Southwest Airlines has long been known as a discount carrier. They started as a carrier fighting for equitable landing rights, but have now expanded into a national force as the older carriers have cutback.

The Wall Street Journal details how Southwest has now grown to the normal carrier level and how their discounts aren’t so much discounts.

Here are the reasons:

• Ticket prices have gone up close to 40% in five years while the industry is only gone up 10%.
• They have increased the fare scales from 8 to 16.
• They have moved into big city hubs, which they used to avoid.
• Their fuel hedges have expired.

Southwest still operates like a discount carrier for the following reasons:

The United States is suffering from 9% unemployment, which only takes into account those people who are still looking for a job. There are thousands of others who have quit looking and that employment rate is estimated to be 11%. It is with these figures that I am struggling to understand why companies don’t consider hiring people who are unemployed.

A Time magazine article delves into this subject and it is becoming more an issue as the economic crisis continues.

Time says companies report the following reasons:

• People who haven’t had jobs lack experience.
• Those who have been out of the job market may lack newer skills.

I think those are specious arguments since you can tell if someone has never been employed and you can also verify skill level through the interview process.

Huguette Clark recently passed away. She was 104, a recluse and owner of some amazing property. According to press reports she owned:

• New York Fifth Avenue apartment
• Santa Barbara estate called Bellosguardo
• A Connecticut estate

Ok, what we’re here to talk about is the last one, the Connecticut estate. Click on this link to the reality page.

I am not in the practice of buying multi-million dollar homes. My home is worth maybe 1% of this estate, but I do know a few things about web sites.

• Auto play music always sucks.
• Flash only for viewing the pics never works out.

How much has TV viewership declined? In the last ten years TV viewership has declined 30%. It is a stunning figure that I totally made up.

The Wall Street Journal, though, actually has facts and figures for this year’s TV season and it isn’t pretty.

• 18-49 age bracket, the most profitable, has fallen off by about 3% over the last years.
• All major broadcast channels have seen their viewership decline.
• CBS, the number one network for primetime, averaged only 11 million viewers a night.

These are horrible numbers.

St. Louis recently played host to the Get Motivated! seminar crew. The advertising was intense. For $1.95 you could come hear the following people talk:

• Rudy Giuliani
• Kurt Warner
• Lou Holtz
• Colin Powell
• Laura Bush
• Steve Forbes
• Howard Putnam

An all star cast to say the least.

When I heard the radio ads for the event it was billed as a way to see these people speak about motivating topics. You could get a ticket for $1.95 or bring the whole office for $7.95. Most of the radio ads sounded like someone trapped in a bathroom; the production value wasn’t there. Still, that is an impressive lineup and I couldn’t quite figure out the angle.

Maryland Heights is a sprawling city in St. Louis County that features a valley that is still, relatively, unspoiled farm land. Recently, development efforts have started to make an entertainment complex in the flatlands called Maryland Pointe. This has caused contention between the developers and a group of people that want to restrict development.

In most cases, I tend to go with the developer, but in this case the folks who want to restrict development seem to have the better argument.

The group is called Maryland Heights Residents for Responsible Growth and they make the following points:

1. Loss of local farms. This is true, but is non-starter for me.
2. Increased traffic. A big one for me since I enjoy bike riding.

Pepsi has decided to go with a more social route in their advertising. Instead of spending money on ads, they now have something called Pepsi Refresh.

It encourages people to buy Pepsi, get a code, go online and turn that code into points. The points can be used to vote for community projects that Pepsi will fund.

Awesome.

I love Pepsi Max, so I have a ton of these codes. I go onto the website, sign up and go to redeem my codes. The first one took three minutes to redeem and the next one never came back.

I was greeted with the following:

Hang on … hang on … hang on …. Yeah, never came back. Their FAQ states:

Health insurance companies are the whipping boys for all the corporate hatred going around nowadays. Between them and the oil companies, well, take your pick.

There are two articles discussion the health insurance companies and how they are making record profits or how they are a scam. I read both articles and cannot come to the conclusion that they are doing anything evil, but exploiting all existing laws in our economic system. Exploiting isn’t always a bad thing. It means you are thorough and aggressive.

Anyway, the record profits are easy to understand. They are for profit corporations and they are able to squeeze as much money as they can. From the NY Times article I learned:

One of the things I like to see is success for the internet companies I enjoy. Believe it or not, I like the NY Times. I feel they are one of the few operations still performing real, hard hitting journalism. Though they lean to the left, they are professionals.

This leads me to be confused as to why they instituted a paywall. The paywall is designed to have people pay to access more than 20 articles a month.

My confusion comes for the following reasons:

Why are they charging like I am buying a paper? They want me to pay weekly and not monthly, quarterly or yearly. What is this, 1950?

St. Louis is odd in that we don’t have any true national grocery chains. We have three regional ones that dominate the local scene. Don’t get me wrong, we also have Super Walmart and Aldi, but they aren’t really traditional grocery stores. We don’t have a Kroger or Safeway type of stores.

This is good and bad. Good in that we get to really see price fights, bad in that there is a lower push for innovation. I mean, when your local chain trumpets new TV ads, well, there is a problem.

We have three chains in the St. Louis area:

• Dierbergs
• Schnucks
• Shop N Save

Dierbergs is the high end store and they have done a very good job of bringing cooking lessons and higher end catering to the market.