(Newser)  That whole “subprime crisis” hasn’t scared banks away from the lucrative world of subprime lending. The nation’s top subprime lenders—like Capital One, GM Financial, HSBC, and JPMorgan Chase—are all trying to woo back less-creditworthy borrowers, who tend to rack up late fees while paying rates as high as 29%, the New York Timesreports. “It’s clear that we are returning to business as usual,” said a former Federal Reserve regulator. But that’s not entirely true; the focus hasn’t yet shifted to mortgages, it’s on auto loans.

Auto loans were left largely unaffected by new post-crisis regulations, and the market for bundled auto loan securities is expanding—so much so that Moody’s last year issued a report that it was growing “too much too fast.” In the fourth quarter of 2011, 23% of new auto loans were subprime. But lenders are also eager to roll out credit cards: In December, 1.1 million new cards were issued to people with damaged credit, the Times notes.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Now see the post I wrote in 2008:

Where Were You in ’32?

December 5, 2008 — Stephen Brooks

Here’s the story; my original post follows.

Hotel Guest Sues Over 75-Cent USA Today

Hotels shouldn’t provide newspapers unless requested: federal lawsuit

 ORIGINAL POST FROM JULY 2008 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I stayed at the Marriot Springhill Suites in Danbury, CT on Monday night.  I forgot to hand in my key card when I left, and found it in my briefcase today with the rest of my trip detritus.  Take a second to read what was printed about USA Today  on the back of the little envelope that contained the key card.

I didn’t even glance at it when it was handed to me at check-in.  I didn’t read it until I was about to throw it in my recycling just now.  Marriott just stole 75¢ from me!

This is an example of negative option marketing and it is a very bad idea.  It became famously unpopular here in Canada a few years ago when a cable TV company tried to gouge their customers, and the practice is consequently illegal.

It’s especially stupid in this particular instance.  Marriott charged me $209 before taxes for the room.  Was the 0.36% of that revenue that came from this ridiculous newspaper charge really worth pissing me off?  And they don’t even clear the whole amount: part of getting this three-quarters of a buck is administering the small charge in the system, printing these little envelopes (or sacrificing the message that could be placed in the notice’s place), and handling people’s objections when they encounter this foolishness.

Even the wording is dumb.  “I” have NOT requested the delivery.  Maybe if whatever genius came up with this idea had been forced to see it written out truthfully, he or she would have seen the error of their ways:

The newspaper that every halfway decent hotel leaves outside their guests’ rooms each morning is not complimentary at this facility.  It costs 75 cents.  We will be leaving one outside your door even though you didn’t ask for it, and we’ll be adding the cost to your bill.  If you don’t want us to perpetrate this cash-grab, you must take the time to call us and tell us not to steal your money, or go out of your way to check this box, and return this envelope to the front desk.  Oh, and don’t forget that you’ll have to peruse your bill at checkout to be sure that we honoured your request!  Have a nice stay.

I’ll grant you that anyone who lives in New Brunswick probably can decipher this.  But the region of Miramichi is presumably trying to draw tourists from afar.   And NB’s First Nations place names are already hard enough.  I’m thinking of Kouchibouguac and Magaguadavic (pronounced MACK-a-DAVE-ee), for instance.  Why throw in the inscrutable font factor?

Here’s the whole ad:

Is this man taking a dump?  Is he panning for gold?  Is he “discovering what ‘WE’ know”?  No, he’s FISHING.  That’s what Miramichi is famous for.  Why go to such great lengths to hide it?

So, my righteous self has a problem with this ad on many levels:

1. I know that written-word fonts are all the rage now, but if they become so “human” that they’re unreadable, what’s the point?

2. Print ads should NEVER have URLs in them.  If you want to provide a link in your print ad, include a scannable barcode like this:

3.  “Discover what we know.” is one of the most ambiguous (almost creepy) taglines I’ve ever heard.  What if  “what we know” is how to re-animate the dead?  Or, more benignly, how to pick up things from the water?

4. And the topper is that this ad appeared in the Moncton Times & Transcript, which serves a market where EVERYONE already knows that the Miramichi has the best salmon fishing in the world.  Whom are we trying to reach, here?  Visiting business people who might come back to NB because of a photo of an old guy grabbing something out of the river?  Sheesh.

