An economic anomaly on Franklin Street

I blogged in May that one of my favorite fast food restaurants opening a location on West Franklin Street across from Panera Bread. The restaurant opened today and as a promotional event, gave out free food the entire day yesterday and on Wednesday. Anyone could choose to wait on line for thirty minutes and order anything on the menu for free.

As a big fan of Chipotle Mexican Grill, I was ecstatic when I heard about this event. But as someone trained in economics, I found the event to disturbing. The free market teaches that “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” And yet the huge big line I witnessed at the corner of Franklin and Mallette Streets told me otherwise.

The next time I go out to Franklin Street, I am going to be on the lookout for people selling one dollar bills for 99 cents.

In search of new housing

I blogged yesterday about some of the changes that are beginning to take place in my life now that I am no longer a student and I am going to continue on that theme today. Starting next week I am going to have to look for a new place to live.

 

Currently I am renting a 935 square feet apartment with two bedroom and one bath for $920 a month. This is the same apartment I have lived in since the weekend before my first year of classes began. The lease ends the end of this month. In May there was a window in which I could have renewed my lease on a three to twenty-four month basis or choose to go month to month starting July 1. I chose the month to month route because I figured it would give me more flexibility even though I the month to month rate is $1085.

 

About three weeks ago I got a letter in the mail telling me that unless I renew on a longer term lease by July 2, my lease would be terminated in August. Although I was initially shocked, I can’t say this was unexpected. August is the most important month in the rental market and the rental office is much better off replacing a month to month tenant with one who is locked in on a longer term. And I heard that the demand for two bedroom apartments is such that the rental office is not even keeping a wait list.

 

I am a little upset that I will have to move but there is an upside to this. Wherever I end up will definitely be much cheaper than where I am now. I am really hoping that I will be able to find something in some of the really nice neighborhoods around the UNC campus such as the one near the Carolina Inn or the ones that run north of Franklin and Rosemary Streets. The biggest trick for me is to find a place where I can live on a temporary basis.

 

If I had been smart back in May, I would have tried to avoid this by renewing on a three month basis. But then again you know what they say about hindsight.

Keeping up with the Joneses while the real world catches up with me

Some of you know that I have a fascination with Mercedes and have always wanted to buy a used C or E Class from the late 90s. I saw one such vehicle on the internet last week. The used car dealership off of 15/501 had a 1999 E320 with only 67,000 miles on it and I decided to stop by just to see it in person. The car looks amazing with a red stripe going down each side of its deep blue body from the tail light all the way to the side mirror. As much as I liked the car, the thinking side of my brain still managed to convince me that even though I have enough assets to make an all cash acquisition (woooh … where did all this MBA business speak come from?), I shouldn’t be buying a car before getting a job.

 

The realities of the real world became more apparent yesterday when I received a letter from the U.S. Department of Education informing me that the loan I borrowed to fund the stellar UVA education I blogged about yesterday is about to become active again. Two years ago when I was getting ready to start business school the loan entered “deferment” and now that I am no longer a student (the national government is really quite efficient when it comes to getting information about law abiding citizens) I can expect to start receiving the monthly bill once again.

 

The thinking side of my brain is now telling me that if I could have bought that Mercedes with no debt, I can make that entire account payable to the U.S. Department of Education disappear. But I am going to tell him that I am in no more of a hurry to pay off that balance than I was last week in seriously negotiating a price on that Mercedes.

The value of having well known professors

I was flipping through the Wall Street Journal this morning and saw a Kenan-Flagler professor quoted in an article about potential sources of tech support for small businesses. This is the professor who taught the managing in the I.T. sector class that I took during this past Mod IV. This is not the first time in the past seven days that I have seen a former professor quoted in a major publication. Last week I picked up the latest issue of Fortune Magazine and saw a printed discussion between two economists on whether Americans are saving enough for retirement. One of them is an economist at Dartmouth University who was my professor for the intro to macroeconomics class at UVA.

