Saturday, October 27, 2007
Get out and live – 14th Street subway news updated.
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
Since the MTA decided to close the service booths in many access locations to the subway system, travel is a bit more difficult for seniors, and a well-stocked discount Metro card becomes a a real necessity. Thus, on Union Square, if you do not have a Metro card, at most entrances you may end up paying full $2 fare, when you buy a ticket at one of the machines. Watch the colors, the booths at the bottom of most Union Square subway entrances have been painted reddish-brown, meaning that the attendants, even if present, cannot sell you a ticket. Only the main subway entrance on 14th and PAS, under the Food Emporium supermarket, has the booth painted blue, and an inside attendant on duty, who for #2 will hand you a one-time card plus a transfer, entitling you to one more ride. Walking down at some other subway stairs with the transfer in your hot hand may be another disappointment; the walk-around attendant may not be there, though a printed card states that he/she is on premises. That's a crunch, particularly if your knees bother you, but continue looking around for a civilian-looking person wearing a vest with an MTA button: the attendant may just have stepped away or walked upstairs to aid someone. The most important simple trick is to always carry a one-time Metro card, in addition to the transfers – you obtain that by buying a Metro card upon arrival at a blue booth at your destination. If you buy one only at departure, you have to use the card right away, and the attendants are not allowed to sell you two cards at a time.This mechanization is going on in the supermarkets also - Whole Foods has a new computerized methodology of routing the lunch- and dinner-time mobs through their 35-odd registers. Thus, when you arrive at the express under-ten items line with your basket, or a soup cup and an Indian-food container, an attendant will prompt you into one of five lines (the non-express side has four). Your personal super-market strategy of looking for a line with the least loaded-down people will not help, just look for the line with the least number of people . That is because you will be sent to the next available checkout counter mechanically , by way of an overhead screen that has five columns, corresponding to the lines, and, as a checkout clerk pushes the button signaling being free, that number drops into the next free column in the overhead screen. You can be sent anywhere in the checkout area. I saw, though, just ahead of me a young woman beating the system. She was reading a magazine while kicking her basket forward, double-tasking, as the lingo has it. When her turn came and a distant checkout counter was indicated, she ignored it and kicked the container toward the nearest checkout, and stationed herself there until it became free. Call it protest, or anarchism or individualism, she got her way.
Market strategy is seen at Trader Joe's wine shop, where the famous Two-Buck Chuck of California sells at $3, the only venue for the product in NYC known to this analyst. Of the six varieties, Sauvignon Blanc seems to be most popular, and it unexpectedly ran out early in the year, with people having to wait two weeks for new supplies to arrive. So, in late summer, when the stock on hand fell to 20 cases, buyers started to double up their purchases, in preparation for a rainy day, and cleaned it out, with latecomers filling up with emergency bottles of Chardonnay - which, in turn ran out. Now, both whites have came back, and today, a month later, there is a huge stack of Sauvignons Blanc, and badly depleted Chardonnay area. Did buyers switch to the Chard, or did the Trader order up an emergency extra supply of the Sauv? What is the market model? Day traders will have to watch the supply-and-demand carefully and act accordingly.
The checkout machines have also arrived at local supermarkets, another way for the capital providers to cut down on expensive labor through automation. Don’t they recall that Henry Ford decided to pay workers decent wages because he needed buyers for his products? The less workers, the less sales, and more people on the welfare system, the higher the taxes, remember? Besides, the machines are a pain.
Some pleasant thoughts – I needed quarters, and walked into the Associated Supermarket, down toward Alphabet City. The checkout lady, after a split second’s thought, rang up a one-penny sale, opened the cash register and made the exchange. When I started looking for a penny, she waved me off, but I persisted. What a nice person!
My car was in the narrow Stuyvesant Town service road, and as I stepped out of it and locked the door, a man on the sidewalk pointed out that my wheels were sticking out and one of the big supermarket trucks could hit them. I thanked him and straightened the wheels, when he also advised me to fold my side mirrors – his had been ripped off, once, in the same narrow passageway. Good to see people looking out for others.
