Thursday, May 23, 2013
Mets’ Ike Davis On Struggles: ‘I Can’t Do Any Worse’
(newyork.cbslocal.com)
IKEA: Join our free loyalty program!
Read More...Despite growing calls for his demotion, Davis won’t be sent down to Triple-A before Friday’s series opener against the Braves, according to the New York Daily News.
“Maybe after the weekend,” a source told the paper.
It’s been a frustrating season for Davis, batting .147 with nine RBIs after getting off to a miserable start last year, too.
“I know I’m going to play better, especially hitting-wise. I can’t do any worse,” he said. “If ...
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1 2 >Also, Amway is gross.
Apart from not doing anyone any good, it's great.
Oh, so many jokes could be made here.
All that time spent in your mother's basement protected your skin from the harsh sun.
No joke. Was asked about work habits as part of my facial analysis.
I wonder if they've got a cream for Mickey Ward.
Yes, mentioned this in the above piece, along with both Capital New York pieces. The difference here being that Amway is on-site, with direct access to the Mets' customers. How you feel about that, as I wrote in the piece, dovetails with how you feel about Amway.
So, what's the difference between Amway and Avon or Mary Kay, or any of those other direct distribution companies?
I've been looking for that, I have a creepy carpet.
That makes sense because all the riches from the Amway scam have gone to the DeVos family who are big philanthropists in Michigan. The DeVos family also owns the Orlando Magic for some reason.
If you live there, you may remember some of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_DeVos's $40 million worth of gubernatorial campaign ads.
Avon and Mary Kay actually have consumers who use their products that don't actually sell their products. The products might be crap or unnecessary, but they do use them. Amway and Herbalife basically only sell to their distributors who then try to sell their products. Essentially, Amway and Herbalife only have the products to shield themselves from anti-Ponzi scheme laws.
Funny. My only exposure to Amway was as a kid, my Mom used to buy Amway laundry detergent, b/c other detergents made my skin itch.
So, they had at least one real customer in the 1970's-80's :-)
Edit: the distributor was quite creepy.
That's a different group.
Ha! You might have been the only one. Selling Amway products independently has got to be a tough way to make a living (and since over 99% of their distributors fail, I guess the #'s back me up.) I remember someone trying to sell me on buying into their company and I couldn't get past the idea that people would be these odd brands of bog standard products from me when they could just pick it up from Safeway or Walgreens. I declined the offer.
Do you have a cite on the 99%? Hugely high failure rates (>80%) are ubiquitous in sales roles.
I'm not saying it isn't a Ponzi scheme, I have no idea, but it doesn't seem crazy on the surface.
I mean, Mary Kay, and Avon are selling the same makeup you can get at Walgreens, right?
If your products were just as good as P&G, you should be able to sell them cheaper, b/c you don't advertise, and the supermarket/grocery store probably takes a huge markup.
Heh, didn't realize that that Seinfeld carpet cleaning bit was referencing a real thing.
Are they a baseball team?
Ha!
Makes perfect sense to me. Desperate, gullible, none-too-bright. A match made in marketing heaven.
Still, it appears that Amway is looking to take advantage of naive, unsophisticated, gullible urbanites -- but so are the Mets!
It turns out that Judge Rakoff really did depart from his decision in Picard v. Sterling. I have no idea why.
We don't deserve any more shrill grumps, please do not consider THAT position open.
Never used Mary Kay or bought any makeup from Avon, but the latter sells lots of products you can't get in regular stores, like that one body oil everybody thought was good insect repellent, and their own lines of fragrances that aren't knockoffs, and jewelry, and giftware.
Speaking of debt searches, when I enter "Wilpon" (or anything else) as the search term in the Uniform Commercial Code database at
http://appsext7.dos.ny.gov/pls/ucc_public/web_search.main_frame
both IE and Chrome return completely blank pages. Anyone know why?
http://appsext7.dos.ny.gov/pls/ucc_public/web_search.main_frame
Same address. Odd.
Are you typing it into business name instead of person's name?
Keep up the good work, btw.
But, are they meaningfully different from the Revlon products you can get in the Pharmacy?
I mean Amway has it's own exclusive brands of detergent and whatever. But, I'm sure they're effectively almost identical to P&G products.
Just out of curiosity, what made you stop using it? Did you grow out of the skin problem, or did you find some other product that also worked for you?
Yeah, just grew out of it. It wasn't a serious clinical allergy. Just annoying.
Copied from the article:
"A simple search of the Uniform Commercial Code database of debts turns up dozens of debts assigned to Wilpon, to his wife, to other family members as well. But other than a brief note well down in a New York Times story the following day pointing this out, none of the stories around the city bothered to put Fred Wilpon's assertion in any kind of context."
This is, of course, factually untrue. A UCC search does not turn up "debts", it turns up "liens". This is not a sematic distinction - it is reasonably common to have a situation where a secured loan is nearly entirely discharged but liens have not yet been released. Wilpon and his various business entities could, for example, still be using some bank products from old lenders, when practically there's no debt incurred.
But lets look closer at a quote from Wilpon - from a Howard Megdal article, no less - to see if the man is a liar:
"It wasn't, as people have written, the reason," Wilpon said about bank debt. "It was a balance there, because we had to make sure the banks got paid off all of the debt. There's no one in my family"—there's the Katz family, the Wilpon family, kids—"[that now] has any personal bank debt. Zero. Everything has been paid. We don't owe a dollar to anybody. We have mortgages on buildings and stuff like that, but we don't owe a dollar."
My emphasis added. He is admitting that some of his assets are encumbered by liens - which the UCC-1s are consistent with. That does not mean that there is any outstanding bank debt that is recourse to him.
If you can't tell the difference betweeen a lien and debt, you shouldn't be writing about the finances of the Wilpons, which are by all accounts bewilderingly complex.
Your own quote is probably the easiest way to explain why your analysis is incorrect. The UCC-1s turn up outstanding debts that other reporting makes clear is still quite unpaid; the personal debt has not been extracted from the byzantine array of personal/business debt. It's part of the complex reason why Wilpon can't simply cash out and go home.
But your obnoxious tone about something you're wrong about is certainly appreciated.
When Fred Wilpon says, "We have mortgages on buildings and stuff like that, but we don't owe a dollar," he's actually saying, "except for all those debts we have with regard to 'buildings and stuff like that', we don't have any debt." Fred's being wholly disingenuous with that statement.
Also, if you're taking the most favorable definition of UCC-related debt (without offering us any of the detail we've seen elsewhere), and still having to conclude that the Wilpons are in debt, it doesn't do anything for your case. The best case, as you note, is that the many liens against the Wilpons are indicative of at least some debt, and we've seen in many places (including Howard's columns) substantive lists of the Wilpons very signficant and perhaps crushing debt.
It seems uncalled for to me to be that aggressive in your post about what is at worst the use of shorthand wrt UCC listings, of liens created by debt (and debt that is still unresolved), for debt.
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