The Bottom Line

I have a bone to pick with supermarkets: their sales have gotten skeevy.

This weekend I got duped at Smart ‘N Final.  I had, as I always do, kept a mental tally of my purchases as I roamed the store, adding a two-dollar bag of salad here and choosing not to add a three-and-a-half dollar jar of jelly there.  (I could get it cheaper at Target, where I would inevitably be within the week.)  By the time I made it to the register, I had estimated my total was a whopping ten dollars.

It rang up $13.49.

I didn’t realize it at the time, however, because the cashier, in her haste to clock out, had flung my entire order across the scanner at once before I’d even had a chance to locate the screen with my total on it.  And I, still teeming with impatience from the seven minutes I’d spent behind a woman making FOUR SEPARATE TRANSACTIONS at the CVS next door, was grateful to have at least one of my purchases that morning expedited.

It wasn’t until I’d swiped my card, thanked the cashier, and bolted out the door with my ill-packed groceries that I registered my receipt was wrong.

“Wait a minute.  $13.49?  Wasn’t it supposed to be, like, ten bucks?”

It didn’t take long to find the culprit on my six-item receipt: my can of sliced olives had rung up twice.

“Ah-ha!”  I cried, darting back into Smart ‘N Final in pursuit of frugal justice.  “My olives rang up twice!”

My cashier, who I snagged just in the knick of time before clocking out, nodded hurriedly and mumbled, “Right, right,” as if she’d known and just forgotten.  I was passed off to another cashier, handed $1.50 in cash (though I’d paid with credit), and never even had my bag of groceries thumbed through, “just to be sure.” Mission swiftly accomplished.

As I left the store for the second time, however, I ran the numbers again and still felt off.  “$13.49…minus $1.49…Doesn’t that still put me two dollars over?”

With a closer look at my receipt, which now had a crude, unofficial-looking blue line scribbled through the duplicate olives, I realized that not only had I been double charged for the olives, but my bread, which was on sale for $1.99– which I had specifically gone to Smart ‘N Final for – had rung up twice as expensive.

I shrieked.  “Four dollars for BREAD?!”  Erroneous sale price or no, four dollars for a loaf of bread was an abomination.  Restaurants give you this shit for free.

As I cursed myself for missing the error, and the cashier for committing it, I paced the patio just outside the store, weighing my lost two dollars against the pride I would have to sacrifice to get it back: was it really worth two dollars to admit that I had failed not once, but twice, to give my own receipt a proper once-over?

I decided that, no, it wasn’t, and left with my tail between my legs and my two dollars in the cash register.  I reminded myself, as I sulked back across the parking lot to my car, that in the grand scheme of things, I had still come out ahead.  Many were the cans of corn that had rung up incorrectly in my favor (or not at all).

But when I got home, I still couldn’t let it go, and so I pulled the circular I’d thumbed through earlier back out of the recycling bin: the sale dates were correct; wheat, which I had purchased, was, in fact, included in the “select varieties” of Sara Lee sandwich bread on sale; I hadn’t needed a coupon.

I was about to admit defeat, to accept blame for the two dollars I had woefully let slip away – “They didn’t scan the sale into the system, and I didn’t catch it.” – when I zeroed in on the culprit: 20 ounce packages of Sara Lee sandwich bread were on sale.  And the bag I had bought was 16 ounces.

I fumed.

“YOU MEAN I PAID TWICE AS MUCH MONEY FOR LESS BREAD?!  WHY WOULD THEY EVEN MAKE THEM IN TWO BARELY DIFFERENT SIZES?!”

But even in my fury, I knew.  Why would they package bread in two unequal but indistinguishable quantities?  So people like me would grab the wrong one and pay more.  Duh.

I’ve run into this scenario before.  You skim the flyer, you find something you like and buy it, only to discover, after you’ve already left the store, or when you’re already at the register, at which point you’re too lazy or too embarrassed to speak up, that the volume or brand or quantity of the item you’ve grabbed is actually ineligible for the sale.

A sinking feeling commences.  The nauseating sensation that you have failed washes over you, followed closely by that of being cheated.  “I never would have even come here if I’d known it was only the double rolls of toilet paper on sale!”

