Sushi, Strippers, ATMs, Sears and Me

“Let’s go get sushi and not pay.” – Repo Man (1984)

I prefer my 7-11® sushi with a side of WD-40® and a banana-bacon-shrimp Slurpee©.  Nothing says great sushi like sushi bought at a store where you can get gasoline and lottery tickets!

On Sunday afternoon I was finishing up work on the last post (The Bridge on the River Kwai Moment), and sitting at the dining room table with The Mrs., enjoying air conditioning and some coffee.  The Boy and Pugsley had hatched a cunning scheme whereby they were going to go into town to buy food, probably 7-11™ sushi.  Yes, I know, but when you live in Modern Mayberry sometimes 7-11© sushi is the only sushi if Wal-Mart® sushi is sold out again.

I assumed the position of the First Bank of Dadâ„¢, and rummaged through my wallet for cash.  Looking, I had a ludicrous number of single dollar bills – $16 in ones.  “Okay, guys, hope you don’t mind ones.  Here is $15 in ones, and a $10 and a $5.  That should keep you in raw fish and botulism.”

Pugsley laughed, “It’s like Dad went to a strip club and got too many ones from the ATM!”

The Boy stopped and immediately defended my honor, “What are you talking about?  Dad would never, ever . . . go to an ATM.”

That’s a direct quote.  Thanks, pal.

I think if I were going to be a stripper, I think I would use the name Brax Thünderhyde, and dress as a construction worker.  Probably a building inspector – they’re sexy, right?  I hear chicks did clipboards.

This really happened, nearly word for word.  The Mrs. immediately started laughing, as did I.  I hadn’t been to an ATM since college, when I determined that an ATM was just a hole in your bank account that your money leaked out of.  When I was about 20, I found out through bitter experience that either I didn’t have enough money, discipline, or intelligence to have an ATM card, so I cut it up.  My life has been far better since then.  So, yes, The Boy was right, I’ve been to a strip club more recently than I’ve been to an ATM.

The ATM card was my first exposure to the concept that banks were certainly not on my side – I wasn’t their friend, I was simply a way for them to get fees.  ATM cards were a way to charge me to get my own money – I’d pay a $1 fee for $100 in cash.  That’s an immediate 1% for the privilege of using my own money, on those rare occasions that I had $100.  In the far more realistic case that I was pulling out $20, it was the same fee for $20, so that’s a 5% fee.  The good thing is that I could also check my balance at the ATM.

I was in college and could do calculus, but I certainly wasn’t smart enough to do basic subtraction.  Take $21 out of your account too many times?  End up with negative numbers in your bank account.  That led to the really fun set of fees – charges for having less than zero money.  Like the lottery, bank fees are a tax on bad math and poor impulse control.

After I had to pay overdraft fees the second time, I cut up the ATM card.  If it was Friday and I needed cash for the weekend?  I’d go down to the bank and cash a check.  That was it.  You can’t use an ATM machine if you don’t have a card.  This had two good effects – I had to plan how much I was going to spend on Coors Light® for the weekend, but, once I ran out of money, I had to stop spending.  No choice, no poor willpower.  I had to stop.  And if I had to check my balance without an ATM?  I could have a friend shove me really hard.

But dumping the ATM card was a good one.

I haven’t had an ATM card (or even a debit card) since then, and don’t think I’ve paid a fee to a bank for anything other than mortgage interest in almost two decades.  I learned a big lesson from using an ATM: to the bank, I was the commodity.  I was nothing more than ATM transaction fees and overdraft fees.  My bad math paid their salaries.

That realization made me look around and observe how other companies viewed me.  I realized that entire businesses have been built around using consumers as commodities.  In the 1990’s Sears® attempted to get every financial dollar conceivable out of a consumer short of turning them upside down and shaking them to see if any singles were left over from the strip club would fall out.  How did Sears do this?

• You could buy your clothing, hardware, crib, bed, refrigerator and lawnmower at Sears®.
• You could also get your auto and homeowners insurance from Allstate©, which was owned by Sears®.
• You could buy your house from Coldwell Banker Real Estate©, also owned by Sears®.
• You could invest your spare cash with your broker at Dean Witterâ„¢, also owned by Sears®.
• And anything you didn’t buy at Sears®, like Coors Light®? You could charge everything else with your Discover© Card – also owned by . . . Sears®.

