Letters To An
Overseas Friend.

I’m reading Hunger. Knute (I did it again! I’ll call this the Knute Rockne Effect) Knut Hamsun. I am doing kind of a literary revisiting tour. Things I’ve read and things that were once on my consciousness and then weren’t. Schaefer’s Shane. Camus’ The Outsider. And now Hamsun, 14 years after Norway, where I heard so much about Hamsun’s writing, which was intriguing, and his world view, which was distracting.

I bought something at the local hardware store that came to just under ten dollars. I hand the clerk a twenty dollar bill. The clerk takes it and says “from ten.” I don’t correct him. No need to. He meant “from twenty.” Let him correct himself. But maybe he thinks it is ten? No. I see him put the twenty dollar bill in the slot with the other twenties. He misspoke. But then he gives me change for ten. I say I gave him a twenty. He looks at me cockeyed. Pauses. A short one. Didn’t even feel uncomfortably long. No sound of crickets or a wolf howl in the distance. Nothing like that. He breaks the short pause like so:

-“OK.”

He hands me an additional ten and wishes me a good day. I am appeased. And that’s that or is it that? I feel a trust has been broken. Perhaps a trust in my honesty. Perhaps a trust in my currency note recognition. Perhaps a trust in his own currency note recognition or “with-it-ness”. Is that worth ten dollars? To me, yes, it’s worth it. Ten bucks is ten bucks. But what is two bucks? Fifty cents? There is a number for sure.

Hamsun’s protagonist would have said to keep the extra ten, he doesn’t need it anyways.

I just posted some old furniture on Graigslist. Free. Got about 25 responses and they were snatched up within minutes. I took time to respond to every inquiry to let them know that the pieces were spoken for. Is there a protocol to this? Or to put it another way, is it a bit weird to respond to every inquiry to say that they can not have it? I would want to know if I were them.

This one is about business, but stick with me here.

A mostly forgettable advert stuck in my head today. It would have been entirely forgotten, except for the tagline at the end. “We put members first, because we don’t have shareholders.” It was for Nationwide Insurance. So I did some research. Turns out there are two (or maybe more?) basic kinds of insurance companies, at least in the States, public and mutual.

Conventional wisdom, at least my wisdom, says insurance companies want to maximize payment from its members while minimizing the payouts to members. Do that well, and you gain shareholders and investment. But this model only applies to public companies. I did not know that. In principle, mutual companies basically try to break even. There’s no incentive to maximize intake (premiums and deductibles) and minimize payouts. Of course, it’s not that simple. Both models offer pros and cons to the consumer. No need to get into that here.

If you made it through the dissertation on insurance company models, here’s the interesting part. At least interesting to me. You’re in the business, so I request your opinion. This Nationwide tagline, is it a stroke of elegance? I mean elegant in that the marketer presents a fact, one that sounds like a simple fact, and lets the audience come to the conclusion that the marketer wants to convey. Isn’t there an industry name for this technique? The tagline is making a claim without making a claim and it lets the listener feel like the conclusion is a given, when the conclusion is actually debatable. In this case, mutual companies don’t necessarily and wholly put the interest of an individual member first. If you were like me and didn’t know how insurance companies work, it makes sense and sounds about right.

I was once told about a scene in Madmen. Something about a line for a cigarette company. “The one that’s cut.” (in reference to the tobacco preparation) Every company cuts the tobacco. It doesn’t matter.