The dollar is dropping like a rock in a river, setting a new ALL time low against the euro just a few days ago. Traveling to Europe is only going to get more expensive in the next few years. If you are going to visit, do it soon.
If you have family in Europe, tell them to come visit you. Even if you split the cost with them, you will likely save money.
My wife and I are heading to Italy this September. The exchange rate is awful but we are simply sucking it up and dealing with it. Our flights really help us keep costs low as we booked them with miles. Still I am anticipating the trip to be more expensive than expected. Our solution, spend that Economic stimulus package in Rome.
My boyfriend and I spent 3 weeks in Europe last August. We went to Dublin, Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, Florence, and Gothenberg, all for under $4000 each, including flights. (We also went to London, but were lucky enough to be staying with a friend, otherwise the budget would have been much higher)
The three major expenses in a Europe vacation are:
food
shelter
transportation
If you plan well enough in advance, you can find great deals on transportation and shelter. We stayed in very nice hostels every night (save one night on a campground in Florence), and paid roughly 35 Euros a night for the two of us.
We took advantage of some great RyanAir deals, including a 0.01 fare from Milan to London, so including the airport fees, we spent 30 Euros on the flight for both of us.
Food can be VERY pricey, but there are ways around it that are very similar to the things you'd do at home. Things like eating a big lunch, getting take-out from restaurants, visiting markets, bakeries, and grocery stores, etc. will cut down on your food expense a fair bit.
And a note for anyone looking at getting a EuroPass for the trains around Europe - a lot of trains still charge reservation fees, even if you have a Pass. The passes are great for people who are winging their trip, but if you plan to be on specific trains, don't go this route. We would have saved money had we bought individual tickets, versus buying the pass and reserving trains in advanced.
I agree with Lily above. I also worked at Target (albeit very briefly), and it was not the greatest place to work -- I was only there for a short time, but I ran into trouble immediately with not being paid for overtime. HOWEVER, I worked with several people there who had previously worked at Wal-Mart and they all agreed that Wal-Mart was a miserable place to work. It wasn't just about the pay, it was mostly about autonomy. For example, one time I was at Wal-Mart, and the guy in front of me had these shoes that he thought were on sale but didn't ring in as being on sale. The cashier repeatedly called for help but couldn't get anyone to come do the price check or void the transaction. That doesn't generally happen at Target, because the cashiers are allowed to void transactions and manually change prices.
I shop at Target maybe three times a year, and I can't remember the last time I went to Wal-Mart -- they're just not convenient for me. I don't think either of them are a force for good, but Target at least mostly avoids actively making its workers miserable.
I bough two different boxes I bought the Zenith DTT900 from HH Gregg and the Digital Stream DTX9900 from RadioShack. They pick up a few different channels and work differently. Most noticeably the DS picks up 2 more stations and has a higher quality remote. The Zenith has better looking menus and has a few nicer functions (the previous channel button brings you back to the last channel and brings up a menu of the last 5 allowing you to jump around quickly). The Zenith has poor volume (only control for the box volume) control while the DS has buttons to control both the TV volume and the box volume. The EPG (tv guide) on the zenith only shows the current and next show while the DS has several hours listed. While that is important the EPG is usually wrong, under the current daylight savings time everything is off 1 hour and not all channels use the EPG, some channels only have EPG during the day and not at night.
When people ask which they should buy I usually suggest one different than I have so we can trade the boxes amongst friends if we find ones that work better in our houses. Especially since I have friends who are buying them but don't need them.
is for a broken Playstation 2. That's why you see so many on eBay. People just throw the thing away when all it needed was a new electronic eye...easily replaceable and also to be found on eBay!
You also have to count in that not all euro countries have the same prices, even if they have the same currency. Austria for example has very reasonable prizes (less than 10 euro meals) and wonderful cafes. Italy can be really inexpensive in the south and you just don`t get better coffee than the one in Sicily..
There's a typo in your Spirit link above. And I'm confused by your comment that the $9 flights are "interstate" -- did you mean domestic?
Since the airline seems to fly to/from Ft. Lauderdale, seems like a great deal only for Floridians or for those near a major hub with family in Florida.
I recently wrote a post about RyanAir, in which I showed that the airline has been paying *me* to fly when I purchase its sale fares. I am guessing that no American carrier has yet made the jump to paying taxes and fees on behalf of the customer -- am I wrong?
I'm so glad that it's not just me who has issues in Walmart, I feel ill, almost sea sick within about 10minutes of setting foot in any of their stores (ok, I've only ever been in 3).
