Connection Perception...Part II

We left off last week with a bit of a history lesson of what led to social media dominating the electronic landscape as it does today.
As I had stated last week, a friend had engaged in a discussion with another about how social media is more of a disconnector than a re-connector.  He posted this on his Facebook profile and solicited responses in kind.
It was a matter that I hadn't given much thought until I read the responses.  I was surprised to read what I did, but then not so surprised as I began to understand it.
The responses ran the gamut.  Reconnector...renewing old friendships across the miles.  Disconnector...the depreciation of the meaning of the word 'friend'.  Reconnector...a more efficient way to communicate. Disconnector...you learn more negative qualities about that person whose friend request you accepted.
Reconnector...for those who work long hours with little to no time for letters or phone calls. Disconnector...those stupid games!
I'll digress on that one.  I do like "Words With Friends".
But are we becoming a generation that has become more comfortable with misanthropy than real social interaction?
Ted Danson's character on the former CBS sitcom "Becker" would happily agree with the former of the two.
In social situations, when we disagree, there is less of a tendency anymore to 'agree to disagree', and more to separate ourselves from that person altogether or even react violently, whether it's verbal or physical in nature.
I know this because in this very forum, I have taken stands on views that have been to say the least, controversial.  While some supported me, others spewed vitriol in my direction and de-friended me, never wanting anything to do with me again.  The remaining messaged me privately asking me to help them understand why I took the stand I took, because they valued me as a friend and didn't want to lose me.
Notwithstanding, my backbone remains intact.
For the past 25 years, I worked in the radio broadcasting industry, and I spent more than half of my career as a journalist.  Objectivity wasn't an option, but a tool necessary to do your job successfully.
And I believe I have been just that.  Though objectivity sometimes carries no weight with the bull-headed so steadfast in their beliefs that they see no room for anyone in their lives whose beliefs are different than their own.
Among my family and friends, and I don't mean the ones on Facebook, there are whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, rich, poor, atheists, agnostics, Christians, Jews, homosexuals, bisexuals, transgendereds, high school dropouts, scholars, tradesmen, professionals, artisans, executives, ex-convicts, and law enforcement officers.
Muslims too.  "OMG...he's a terrorist!!!"  I can see it now.  Grow up.
Just about every one of them would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.
There's positives and negatives to social media.  Do the negatives outweigh the positives?  I believe they do.
But then again, how long can you carry on an in-person conversation with another before life gets in the way and you have to leave, wishing 'I would have loved to talk about that some more'.
When I joined the planning committee for my high school class's 25th reunion, none of us ever would have dreamed that the number of attendees would be less than half of those who came to our 20th.
Nonetheless, we still had a great turnout, with many traveling hundreds of miles to be there.  But I'm sure that social media played a role in determining whether or not many of our classmates were going to show up.
Some are content to live their lives vicariously through others or see the pictures of what someone is doing rather than going out and having these experiences on their own.  Pictures may be worth a thousand words, but why not go beyond a thousand?
You may have received a 'friend request' that you accepted with some degree of reluctance because it was a person you may not have cared for years ago.  And as you browsed that person's profile, you may realize you may have misjudged that person.
Or that you were right about them all along and nothing's changed.
Employers are finding social media to be a useful tool in screening potential work candidates, or giving them grounds to fire an existing employee.
I like Facebook.  It gives me an opportunity to share my life with others I don't get to see as much as I would like.  Photos, this weekly blog, the occasional trip, my love of wine, things like that.
I don't do Twitter.  I personally don't find my life all that interesting to 'tweet' about every single action I have going on.  One form of social media that's fairly low maintenance is enough.
For everyone.  I don't care who you are.
Anything beyond that is overboard.
I first started with MySpace.  Once I learned that Facebook gravitated to a more mature crowd, I migrated there and shut down my MySpace profile.
If I spend that much time on social media, all I'll be 'tweeting' about is how much time I spend on social media.  It doesn't make sense to me.
So what's my final answer, disconnect or reconnect?
It's all a matter of perception, and it boils down to this:
With great power, comes great responsibility.
Make of that what you will.