And I’ve noticed it popping up more and more.  “Four ounce varieties only.”  “With a $25 minimum purchase.”  Or my favorite: “Must buy 10.”  Really?  Ten?

It’s not the little asterisk, the “catch” of the deal, that I have a problem with so much.  I get it that “buy one get one half off” benefits the store more than “25% off each” because then the store sell two items.  They move the inventory.  And I completely understand when some-but-not-all of the Pepsi products go on sale, because sometimes Pepsi wants to push a flavor that’s not doing well.  Or sometimes the pre-packaged organic carrots (but not the regular carrots) are about to expire and the store wants to unload them.

My problem is that these asterisks have become so convoluted, strategic and misleading that they’re downright insulting.  There’s a difference between negotiating a deal that benefits the seller and the buyer (“Okay, I’ll give you 30% off, but you have to buy three of them.”) and one that’s just trying to trick the customer into paying full price (“Oh, you wanted the three cheese frozen pizza?  Yeah…It’s only the seven cheese frozen pizza that’s on sale.  Sorry.”)

Marketing slight of hand is bad business, and I’m sick of it.

I am a savvy shopper.  I read the ads closely and check the shelf tags, and I am usually very careful to make sure that the product I grabbed wasn’t just a close-but-no-cigar reject dumped there by somebody else mislead by the deal before me.  So when I get scammed, I take it personally.  20 and 16 ounce packages of bread?  Give me a break.  Since when has anyone ever shopped for bread in a denomination other than “loaf?”

A few months ago, I was outsmarted by Vons, and I’ve had a sour taste in my mouth towards them ever since.  For a while, I’d been purchasing their pre-made salads, which all came at a discount when you bought two or more.  (About $3 each for the little ones and about $4.50 each for the big ones.)  One morning, I bought two of the little salads and they rang up at $4 each.

“Those are supposed to be $2.99,” I said.

To which the cashier replied, “You have to buy three.”

Really?  All of a sudden, huh?

Not helping matters was that in the same transaction, my Thomas’ English Muffins had also rung up unexpectedly at full price.  (Turned out every flavor except ”regular” was on sale.)

Obviously my life is not going to be upended over $3.50, but $3.50 seems like a petty victory on the store’s part when you consider how it tainted my relationship with them.  I have always perceived Vons as a slightly more expensive, slightly less extensive grocery store.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it’s the dark lighting.

But now that I’ve gotten the ‘ole bait-and-switch from them, I’m even less likely to shop there.  Now I only really go if it’s the only store on my way to or from work, or if I know before I leave the house that the majority of the groceries I want will be on sale (which they usually aren’t).

I get that we are in aggressive economic times, and that the cost of groceries is high – especially in Los Angeles.  Sales will be sparser and less impressive and will come with more caveats.  I can’t remember the last time I was invited to buy one – just one – case of soda at a discount.  Now “must by four” is the standard.

I also get that Vons probably and Smart ‘N Final most definitely don’t care about my $15 – $30 a week grocery bill.  They are, I’m sure, more concerned with that family of six.

But with so many grocery chains in Southern California to choose from – Ralphs, Vons, Jons, Albertsons, Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, Food 4 Less, Smart ‘N Final, Costco and now even Target – shouldn’t these stores think twice about misleading their customers?  I mean, there is literally another option across the street most of the time.

It’s all about the bottom line for the grocery stores, but for me, the bottom line is customer satisfaction.  Did I get what I want?  Did I get it at a good price?  Did I feel good about the purchase, or did I feel coerced into it?  Will I come back?

With more people pinching pennies these days, and more companies combating it by nickel-and-diming us, I’d rather spend what little change I have at a place that makes me feel good about handing over my money to them.  At least the airlines tell you up front how they’re screwing you.

Grocers take note: a penny saved is a penny earned, but a penny swindled is a customer lost.