Like Philip I don't really ever go to these stores because I don't need anything from them, but do any retailers ever do much for their staff? I worked for a small local business for 18 months and often thought I would have been better off working for a larger company.
My TV is big and heavy and maybe 8 years old, but since I don't watch that much, it's in great shape and still has a lot of life left in it. I couldn't justify throwing it out and buying and expensive new one. But with this new box, it FEELS like a new TV! Your remote problem would be partially solved since you use the converter box remote for all the channel and even volume functions. I was really impressed because my remote also has a power button for the TV that was easy to program, so now with one remote I can turn on the TV, the box, and surf through the channels/program guide.
Regardless of what those videos say, the choice is 50/50. No matter what door you pick, one goat door will be removed. You will always be left with a goat door and a car door. Doesn't matter if you pick goat 1, goat 2, or the car first.
If you live in an area with a large Latino population, check out Mexican stores for spices. Especially popular with this community are cinnamon and cumin, which you can buy very inexpensively. They don't go in for things like basil and tarragon, but they do have good varieties of marjoram, oregano, bay, thyme, and a lot of things whose names you can't pronounce. Also they have more varieties of peppers than you can imagine, dried and fresh.
BTW, you don't need a dehydrator to dry herbs. Grow your herbs in pots (or the ground, if you have it). When they reach a point where they want to go to seed, cut the stems back. Gather these together in a kind of bouquet and tie with string at the cut end of the stems. Form a loop at the free end of the string. Use this to hang the herb bunches from whatever handy place you can find--in the garage, in the kitchen, on the balcony. All you need is to have the air circulate pretty freely around them. Soon enough, they'll dry up nice and crispy.
Crumble them up and put them in saved jars. Keep in a cool, dry place.
You can make fines herbes by mixing equal parts parsley, chervil, and tarragon.
We just recently received our two coupons and bought our first converter box today -- the Digital Stream DTX9900. We're just thrilled with the results and have had the same experience as Jamie. We bought ours at Radio Shack, which was the only local option for us. We ended up paying $24 out-of-pocket. We plan to use our second coupon to buy one for our other TV that's about 30 years old, but still going strong. I'm so glad I won't have to buy a whole new TV when analog disappears!
What do you think about getting these for a really old TV set? Both my TVs -- one of them a hand-me-down and one a tiny portable bought for the office, to watch the antics of a controversial governor who kept everyone entertained until he was impeached (many, many years ago) -- are pretty decrepit. The big one, a gigantic tube that I can't move by myself and so will need to get a male to come in and help attach the box, no longer communicates with the remote and will not connect with ANY universal remote.
If I get a box within 90 days, that's August. Broadcast analog TV goes extinct next February. If one or both of the dinosaurs dies between August and February, the box is just so much wasted money. To say nothing of adding a dust-catcher for me to have to clean.
Don't watch TV much and am not thrilled about having to pony up $400 for something I look at once or twice a week. But maybe it would be more cost-effective to just go ahead and buy a new TV now? I feel in a quandary about this.
I don't get all of this "classist" stuff. Maybe there's something in the commercials that makes people say that? I don't have TV, so I wouldn't know.
What I do know is that I feel uncomfortable in WalMart. I don't know if it's in any way physical or entirely psychological, but all I can think about when I'm in a WalMart is getting the h*** out. Maybe it's the lighting, but I wouldn't have come up with that on my own. It just feels like my soul is being drained out of me.
I don't feel that way at Target. In fact, I kind of like hanging out in Target. That of course is not an argument for shopping at Target, but it is certainly a good reason for me not to shop at WalMart and leaves open the question of whether I should shop at Target. I really don't see how that's classist at all.
The question is pretty moot for me most of the time, though. Here in San Francisco we have neither store. I have no idea where the nearest WalMart is; the nearest Target is in Colma. If I had a car I suppose I could go shop there from time to time, but generally I don't need anything I could buy at Target that would be worth the trouble of getting a car share car to go down there.
For me, my shopping dilemma has nothing to do with big box stores, since there are few of them I even am able to patronize. It's the little independent businesses on my street that sell all kinds of imported gizmos and do-dads from God knows where, probably China. And cheap! Cheap, cheap, cheap. I have to wonder just why they are so cheap and who suffered to make it so. But there isn't a big national bruhaha over the business practices of the "99 Cent Depot" or "Cheaper than Cheaper" so I really have no way of finding out.
I agree that it is sad that someone in China or another foreign country makes $12.00 a week making clothes or whatever else is sold in Wal-mart or Target. But at the same time, if we were to move said sewing operation out of that country, then that person is making $0.00 (okay, yes they could get another job, maybe) a week.