NEXT WEEK:  The Ticking Clock

Connection Perception...Part I

An old friend of mine from high school posed this question on his Facebook page just a few weeks ago.

He and a friend were discussing how social media is a disconnector and not a reconnector.

A very thought-provoking argument, Michael.  Challenge accepted!

The root argument is this...are we relying on social media to supplant social interaction?

Let's think about the oldest form of social media there was before social media.

Huh?  

I'm getting around to that.  Just humor me for a moment.

The church was the cornerstone of every community.  It was the place to gather for worship, and fellowship before and after the Sunday (temple on Saturday) service.  With the rise of electronic media and more secular thinking among today's society, the church is slowly losing its grip on that.  And churches have been around for...well, forever.

Oh, let's also not forget the stay-at-home Mom.  America's social calendar personified.

Then came newspaper.  The telephone.  Radio and television.  Then the personal computer.

While there is some debate over whether or not IBM co-founder Thomas J. Watson Sr. actually said "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" in 1943, I doubt even he would have believed that these devices, once large enough to fill an entire floor of an office building, would have shrunk to the size of a notebook, with similar capabilities found on cellular telephones, and be available in just about every home worldwide.

It began in the 1970s following the introduction of the microprocessor, though the personal computer as we know it today would not begin entering homes until the start of the 1980s.

Even then, the devices were used for little more other than playing games or as word processors. The latter would eventually supplant typewriters, though some of those devices are still in use today.

With the increase in the number of personal computers entering homes, then came the internet.

The internet as we know it today has been around for a little more than two decades now.  However, the concept of networking computers with one another had been around for at least two decades prior to that, though limited in scope to only government, educational, and scientific entities.  As more computers entered homes in the 1980s, more 'hackers' found ways to infiltrate computer networks if they were fortunate enough to own a dial-up modem.  

Then someone thought of a way to bring the hackers out of hiding.  Thus the birth of the World Wide Web.

While some hackers are still underground, others are working legitimately to combat what they had become experts at over the years and now getting paid for it.  The birth of the IT department.

Email was praised as a means for those who didn't have the time to devote to sitting down, finding a piece of paper and envelope, go to the post office and get stamps and THEN put the finished product in a mailbox for pickup the next day.  Once you bought your monthly subscription to AOL, you could visit any of the free email sites and set up your own account immediately.

I've had my hotmail address for 15 years now.  

You could start a letter to a friend, and if you didn't have time to finish, you could save the draft and return to it later, then finish and send it off.  

Those who didn't like to write letters now found themselves with time to email.  Even those who highly valued the art of penmanship like my mother (who is a left-handed calligraphy artist), found themselves having to assimilate to electronic mail if they intended to stay in touch with family and friends across the miles.

Some even took this a step further and spent the money needed to develop their own website, make money with it by doing something they enjoyed (blogging, photography, selling of crafts, etc.) and quit their hated day jobs.

Entertainers also plied their trades through websites of their own.  But what was left for those who couldn't afford a site of their own, yet still wanted to share their lives with others?

Enter Facebook, MySpace, Twitter.

And we'll touch on that next week.

