(President Roosevelt said, economic diseases are highly communicable.  We show how economic cancers start. President Teddy Roosevelt said, his worst fear for America is when big government merges with big money.  President Obama has made this a reality in a new kind of Socialist Capitalism.)   I grew up in a family food store and have about 20 years of experience in this field. The family had our store for more than 60 years and it represents a  world from the past that was better than what we have today. Note the 1939 price list below showing all steaks for just 25 cents a pound.  In just a two block area around our store alone,  there were about 5 to 6 grocery stores with each having its own specialty.  Our store was a full service one featuring young beef. If you could find this beef today, it would be too expensive for the average person to afford. I have not found any for years at any price. In about every 2 to 3 blocks in our city, you could find a drug store, a hardware store, a dime store, a ice cream store, candy stores and a shoe or clothing store along the way.  We had streetcars running by all these stores on a regular basis. This applied to three main streets consisting of more than a mile each. You could take a streetcar downtown which was about 6 to 7 miles away and it would take less than a half an hour.  Many did not own car because everything was convenient within walking distance and many who had car only drove them on weekends to take the family for a drive in the country or for some recreational purpose. 

Many of the businesses were fifty to 100 years old.  However when World War 2 came, President Roosevelt  put a ceiling price on most products.  A big problem arose when the ceiling price was less than cost and many businesses took a hit. Up to this time, the company stores were called chain stores and the family businesses were more competitive because every product had its own markup. The chain stores soon learned how to combat this by selling certain items at costs or under costs to knock out competition. Thus a new business approach was created where retailers would draw in volume of customers with lost leaders and make their profit on certain items  in very visual areas. What I call the lost leader economy was created which led to companies with more capital to put out competitors on a regular basis until they capture the market share they were seeking and then boost prices.  So when you look at the price list below, you should know that if these prices evolved in a more natural economic fashion, most likely our cost of living would be much less than it is.  In general the small family businesses worked with about a 30 percent gross margin and were able to take out about half of that in net profit.  The super markets came and their gross margins were in the 38 percent range and their net profits were about 7 to 10 percent with the operating costs and advertising costs taking a larger share of the gross.  The loss leader economy spread. It went from the retail industries to other corporations and many times, these corporations would sell under costs to capture the markets and then after doing this raise the prices even higher than they originally were. I lost a good job and may computer supply business due to this lost leader competition.  In my case,  the company who knocked out my company when I lost a good job later merged with a larger corporation who was financed by a giant international company and they controlled the local market for about ten years until another large corporation took them out by doing the same thing with lost leaders.  We had and have fair trade laws to govern these practices but they stopped being enforced and the small family business did not have the finances to confront the unfair competition in courts.  This lost leader economy led to more and more unfair trade which ultimately led to so called free trade where the value of workers and labor were affected the same way.  Now it is out of control with massive transnational corporations only left with many of these corporations finding a new wrinkle whereby they just produce and sell products for the sake of cash flow and found ways to make more money on financial products instead of the things they make or sell.  And some of these corporations and financial institutions are only in place to wash 'dirty money.'

So you see why I miss the old ways that stood as solid economic models compared do what we have today.  With this background, I started college and since the family food store could not pay me enough to go to college, I worked at several factories while going to college full time. With my many years of small business experience and factory work, I found a vast void between the real world of business and work and the college classroom.  I found even good Jesuit schools training good men and women to take over what I considered to be unfair trade and business practices.  To this day,  I have never felt at home with my college career as a result. And with my background, it was as if I had one hand tied behind by back but with a large family I went at it in the corporate world and in several business ventures of my own.  My business eperience when I was young and the factory work while going to college represented the innocent years that would never be mine again.  In the corporate world I was faced with immoral if not downright illegal practices that were just considered to be part of the game.

At age 32, I join the corporate world and the computer industry for the next 40 years directly with major computer corporations and in by own business pursuits.
At age 32, I had a growing family to support. For the most part, my health was back.  I had to compromise my ideals and join in the corporate economic arena. The family food store was thriving ok but not enough to support two families. All my independent ventures had failed.  I sought a job in the computer field thinking it was the place to be just like I thought the transportation industry was.  I did have some interviews with trucking companies but knew they too were becoming an endangering species. The airline industry was ending its golden years with blocks of different airline offices closing downtown.  Soon after most of all the airlines closed their offices downtown. What was once a community of airline workers was fading away.