This is the best book I've ever read regarding debt and I'd recommend it to anyone. In addition to strategies for dealing with debt the book talks about how you got there and suggests simple tools/actions to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. I go to it often when I feel myself slipping toward plastic. It's not the easiest book to find. I saw it in B&N a few years back but I can't find it now. You can order it through Amazon. I'm sure I sound like an advertisement for the book but if debting has been a way of life for you really need to read this.
One, I have a friend who, a few weeks ago, posted on her Facebook status update: Got a super shweet bonus. Yesterday she posted: wonder how long it will take me to find a new job. Obviously, the bonus was not the be all and end all.
And you wrote about the kid and the skateboard. Now, take a kid with no interest in skateboarding and offer him (or her) money to learn the trick, make it an intermediate or advanced trick, if the kid really has zero interest in skateboarding, you could offer them $1000, $2000 or more and he/she will never ever earn it. Skateboarding is hard, you fall off, you get scraped up. If you want to learn, all that is part of the process, if you don't, you'll give up.
And, I"m getting my master's in education. It's pretty much what all the educational research says (despite ever more new policies to the contrary) - kids do best (and adults) when they are motivated by internal stimulus and curiosity and will retain that knowledge much longer. They want to learn, they are motivated to learn, they will learn. Otherwise, they just keep it long enough to get the 'A' or the award and out it goes. That's why Jay Leno can stop people on the street and make them look like idiots. They had no interest in the first twelve presidents of the US to begin with.
My thinking on this topic dates back well before the Alfie Kohn book, to the early 1980s when I ran into a great article on "gaming" incentive plans.
The article presented long strings of attempts to come up with a metric that couldn't be gamed, always ending in failure. If the metric called for more production, the workers produced quantity over quality. If the metric only counted "good" units, the workers sped the line up enough to hit the metric (even if it meant producing even more bad units). If the metric put a ceiling on failed units, the workers slowed the line down enough to stay under the ceiling. And so on.
The article was compelling because, faced with workers finding a way around the metric, the reader automatically said, "Well, of course--but you could solve that by making the metric be X." Except that the article was always one or two steps ahead of you, coming up with that metric, and the reporting on how it was evaded by workers at some plant or office. It was really quite humbling to find that all your ideas had been tried and found wanting.
Sadly, I saw that article in some paper journal, and I don't remember enough about it to find it again.
Really, though, I base most of this on my own experience. I've just seen too many incentive plans over the years. I've seen some that were severely de-motivating, and I've seen others that were only a little de-motivating. I've seen some that paid out large bonuses (which are great to get), and I've seen others that paid no bonus at all. But I've never seen one that made employees more creative or more collaborative. I've never seen one that made employees try harder to produce good products or please the customer. All the plans I've seen either did nothing (except waste some time and generate some grumbling and ill-will) or else caused workers to spend time doing stuff that was something other than the most useful thing they could have been doing. (Because, after all, if it hadn't been for the incentive plan, that's what they would have been doing.)
Alfie Kohn's book was important in the evolution of my own thinking on this topic, though. The article I mention, and my own experience, offered some emperical evidence that incentive plans don't work. Kohn's work, though provides a basis for understanding why they don't work. With that understanding, it's not such a big jump to conclude that they never work (for any job that's not utterly trivial).
I got my coupon a couple weeks ago, and after doing some online research, I decided to get the Insignia box from Best Buy. It cost me $20 after the coupon. I read negative reviews of the cheaper Magnovox offered at Walmart. Actually, I bought two, one for me and one for my parents.
Let me tell you: this digital TV ROCKS!!! Before I got maybe 10 or 11 channels over the air, many of them fuzzy due to reception. Now I have 24 channels of perfectly clear digital TV (four of them are audio channels with a weather map for video). I obviously have much more programing to choose from. I also love the program guide that tells you what shows are coming up next. It is in many ways just as good as the kind of service you would get from cable, except for $0/month (not accounting for lost productivity on your part because of your new time-wasting options!)
Anyone in an urban area will greatly appreciate this box - get it NOW. I have heard that if you live on the outskirts of a broadcasting area, you might be screwed - because with digital, it's either all or nothing, so if before you were barely getting anything, now you might just get nothing at all.
I should also say that I shelled out for a high-gain powered antenna a while ago, and I don't know if I could get all these channels without it. It cost about $30.
I wouldn't describe my situation as 'suffering' under an incentive plan. It's worked well at my company to give our employees a kick in their already intrinsically motivated pants.