Preventative Mastectomies: The Daughter of a Breast Cancer Victim Weighs In

Last month, the US Preventative Services Task Force (say that three times fast) released a statement officially recommending against routine PSA screening in men.  It was also breast cancer awareness month.  As the daughter of a breast cancer victim and the granddaughter of a colon cancer victim, I wanted to weigh in on the importance of routine preventative cancer screening.  Only I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to say about it.

I wrote a lengthy, statistic-laden article that basically amounted to me voting against routine PSA screening in men, in favor of annual mammograms in women starting at age 40, and against preventative surgery in women who test positive for gene mutations associated with breast and ovarian cancer (BRCA 1 and BRCA 2) but who do not yet show symptoms of those cancers.

I wasn’t happy with the article I wrote.  It was boring.  Long.  It lacked a voice.  And the only part of it I really felt passionate about – discouraging women from lopping off their breasts voluntarily – got short shrift.

This past week, more articles popped up about mammograms and breast cancer, and the haze in my head started to clear.  One article in particular about a breast cancer victim who was irate that her doctors tested her for most genetic mutations but not all of them (she would have had both her breasts and possibly her ovaries removed had she known she tested positive for these mutations), solidified what it was I wanted to say to the world:

I don’t agree with preventative surgery.

Despite being third in line in a crappy gene pool, despite knowing that both my mother and my maternal grandmother died of cancers – and that both of them delayed treatment and were ultimately diagnosed with very developed cases of cancer – despite being in favor of rigorous, routine non-invasive prevenative screening (mammograms, MRI’s), I do not believe a woman at high risk should undergo preventative surgery.

I am a woman at high risk for developing breast cancer.  My mother died from it.  My grandmother (her mother) died from colon cancer.  My odds are not spectacular.  I haven’t taken any genetic tests to screen for BRCA 1 or BRCA 2 (and I’m not sure if I ever will) but honestly, I’d be more surprised if I didn’t test positive for one of them.

I am a woman who could reasonably expect to hear in my lifetime that I should consider having both my breasts removed to minimize my unusually high chances of developing breast cancer.  And I’m going to ignore that doctor.

I stand strongly in favor of early and frequent mammogram screenings.  As the daughter of a breast cancer victim, I had planned to start getting mammograms even earlier than usual.  I figured – ballpark – I would start around age 35.

But I cannot recommend preventative surgery, and it’s for the same reason the USPSTF now discourages yearly mammograms: the quality of life balance gets skewed.

I did not know this until I started researching PSA screening last week, but according to a revised statement in late 2009, the USPSTF actually now believes that providing yearly mammograms starting at age 40 harms more women than it helps.  They now recommend biennial mammograms (one every two years) for women beginning at age 50.  I disagree.

First of all, I’m biased.  My mother was diagnosed and dead by 47.  A lotta good that recommendation would have done her.

Secondly, I disagree with the logic.  The two most significant harms the USPSTF is trying to reduce by recommending fewer mammograms in an otherwise healthy woman’s lifetime are:

1. Overdiagnosis, which can mean repeat testing as a result of inconclusive results; repeat testing and biopsies as a result of false positives; and treatment for cancers that might not have actually been aggressive enough to kill the patient within her lifetime.

2. The psychological distress caused by overdiagnosis and the screening process itself.

Now, I agree that the psychological impact of breast cancer screening, regardless of outcome, isn’t something to be taken lightly.  For all my mammogram-touting, even I sometimes find myself asking, “Is it better to live and know, to mangle your body but survive?  Or is it better to live a fuller life that might be a little shorter?”

Whether or not a woman can handle the process of breast cancer treatment and screening is entirely up to her.  And I respect that even the USPSTF acknowledges this in their statement.

But I don’t believe, from a medical standpoint, that this is a valid reason for any doctor or medical board to recommend against testing for the disease.  Or for any disease.  That’s like saying you shouldn’t check your bank account balance before writing a check because you might find out you don’t have enough money to cover it and be disappointed.  If you don’t look and the check bounces, you’ll be even worse off.

Plus the harms of overdiagnosis are, in my opinion, rather small.  Unlike prostate cancer biopsies, which have considerably uncomfortable side effects, the side effects of breast cancer biopsies seem miniscule enough to forgive the extra biopsy or two that it might take to confirm a clean bill of health.