NEXT WEEK:  Part II

Center of Government

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have." - Thomas Jefferson

Think about the third President's words for a moment, and realize just how big government really is.  Especially here...at just about every level.
I'm not just talking about our elected leaders and appointed officers, but the staffs that support them.
And the mounds of paperwork that make it all run smoothly.  
Or so it seems.
Here in Butler County, Pennsylvania, where I've been based for the past seven years, our county commissioners have come under fire for an annex they wish to attach to the county courthouse because they're running out of room.
In this forum, I'm not going to chide nor praise by name any of the three commissioners currently in office for this reason: many of the county's residents have already formed their own personal opinions of each of the commissioners.  Their character flaws or gifts are not the issue here.  It's all about money and how it's spent.
Just about every county seat in this country has outgrown its original courthouse.  They either add another building onto it like in Westmoreland and Butler Counties, vacate it completely and move into an entirely new one, like in Indiana County or in Seneca County, Ohio, or keep the existing building and rent or buy space in neighboring buildings that are but a short walk away, as is the case with Armstrong and Jefferson Counties.  
Since those buildings were first erected, populations were beginning to grow in the areas that surrounded them. With population growth, there comes problems that create a need for "growing the government" in kind.
Public safety.  Social welfare.  Parks and Recreation.  Public works and the relative infrastructure.  Those are just a few examples.
Fifty years ago, the ills that face our society today simply didn't exist.  That's not to say that things like drug abuse, rape, incest, assault, robbery and theft, and murder weren't around, but they were in far fewer numbers than what they are today, and much went unreported or journalists were told to shy away.
In many cases, much of these crimes involve suspects and victims known to each other, and not random crimes committed by strangers.  These are crimes borne out of bad choices made by mature adults capable of taking responsibility for their own actions, yet many choose to make victims out of suspects and place the burden of it all on society's shoulders.
A great example of this is Children and Youth Services.  This agency has been praised, feared, damned, and celebrated because of the unenviable job its people are tasked to do.
The essence of the job involves removing children from dangerous situations, and also removing them from society where they pose a danger to others.
The commissioners say that this particular agency has outgrown its space and needs room to expand.  Not in terms of staff, but the mounds of paperwork from the multitude of files that have to be at near-arms-reach of a caseworker at any given moment.
Thus the basis of the need for the new building, known as the "Government Center Annex", that two of the three commissioners want to attach to the existing Government Center, which is the courthouse annex (an annex for the annex, yes).  The third wants to purchase a building down the street that he claims will cost less than building new.  The two others claim that cost will be inflated by necessary construction upgrades to bring that building to suit the needs of the CYS office.
A former co-worker of mine inspired me to write this, saying that the money used to buy or build the building could be better spent on fixing roads or giving police departments K-9 officers or other tools necessary to combat the growing threat of drug-related crimes in town.
I couldn't agree more.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple.  Even more unfortunate than that, is that the elected leaders at the county level often get an unfair rap that they don't deserve.
Like other municipal governments, counties are restricted on how they raise revenue on their own, and spend money they receive at the state and federal level.  It must be documented in painstaking detail.  Not only that, they're required by state law to provide human service programs, yet be totally on their own insofar as raising money to fund those programs.
Unfunded mandates, if you will.  They're not the only ones.  Special education programs that school districts are mandated to have are all funded through local real estate tax revenue.
When more people depend on 'the system' to carry them through life, these programs are forced to grow in size, because the caseload size grows.  Though western Pennsylvania has experienced a 'brain drain' over the past two decades with our native-born population fleeing to a more prosperous job climate, we've become a haven for welfare-dependents from other states who come here after they've exhausted their benefits from their own points of origin.
Thus, western Pennsylvania has earned the nickname "Pennsyltucky".
The paperwork involved with these programs, along with CYS and juvenile courts is monumental...more than you could ever imagine.
But we could make those forms and that paperwork electronic, right?  
Not that simple.
Unlike the federal government, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania does not have a Paperwork Reduction Act, geared towards making forms simpler and only available through electronic means.
We need one.
Though Common Pleas (in Pennsylvania, circuit court elsewhere) Judges are housed in a county-owned edifice and are elected by county residents, the county has little to no jurisdiction over the judges.  They collect a state-issued paycheck and answer to the state.
And Judges want to see real paperwork written in one's own handwriting, if that's the case.  The reasoning behind it is because our justice system is so detail-oriented that one little typo or missing word could make the difference between a conviction or acquittal.
Case files need to be on live paper and have to be easily accessible under rules of criminal procedure in just about every state governing disclosure in the court system.  
In case this week's column is too long, it's the shortest, yet most concise answer I can give regarding this subject.  
That money could be better spent elsewhere.  But state law says it can't be.  That's what needs to change, and it's up to us to lobby our legislators to make this change happen.  If they can't do it, we can elect someone who will.
When we talk about spending millions of dollars for a new courthouse annex for the existing courthouse annex built over a decade ago, BUT have no money to buy the City of Butler a K-9 officer (money for that was raised mostly through private donations spearheaded by a local businessman), yeah, something's wrong!
The county eventually did kick in some cash towards the dog after it became clear that this is what private citizens in Butler wanted, and proved it through a very successful fundraising campaign.
There's also bickering over office space sizes and parking.  Let's settle this once and for all.  All department heads get the same office size!  Your subordinates are doing the legwork, they need room for all the required paperwork.  As for parking, let's not put the cart before the horse.  I think employees will take any free off-street parking that's available to them.  Umbrellas and overshoes were invented for this reason.
Ron, I thank you for your challenge.  
I hope this gives you the answer you were looking for.