To draw the conclusion that incentive plans *never* work seems like a very hard line to take. This post feels like a book report done after reading something full of wrong ideas that appeal to you. Perhaps the case being made has been reduced for this summary and lost something.
(I recognize that it's easy to armchair quarterback someone else' work; I genuinely feel that there is some critical thinking left to be done on this topic.)
The dollar is dropping like a rock in a river, setting a new ALL time low against the euro just a few days ago. Traveling to Europe is only going to get more expensive in the next few years. If you are going to visit, do it soon.
If you have family in Europe, tell them to come visit you. Even if you split the cost with them, you will likely save money.
My wife and I are heading to Italy this September. The exchange rate is awful but we are simply sucking it up and dealing with it. Our flights really help us keep costs low as we booked them with miles. Still I am anticipating the trip to be more expensive than expected. Our solution, spend that Economic stimulus package in Rome.
My boyfriend and I spent 3 weeks in Europe last August. We went to Dublin, Paris, Rome, Venice, Milan, Florence, and Gothenberg, all for under $4000 each, including flights. (We also went to London, but were lucky enough to be staying with a friend, otherwise the budget would have been much higher)
The three major expenses in a Europe vacation are:
food
shelter
transportation
If you plan well enough in advance, you can find great deals on transportation and shelter. We stayed in very nice hostels every night (save one night on a campground in Florence), and paid roughly 35 Euros a night for the two of us.
We took advantage of some great RyanAir deals, including a 0.01 fare from Milan to London, so including the airport fees, we spent 30 Euros on the flight for both of us.
Food can be VERY pricey, but there are ways around it that are very similar to the things you'd do at home. Things like eating a big lunch, getting take-out from restaurants, visiting markets, bakeries, and grocery stores, etc. will cut down on your food expense a fair bit.
And a note for anyone looking at getting a EuroPass for the trains around Europe - a lot of trains still charge reservation fees, even if you have a Pass. The passes are great for people who are winging their trip, but if you plan to be on specific trains, don't go this route. We would have saved money had we bought individual tickets, versus buying the pass and reserving trains in advanced.
I agree with Lily above. I also worked at Target (albeit very briefly), and it was not the greatest place to work -- I was only there for a short time, but I ran into trouble immediately with not being paid for overtime. HOWEVER, I worked with several people there who had previously worked at Wal-Mart and they all agreed that Wal-Mart was a miserable place to work. It wasn't just about the pay, it was mostly about autonomy. For example, one time I was at Wal-Mart, and the guy in front of me had these shoes that he thought were on sale but didn't ring in as being on sale. The cashier repeatedly called for help but couldn't get anyone to come do the price check or void the transaction. That doesn't generally happen at Target, because the cashiers are allowed to void transactions and manually change prices.
I shop at Target maybe three times a year, and I can't remember the last time I went to Wal-Mart -- they're just not convenient for me. I don't think either of them are a force for good, but Target at least mostly avoids actively making its workers miserable.
I bough two different boxes I bought the Zenith DTT900 from HH Gregg and the Digital Stream DTX9900 from RadioShack. They pick up a few different channels and work differently. Most noticeably the DS picks up 2 more stations and has a higher quality remote. The Zenith has better looking menus and has a few nicer functions (the previous channel button brings you back to the last channel and brings up a menu of the last 5 allowing you to jump around quickly). The Zenith has poor volume (only control for the box volume) control while the DS has buttons to control both the TV volume and the box volume. The EPG (tv guide) on the zenith only shows the current and next show while the DS has several hours listed. While that is important the EPG is usually wrong, under the current daylight savings time everything is off 1 hour and not all channels use the EPG, some channels only have EPG during the day and not at night.
When people ask which they should buy I usually suggest one different than I have so we can trade the boxes amongst friends if we find ones that work better in our houses. Especially since I have friends who are buying them but don't need them.
is for a broken Playstation 2. That's why you see so many on eBay. People just throw the thing away when all it needed was a new electronic eye...easily replaceable and also to be found on eBay!
I am just moving into my new office and am looking for office supplies. Thanks for the link!
You also have to count in that not all euro countries have the same prices, even if they have the same currency. Austria for example has very reasonable prizes (less than 10 euro meals) and wonderful cafes. Italy can be really inexpensive in the south and you just don`t get better coffee than the one in Sicily..
There's a typo in your Spirit link above. And I'm confused by your comment that the $9 flights are "interstate" -- did you mean domestic?