(In case you’re wondering, the side effects unique to prostate biopsies include trouble urinating and blood in the urine, in semen and in bowel movements.  The only side effect unique to breast biopsies is a change in appearance of the breast, depending on the size of the sample that is removed.)

I do, however, believe that undergoing invasive surgery to prevent a possible cancer crosses the line from being careful into being crazy.  And this is coming from someone who, statistically speaking, would benefit from such a surgery.

I have watched a woman undergo a mastectomy, and it’s no picnic.  My mother had several staples across her chest and a garish wound after her breast was removed.  And the movement in her arm on that side was limited while she healed.  I remember watching her slowly rotate her arm, cringing while she worked through the at-home phsyical therapy routine.

And what about the psychological effects of that?  Of being half a woman?  Imagine losing both breasts?  Imagine shopping for fitted shirts?  Or swimsuits?

It should also be clarified that some women diagnosed with early stages of breast cancer undergo lumpectomies, which are less drastic than mastectomies.  Mastectomies remove the entire breast.  Lumpectomies only remove the tumor.  It’s possible that a woman who removes her entire breast (or both breasts) preventatively may have only needed to remove a portion of one if she caught the cancer early.

To be fair, I’m still young.  I don’t have children looking up to me and am still at an age where I feel like I’m invincible, even though I know I’m not.  (Nothing can kill me yet, right?)

But speaking as someone who’s very closely observed the entire breast cancer arc – diagnosis, treatment, remission, relapse, death – I’m still not interested in removing my breasts today.  I’m even less interested in removing something internal like my ovaries.

I say this as someone who knows the ill effects of waiting too long for treatment.  My mother was diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer when she first went to a doctor.  That means her cancer had mestasticized, which means it had spread to other parts of her body, which means it was significantly harder to treat.  Last year, I learned that my mother had waited nearly a year to go to the doctor after first detecting a lump in her breast.  She thought the lump was a cyst, and that she could change her diet to fix it.  I can’t help but wonder how much more time she could have bought herself had she treated the cancer earlier.

Last week, I learned that my grandmother had also put off treatment for her colon cancer.  She died in less than a year.

I know that early treatment is important.  It is essential.  But so is quality of life.  It’s the difference between being cautious and being paranoid.  I could get a brain tumor one day.  My mom had one of those.  Should I get a lobotomy?

The simplest way I can think to explain it is that you don’t take your car into the shop until it stops running.  You don’t replace the radiator because it might crap out.  It will one day.  You don’t replace the tires because they might blow.  Otherwise you’re just spending money and time to limp around without a vehicle.  You wait until the car won’t start.  You replace the tires when they go flat or lose their tread or when they develop a bubble – a lump.

The woman in that CNN article has every right to be mad.  Every woman has the right to know – or to not know – if she’s at a higher risk for cancer.  And she has the right to choose whether or not to act on it.  I, personally, wouldn’t.  That’s just my choice.

Excuse Me, Waiter. There’s Some Tinsel in My Pumpkin Pie.

On October 10^th, 2011 my mind was officially blown.

I had stepped into a Bath & Body Works in the Sherman Oaks Galleria, and at the far corner of the store was one, lonely island display boasting the branch’s entire dwindling stock of Halloween wares – on clearance.

“Um, excuse me,” I asked a sales associate feverishly shelving Christmas-themed three-wick candles.  (She was, it should be noted, filling the entirety of the store’s longest wall with them.)  “Is everything on that table half off?”

The woman nudged her glasses up the bridge of her nose, glanced at the spooky scents, and said, “Uh-huh.”

“That’s early,” I scoffed.

“Well, you know, it’s almost Halloween,” she said, like she believed it.  (She did believe it.)  I cocked my head, and she went back to clearing the window, presumably to make room for their Christmas display.

Three days later, in the same mall, Macy’s was putting up their Christmas decorations.  I scowled as I passed a red be-snowflaked sign in the men’s department, squinted uncertainly at the spiky, vaguely ornamental thing greeting me at the top of the escalators, and gawked as I rounded the corner into the women’s department:

“Stay Warm!” sang an italicized sign above two red Christmas trees and a trio of mannequins swaddled in winterwear.