NEXT WEEK:  Disconnect or Reconnect?

Retirement

Outside of radio, not many people would know the name Mel Karmazin.

Inside radio, we know it.  And we know it all too well.

Briefly put, he was the guy who discovered (and ultimately syndicated) Howard Stern, who ruled terrestrial radio for more than two decades before moving to Sirius XM.

Mel, whose claim to fame was WNEW in the 60s, gradually moved up the ranks with Metromedia and Infinity Broadcasting, turning the latter into one of the most profitable radio enterprises in the United States, before leading it into a merger with CBS and Viacom.

His support of longtime shock-jock Stern led him to lock horns repeatedly with the FCC, when the agency tried to levy fines for indecency-related allegations against the company.  Mel successfully appealed every fine, resulting in reduced judgements or negotiated settlements.  Investors fondly looked upon him as someone with a license to print money.

He announced his retirement in early August.  It was the second go-round at such an attempt, as he retired from CBS/Viacom after one too many skirmishes with aging company chief Sumner Redstone.  He then was lured back into the radio business by officials from Sirius Satellite Radio, and led the company through its merger with XM Satellite Radio.  He fought every monopoly-antitrust allegation against him and his new company.

For someone well-positioned to chart a course for radio's future, he may instead be remembered for its demise.

Mel was one of many broadcasting executives who championed relaxing the then-stringent ownership rules for broadcasters.  Until the summer of 1992, no company could own more than one FM and one AM station in a single market, and no more than twelve nationwide.  That restriction was lifted, allowing companies to acquire a third and up to a fourth property, depending on the market's size, and the fourth property had to be equally in line with the other three.  The new rule was called "No More than Four".

Four was just the beginning for Mel.

"I don't see why we can't own more than three FM's in a single market", he was once quoted as saying.

He continued the push for the FCC to relax the rules even further, to the point where a single company was limited to a percentage of market share, which was more abstract and could easily be manipulated by ratings. In short, you could fire a successful program director for doing his job.
Commercial-per-hour limits were all but eliminated.  Especially on fragmented niche-driven formats like decade-based Classic Rock or Pop.  Song. DJ chatter.  Commercials.  More DJ chatter.  More Commercials.  Song.  This was especially prevalent on stations in the nation's Top 10 markets.
As radio turned more and more into commercials with music in between, this gave birth to another market: Satellite radio.
Research showed that people were willing to pay a subscription to hear music without commercial interruptions.  Simply put, it was bringing services delivered to cable television via Digital Music Express and Music Choice, but this time through one's car.
Because I don't spend this much time in my car, I can't justify the expense.  But my own listening habits have changed over the years.  Today I listen to music through my iTunes application on my iPhone, which holds about 800 titles.  Most of the tracks are stuff that were hits back in the day, but are today all but ignored by program directors.
Or I listen to other radio stations from far-away markets that can't be heard over-the-air here in western Pennsylvania.
Enjoy your retirement, Mel.
At least you're a radio guy who has something to depend upon for the future.
I'm not so sure about the rest of us.


