket with a hole in the middle for your head, sometimes with flaps to extend over shoulders. I knitted it just long enough to pile around me while sitting down in cold weather. I knitted exactly two inches of V into the front neckline. Before it was even knitted the cheap yarn started to pill, which makes it look as if it's been washed and dried many times, but it has yet to be fully immersed in water; it's been worn like a blanket rather than a shirt and has yet to be soiled. And already the hems flap around my ankles and the V is down to my waistline. And the shoulder flaps, knitted to extend an inch or two above my elbows, are forming long sleeves.

Most cheap acrylics will stretch--beyond all imagining, if they're handled while wet--and are not really worth knitting. You can use them to knit itsy-bitsy patches of color, but after your first twenty or thirty knitted projects you have a stash of scrap yarn that you use to knit itsy-bitsy patches of color. Probably the best use for cheap acrylic yarn is as stuffing. There have been other acrylics, most originally made by Monsanto and trademarked as "Wintuk," that will make fabrics whose stretching can be controlled, and I always like to experiment with the new brands to see into which category they fall, but...sad but true...most of them are execrable.

(Caron Dazzle-Aire was probably, of all acrylic yarns ever made, the closest to Red Heart in durability. It was a casualty of people's feelings toward Monsanto. I have Dazzle-Aire sweaters that I still wear, and Dazzle-Aire yarn in my wool room that I'm still knitting for sale, because this yarn really does feel like kittens' fur and wear like iron; Dazzle-Aire doesn't even pill as much as many smoother yarns pill. Caron Simply Soft, which is still made by a company that bought the spinning operation away from Monsanto, will stretch in use, but reasonably--a blanket will stretch enough to tuck under your toes, not enough to become a carpet rather than a blanket. I can't recommend any other acrylic yarn currently on the market. If, however, the color appeals to a small child, I would buy more of Hobby Lobby's "Yarn Bee" acrylic to make a child's sweater; it'll stay cute through one or two wearings, which is about how long it takes a small child either to lose a sweater or to outgrow it.)

So this Joann's store had whole shelves full of cheap acrylic, for which they wanted about as much money per ounce as Wal-Mart wants for Red Heart, and a few leftover skeins of Red Heart, for which they wanted more than Wal-Mart wants for Red Heart. And they wondered why nobody was buying this yarn even on this going-out-of-business sale. Nobody with the math skills to knit would ever have bought yarn from Joann's, because they never offered competitive prices. Even for their going-out-of-business sale their prices aren't competitive.

Joann's primary commodity was woven fabric. I don't buy enough woven fabric to judge, but it didn't seem to me that their prices on woven fabric looked very competitive either.

How did Joann's ever get to be a competitor with Wal-Mart, Michael's, and Hobby Lobby, whose prices are generally competitive with one another? There's only one explanation: Joann's was there first, in places that didn't have Wal-Mart, Michael's, or Hobby Lobby. 

And so, although in some places Joann's may be missed...we can't remember it as a casualty of the economic damage the COVID panic has done. The demise of Joann's looks, from here, like a simple and desirable market correction.