 

Seeing my old economics professor’s picture on the pages of Fortune Magazine got me thinking about the benefits of having attended a supposed prestigious school such as UVA. I have been told, I don’t remember by whom, that one of the supposed benefits of attending an institution such as UVA is that you are more likely to have professors who are at the top of their fields and somehow this enhances your education. While I value every drop of knowledge I received (intentionally as well as accidentally) during my undergraduate years, I don’t agree that having an instructor who is considered a leader in his respective field necessarily contributes to one’s learning. This particular professor creatively used graphics drawn on a transparent slide to explain the multiplier effect in such a way that I will never forget it. But yet I don’t think the fact that he was a well published academic made me learn any more material or learn the material any better. I could have been just as adequately prepared by sitting in a classroom of thirty led by a graduate student instead of a “super-star” professor teaching in an auditorium of 400.

 

The only real value to having been taught by a big name professor is bragging rights, which I am exercising this minute.

“Love what you’ve done with the place”

On Wednesday I returned to McColl to use one of the conference rooms for my phone interview with the cable service provider in Philadelphia. This was my first time back to Kenan-Flagler since I graduated about a month and a week ago. After the interview, I went down to the first floor to check out the construction.

 

To those of you who don’t know, the first floor of McColl is getting a summer facelift. The large reading room, computer lab, “fishbowl” study rooms, will be torn down and replaced with a more open floor plan and newer, nicer reading rooms. The following video begins showing the entranceway that leads to the elevator and after the 360 degree pan ends showing another doorway that leads to the locker area.  The floor will look really nice when the new school year begins in August. I am hoping I won’t be in the area when that happens but judging from the way that phone interview went on Wednesday, I may still have quite a way to go.

 

Keeping myself busy

A friend of mine from church is moving to Texas this week and last night I helped out a bunch of his friends pack his two bedroom apartment into a 16 feet Penske truck. This friend is/was a graduate student in the computer science department and I noticed the almost obscene number of computers he has. I counted a Mac G3, another Mac G5, the original Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo, and an Xbox 360. One of his classmates jokingly asked him how many processors his truck was going to be carrying while another one not so jokingly said he counted five Mac computers.

 

Yesterday I received in the mail the annual report that I requested last week of what has become, in the last 24 hours, my favorite cable service provider. I blogged about this company last week and the annual report arrived just in time because I received an invitation yesterday for a phone interview later this week.

Learning new things

Spent last night with the guys from my Bible study watching the college world series baseball game between UNC and Rice University. It’s funny how I think of baseball as a game I understand completely and everytime I watch it with other people, I find out just how little I know about it. Last night’s key takeaway point was something called a “balk” that …. well let’s just say that I don’t completely understand it yet but I know it is a penalty against the pitcher that results in every runner from the opposite team advance one base.

 

The previous Sunday night I went with Larry to see the movie Knocked Up. I have mentioned Larry before on a previous post. He is a retired college professor who used to live downstairs from me. The movie was pretty funny but the funniest (and most memorable) line did not come from the screen. During the scene when Alison told Ben that she was pregnant, Ben said (paraphrasing) “I thought you asked me out to dinner because you wanted to hook up with me. I told my buddies I was expecting at least a B.J.” After the laugher in the audience died down, Larry elbowed me and asked “what’s a B.J.?”  

 

It goes to show that regardless of age or level of education, there are always opportunities to learn new things.

One month out

It was one month ago today that I officially received my MBA degree, this is a good point for me to give an update on my job search. As mentioned earlier, I traveled down to Atlanta for an interview for a position at the internet division of a cable television network and an informational interview at an internet company. I have yet to hear back from the cable television network. I figured this most likely means that the position has been offered to someone else and the company wants to wait for this person to accept before officially informing me that I have been rejected. However, I emailed someone in that company’s human resources last week and got a reply from the director (the UVA grad whom I had the initial phone interview with and whom I interviewed with again in Atlanta) telling me that a decision has not been made yet and that she has been having a tough time interviewing all the candidates because of everyone’s vacation schedules.