Since the MTA decided to close the service booths in many access locations to the subway system, travel is a bit more difficult for seniors, and a well-stocked discount Metro card becomes a a real necessity. Thus, on Union Square, if you do not have a Metro card, at most entrances you may end up paying full $2 fare, when you buy a ticket at one of the machines. Watch the colors, the booths at the bottom of most Union Square subway entrances have been painted reddish-brown, meaning that the attendants, even if present, cannot sell you a ticket. Only the main subway entrance on 14th and PAS, under the Food Emporium supermarket, has the booth painted blue, and an inside attendant on duty, who for #2 will hand you a one-time card plus a transfer, entitling you to one more ride. Walking down at some other subway stairs with the transfer in your hot hand may be another disappointment; the walk-around attendant may not be there, though a printed card states that he/she is on premises. That's a crunch, particularly if your knees bother you, but continue looking around for a civilian-looking person wearing a vest with an MTA button: the attendant may just have stepped away or walked upstairs to aid someone. The most important simple trick is to always carry a one-time Metro card, in addition to the transfers – you obtain that by buying a Metro card upon arrival at a blue booth at your destination. If you buy one only at departure, you have to use the card right away, and the attendants are not allowed to sell you two cards at a time.This mechanization is going on in the supermarkets also - Whole Foods has a new computerized methodology of routing the lunch- and dinner-time mobs through their 35-odd registers. Thus, when you arrive at the express under-ten items line with your basket, or a soup cup and an Indian-food container, an attendant will prompt you into one of five lines (the non-express side has four). Your personal super-market strategy of looking for a line with the least loaded-down people will not help, just look for the line with the least number of people . That is because you will be sent to the next available checkout counter mechanically , by way of an overhead screen that has five columns, corresponding to the lines, and, as a checkout clerk pushes the button signaling being free, that number drops into the next free column in the overhead screen. You can be sent anywhere in the checkout area. I saw, though, just ahead of me a young woman beating the system. She was reading a magazine while kicking her basket forward, double-tasking, as the lingo has it. When her turn came and a distant checkout counter was indicated, she ignored it and kicked the container toward the nearest checkout, and stationed herself there until it became free. Call it protest, or anarchism or individualism, she got her way.
Market strategy is seen at Trader Joe's wine shop, where the famous Two-Buck Chuck of California sells at $3, the only venue for the product in NYC known to this analyst. Of the six varieties, Sauvignon Blanc seems to be most popular, and it unexpectedly ran out early in the year, with people having to wait two weeks for new supplies to arrive. So, in late summer, when the stock on hand fell to 20 cases, buyers started to double up their purchases, in preparation for a rainy day, and cleaned it out, with latecomers filling up with emergency bottles of Chardonnay - which, in turn ran out. Now, both whites have came back, and today, a month later, there is a huge stack of Sauvignons Blanc, and badly depleted Chardonnay area. Did buyers switch to the Chard, or did the Trader order up an emergency extra supply of the Sauv? What is the market model? Day traders will have to watch the supply-and-demand carefully and act accordingly.
The checkout machines have also arrived at local supermarkets, another way for the capital providers to cut down on expensive labor through automation. Don’t they recall that Henry Ford decided to pay workers decent wages because he needed buyers for his products? The less workers, the less sales, and more people on the welfare system, the higher the taxes, remember? Besides, the machines are a pain.
Some pleasant thoughts – I needed quarters, and walked into the Associated Supermarket, down toward Alphabet City. The checkout lady, after a split second’s thought, rang up a one-penny sale, opened the cash register and made the exchange. When I started looking for a penny, she waved me off, but I persisted. What a nice person!
My car was in the narrow Stuyvesant Town service road, and as I stepped out of it and locked the door, a man on the sidewalk pointed out that my wheels were sticking out and one of the big supermarket trucks could hit them. I thanked him and straightened the wheels, when he also advised me to fold my side mirrors – his had been ripped off, once, in the same narrow passageway. Good to see people looking out for others.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 10:17 AM 