I got a job as a sales rep for a small tab card manufacturer- Hackett Corporation.  I  liked the opportunity because the took on big brother IBM directly.  Tab cards were the mainstay of data processing in those days with corporations using millions of them at a time. I later became something of an experts and had some letters published during the 2000 election.  See tab cards got a bum rap at http://ezinearticles.com/?id=398440  
The most important thing to remember that tab cards ran our many corporations during the most economic prosperity ever.  With my art skills and learned application knowlege,  I even designed some of them myself. I became a National Accounts Manager for several large national and international corporations.  I enjoyed one major rubber manufacturer account  for several years just by a gentleman's agreement lasting for the next year,  over lunch.
The purchasing agent paid for the lunch and made it a tradition by buying me a kolbasi sandwich which he thought fix my ethic grouping.  Every year I would travel back home sick but he liked it as part of the deal.   This all ended when our General Manager forced the issue with a real paper contract. We lost half the business going for a written contract. 
I also enjoyed a contract with the major greeting card manufacturer in Cleveland and did the art work myself for the tab reorder card which was in card racks across the country.  I also was confronted with things I did not like in the area of gifting buyers in exchange for business.  I refused to this and suffer a lost of business and accounts due to this.  I figured one little bribe leads to another and another until you find yourself in a big mess.
The original factory was in the flats near the downtown area.  Our management decided to move the factory to a new location in the inner city to help in restoring manufacturing there.  The workers also were in the process of forming a union and I was on the management team in this process. At the same time, we were trying to find new products and became direct agents for a new computer tape manufacturing. I liked this because it again took on big brother IBM directly.  
I also managed the factory a few times while my manager was out of town.  I was in the Data Processing Manager Association and did the advertising in their membership book for our company and still have one of the art ads.  It was good time and my manager and I  became friends for life. We both experienced the Cursillo too which was a dynamic spiritual course in the Catholic church. 

We had problems with the workers forming the union and I had a burning 2x4 waved just above my head on the strikeline.  I was doing all that I could trying to find new products to supplement their wages but could not.   During this time, my management and I drove trucks of tab cards through strike lines to keep some of out major customers businesses in operation.  When I was growing up in the store, the unions were also very strong and I questioned their rationale about the way they forced things but in all my thoughts and writings since then, I know our economy and all workers were much better off including non-union workers when the unions were strong.  Today, many still attack unions but the production worker unions have been gone for years.  The free markets types keep attacking a group that has really existed for years.  Today, 50 percent of all unions are government workers and they should have their own separate union and not confuse the situation with private sector workers who want unions in order to just survive.  The new factory was in  a refurbished factory building in the inner city. We were hoping to be part of restoring the area.  However, things did not work out the way we had hoped.  The Hough Riots-  The Hough riots changed everything.   We were in the center of it.  Our vice president was in town and we drove through the riots in a convertible.  The vice president was standing up in the car crying out to the crowds to stop.  I was in the back seat doing the same thing.  The National Guard was there trying their best to calm things down. We could have easily been fatalities but the rioters did not hurt us. There were fires and  some gunfire everywhere.   After that I knew it was over. I drove through the streets where many of the super markets I once served in my own business were burned down. The whole region was a disaster.  Later I learned the local tavern restaurant just down the street from our factory where we ate lunch closed down too after the cordial owner was shot to death in a robbery attempt.  It was a sad ending to a dream many of us had at Hackett Corporation. It was a sad ending to many businesses in the whole area for miles.   I  always wondered why people would burn their own neighborhoods down when the cause of the problems were in suburbia. 
 
I gained a tremendous following of customers in the computer departments of major corporations but again my family was growing and I needed more money and more skills for that purpose alone.  I left to  pursue another level in the computer field.  Also the lost leader economy was at work with a competitor selling under costs to knock my company out of the  market. This competitor was fronting for a major transnational corporation which was trying to control the market.  They were successful in their quest a couple years after I left the company.
Honeywell HIS Computers  - Even though I was in my later 30s, Honeywell hired me. I had a good following in the computer industry and some good experience to offer them.  They sent me to their corporate schools.  Back then there was no computer training and education in colleges. The computer corporations did the training.  IBM trained  thousands in systems and quietly layed off about 10,000 systems people and programmers to stock the corporations with workers trained their way.  This is one of the reasons, IBM was able to take control of the industry.   Honeywell took over GE computers thinking they could counter an attack and while I was there did take a distant second place in the computer industry.  I was trained in systems but could not program.  I could have most likely programmed to a decent etent to get by but after going to classes and sharing classes with students from corporations trying to cover their weakness for the craft, I let everyone know that programming was not my thing.  I did become one of the better debugger of mainfraim programs and operating systems.  The logic was there that I could not find in programming.  After a few months I became an assistant to the top sales rep on  major accounts. However, in those days everything was smoke and mirrors.  Companies were following IBM leads of over selling what they could really do.  Some of the application  manuals with their beautiful covers were the only thing that existed. Everyone was selling the future as if it was here today.  After a sale of a large computer systems it would take months to install the reality displayed in the manuals.  I decided I could not be a part of selling mainframe systems especially after being on calls where IBM ruled the roost and were the best in smoke and mirrors.  After what I saw,  I never believed in going into any new system without paralleling the old one.  I never understood how a corporation could consent to shutting down one system on the spot and going to a new untried one.  I did not even want to go into the smallest computer systems because of this.  My selling techinques were based on making a friend and then selling a friend. The best salesmen would sell the computer system and then transfer the account to a new salesman to install.
IBM was very good at selling from the top to the bottom.  If they had problems with a Director of Data Processing, they just moved their sales up the ladder as far as it took to get an order.  Many managers put their jobs on the line going with Honeywell with many suffering the consequences.  One manager who was a friend of mine,  saved his company millions of dollars by staying with Honeywell for ten years but then was let go ignoring how much he saved the company.

I could not  do business this way.  This was about the time when a large church assocation took a poll and found that only a very few could match up their spritual life with their life on the job. (Honeywell HIS era continued on next page )