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Last week acquaintances boasted to me of withdrawing all their deposits out of Washington Mutual. I tried my best to assure them WaMu would not collapse. It would survive, it would be sold whole, or it would be sold in pieces. And its most valuable, most saleable pieces were its bank branches and its individual accounts.
Today, this point was proven. The FDIC just arranged to have these assets sold off to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.
It might not have been so necessary, so imeediately, had there not been so many sudden withdrawals from WaMu accounts–more than $16 billion in less than two weeks!
Thus ends the rollicking saga of the little Seattle thrift institution, a secondary player in the local banking market back during the days before interstate banking giants, that became the biggest institution of its type in the nation.
It effortlessly subsumed such former giants as Dime Savings in New York and Home Savings in California. Like a dot-com (only using real money), its business model was to Get Big Fast. At the peak of America’s housing bubble, WaMu was the nation’s biggest home-mortgage originator, with some 2,000 branches coast to coast.
But all that growth was predicated upon one gamble– that the national home-buying mania, abetted by lax government regulations and the massive trading of obscure “mortgage-backed securities,” would just keep on a-growin’ forever. Or at least for five or six more years.
It’s easy to say they should have known better.
Which I just did.
But think of it this way: Imagine you were running the last big financial outfit still based in the NW region. Imagine you’d come to believe you had two options. You could remain a local player, slowly but surely losing ground against the consolidating industry giants. Or, you could become one of those consolidating industry giants.
Yeah, I would have picked (a) also.
WaMu’s shotgun marriage creates another addition to the roster of big companies that used to be based in Seattle but aren’t anymore. Some others:
It seems like just six days ago, instead of six years ago, that the headlines were full of gloom-n’-doom about economic hardship and consumer cutbacks.
Then, for a while, the media (particularly much of the “alt” media) were back to ignoring the poor and the working families, preferring to inhabit (or imagine) a world of unlimited luxury.
Around here, this meant slick magazines and online shopping guides dedicated to the highest and best possible spending of money. It meant “progressive” local politicians who unashamedly sucked up to the upper castes, and to the merchants and real-estate developers who outfitted and supplied upper-caste households. It meant hundreds of elegant bistros and whole grocery chains dedicated to ever-dearer visions of The Good Life.
Now, though, we’ve got front-page wire stories talking about Americans’ supposed “newfound frugality.”
As if tens of millions of us haven’t been pinching pennies all along.
In my current stompin’ grounds of Belltown, the alleged Good Life has been what it all was supposed to have been about for a long time. I’ve got old condo ads from 1992 offering up fantasy visions of unparalleled beauty and elegance, quoting old British aristocrats in wedding-invitation typefaces.
Later in the decade came the big billboards with the manically grinning young couples striding happily into their utterly fabulous view homes.
But behind the marketing images, there were a lot of young couples whose parents had donated down payments, hoping to get their kids into home ownership while it still could sorta happen.
There were law-firm junior partners and hospital physicians living just beyond their means, trusting/hoping their careers would grow to match their mortgages.
There were AARP-agers downsizing from bigger homes elsewhere with more stuff in them.
There were Microsoft stock-option early retirees, who’d pinned the whole rest of their lives on the premise that their accumulated nest eggs would remain uneaten by inflation.
They, and much of the rest of us, now await whatever’s next, wondering how to stay afloat.
I’M THINKING OF TURNING the print version of MISCmedia into something closer to a slick magazine, with prettier paper and a real cover and everything.
Three things are keeping me from making the jump:
1. The startup costs.
2. The time commitment involved (which is really an excuse for the emotional commitment involved).
3. The iffy current state of the magazine biz.
Specifically, there’s a glut of newsstand magazines out there. Publishers have tried to seek out every potentially lucrative demographic niche market, and have accordingly shipped hundreds of new titles in recent years.
We’ve previously mentioned such hi-profile attempts as Talk, George, Brill’s Content, O: The Oprah Magazine, those British-inspired “bloke” magazines such as Maxim, those corporate-warrior business magazines such as Fast Company, and those Helvetica-typefaced home-design magazines such as Wallpaper.
But that all’s just the proverbial flower of the weed.
