Went to break room, bought bag of chips, and it was less than one-third filled. (1 Viewer)

[Max Leung]

Arizona sounds nice. It can't be any drier than the northern prairies! When the chinook comes in, I swear I can feel my skin turn to leather.
Dunno if I can handle the heat. Well, at least it's a dry heat...I hate gasping like a guppy, like I did when I was in Orland, Fl, and in Bangkok. However, Bangkok was not a concrete wasteland, so I didn't mind so much.
Mmmmm....central air. One of the great sins right?
I hope they got good goth clubs in Phoenix. The presence of goth clubs is a measuring stick I use to determine the cultural diversity of a (western) city.
No, I'm not a goth. But damn, I listen to a lot of industrial!
To get back on topic: The cost of books has really pissed me off. Books are my brainfood. My 2nd printing copies of Lord of the Rings still have their $1.75 prices on them. Purchased in 1975. Now their $9.99. Grrrrr.

 

[Kevin P]

As volume dries up, you (as the phone owner) have to increase prices in order to make a profit. Lower prices won't help, as that wouldn't entice people to put down their cellphones.

If demand for payphones is going down, raising prices is only going to make things worse. Payphones have always been gouging consumers, even when local calls were 10 cents--long distance calls have always been way more expensive to place on a pay phone, even though the cost to the telcos are the same. Even owners of 800 numbers pay more when people call from pay phones. And on top of this, the cost of having a phone at home has gone up significantly over the past 15 years. I pay 40 bucks a month for my phone line, and that's before toll calls. And don't get me started on cable rates, or ATM fees!!

As for downsizing, I've noticed that bags of M&Ms in our vending machine don't have as many M&Ms in them as they used to. I wish I had an older package so I could compare the weights.

 

[Julie K]

I hope they got good goth clubs in Phoenix.

I don't know. Of course, I'm hopelessly mundane and wouldn't know a goth club if it bit me on the proverbial ass. In any case, I prefer Tucson. It has nicer cactus. Saguaros are fantastic.
But back to the topic (who, moi?). Thinking of the ripoffs of ATM fees, I recently purchased something in England with my debit card. My bank charged me $2.32 for a "currency conversion fee". WTF?!? I've never seen this before. I've used regular credit cards before and there's never been a charge.

 

[Kevin P]

But back to the topic (who, moi?). Thinking of the ripoffs of ATM fees, I recently purchased something in England with my debit card. My bank charged me $2.32 for a "currency conversion fee". WTF?!? I've never seen this before. I've used regular credit cards before and there's never been a charge.

So, in essence, your bank charged you $2.32 to use .1 microsecond of a computer's CPU time to multiply your purchase price by a conversion rate. Insane.

If I could collect fees and charges for all the mundane things I do every day, I wouldn't need to work full time anymore.

KJP

 

[Jack Briggs]

I am glad that station bugs have been introduced into the argument.

As for bacon, here's another pig thing: I love Southern-style barbeque pork sandwiches. Nothing comes close to the Memphis, TN, glory that is barbeque pork. And we have a transplanted Memphis barbeque freak who has opened a killer restaurant on La Brea Avenue just five or six blocks from my house, called The Pig.

It is wonderful. And it is an exception to the Rule of Diminished Expectations: You get a lot of awesome food for not a lot of money.

However, the thrust of the thread is not undercut by this revelation.

Julie: I understand about Arizona. It's my second-favorite state in terms of physical beauty. Before committing yourself to your post-retirement plans, please make sure to check on the price of bacon in that state.

 

[MickeS]

Humidity here right now is 18%, which is fairly high. Uh, just thought you'd want to know, Max.

So where do all these price increases go? I mean, someone must be making more of a profit somewhere?

 

[Kevin P]

So where do all these price increases go? I mean, someone must be making more of a profit somewhere?

Yep, it goes into the executive's/CEO's pockets in the form of ludicrously high salaries, bonuses, etc. They don't care about the price of pay phones or bacon or 1/3 full bags of potato chip(s) when they take home 20 million a year. Instead what happens is they all lock themselves into a conference room and discuss ways to cut costs so they can get even bigger raises/bonuses next year. "Hey, let's put 10 chips in the bag instead of 12 and sell it for the same price!! No one will notice!", or "Let's increase the price to use a pay phone to 50 cents! No one will care, everyone and their dog has a cell phone anyway! Sure, this Kevin guy who's the only remaining mortal without a cell phone might complain on some Internet forums, but we don't care while we're laughing all the way to the bank in our $75K cars!"
KJP

 

[Jack Briggs]

I love Arizona! And Tucson is my favorite town there. In fact, I have a very good and close friend who lives in Tucson, a graphics designer named Kathy. I love Tucson's closeness to the desert, and the desert is my favorite sort of place.

So you see? I've just yapped in this thread without truly contributing to it. In other words, I've supported this thread's central argument by interjecting more of myself without having further contributed to the thread itself. Less for more. So there you go.

 

[Nigel McN]

a little bit of rose tinted glasses there me thinks. There were around 26 eps per season (on average) of TOS and there's 26 eps of Enterprise too.