NEXT WEEK:  The Hot Seat

AM Radio

"Wanna get down in a cool way?  Picture yourself on a beautiful day...big bell bottoms and groovy long hair, walking in style with a portable CD player...NO!  You would listen to the music on the AM radio...you could hear the music on the AM radio."
Those words were forever immortalized by Art Alexakis, the lead singer of the band Everclear, in the song he penned, released in 2000, entitled "AM Radio".  If you ever want to hear it, it's off the band's album "Songs from an American Movie Vol. 1: Learning how to smile".  It's a great tune.
Alexakis reminisces about growing up in southern California, during the 1970s listening to Top 40 music over an AM radio, which most broadcasters today find blasphemous, if not downright laughable.  The most celebratory note of the song is a jingle from the legendary KHJ, played at the very beginning, followed by a static-ridden sample of 70's soul diva Jean's Knight's "Mr. Big Stuff", which establishes itself into the song.
It didn't seem that long ago when you could still find Top 40 music on an AM station.  You still can find such stations, albeit in smaller markets and in much smaller numbers.
But stations broadcasting over the AM band have been shrinking over the past decade, giving way to FM and other forms of electronic media.
I'm not in favor of giving up on the band.  At least not yet.  Though I now consider myself retired from the business, my career, like those of many others, began on AM radio.
WACB in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, was known as "The Ace of Entertainment" in the late 1980s when I first joined the staff in May 1988.  Satellite-delivered formats were emerging since the first half of the decade, but WACB remained live and local, with jocks on-site playing their music in real time, rather than engaging in the practice today known as 'voice-tracking', often involving jocks from other markets across the country, infamously mispronouncing town names.
We played real records.  You know, the kind that are mostly black vinyl discs that can skip if they're not handled properly.  What wasn't on records was played from cartridges, called 'carts' for short.  They operated on the same principle as an 8-track tape, but without the four program separation.
Records skipped.  Carts wowed or snarled.  Both happened on the air.  And sometimes it even happened during the 'restroom records'.  This was a list of songs that every rock jock knew that were long enough to assure a non-rushed bathroom break.
"Light My Fire" by The Doors.  "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" by Crosby, Stills and Nash.  Anything other than "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin.  "MacArthur Park" by Richard Harris.  And there was the granddaddy of them all..."American Pie" by Don McLean.  There's many others, but those are the ones immediately coming to mind as I'm writing this.
Good times.
And we more or less programmed our own music.  We followed the music clock (most of the time), but more often than not, we skipped over song titles we didn't like printed on the 3 x 5" index cards and kept going until we found one we did.
And it didn't matter to the majority of our listeners.
We were allowed to be creative and chatty.  But as the years progressed and FCC ownership and operational rules were relaxed, in came the multiconglomerates swallowing up signals, mostly high-powered FMs, automating them, and any AM's that were included were either switched to syndicated news/talk formats, also automated, or turned off altogether.
The number of AM's has shrunk.  It will continue to shrink.
It has to.
Most of the stations that have disappeared are low-powered with complicated and expensive directional antenna arrays, and are too close to major population centers to really be missed by the overall majority, as broadcast television and city newspaper can provide local news in a much more superior manner, thanks to the advances made in modern technology.
I for one, am not ready to give up on AM radio, but a leaner, trimmer band is necessary to assure the band's survival.  It has become the proving ground for up and coming radio talent.  If these 'farm clubs' are allowed to die, where is the next generation going to go for spring training?
And that's a whole other argument to be featured next week.
Pardon the pun, but stay tuned.


NEXT WEEK:  Retirement from Radio

The Kidd at Heart

Someone once said "Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life."
One person did just that.  He has lately come to be known as "Radio's Biggest Kidd".
To most people outside of Dallas, Texas he was an unknown.

To those in and around Dallas, he was a close friend who helped you get your weekday mornings off to a good start.  He even did so via satellite for a number of stations in about 75 markets nationwide.

To us in the radio industry, including those of us retired from it, he was a brother.  He was out to prove that good morning radio didn't have to be dirty or tasteless, and he did just that.

He published a monthly newsletter called "The Morning Mouth", dedicated to helping morning jocks make their shows better, no matter what size market you were in.

Bit ideas, cheap promotional gimmicks that wouldn't make the GM reach for his antacids, and news that jocks needed to know about the changing facets of the industry, but might have been reluctant to accept.

"This business is changing so much, that a year from now, I don't think we'll recognize it," he said in one issue.  That was shortly after FCC rules were first relaxed that allowed a company to own more than one FM in a single market, thus putting your once mortal enemy right across the hall from you.  Weird.

At that time, the internet was slowly burgeoning.  He encouraged jocks to embrace the evolving technology with "BitBoard" a free show prep sharing service accessed online, where jocks who subscribed agreed to provide a weekly report of what they had planned or had previously done for their shows.  