It was October 13^th, and it was 98 degrees in the valley.

A staple gun ten feet to the right of me jolted me from my rage-fueled stupor.  It took every ounce of willpower I had not to yell out at its handler – who was using it to adhere an ornament to the wall – “WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!”

It’s not that I dislike Christmas.  I love it.  The carols.  The snow.  The wrapping paper.  (Oh, the wrapping paper!)  I am a sucker for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, for Santa hats and tacky light-up necklaces that look like twinkle lights.  (Because they are twinkle lights.)

The problem is that I also love Halloween. And the 4^th of July.  And Valentine’s Day.  I love all holidays, and this perverse punctuality, this obsession with starting Christmas before the pumpkin patches are even ripe, is gypping me out of my precious, ghoulish celebration.

I get it.  Really, I do.  As a publicist, I understand that you have all your ducks in a row before the public even realizes it’s duck season.  In marketing, Christmas in July is a very real, unironic thing.

But there comes a point – a very quantifiable line in the sand – when we as a culture cross over from being “ahead of the game” into psychotic.

Christmas shouldn’t start before November 1^st.  Period.

It’s just depressing, for one thing.  I already feel – at the laughably young age of 26 – like life is speeding by at warp speed. “It only gets worse as you get older,” people told me, and that was years ago.

I’m already wallowing in self-pity over the fact that I only made it to the beach twice – twice! – this California summer.  And I feel like I am constantly refilling my soap dispenser.

Not to mention the darker feelings Christmas can drudge up.  Sure, it’s all visions of sugar plumbs for some people, but for others, the holidays are a reminder of the kids they don’t have, the spouses they long for, or the families they live too far away from to see often.  Shouldn’t we let them have their October in peace?

I myself am a sporadic sufferer of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD, as it is almost embarrassingly acronymmed).  As the winter days shorten, I have a harder and harder time focusing.  I cry more often.  I sleep.

For me, and for others like me, the “fall back” of daylight savings time is an incredibly difficult transition.  While everyone else is toasting the extra hour ‘til last call – and the extra hour of sleep they’ll get in the morning – we SAD sacks are mourning a lost hour of sunlight, trying to convince ourselves (in vain) that we never had it to lose in the first place.

Secondly, I’m not convinced that starting the Christmas shopping season so early is necessarily good for business.  I mean, it must be (right?), but what’s the point in stocking candy canes in October if you’re just going to put them on sale in December to make room for the candy hearts?  Why don’t we just, you know, push everything back?

I’d understand if there weren’t another holiday in close proximity.  Like if the pumpkins came out in August; they wouldn’t be getting in anybody’s way.  But there are major holidays between September and Christmas – Halloween, Thanksgiving – and we are totally shafting them.

Also – and this is just a personal bias – Halloween is my favorite.  I take personal offense to that wall of Christmas lights encroaching on my trick-or-treat candy, thank you very much.

We’ve gone bonkers, people.  We’re so far ahead of ourselves we’re almost closer to the Christmas before us than the one we’re gearing up for.  Pretty soon we’ll be filling stockings in March and drinking green beer in November.  Calendars will be meaningless.

I’m not trying to shorten any of our celebrations or shopping sprees.  I relish thematically colored votive candles as much as the next consumer.  I’d just like to buy – and use – these things in the general vicinity of the holiday they’re actually for.

Keep the candy corn within October.  Push the heart-shaped cards back into the new year.  Stock the Christmas cards the day after Halloween.  (Hey, I can be reasonable.)

All I want for Christmas is my Halloween back.

The New Facebook: Dare I Say I “Like” It?

When I heard about the new Facebook Timeline, my first thought was, “Great.  Another ‘upgrade’ I get to spend a week getting used to.  Can’t wait to hear all my friends bitch about it on my news feed.”

Like some perverse Easter egg hunt – no, like lice – I anticipated an infestation of brand new opt-out checkboxes I’d have to seek out and destroy to prevent my every page view, purchase and nose pick from showing up on my profile.