When (in the late 1990’s) I realized that Sears® at one point or another owned all of those companies, it became clear to me that Sears® was attempting to get a piece of every dollar that I could spend that wasn’t given to directly to a mortgage lender.  They then sold off these businesses, and have been very successful since then:

I kid.  Sears® remains every bit as relevant today as fax machines and slide projectors.

It was around the same time that I first heard the word “monetize.”  Taken literally, it means, “make into money,” and an example is what the Clintons did with the presidency and Jeff Bezos’ girlfriend did with Jeff.

But back to me.  It was the late 1990’s and a friend of mine had moved into the financial side of the business we were working at.  She mentioned that they were going to “monetize” the Werewolf Repellent® that our company made by selling it while it was still in our warehouses, and then lease the warehouse out to somebody else and rent back the space from the people we leased the warehouse from to store the Werewolf Repellent™ that we’d (by then) sold to someone else.  Our salesmen would (eventually) sell the Werewolf Repellent© to yet a different person, but the money would go to the person who now owned it with a cut to the person leasing our warehouse from us.  It was a way to make money without having to actually sell anything to a pesky consumer.

To me, the scheme seemed unnecessarily complicated, like trying to play a trombone using a vacuum cleaner, a live chicken, a brick, and a purple condom.  It was explained to me that this was a way that our Werewolf Repellent© could make money for us even when it was sitting in our own warehouse not repelling even a single werewolf.  I think they gave up on the idea when they found that the only money we were making from the scheme was due to accounting irregularities and by saving aluminum cans from the employee lounge.

When she was describing the scheme, I nodded and mumbled “okay” and pretended like I understood what she was talking about, even though I still didn’t get it.  But it did spark another thought.  If we could monetize our Werewolf Repellent© that was just sitting in a warehouse, then what was Sears® doing?  It was pretty simple.  They were attempting to monetize me.  I now had a word for it.

Capitalism works best when people look for ways to create better service for you so that you will give them your money.  This is the power of capitalism – people competing to make you happy.  This provides a springboard for innovation.  It provides a reason for people you’ve never met to cooperate with you to allow both of you to meet your goals.

And I hear that their diet plan works great, too!

A rule of economics is that the more indirectly you do something, the easier it is.  If you had a rock to break, you could hit it with another rock until it broke.  It’s the simplest way, but it’s also the hardest.  You could get a steel hammer to break the rock, but now you need find iron ore and make the steel and form it into a hammer.  Much more efficient, but much more indirect.  Heck, you could create an entire chemical laboratory and make explosives, and taking your hammer and a steel chisel and put a hole in the rock, and then blow it up.  That’s the easiest, but it is the most indirect method yet.

Just like my bank tried to do when they created the ATM, the coming trend is to monetize cash.  It’s harder to remember to go to the bank on Friday to get cash than to get cash, anywhere, at any time.  From the standpoint of Wall Street, cash sucks.  If I want to go buy a six pack of crotch weasels and I use cash, the only people getting a cut are the crotch weasel store and the government – crotch weasel sales are taxable in Midwestia.  Governments have this monetization thing down.

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of products I’d miss, if they disappeared tomorrow, but monetization is also control.

• Appetite: grow your own versus a buying food at a supermarket
• Money: cash versus a credit card. Every credit card requires fees.
• Emotion: Twitter® versus not being irritated at everyone.
• Envy: Facebook© versus just being happy being you.
• Attention: Netflixâ„¢ versus a book or this fine blog.
• Lust: Ruffles®.  You know you want some.

Okay, that might be an extreme solution.

Don’t think monetization is control?  What about EBT cards?  Legislators have even figured out how to give banks a share by monetizing poverty.  What happens if the EBT cards shut down?  Yup.  Monetization is control.  Ben Hunt has a good post (LINK) on how Facebook® is attempting to monetize money yet again to destroy cash (and Bitcoin) and give governments complete surveillance of every financial transaction – and Hunt thinks that it just might work.  (H/T Remus, at the Woodpile Report (LINK) – if you’re not reading the Woodpile Report – you’re missing out.)

If monetization is control, that means that if it can be monetized, it can be weaponized.

• Stop the food – without a farm, you’re hungry.
• Deny you credit, cancel your card – you’re not able to rent a hotel room.

Okay, the world would likely be better off without Twitter©, Facebook™, and Netflix® (you’ll pry the Ruffles© from my cold, dead fingers) but what would we do with our time?

Go to strip clubs?  I know you’re certainly not going to catch me near any ATMs . . . .