Though a jock for more than three and a half decades, he was also an astute businessman, later selling both "The 'Mouth" and BitBoard to other broadcasting companies.  

His name was David Peter Cradick, or "Kidd Kraddick" to the scores of listeners he entertained each morning out of the Kiss-FM studio in Dallas, Texas...the native Ohioan's adoptive home base for almost 30 years, having been born in the Toledo area and raised in Florida.

In an industry where shock jocks like Howard Stern, Mancow, and Don Imus gain publicity by what they say or do (negatively), Kidd didn't stoop to such tactics.  He made a name for himself by not engaging in overly high-profile sophomoric on-air stunts, but rather using his position to make the world a better place for the most vulnerable members of society.

Thus, Kidd gained a reputation as the industry's 'good guy'.  Gregarious, engaging, and personable are just a few adjectives to describe his character.

He made time for everyone, without exception.  He valued his listeners, and valued his colleagues. Especially the young, hungry talents still getting their feet wet in small markets.  I know this personally, because I was one of them.

I always called him Dave, never Kidd.  "Hey Pittsburgh!  How's it going?" he would ask when fielding the occasional call from me.  I felt a bit of a personal connection, because as he was having his tenth birthday party, I was coming into this world.

A short 21 years ago, he personified the example of 'giving back' by creating his own charity, The Kraddick Foundation.  The charity is dedicated to helping children with life-threatening illnesses or chronic injury, mostly listener-funded.  You can read more about it at www.kiddskids.com.

He also had his share of personal problems, all of which he successfully overcame.

He was canned from KEGL after eight years in 1992, in favor of a format change and Howard Stern.  Many thought he was finished after a six-month paid vacation by the then-owners.  No one could be more wrong as the new KHKS hit the airwaves as a new Top 40 station after modest success under an NAC format, and quickly hired Kidd to do mornings, sparing no marketing expense.  It all paid off...for he would remain there for the rest of his career, and his life.

His marriage of 21 years to his wife Carol Charette ended in divorce in 2007.  "I was fortunate to meet Dave when he was doing nights and eating 'Beanie Weenies' out of the can," she once said.

They had a daughter together named Caroline, born in 1990, and having just graduated college last year. Despite the parting, Kidd and Carol remained friends. Kidd eventually found love again, with Lissi Mullen, the 32-year-old national sales manager of the Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center, whom he planned to marry only very recently.
Though his fame was mostly confined to north Texas, Kidd managed to collect some famous friends over the years, including Dr. Phil McGraw, Ryan Seacrest, and Mark Cuban, who all expressed shock over his passing.  Just to name a few.
Two weeks prior to his passing on Saturday, July 27th, 2013, he did a bit on his show about how he'd like to die, complete with a fake memorial service on the air.

He wanted it to be quick.  No terminal illness or prolonged suffering.  

He got his wish, albeit earlier than anyone ever could have imagined.

And the timing of the on-air bit was eerie.  

It happened on a New Orleans golf course, during a charity event for his foundation.  He had fallen ill and was taken to West Jefferson Medical Center, where he died moments later at age 53 of what we now know to have been due to complications arising from heart disease.
We also know now that Kidd did not die a suffering death.  He died at one of his own charity events, doing what he loved.  All things considered, that's not too bad.

"When I die," he told his morning show team during the death bit, "you have permission to take a bunch of creepy pictures of my body."

Whether they took him up on that offer, or whether his family allowed it is anyone's guess.  No pictures have surfaced.  So far, no one of the hundreds who attended his private memorial service a week ago this past Friday has anything to say about it.  Plans for a public memorial service have yet to be announced.

But the truth is this.

The world has lost a kind and generous spirit.  The radio industry has lost a gifted on-air talent.  Lissi has lost her life partner.  Caroline has lost her beloved daddy.

"I will never wrap my brain around my father's passing," she Tweeted.  "Please keep me and my family in your prayers and ask the Lord to watch over my Daddy."

You got it..."Little Kidd."

NEXT WEEK:   Band on the Run

GM's New Deal

For those of you who have been paying attention, you may notice that General Motors has undergone a major facelift of several of its dealerships over the past few years.