 

Right before leaving Atlanta, I had one informational interview with a product manager at the internet company. The purpose of an informational interview is not to apply for a specific (or even an existing) position but to express interest in the company and to demonstrate your knowledge of the industry. I think I did that quite thoroughly. I talked about some of the areas that I think the company should either go into or be weary about and the manager told me that one of the points that I brought up was something that has recently been discussed at a meeting. He told me one of his products was that company’s Internet Explorer toolbar and just two days earlier when I was interviewing at the cable television network, I learned that the television network’s desktop software served as a distributor for that toolbar. I casually brought that up just to impress him on my familiarity with his toolbar and he said “oh yea I talk to (name of cable television network) every week.” I then asked if he knew the name of a particular product manager at the television network and he said “I talked to him just today, how do you know him?” I then tried my best to not smile and revealed that he had interviewed me on that Wednesday. We then talked about that television network’s online products and what we thought about it.

 

That internet company’s recruiter had wanted me to meet with two to three other people for informational interviews. Sadly those have not taken place yet. But I have been making progress. I reached out to that company’s CEO, a Kenan-Flagler MBA alum, and he’s been supportive. I also had a random encounter with a Kenan-Flagler professor at the Southpoint Mall Barnes and Nobles on Memorial Day and when I emailed her a few days later about something she had asked me about, she wrote back and offered to introduce me to various contacts she has in the area. But sadly not every I have reached out to has been as responsive. There are two other companies I have been trying to network with. One is a cable television provider in Philadelphia and the other is a mobile phone content provider in Durham. I emailed Kenan-Flagler MBA alums in both companies last Friday and they have not replied yet.

 

The most challenging part of any job search is to stay positive. I have been doing a pretty good job with that until yesterday when I began to feel a bit discouraged. This morning I went out to have lunch with some people I know from church and then went to the Health Sciences Library where I emailed more alums. One of them is someone I found on the UNC General Alumni Association directory (this is not the Kenan-Flagler alumni directory and is available only to paid GAA members) and he responded within an hour and got me in touch with a recruiter at the Philadelphia cable television provider.

Going through Richard Rorty’s emails

I was looking at Greg Mankiw’s blog a few minutes ago when I saw the link to the New York Times article and read the news. Well known philosopher Richard Rorty has died.

 

This man taught at UVA when I was there. I remember during my fourth year I took an intro to political theory class (GFPT 101) and the teaching assistant jokingly said that just as his generation of students spent a lot of time reading the papers of the likes of Plato, future generations would be going through Rorty’s emails to attempt to understand this intellectual giant. I never did take a class with Rorty. The closest I came to sitting in his class was during my last semester when I was in the audience of an event at Newcomb Hall in which he and the government department’s James W. Ceaser discussed Caesar’s recent book in which Caesar disagreed vehemently with Rorty. I found Rorty interesting enough to attend the event but not interesting enough to stay for its entirety. A few years later I was talking to someone who graduated ahead of me and he told me him and his sister (who also knows me from UVA) were watching the event on C-SPAN when all of a sudden I walked through the camera’s field of vision and one entire side of my face filled the television screen for a few seconds.

 

During my first semester at Kenan-Flagler, the most popular professor at UVA came to speak at FOCUS and told a fascinating story about an email exchange between him and Rorty. He had emailed Rorty to congratulate him on his appointment at Stanford and the reply that came back read (paraphrasing) “we should do lunch before I leave, it will be a meeting of the minds between the man who’s done the most to convince UVA students that there is no god and the man who’s done the most to convince them that there is.” I don’t know whether he got around to changing his mind about the existence of God before he died. But if he had remained an atheist until his dying day, I am pretty sure he doesn’t feel the same way right now.

Most expensive piece of mail ever

I opened my mailbox today and was surprised to see the blue slip informing me that there was a package waiting for me at the rental office. I went into the office not knowing what it was since I hadn’t been expecting to receive anything in the mail. The receptionist went into the closet and didn’t find anything under my last name and was about to ask me to come back tomorrow when she asked “could it be diploma?” I responded “yes” and she picked up a stack of huge thick cardboard envelopes before fishing out the one with my name on it.

The diploma is currently sitting on my coffee table unopened. I will probably frame it sometime this summer. The $155 that the UNC Student Stores is charging for a frame is a bit expensive. But it’s really not considering that it comes with the official UNC gold crest on top and $155 is a drop in the bucket considering the amount of money I have spent on earning this degree.