I was indifferent at best to the prospect of a new layout.  And I was repulsed – outraged – at the thought of all those status updates from 2004 suddenly being viewable again.  “THOSE WERE NEVER MEANT TO SEE THE LIGHT OF POST-COLLEGIATE DAY!”

In truth, I am kind of repulsed by how far back the new Facebook Timeline threatens – promises – to go.  And on some non-legal level, I feel like it’s…well, unfair.  When Facebook first came into being, you couldn’t be my dad or my baby cousin or my employer and see what I was (or was not) up to.  Facebook was for college students only, and even then, at the very beginning, you could only add students from your own school.

The information provided back in Facebook’s infancy – the statuses that had to start with “Jess is,” the chiding and/or flirting wall posts – was all supplied with a certain level of assumed privacy.

Ha.

Ha.

But instead of jumping to conclusions – because where would my journalistic (blogalistic?) integrity be then – I signed up for a fake Facebook developer account and activated Facebook Timeline for myself.

And wouldn’t you know it: I was charmed.

To clarify, I was charmed but cautious.  There is certainly more out-of-context information here than I ever planned on sharing with my less-than-closest friends.  Status updates I thought – foolishly – were dead and gone, turned to fertilizer mush in the compost heap of the internet, live on.

But I’m a sucker for nostalgia – for boxes of old photos, for angsty teenage poetry (my own and those of others), for tween mementos and Saturday morning cartoons of yesteryear.

And because I’ve never really done anything regretful in my life – Dorky?  Sure.  Humiliating?  Absolutely.  But nothing that would ever keep me from being elected into office. – I can appreciate the time capsule that New Facebook wants to be.

Facebook Timeline, for those of you who haven’t peeked yet, is basically a more thorough and more organized version of what your newsfeed is today – except it’s all about you.  Structurally, it resembles what we think of when we picture timelines: staggered boxes; a to-and-fro of data hopscotching back and forth over our lifeline; photos for the big events; quotes from the small.

And it’s exhaustive.  Your Facebook Timeline literally starts with your birth.

The thing that fascinates me about this new feature isn’t so much the glut of forgotten content that gurgles up – because once you get past the shock of reliving 2004, you realize you’ve lived a lot more years of your life off Facebook than on it.  (And surprisingly, the one piece of information I was most curious about – the date I signed up for Facebook – is strangely lacking.)

What fascinates me about the new Facebook Timeline is that for the first time in a long time – for the first time since Zuckerburg started catering to his advertisers, maybe – Facebook’s latest update adds to the user experience instead of taking away from it.

Once again we are asked to add information.  To add our baby photos, our birthdays, our elementary schools, our achievements.  It suggests less boilerplate but arguably more emotional milestones like, “Got a piercing or tattoo?” and, “Got a license?”

In previous updates, Facebook has taken content away.  Profile text fields yielded to simply “liking” pre-existing things.  Groups as we knew them dissolved.  And remember when we had a wall?  Like, separate from the news feed?

I still have my qualms; don’t get me wrong.  I still begrudge how shamelessly Facebook Timeline reinforces the Millennial ideal that “I am important.”  Or worse: “I am interesting.”

And do we really need to make it this easy to learn about someone?  What happens in a job interview?  On a first date?  I mean, it’s bad enough trying to make small talk with someone after you spent two weeks emailing and texting through all the bullshit.  What do you say when you finally get there?  What the hell do you talk about when you’ve literally watched the person’s entire life story on Facebook?  Do you even need to be there?

But for perhaps the first time ever, Facebook Timeline is asking us to reconnect – if only temporarily, in search of data to bring back to the hive – to our real lives.  By asking us to fill in the gaps between our births and the birth of Facebook, we are tasked with remembering.  Reliving.  Reconnecting with those who can verify the facts of our life.  “Mom, when did I stop believing in Santa Claus?”

For once, the fuel of Facebook will not be “now,” “here,” and “this.”  Jess is at Granville Café.  She likes the sweet potato fries.

It will be “then,” “there,” and “that.”  Jess was in Milwaukee.  She got a tattoo.  Hannah got…wait, what did Hannah get?

