Get to Work

I am not a spoiled brat. I was clearly just in the wrong job. My job as a small business owner, being passionate about my work and the cause I was steering came to an abrupt end. It was hard to transition to a customer service rep in a call center for Directv.

There is nothing like the experience of being a call center employee. Nothing has ever motivated me to get out of my current situation and regroup so feverishly. I heard my Dad’s words over and over again - “The best way to get over something is to go to work.”

Those words were really valuable to me at that time. While reviewing my life and indexing everything that I had done poorly (just to add depressing onto depression), I realized that work and change had been leaning on each other for ages.

Break up with my boyfriend - get to work.
Move to a new town - get to work.
Go to the edge of reason - get to work.
Get a job in corporate America - get to work.

I feel as if I could write forever about my experience at Directv and what I learned about big business and how I can now relate to Republican’s desire to decrease big governments but how I think big businesses seem equally inefficient .. but I’ll leave that for another time.

Re: Failure

It has been a while. I guess a while equals 17 months and 1 day.

To say the least, I have Regrouped.

Regrouped is an excellent word that literally means to become Reorganized in order to make a fresh start. Usually Regrouping happens twice a year: on New Years and on my birthday.

But this was an emergency Regrouping if you will. It was not usual because the Regrouping was do to failure. I am not big on failure. Especially when it is I who does the failing.

Etica, my baby, was falling into the abyss.

It is hard to fail.

In combination with failing in the general sense (business and livelihood), I found that I could be more specific and also fail in the “trying” category. Trying in this case included trying to fix my problems, trying to get out of debt, trying to not loose my mind and so on and so on.

For a while there I locked the doors and hid from creditors. Eventually, I came out of my house (in order to move) and went and got a job. And I got one - in Corporate America.

Although I knew I was lucky to find a job, I will be the first to admit it - I was in hell.

World Fair Trade Day 2009

It's World Fair Trade Day! Get out and support Fair Trade in your city! A day full of Fair Trade goodies, coffee, tea, chocolate, fruits and veggies and of course, WINE!!

Support the cause people, Drink (eat & buy) Like You Give A Damn!!!!!

http://www.worldfairtradeday09.org/

Etica in Duluth, MN

We had a great time in Duluth yesterday! We're so excited to finally get our wines in the area.

Check out the newest Duluth Dish's "Bin 218", written by Brenda Schwerdt, it's all about Etica!

http://duluthdish.com/2009/04/drink-like-you-give-a-damn/

Sweet Berry WINE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J1BXOdNWoM

So hilarious it hurts!

My Daily Red

The ever-growing-in-popularity-USDA-organic-certified Red Wine. For a sulfite free wine, you know, it wasn't half bad. Actually it was good for being a $9.99 bottle of wine. I was surprised.

I wanted to try it out at a consumption level that I could test. Part science experiment, part excitement that I have an entire bottle all to myself! No, I didn't drink the whole bottle, just half, in one sitting. I wanted to know if I was going to feel the sulfite-free difference.

The arguments about sulfite vs. sulfite-free wine was beginning to get a little mind boggling. The arguments seem compelling on both sides of the consumption spectrum. However, for my business, importing a sulfite-free wine is a little scary. Forget about it. I could end up with a container of vinegar by the time it rocked all the way to the US!

Back to my experiment.

Directions:
Pour yourself half a bottle of wine. (over at least three glasses of course)
Drink it.
Got to sleep.
Wake up.

Hypothesis: I would wake up feeling like a million bucks.

Results: I still woke up with a headache and my usual sinus pressure when I am dehydrated.

Recommendations: I guess I am not that susceptible to the so-called ills of sulfites. I guess if you are then you should drink this wine. If you aren't then drink it anyway. Moderation is key to the drinking process anyway you look at it and there's no getting around it.

Enlightenment: I did realize that the sacrifices I make for this job are just so critical to its success. And someone's got to do it!

Fair Trade Draws Buyers, Study Says

Student-professor team shows label compensates consumers for higher prices
Published On Tuesday, March 21, 2006 4:06 AM

Professor of Government Michael J. Hiscox has found that the market may not be as cold-hearted as economic theory would suggest. In a study conducted between June and November 2005, Hiscox discovered that consumers were willing to pay more for products that were labelled “fair trade.”

Hiscox and Nicholas F. B. Smyth ’05, who wrote his thesis on their research, carried out the social labeling experiment at ABC Carpet and Home, an upscale Manhattan housewares store.

They compared the sales of towels and candles, to which a “fair trade” label had been applied, to similar products that did not carry the label.

The label included a statement that certified that the product was made in a “safe and healthy working environment which is free of discrimination.”

Hiscox and Smyth found that sales increased dramatically for the labeled products. Even more surprisingly, consumers kept buying the products even as prices went up.

“It did surprise me that demand for the labeled products was so strong and price inelastic,” Hiscox wrote in an e-mail. “It was not just that people bought more of the goods once they were labeled, but they bought even more when we raised prices by 10 percent and still more when we raised prices by 20 percent.”

Richard B. Freeman, Ascherman professor of economics, said that the study was the most conclusive social labeling experiment done to date. Freeman has also done research on social labeling and its potential to inform consumers’ decisions.

“Other social labeling experiments have yielded weak results, and this study builds on them to do the closest to a real lab type experiment we have, and the results are strong,” Freeman wrote in an e-mail.

But ABC Carpet and Home caters to a specific well-to-do demographic, said one professor.

“One issue is that it’s saying that rich yuppies care about social labeling (if you have ever been to ABC, then you will understand),” wrote Raymond J. Fisman, a visiting professor from the Columbia School of Business, in an e-mail.

Hiscox said he is planning to undertake a major social labelling experiment with a supermarket chain in Italy, which caters to a broad swath of Italian society.

While the study’s conclusion appears to contradict established thinking about consumer preferences and price, Eileen Kohl-Kaufman, executive director at Social Accountability International, which is undertaking the Italy study with Hiscox, said that the experiment’s conclusions were consistent with economic theories about consumer preferences.

“The idea is to make consumers aware of what they are buying and to reward good practices,” Kohl-Kaufman said. “For example, my sixteen-year-old daughter won’t buy anything that was made by someone younger than her, but in many cases there is no way to know that.”

Smyth, who was a Crimson editorial editor, said that the experiment confirmed his belief that consumers will support good labor standards.

“I have believed for a while that there was a market for good working conditions out there, and this was just a case of consumers not having enough information. We supplied the information, and they responded,” Smyth wrote in an e-mail.

Hiscox and Smyth asked many retail stores in Harvard Square and Boston to participate in the social labeling experiment.

Many feared calling attention to labor issues in their stores and declined, according to the study.

—Staff writer Adrian J. Smith can be reached at smith9@fas.harvard.edu.