One of the 12 million laggards

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article titled “When the Kids Don’t Leave The Digital Nest” about young adults who still rely on their parents to pay for their cell phone, cable, and/or internet bills.

 

“Mr. Marshall, a math and science teacher in a northern suburb of Detroit, syas he is more than willing to enable Ms. Hsu’s AOL habit. “It just feels good that you can help make it easier for them,” he says. Mr. Marshall says he pays $25 a month to allow his four adult daughters, who range from 24 to 29 years old, to surf the Internet using AOL.”

 

One of the things you learn in business school is that when you are tacking a business case, it’s important to not only make good assumptions but to state them for your audience. So I am going to make the assumption that even though AOL has broadband service plans, that Mr. Marshall is not on one of them. This is because of the price point he is at and the fact that his four daughters cannot share the broadband plan unless they all live in the same house. So we are going to operate with the assumption that this is a dialup plan.

 

I don’t know what I find more shocking, that there are still people in 2007 who pay for AOL or that Mr. Marshall has four grown daughters who are all still on narrowband. You mean to tell me that none of them are able to stick a wireless receiver into her computer and steal wireless broadband from an unguarded access point. But I shouldn’t be too shocked since, at last count, AOL still has 12 million members on a subscription of some kind. This goes to show that technology companies have to cater to customers on every portion of the innovation adoption curve.

Last summer ever

I have not been doing much of anything since I got back last week. I have been spending an average weekday doing job search related stuff in the morning, hanging out at the pool in the afternoon and watching TV or hanging out at places at night.

 

Last night I went to He’s Not Here for the weekly “blue cup” night on Tuesday. I didn’t know if anyone I know was going to be there but was fortunately enough to run into four of my classmates there. Two of these four are also in the process of job searching. After an hour and a half of drinking and talking among mostly other college/grad students/recent alums, three of us left so they could be well rested for their tee time this morning. I was talking to the last one right before I left and I mentioned my philosophy of the job search – that ten years from now none of us would look back wishing we had started working six or seven weeks earlier, but we may very well look back wishing we had spent more time enjoying our last summer ever.

Delta’s new web strategy

Delta Air Lines recently unveiled a new web site that allows customers to share travel tips and allows readers to then rate the usefulness of the advice given. This strategy parallels what many web sites are moving toward. The UNC Graduate and Professional Student Federation has a web site that allows users to setup a Wiki that they can then use to publish and edit content for anyone to see. Other sites such as Digg aggregate the votes its users give to articles they recommend and the most popular articles are then pushed to the top of the list.

But in unveiling the site, Delta did something that is considered almost unforgivable among the very group of people it is trying to attract. It sent out emails to customers inviting them to visit the new site, 69 times. At least that’s how many times that email showed up on my AOL Inbox.

Fortunately I was able to use AOL 9.0 Optimized to delete the emails in seconds by simply highlighting the first one and hitting CONTROL + HOME. But I couldn’t help thinking how this affected other customers who are either on other email clients or are not as quick with the keyboard/mouse as I am.

It goes to show that the internet presents potentially embarrassing pitfalls along with its colossal opportunities.

Random act of kindness

I was at the Lineberger Cancer Research Center earlier today for a party for a friend of mine who has successfully completed his PhD dissertation. I was leaving the Dogwood Parking Deck (by the way, if anyone ever needs to park a car for an entire day, the rates at Dogwood are only $1 an hour compared to $1.25 at Ramshead) when the attendant at the booth held up a dollar bill in front of me and said “that woman in the car ahead of you told me to pay this for you and for you to have a happy weekend.”

 

What an incredibly nice thing for her to do! It reminds me of that Ford “Bold” commercial where the woman was picking up her laundry on a drive-through, spotted a guy in the car behind her, and paid for that guy’s laundry and left a note with her phone number on it. But unlike in the Ford commercial, the woman this afternoon did what she did with no expectations that any benefits would reap onto her (at least in a secular sense) by her act of kindness.

 

I really need to be more generous with people.