The shelves of Steve’s Broadway News and the big-box bookstores are verily flooded with unauthorized Pokemon collector mags, kids’ versions of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan, Internet magazines forever searching for excuses to put movie stars on the cover (“This celebrity has never actually used a computer, but somebody’s put up an unofficial fan site about her”), superstar-based music magazines, genre-based music magazines, fashion-lifestyle magazines, ethnic-lifestyle magazines, and “ground level” magazines a step or two up from zinehood (Rockrgrl, No Depression).
(Then there are all the ever-more-specialized sex mags, from Barely Legal to Over 50.)
In all, there are now over 5,200 newsstand-distributed titles big enough to be tracked by trade associations. (That figure doesn’t include many ground-level titles. It also doesn’t include most comic-book titles, which these days are sold in specialty stores with their own distribution networks. It does include many regional and city magazines that don’t try to be sold everywhere.)
The good news about this is that it proves folks are indeed reading these days, no matter what the elitist pundits rant about our supposed post-literate society. Or, at least, that the media conglomerates are willing to place big investment bets that folks are still reading.
And it means a lot of writers and editors (even mediocre ones) have gotten work.
The bad news is it can’t last. Literally, there’s no place to put them all. Not even in the big-box stores.
Even the ones that make it into enough outlets can’t all attract attention through the clutter. Some big wholesalers now find only 33 to 36 percent of the copies they ship out actually sell through to consumers. The rest are shipped back to warehouses, stripped of their covers (which go back to the publishers for accounting purposes), and either recycled or incinerated.
One industry analyst estimates more than half the newsstand mags out there now will be gone within a year.
Granted, there are still enough startups in the pipeline that the net reduction will likely be smaller than that.
And many, many of these threatened titles won’t be missed much, maybe not even by those who work on them. (Though I could be wrong; perhaps in 2002 there will be eBay auctions for scarce old copies of Joe or Women’s Sports & Fitness).
So where will all the thousands of potentially soon-to-be-jobless word and image manipulators go?
Barring a sudden revival of commercial “content” websites (now intensely disliked by investors), a lot of them might end up trolling the streets of New York and other cities, trying to round up nickel-and-dime investments from pals to start up their own publishing ventures.
Just like me.
TOMORROW: Men’s designer fashions become just as silly as women’s.
ELSEWHERE:
Anheuser-Busch surrendered to the Belgian-based InBev. Miller was sold to South African Breweries (which, despite the name, is based in Britain). Coors merged with Molson.
So: What’s the biggest remaining American-owned suds maker?
As you recall, the company now calling itself Pabst is simply a budget-priced marketing company, whose products are made under contract in Miller plants.
Next on BeerInfo.com’s Top 50 list: Boston Beer, a.k.a. Samuel Adams. Boston used to be a “virtual brewer”, like today’s Pabst. But today the majority of its product comes from the former Hudepohl Brewing plant in Cincinnati, bought by Boston a decade ago.
In sixth place stands Pennsylvania’s Yuenling, the biggest remaining regional lager producer.
Several Northwest microbrewers are also on BeerInfo’s list–Widmer, Redhook (both of which have distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch), Pyramid (now merged with a Vermont firm), Deschutes, Full Sail, Mac and Jack’s.
This prominence signifies both the strength of regional specialty brews and the disappearance of the industry’s whole former second tier (Stroh’s, Ballantine, Schaffer, Falstaff, Blatz, Carling, Lucky, Rainier, Oly, Blitz-Weinhard, etc. etc.).
…(see below), last Tuesday apparently saw the demise of Procter & Gamble Productions. This would also mean the end of sponsor-owned programming as a regular feature on the old-line broadcast networks.
When network radio was launched in the U.S. in the 1920s, networks would sell whole blocks of time to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, would hire ad agencies to create and package both the commercials for the advertisers’ products and the shows that would surround the commercials. Procter and its soap-making competitors were the main sponsors of melodramatic daytime serials; thus the nickname “soap operas.” One of the first of these, The Guiding Light, was originally sponsored by Procter’s “P and G White Naphtha Soap.”