It's kind of hard to miss.  The soon-to-be signature blue tiles of Chevrolet dealerships and the silver tile of Buick and GMC dealerships, all complete with new signage.

GM has unfairly received a lot of critical backlash over the past few years.  Whether is was taking government-offered assistance to ensure the brand's survival, or starting this program to facelift its dealership network, with the automaker picking up the majority of the tab for its dealers.

This backlash, to me, is not fair.

I'm a second-generation motorhead.  I not only pay attention to what's under the hood, but what all goes into the production of an automobile.  From its engineering to its purchase.

For a period of 18 months, I worked for Mazda's Flat Rock assembly plant in southeastern Michigan, about 20 miles south of Detroit.  During my tenure, the plant produced the 626 and the MX-6 models, including the Ford Probe through Auto Alliance, a joint endeavor between Ford and Mazda of North America. 

My job was to take cars off the assembly line and either move them into the storage yard or lines for shipping by truck or rail.  Or we pulled cars from the storage yard into the shipping lines. 

Our busiest time of the year was the first quarter, when dealers were replenishing their stock after the year-end closeout sales.  This meant seven-day workweeks and sometimes 10 to 12 hour days...all in sub-freezing temperatures and blizzard-like conditions.

Not always a pleasant place to work.  Nonetheless, I still had fun doing it, and still have many happy memories of the place.  

Thus, it was only natural that I keep an eye on the industry years after leaving it.

I especially paid attention to GM's plight, and how the conservative capitalist purists insisted that the brand be allowed to die.

To do so would have cost not just thousands, but MILLIONS of jobs.  Not just at GM, but the subcontractors that produce parts for the automaker.  The network of approximately 6,000 dealerships nationwide, many of which employed at least 50 people.  

And there would have been the domino effect on the other brands that didn't have to fold, now that consumer confidence had been shattered forever due to the demise of what used to be the largest corporation in the world for decades.
One person still has yet to offer me a plausible solution that would have been an effective alternative to the federal bailout.

Let it die...real smart, huh?

But the brand hasn't died.  It's come back.

And it's done so in a big, big way.

GM has trimmed its dealer network to approximately 4,300, which has allowed it to be administered much more efficiently.  The retail brands have been trimmed from seven to four.  Its new dealership renovation program has the goal of providing uniformity and instant recognition not just with the vehicle's badging, but the 'badging' of its dealerships as well.
It only makes sense.  As a society no longer limited to the geographic borders of its native land, we have had more foreign-born citizens coming to the U.S. than ever before.  Those who were not born with English as their first language.  The common appearance of the dealerships don't require a strong command of the English language to know what can be found at one.  The color and badging do the work for you.
Ever wonder why controls inside vehicles have symbols instead of words these days?

By the way, this is nothing new among the Big Three.  Just a different take on what Chrysler did several years before when many of its dealerships took on a southwestern hacienda-styled motif, and Ford adopted new signage.

And there are rules.

To participate, the dealer can only show it's GM-licensed brands in the showrooms.  Foreign branded new vehicles owned by the same dealer must be located in a separate showroom with its lot separate from the GM vehicles.  

The program is strictly voluntary, but it's hinted that non-participating dealers had better be producing impressive sales numbers if they want to keep their franchises.  Some of those in the program have gone the extra mile and built entirely new facilities according to GM standards.

I heard one man complain recently "all done with (taxpayer) money."  

Read the papers, buddy.

GM paid back every penny they borrowed from the feds.  Its leadership at the time was smart enough to realize that any negative publicity generated by asking for loan forgiveness or an unreasonably long term of repayment, could kill the badly-injured brand.  

And people are buying again.

Many GM dealerships are now reporting that 2013 could be their best year ever, in terms of sales figures. Not only that, but people are buying the larger pick-ups and SUV's, as opposed to the "loss leaders" (aka subcompacts) when the industry's rebound began.

GM has not only regained a foothold in the new car market, but it has worked hard to increase its brand awareness and live within its means.  Unfortunately, it had to learn this lesson the hard way like other companies when the housing market collapse of 2008 created the domino effect that still has our economy healing.

Healing is always better than reeling.

NEXT WEEK:  For Kidd's Sake