Yesterday, I wanted to transfer all the photos that my daughter has on her digital camera to my hard drive, so she could email one of them to her teacher.  The camera is fairly new to her, so I had never had to do this before.

In my dream world, plugging a camera into a USB port would be the same as plugging in a flash drive — you would see a whole bunch of files, and you could pick the ones that you want to grab.  (Similar to how I wish iPods would work.)

Alas, that is not the case.  As soon as the camera is plugged in, it makes your computer go to a web site to download an application.  You CANNOT retrieve the images from the camera without doing this first.

I already feel like someone’s takin’ me for a ride.

THEN, once you’ve downloaded and installed the app, and even before you have the actual photos off the camera, Kodak asks you to log into facebook.  Did you hear me?  LOG INTO FACEBOOK!!!  I presume they think that everybody wants to share every pic they take, with the entire planet, instantly.  Well I don’t.  And neither does my daughter.

I did NOT log onto facebook, and the Kodak app was mad at me, but let me continue nonetheless.  So I accomplished my goal (eventually).

For a complete neophyte, I can see how this might be a way to help them out.  But it just smells bad.  It’s like if they gave an appendectomy to every human who walked into a hospital.  Sure, you may need one someday, but MAKING you do it isn’t the right way.

Yesterday, the highway drive from my office in Saint John to my home in Moncton (about 150km) was a MESS. There was snow, rain, freezing rain, sleet, hail, and ice pellets. (Canadian readers will know there’s a difference between those last 4 items.) Most sane individuals had already abandoned any idea of driving through this crap, and those that were still on the road were going painfully slow – about 40km/h. And there were many motorists going nowhere, because they had slid off the road.

I, however, was gleefully cruising along at the speed limit – 110km/h. My Audi S4 has Quattro all-wheel drive. This is a suspension/computer system that dominated the European rally racing circuit in the early ‘80s because it was so good – Audi won nearly all the races. After learning in my youth how to winter-drive in conventional front-engine, real-wheel-drive vehicles; the difference in an S4 is shocking. In any road condition, at any speed, it feels like you are glued  to the road. My car probably saved my life yesterday.

Now to my point. Thirty/forty years ago, people expected  their cars to be unmanageable in snow, to break down periodically, to rust out after a few years, to be expensive to maintain, and to be sold by unscrupulous hucksters. Because of the entry of QUALITY vehicles into the North American market, all this changed. Now all vehicles are expected  to be well-made, easy to service, reliable, and available through honest distributors; whether they’re from Japan, Korea, Germany, Sweden, or Detroit.

Did the automobile industry increase their focus on quality, causing consumers to upgrade their expectations; or did consumers begin to realize that cars could be well-made, and start to demand it? Probably a little of both, but it was marketers who gauged the public expectations, and product managers who made the changes to their products. Chicken and egg, I know, but who cares? The lesson is that QUALITY became more important. I think this is a transferrable concept. Designing/making/selling/maintaining a higher quality product will almost always lead to success with your market.

It started when my cell phone, which is from the Pleistocene epoch, was getting no signal.  I called Rogers (Canadians will know that company), and the friendly tech support lady fixed me right up.  I figured, while I was on the phone with them, I would ask about something Bell Aliant (the OTHER Canadian telco giant) is doing in my neighbourhood.  For the last few weeks they have been stringing FibreOp cables on all the hydro poles.  Also, there is a billboard campaign throughout the city, advertising much lower rates than I currently pay Rogers for my broadband and cable TV.

So, the friendly tech support lady transferred me to a friendly “customer retention specialist,” who, on the spot, knocked 20% off my cable, land line, cell, and internet.  90 seconds of my time just saved me ~$40 per month.

Just by asking.

While Québec is the largest producer of real Maple Syrup; here in New Brunswick, we have a pretty solid industry built around it.  Of course, maple syrup is only one of the products you can make with the sap of the Sugar Maple: maple butter and maple candy are also popular, especially in these parts. As a matter of fact, there is an annual tradition for most people to take their kids out to the “Sugarbush” to visit a “Sugar Camp” AKA “Sugar Shack.”  Here you see my daughter and three neighbourhood friends about to enjoy their treat of some hot thick maple liquid, which is kind of halfway through the refining process between syrup and candy.  Here it is being poured onto some snow, where the kids roll it onto popsicle sticks and it cools into a kind of lollipoppish thing.