Facebook Timeline is interesting in a way that Facebook hasn’t been in a long time.  It requires us to use of a different quadrant of the brain.  It asks us to look back, not inward or downward at the smartphone in our hands.  To fill in the blanks, not to like-and-run.  It forces us to pick and choose the stuff that really mattered, because we weren’t geotagging every milkshake we drank and we cannot possibly remember them all.  And why should we?  They didn’t matter.

None of this is to say that I’ll be diving head-first into sorting out my Timeline.  I may not even elect to dip my toes.  I have plenty of other things to do and would rather invest the time in making a physical scrapbook, into forming something with my hands that I can burn in twenty years if I decide it’s too embarrassing.

But I do feel like the New Facebook is  intriguing.

No doubt the novelty will wear off.  Timelines will catch up to the recent past and people will get bored.  But for a while – and it will be a while; there’s lots of years to input – Facebook actually looks like it’s given us something intriguing.  It’s given us something to do.

It may not be unfamiliar.  Really, it’s just a digital scrapbook.  But it is different from its old self – and not in an entirely repulsive way.  And that, in the information age,  is sort of a remarkable thing.

Facebook surprised me.  That deserves at least a thumbs up.

Get Off My Lawn

Let me be the first to tell you I don’t understand politics at all.  Or economics. I have no idea who my congressman (congresswoman?) is or how many of them I have.  I filed my own taxes until I earned self-employment income last year, at which point I handed over a blank check to my accountant and cried.  I can name maybe six presidents.

I don’t have a legislative brain.  I’m the person who walks around saying things like, “Why isn’t the winner of the popular vote president?” and “Why don’t they just call them all civil unions?”  School House Rock made it all sound so simple.

But I can speak with authority on being a human, on being (unfortunately) a millennial, and on a being a publicist (yes, this is relevant).  And on those grounds, I feel comfortable voicing the unpopular opinion that I’m a little bit allergic to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Use Your Words

Let’s get this one out of the way: What do these people want?

It’s a popular argument against the movement, and the popular rebuttal seems to be, “That’s not the point!”

Well, actually, it sort of is.

Things aren’t perfect, agreed.  The banks are greedy.  Jobs are too few.  Minimum wage – which I am blessed to never have been subject to – is totally not a livable wage.  The Social Security program is imploding.  Washington is gridlocked.  We, as a nation, are broke.

But what exactly do they want the government to do about it?  It’s not enough to stomp your feet and throw a tantrum; you have to articulate your demands.  If you want people to treat you more seriously than a toddler, you have to explain what you want like a grown-up.

“What, are you hungry?  Tired?  Do you need to go to the bathroom?  Here – here’s a lollipop.  Do you feel better?  Oh, you wanted universal health care?  Well you didn’t say that.”

As a publicist, one of the things that really makes me cringe is when a writer asks me, “Who else on your roster can I interview?”  Unless you’re Entertainment Weekly, it doesn’t work that way.  You came to me.  I don’t have time to ask thirty-five people if they want to do an interview that most of them are going to pass on.  You tell me who you want, and I say whether or not they’ll do it.

The same rule applies to me.  When I have to pitch to someone who doesn’t want to talk to me,  I don’t get to say, “Hey!  This person is funny!  Where can you put them in your magazine?”  I have to give them an angle, a plug, a column.  Something they can say “Yes” or “No” to.  Not, “What do you want me to do with this?” like I just handed them two thirds of an IKEA cabinet and an Allen wrench.

It’s admirable that Occupy Wall Street has a strong following, but right now it’s all just white noise.  Until they choose a unifying mission statement, nobody will know how to help them.

Please tell me we’re not talkin’ bout my generation.

News reports are indicating that the majority of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are young.  ABC News pegs them as predominantly “under 30,” which makes them millennials.  This has me concerned.

Millennials are widely considered to be an entitled generation.  Privileged.  Over-educated and under-skilled.  Lazy.  Spoiled by mom and dad.  They face a major uphill battle convincing people to feel bad for them.

I’m one of them (technically – I don’t sympathize), and I scoffed when I heard it was mostly twenty-somethings riled up because the status quo “isn’t good enough.”  I judged them unapologetically.

