Archive for April 15th, 2011

Why work when you can just wait for the mailman?

April 15, 2011

Punch line: Men are disappearing from the workplace in ways that don’t always register on the official unemployment rate 

Excerpted from Business Week, The Hidden Job Crisis for American Men, April 7, 2011

The March jobs report released on Apr. 1 seemed like the best in years. Behind the headlines, though, statistics on jobs are far less encouraging.

Yes, job growth has picked up somewhat. Yet an equally important reason for the lower jobless rate is that many people, men in particular, have simply given up looking for work and are no longer counted among the unemployed.

Some sit at home. Rather than paying taxes on labor income, they are drawing government benefits, or relying on family and friends for support.

There is an ominous trend of disengagement for male workers that stretches back six decades. The share of American men aged 16 to 64 who are employed has fallen, from nearly 85 percent in the early 1950s to less than 65 percent now.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics study found that many older workers who lose jobs never go back to work again. Of those aged 55-64 who were displaced from 2007 through 2009, 21 percent were out of the labor force as of January 2010.

Typically the unemployment rate stays flat or even rises when the economy begins to recover. People reenter the labor force. There is no flood of reentrants this time, at least not yet.

Posted in Employment - Jobs | Leave a Comment »

P&G Sheds Pringles, its Last Food Brand

April 15, 2011

TakeAway:  In announcing the sale of Pringles to Diamond Foods for $2.35B, P&G concluded what had been a tumultuous, sometimes zany, 50-year experiment in engineered food.  P&G also refocused on its core product lines.

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Excerpted from the NYTimes, “Once a Great Flop, Now Sold for Billions” By Andrew Martin, April 5, 2011

The company’s expertise in edible oils was used widely by the potato chip industry in the 1950s and 1960s, and shaped the invention of Pringles. Company officials still aren’t sure how the chips got their name.  Pringles are basically dehydrated potato flakes that are rolled and then fried, but they were not universally loved initially.  The product was such a dud in its early years that some called for P&G to dump the brand. The brand did not take off until the company tweaked the flavor in 1980 and introduced the “Fever for the Flavor of Pringles” advertising campaign.  By the late 1990s, Pringles had become a $1 billion a year brand.

The sale of Pringles was not unexpected, as Procter has refocused its attention on the core businesses of beauty, grooming and household care.

In the 1950s, roughly 25% of the company’s sales were in food, particularly in shortening and other cooking oils.  But P&G lacked a distribution network to ship perishable bags of chips to grocery stores, so it directed its researchers to come up with a longer-lasting chip that could be distributed with P&G’s existing distribution network.  P&G wanted to create a perfect chip to address consumer complaints about broken and stale chips and air in the bags.

Officially, Pringles are called crisps rather than chips, the result of a long-ago fracas between competitors and regulators over what could be called a potato chip.

Edit by AMW 

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Posted in Mktg - Product Line Mgnt | Leave a Comment »