For those who don’t know, maple products are made through a series of evaporations.  The sap that is taken directly from the tree is boiled until most of the water is gone and the sugary part dominates the liquid.  That’s syrup.  You get about 1 part syrup for every 8-10 parts sap that you boil.  Boil it some more, and pour it into molds, let it harden – that’s candy.  The technique was probably discovered by the Algonquin First Nation, but there are other theories.

Anyway, my question has always been, and the Web doesn’t even seem to know the answer, what prompted some nutcase hundreds or thousands of years ago, to boil tree sap and then eat it?  Did they try this with everything?  Was there some mad proto-scientist who went around boiling random things and feeding the results to people to see what happened?

For years I wondered about this, and then, last spring, I figured it out.

First, some physics about how maple sap is collected.  Or, more importantly, when.  It can only be collected in the spring, when the temperatures drop below freezing at night and rise above 0°C during the day.  As you know, water expands when it freezes.  So the night-time freeze forces the sap (which is produced by the roots) up the trunk of the tree to nourish the buds that will become leaves.  During the day, the sap melts inside the tree to become liquid again.  That’s when the taps that have been hammered into the tree trunk drip out the sap into waiting buckets.

But the question remains; who figured out it was worthwhile to do all this?  I got my answer one spring evening when I noticed an icicle, about 30cm long, hanging from a branch of the sugar maple in our front yard.  Nothing strange about that, but then I noticed that there were no other icicles on any other tree in our yard, or any other on this particular tree either.  I then noticed that this icicle was emanating from a place where that branch had been broken during the winter – probably by ice/snow overload or something.  Therefore, the icicle hadn’t been formed by rain or snow-melt – it must be frozen liquid that came from the tree.  I broke off the icicle (like people, including Algonquins, have been doing for millennia), and tasted it, and it was decidedly sweet.  Aha!  So I rushed inside and put the icicle into a pot and boiled it.

Now, bear in mind that the total volume of this icicle was only about 100ml.  But I did triumphantly produce about half a teaspoon of syrup.  Mystery solved!

One team that we played fairly regularly, St. Thomas University, had a player who weighed at least 250 lbs.  And it as ALL muscle.  Her name was Bonnie.  The game plan for every match for STU, was, “give the ball to Bonnie.”  And it worked.

Now, let me turn the story to OUR team – the Fredericton High School Queen Bees.  (It’s a long story – our school colours were black and yellow, and all the other teams are called Black Kats, except for the boys rugby team, which are called the Hornets, and I wanted to call the girls’ team the Hornettes, but whatever.)  We had some exceptional athletes on our squad, many of whom would letter in this and other sports.  But this post is not about them.

This post is about Carolyn Garber.  An extremely intelligent and attractive young lady who was 2 years ahead of herself in grades, and about 15 years ahead in maturity.  She tried out for the RUGBY team, despite being about half the size of any of the other (very fit) girls.

We weren’t even allowed high school field time to practice, so I used to take the ladies down to the Fredericton Green for our workouts.  On one such evening, we were working on tackling drills.  I explained, that not even the largest person in the world can run anywhere, if their ankles are pinned together.

Flash forward to the following weekend.  We are playing STU, and Bonnie (of course) has the ball.  Our biggest, fittest, roughest players are literally BOUNCING off her as she rumbles down the field for a certain try. (“Try” = “touchdown” in rugby.)  THEN, from out of no-where, like a snake or a ferret, comes Carolyn!  She grabs Bonnie by the knees and slips her hands down to her ankles, and it was like a redwood falling.  It seemed to take 5 minutes for Bonnie to hit the turf, and when she did, car alarms went off.  It was AWESOME!.

Anyway,  we still lost like 106-3, but that was ABSOLUTELY my proudest moment as a coach.

To get the full effect, you’ll have to watch the whole 6-something minute video here, but it brought back a lot of memories of when I had folks out on stage doing amazing things.  BTW, I’m not saying that Glee is the best art on TV – probably on a par with American Idol.  But it does capture the fear/rapture of performing live…

Also BTW, the theatre in this clip is fairly similar to the Capitol, here in Moncton, whose board I am vice president of.  [Attention grammar police!]