The Economy

After my first year of college, a high school friend and I scored the greatest summer job ever.

It was for a large circulation newspaper (at the time) near where I grew up. The managers in the office near us always struggled to fill their paper routes with kids during the summer and they had hundreds of newspapers that they needed delivered. ... with no kids to deliver them. The unfilled routes were scattered over a wide area and it had become a problem for them every summer.

That summer, the corporate headquarters of the newspaper offered a "summer district manager" internship for college students and it paid a decent hourly wage. The guys in the office near us arranged for me and my friend Bill to get the internships and had us placed in their office. We were paid for 8 hours a day. But instead of doing an internship, they gave us a van and sent us out every day to deliver papers. We'd wake up at 4 in the morning, meet the truck dropping off the papers and load our van. While Bill drove, I'd start stuffing newspapers into plastic bags and we had the routes down to a science, where he'd stop and I'd run down one side of a street tossing papers on driveways and he drove down the other side of the street tossing them out the window.

In addition to our hourly pay, they also gave us the money for delivering the papers and we got to keep any tips. We collected by putting envelopes in the paper every 2 weeks with instructions to leave it in their mailbox the next morning.

It usually took us about 3 to 4 hours to finish up and then we'd drop the van back off and go the beach. We did a shitty job of delivering the papers, like if a house was not conveniently located, we'd just toss the paper from across the street and wherever it landed it landed. If anyone complained, we just canceled the paper on them (which pissed off the actual district managers when it came back to them weeks later).

With a week to go, we still had a lot of people who had never left the envelopes out for us, and owed us money. We were so far ahead of what I had hoped to earn for the summer that I didn't care. But not Bill. I will never forget him ringing doorbells at 5 in the morning on a Sunday, intent on collecting every penny still out there. We're lucky we weren't shot.

 

The summer I was talking about, almost everyone got the paper. I think it was 1987. On a typical block, probably 80 percent of the houses got the paper. So it was more efficient than what you're talking about. We had dozens of routes, though, spread throughout neighborhoods that covered a large area. The hardest part, if I remember, was mapping out (with an actual map, not a smart phone) how to do it most efficiently. But after the first week we had it down to a science.

 

Thank you for this.

Neel Kashkari makes my blood pressure go up. He's a fucking idiot. ... and unbeknownst to most Americans, he is one of the most powerful people in the country. I can't stand most of the regional bank presidents and most of the governors, but the hubris on that guy takes it to a level that drives me crazy. That part toward the end when Jeremy Grantham and Peter Fisher were saying this will not end well, and then they cut to Kashkari saying that only Wall Street observers care about the asset bubbles, people in poor neighborhoods don't, made me pull out what little hair I have left. It belies reality. He has HURT those people by driving down wages and creating massive wealth inequality that has left them behind in a stagnant economy that has the Fed's anchor now permanently weighing it down. And every time the exponentially growing debt bomb those idiots have created over decades starts to implode, they step in to keep it from exploding by coming up with a new scheme to create trillions of dollars of more debt to prop it all up. ... while putting an anchor on the broader economy, in the process. What gets me is that when this all does come to an end, the economic effects for everyone (but disproportionately for those very poor people) are going to be devastating. And Neel Kashkari will be sitting there telling you it wasn't his fault. I have had this conversation with him and it is maddening. It's like talking to the arsonist who then rides in on the fire truck to put out the fire and acts like he is the hero who is there to save the day.