When TV came along, so did sponsor-owned programming. But TV’s higher production costs meant such ventures as The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Camel News Caravan faded from view.
But Procter & Gamble Productions (PGP) continued, like the stories on its shows. At its 1982-84 peak, PGP controlled 25 hours of network programming per week (more than Fox or The CW broadcasts these days).
Through PGP, P&G financed the shows and exerted both censorship and hiring control over them. But the shows’ actual production was subcontracted to ad agency Benton & Bowles. That agency disappeared some years ago in a series of global corporate mergers. Its TV-production unit was renamed Televest, then spun off as Telenext Media, which is apparently now an independent company.
(I know, this story’s getting to be as convoluted as any As the World Turns storyline.)
Anyhoo, on July 1, PGP’s name and logo disappeared from the ATWT and GL closing credits, replaced by that of Telenext. The shows’ official Internet message boards changed addresses from “pgpphoto.com” to “tnmphoto.com.”
Without any official notice of what, if anything, has changed, online message boards are rife with speculation.
Some users claim P&G must have sold off its interests in the shows. That wouldn’t be out of character with the company’s recent spate of portfolio-shuffling. (In recent years P&G’s bought Tampax, Gillette, Braun, and Clairol, while selling Comet, Duncan Hines, Crisco, Jif, and Folger’s.)
Of course, the credit change could just be a matter of semantics. But many of these message-board users have complained about P&G’s (mis)management of the serials, including drastic budget cuts on GL and its alleged cold feet concerning ATWT’s current gay-love storyline. Some of these users say they would like the shows to become independently owned.
Of course, even the deftest indie producer would have to be pretty clever to effectively confront the daytime-soap genre’s collapsing ratings and revenues.
But that’s a topic for another day. Tune in again.
To mix sports metaphors, the city punted. Nickels took a dive. They settled for a settlement. They whored out to Clay Bennett. They took sheckels of gold (and the vaguest of non-promises by the NBA for a new team in some future decade) instead of continuing the fight to keep the Sonics here.
The separate Howard Schultz lawsuit continues, and is our only remaining chance to keep this team, OUR team, our first big-league team.
This feels worse than the 1978 finals loss, the 1996 finals loss, and the trading of Ray Allen combined.
The Kress IGA Supermarket should finally open sometime this week. The pre-opening VIP gala occurred Monday evening. (Yes, you may ask why I photographed this event, but didn’t try to get into many SIFF-related parties and didn’t photograph the one I was at. I won’t answer, but you can ask.) At the gala, the store’s many local suppliers (particularly in the deli and to-go-meals section) showed off their products. Reps from the city and the Downtown Seattle Association were on hand to wish the store and its Whidbey Island-based owners well. I think it’ll succeed, even though it’s opening at a time when retailers in general are facing rough seas, and even though it’s in a basement, and even though it has no dedicated parking, and even though independently-owned groceries have taken a dive in this state (concurrent with the decline and fall of the Associated Grocers co-op).
The place just feels right. It’s not gargantuan (without the prepared-meals section, it’s about the size of an old ’60s-era supermarket), yet it’s got a complete selection. Prices are at least competitive with those at the big chains. (IGA is a member-owned franchise operation, whose presence in Washington has ebbed and flowed over the decades.)
Even the deli part, which is obviously intended as the store’s main profit center, serves up a lot of honest grub at honest prices. (Though I don’t understand why there’s a whole olive bar. But perhaps I’m not hep to the whole olive revival thang.)
…perhaps even sell or scuttle Hummer brand: All square-bashing “radicals” may now cease stereotyping non-hipster Americans as war-lovin’ consumption addicts.
This week we must say goodbye to the KFC restaurant at 1001 East Pine.
For decades, it was a welcome sight to nightclubbers seeking a pre-drinking meal, regular working folk seeking an affordable treat, and defiant carnivores who loved its wafting aromas signifying a Hill holdout for un-PC eating.
It was built in the mid-1950s as Gil’s Drive-In, part of a small regional chain started by Gill and Alma Centioli. When Kentucky Fried Chicken first rolled out as a franchise brand, Gil’s three locations offered it as a sideline to their burger-based menus.