I pictured “writers” and “artists” and “actors” whose definition of overtime meant checking their work email on a 3-day weekend.  I envisioned hipsters armed with iPhones and mommy’s credit card.  I assumed they were all just kids who, on any other day, would rather take unemployment than “settle.”

And while, let’s be honest, those millennials are out there, I know it isn’t fair to make those assumptions.  But those are the stereotypes Occupy Wall Street protestors are up against, and they’re going to have to be very mindful of it.

They’re going to have to be careful about what they demand – as soon they figure out what it is.  Do they want to tax the rich so that they can get a hand-out?  The way their generation got handouts from mom and dad?  What do they want to do with the money they feel they’re missing out on?  Do they want to pay off college debt?  Save?  Buy $4 lattes?

They’re going to have to put in twice as much effort to make up for the preconception that they don’t work hard enough in the first place.  Millennials are notorious for expecting a bounty of perks on the job, as well as the right – not the privilege, the right – to telecommute.  They are frequently criticized for expecting promotions and raises simply because they’ve done their time, not necessarily because they’ve earned it.

I fear they’re going about this movement superficially.  Sure, they have passion, but what’s their point?  Are they going to feel they deserve a revolution simply because they put in the time to protest?

And what jobs is this group anticipating?  They say they want to work.  Are they prepared to get their hands dirty if the next batch of job openings are several thousand construction jobs?  Would they get in line for retail positions at Wal-Mart?  What jobs would they create for themselves – what jobs would they reasonably expect – if someone told them they could all be employed tomorrow?  I’m genuinely curious.

I’m reminded of a news article I read a few months ago about a millennial who’d organized a round-robin recruiting night.  Speed-interviewing, if you will.  One of the participants they interviewed was looking for a job as an online community manager.  “Online community manager?” I remember snorting.  “What, like a chat room moderator?  How about applying for a real job?”

Granted, I’m also reminded of an opinion piece whose writer asked if, thanks to technology, there would ever be enough jobs to go around again.  So maybe fake jobs are the wave of the future.

There you go, millennials.  My one olive branch.

The revolution WILL be televised!

According to CNN, Wikipedia, and the Occupy Wall Street’s own manifesto, protestors have taken inspiration from the Arab Spring protests.

Really?

Really?

I’ve tried to read up on the protests that sprang up in the Middle East, and I do recognize that economic disparity and high unemployment rates – similar to what we’re experiencing here – were contributing factors.  I also acknowledge that the uemployment rate for youth in particular was especially high, and that young people were a driving force in these revolutions.  There are similarities.

But am I the only person who thinks this comparison is a little…I don’t know…douchey?

I mean, does New York’s youth really think they have it as bad as the people of Egypt?  Or Tunisia?  Women there just found out they can vote.  Do Occupy Wall Street demonstrators really feel equally deprived, as they live-blog the revolution from their Macbook via the free Starbucks wi-fi?

I understand we’re all disgruntled.  I would prefer not to pay $5 a month to use my debit card myself.  But there’s a difference between a recession and oppression, between a lazy government and a malicious one, between sit-ins in Central Park and a full-blown civil war where over 25,000 people have died.  Comparing our uprising to theirs feels a bit insensitive.

Personally, I don’t even think it’s fair for millennials to call the plight of the average American “theirs.”  “We represent the 99%,” they like to say, but are they really suffering as much as their elders?  Did they foreclose on a house?  Lose a life-long career?  Do they have children to feed and insure?

It just makes me nervous.  Nervous that these other countries will think we’re trivializing their revolutions.  Nervous that we’re being superficial about our own.  Nervous for the future, when these millennials face other hardships.  Will they peacefully protest every time they hit a rough patch?

In Conclusion

Times could be better, certainly.  Americans’ homes are worthless – if they still own them.  Millions have ruined credit.  The job market remains bleak.

But progress requires focus and planning and a hell of a lot of hard work.  I don’t know how to fix it.  I don’t know what to do.  But I think it will take more than big numbers to affect change.  It’ll take a big idea.