How is that recovery going?

[longbow]

Natural Disasters are killing the insurance industry. All that means is higher prices and mergers for the companies to keep going. Mergers mean layoffs of 7 to 10% of the staff.

How is work going at your job?

I had a good laugh at how some products are changed to hide hidden price increase. This is not new, but it really is expanding.

One of my customers was going to add up to 70 jobs by the end of the summer. Instead, GM is going cancel the new design and continue using the old part for the new model year.

A customer that does packaging told me they are reworking product boxes to allow printing of the content weight at the place they are filled to adjust for smaller contents without changing the box size. What that means is no down time to order new containers as item contents get smaller. The way you can tell if a brand has this is the print for the weight will be black ink and the text will not be an exact match to the box. Also instead of 16 oz you will see weights such as 15.25 oz or 14.30 oz. They litterally can change the weight every day. The filling machines also can be adjusted as needed.

For bottles, look at the bottom to see if the shape has changed to push the contents up into the bottle so it looks at the same level. Another trick is ribbed products, or a bigger handle to displace the interior contents.

They are doing thier best not to change the general shape of the product packaging.

I also hear the small county I live at, is almost 2 million down in tax reciepts compared to two years ago.r

What have you heard?

 

[woowoo2]

Another trick is ribbed products,

For some smaller may be better.......

 

[japartridge]

For some smaller may be better.......

 

[Z71Gunner]

The insurance company that I worked for suffered severe weather related losses in KY during the past couple of years. If it wasn't the hurricane (Ike), ice storms (2009) it was the wind and tornadoes. This greatly impacted us as our parent company located here in Indy, which will remain nameless, decided to sell our small company to another Insurance Carrier located in Virginia because we were not profitable.

Needless to say, our satellite office located here in Indianapolis was shut down and the 8 of us lost our jobs as our positions were eliminated by the new parent company.

I now join the ranks of the unemployed, again. Second time in five years that I've been laid off due to downsizing.

 

[IndySSD]

Another trick is ribbed products, or a bigger handle to displace the interior contents.

They are doing thier best not to change the general shape of the product packaging.

Geeze, I don't want to displace any of the interior contents on the ribbed products I use and I SURE AS HELL don't want them changing the general shape!


All joking aside, a downtrodden economy is generally OK for my business as it means more people spend time at home consuming my companies goods/services. However if things get TOO bad, then like all luxuries, it will be bad because people will cut out all non essentials.


That being said.... the economy is still bad..... how do I know for sure? There are still guys holding signs on every major city street that say "Cash for Gold"..... When the economy is good, those businesses shut their doors and go back to whatever business they were doing before... it's generally a 10-15 year cycle from some of the precious metal vendors I've spoken to.