By the mid-1960s, the Centolis remodeled Gil’s to conform to KFC’s chainwide branding. (They eventually owned more than 60 KFCs in the metro area.) But the Capitol Hill location remained listed as “Gil’s Drive-In” in industry directories. Restaurant-directory Web sites picked up this oddity, and continued to direct users toward this phantom burger stand.
(The Centiolis’ daughters were involved in the founding of Pagliacci’s Pizza and Merlino Fine Foods; their son owns the regional rights to Krispy Kreme.)
Jack in the Box, recently displaced from its own Broadway site, is said to be taking over the location. It’ll be a few months before the place is remodeled and reopened.
(Update: However, there’s a curious Craigslist posting claiming the site’s currently available, implying another chain doesn’t have it yet.)
Hydrox is coming back!
…to the memory of J.R. Simplot, the only American to be a tycoon in both potato chips and computer chips. (He also dominated Boise’s economy, particularly in recent years, as Albertson’s and Boise Cascade got swallowed up by out-of-staters.)
Once again, we’re hearing about one of my pet topics, the lack of decent grocery shopping in many Seattle neighborhoods; particularly in neighborhoods far from any full-size supermarket.
The dilemma, as per current industry practice, is that low-margin, short-shelf-life items such as fresh produce don’t fit in with the typical convenience store business model. So the makings of “real” meals can only be found at huge marts that need a big population radius; while local “food” stores offer little besides beer, wine, soft drinks, cigarettes, candy, and potato chips.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Specialty produce stands, such as MacPherson’s on Beacon Hill or Rising Sun Farms on NE 65th, profitably fit into former gas-station buildings, with the same square footage as your basic C-store. With a little bigger restocking budget and a couple more cooler compartments, they could fit in a meat-deli counter and some basic staple groceries (rice, pasta, etc.).
Stick in a few higher-margin C-store items and you’ve got the return of the traditional corner grocery.
All it takes is a storefront (or a plot of land where one can be built), a competent operator, and a supportive investor (note: the latter two traits are not always found in the same person).
Communities can organize to start up such a store in their ‘hoods. A nonprofit could be formed to start a string of such stores, more compact and less hoity-toity-foodie than PCC.
It’s no megaproject. Really.
Broadstripe (formerly Millennium, formerly Summit, formerly Seacom), the “little” cable company with a big image problem, has finally added a bunch more hi-def channels. They’re all versions of brands you know and love—TNT, TBS, A&E, History Channel, National Geographic, Lifetime Movie Network, and (for a little extra) Showtime.
So far, so good. We get TNT’s NBA playoffs (including, alas, the Lucking Fakers) and TBS’s baseball games (no longer exclusively starring the Braves) in their full-res, widescreen glory. The same goes for some movies, recent off-network reruns (Lawn Order: Assorted Flavors), and “reality” faves such as Ax Men (northwest Oregon never looked so beautifully foreboding).
But, and this is something Broadstripe can do nothing about, sometimes these channels aren’t showing HD material. (This is usually when they’re simulcasting the same shows as their famous parent channels.) That would only be a minor annoyance, except these channels then ruin this material by altering it into that fake-widescreen stretch-O-vision. Sometimes, even movies that were originally made in widescreen will get cropped and then stretched into unviewability. And you can’t “squeeze” it back into its proper proportions; you can only search out these shows on the channels’ regular standard-def incarnations.
The worst offender: Lifetime Movie Network, whose shelves of moldering ’80s-’90s made-for-TV victimization-and-revenge tales are almost all stretched out like digital Silly Putty comics.
You know when I said I wanted you more than anything else in the galaxy? I don’t anymore. Sorry. Really. It isn’t you. Well, yes it is you, but it’s not like I’m running off with somebody else or anything…
After multiple restructurings and selling off its iconic U District office tower, Safeco Insurance has allowed itself to be eaten by Liberty Mutual. Now there’ll be one fewer corporate board to hit up for charitable donations, one fewer set of bigwigs to serve on blue-ribbon civic improvement task forces. And they’re not yet talking about how many head-office troops will be fired. But the Safeco brand will remain, which means the signs on Safeco Field stay up, at least for now.
