|
The Good
Ole Ways
I’m
sure that you have heard others, or maybe yourself, talk about and even
seem to be longing for a time referred to as the "good ole
days." I am at an age now that I find myself thinking of the way
some things used to be and think of those days as the good ole days
myself.
Why
would we refer to a time from the distant past as the good ole days?
What made the good ole days good? Were those days good because of the
things that we didn’t have then that we do now? Would people long to
go back to a time of no air conditioning, mostly dirt roads, fewer
modern conveniences, no TV or just a few local channels available, AM
radio? The list could go on and on.
I
would say that none of us would want to give up the modern things that
supposedly make life easier to go live in a more primitive time. If that
is really what we wanted to do, I’m sure there’s some place in the
world that is primitive enough that we could fit right in. So, the
distant past is not thought of as the good ole days because of the thing
we did without.
A
longing for the good ole days is a recognition that all the modern stuff
has not given us more time for the things that really matter. Whether we
are busy with recreation or work, our lives are spent at a faster rate
than ever before. The computers in our work place now seem necessary and
unthinkable to go back to doing things the old way. But we have not
given ourselves more time with the introduction of computers. With
computers, many more things are possible than ever before and therefore
more is expected than ever before.
I
think those of us old enough to remember a time that we think of as the
good ole days are longing more for the good ole ways rather than for the
good ole days. This is obvious more in the realm of business than any
other area, in my opinion. There have always been crooks among us, but
most know of or have heard of a day when a man’s word was his bond and
a handshake was as binding as a signature on a dotted line.
Deception
is now a major part of marketing conspiracy. Manufacturers know that
most people shop for the best price. They also know that our biggest
weakness in school was fractions in arithmetic. Many products have gone
from standard units of measure to fractions. Coffee went from pound bags
to 13-ounce bags and now to 11.5-ounce bags. The size has steadily
decreased while the price has stayed the same. I just went to the
cabinet to check out what I thought was a 3 pound can of coffee to find
that it was 2 pounds, 2.5 ounces. Most ice cream has gone from
half-gallon to 1.75 quarts. It always seems to be some odd weight to
make figuring the true cost difficult. The odder the weight is, the more
difficult it is to know the true cost per unit of measure.
Have
you tried to buy a car or truck lately? Those TV commercials with the
lines of unreadable fine print at the bottom of the screen are meant to
be deceptive. The radio commercial where a man says seven complete
sentences in six seconds at the end that is not intended to be
understood by us southern talking people. A couple of years ago, Bev and
I decided that we wanted to trade for a new vehicle. We went to a large,
well known dealership that was advertising a "super sale." The
part of the radio commercial that we could understand sounded pretty
good.
The
salesman took the keys of the vehicle we were going to trade in to let
someone evaluate it and then ask us some questions about what we were
interested in. We were then told to wait in his office while he went and
made his first selection. Bev and I looked at each other with puzzled
looks on our faces; she giggled and I snickered. It sounded as if
talking to us had inspired him to go pick out a truck for himself. By
the time we got our keys back to the car that we came in with and made
our escape, the evening was wasted. Even the restaurant where we had
planned to eat had already closed.
I
recently helped Josh, my youngest son, trade vehicles. The persistent
question that the salesperson kept asking him was "What payment can
you make?" Josh finally blurted out that he could make a payment of
$300. She went and discussed the deal with the young, slick-headed sales
manager and came back with the good news that they had worked out a deal
where the payment would be exactly the payment that he had stated. They
wanted to make a deal based on a payment only and not disclose cost of
their vehicle, trade in allowance, interest rate, amount financed,
length of contract, etc. What has happened to the days when you just
reached an agreement on the difference between the new car and trade-in
and went from there? That was the old way of doing things.
The
Co-ops are changing with the times as well. But may the day never come
when you go to the Co-op and find that nails are priced at $.88 per 13.5
ounces.
Darrell
Thompson is the Moulton store manager of Lawrence County Exchange. |