Since the airline seems to fly to/from Ft. Lauderdale, seems like a great deal only for Floridians or for those near a major hub with family in Florida.
I recently wrote a post about RyanAir, in which I showed that the airline has been paying *me* to fly when I purchase its sale fares. I am guessing that no American carrier has yet made the jump to paying taxes and fees on behalf of the customer -- am I wrong?
I'm so glad that it's not just me who has issues in Walmart, I feel ill, almost sea sick within about 10minutes of setting foot in any of their stores (ok, I've only ever been in 3).
Like Philip I don't really ever go to these stores because I don't need anything from them, but do any retailers ever do much for their staff? I worked for a small local business for 18 months and often thought I would have been better off working for a larger company.
what kind of TV you have?
I totally agree with this advice. I always try to fix things instead of replacing them. Sometimes, I even try to combine several broken items into a single functioning one .
My TV is big and heavy and maybe 8 years old, but since I don't watch that much, it's in great shape and still has a lot of life left in it. I couldn't justify throwing it out and buying and expensive new one. But with this new box, it FEELS like a new TV! Your remote problem would be partially solved since you use the converter box remote for all the channel and even volume functions. I was really impressed because my remote also has a power button for the TV that was easy to program, so now with one remote I can turn on the TV, the box, and surf through the channels/program guide.
Regardless of what those videos say, the choice is 50/50. No matter what door you pick, one goat door will be removed. You will always be left with a goat door and a car door. Doesn't matter if you pick goat 1, goat 2, or the car first.
what kind of charcoal can you use to add flavor and filter the shine
If you live in an area with a large Latino population, check out Mexican stores for spices. Especially popular with this community are cinnamon and cumin, which you can buy very inexpensively. They don't go in for things like basil and tarragon, but they do have good varieties of marjoram, oregano, bay, thyme, and a lot of things whose names you can't pronounce. Also they have more varieties of peppers than you can imagine, dried and fresh.
BTW, you don't need a dehydrator to dry herbs. Grow your herbs in pots (or the ground, if you have it). When they reach a point where they want to go to seed, cut the stems back. Gather these together in a kind of bouquet and tie with string at the cut end of the stems. Form a loop at the free end of the string. Use this to hang the herb bunches from whatever handy place you can find--in the garage, in the kitchen, on the balcony. All you need is to have the air circulate pretty freely around them. Soon enough, they'll dry up nice and crispy.
Crumble them up and put them in saved jars. Keep in a cool, dry place.
You can make fines herbes by mixing equal parts parsley, chervil, and tarragon.
We just recently received our two coupons and bought our first converter box today -- the Digital Stream DTX9900. We're just thrilled with the results and have had the same experience as Jamie. We bought ours at Radio Shack, which was the only local option for us. We ended up paying $24 out-of-pocket. We plan to use our second coupon to buy one for our other TV that's about 30 years old, but still going strong. I'm so glad I won't have to buy a whole new TV when analog disappears!
What do you think about getting these for a really old TV set? Both my TVs -- one of them a hand-me-down and one a tiny portable bought for the office, to watch the antics of a controversial governor who kept everyone entertained until he was impeached (many, many years ago) -- are pretty decrepit. The big one, a gigantic tube that I can't move by myself and so will need to get a male to come in and help attach the box, no longer communicates with the remote and will not connect with ANY universal remote.
If I get a box within 90 days, that's August. Broadcast analog TV goes extinct next February. If one or both of the dinosaurs dies between August and February, the box is just so much wasted money. To say nothing of adding a dust-catcher for me to have to clean.
Don't watch TV much and am not thrilled about having to pony up $400 for something I look at once or twice a week. But maybe it would be more cost-effective to just go ahead and buy a new TV now? I feel in a quandary about this.
I don't get all of this "classist" stuff. Maybe there's something in the commercials that makes people say that? I don't have TV, so I wouldn't know.
What I do know is that I feel uncomfortable in WalMart. I don't know if it's in any way physical or entirely psychological, but all I can think about when I'm in a WalMart is getting the h*** out. Maybe it's the lighting, but I wouldn't have come up with that on my own. It just feels like my soul is being drained out of me.
I don't feel that way at Target. In fact, I kind of like hanging out in Target. That of course is not an argument for shopping at Target, but it is certainly a good reason for me not to shop at WalMart and leaves open the question of whether I should shop at Target. I really don't see how that's classist at all.
The question is pretty moot for me most of the time, though. Here in San Francisco we have neither store. I have no idea where the nearest WalMart is; the nearest Target is in Colma. If I had a car I suppose I could go shop there from time to time, but generally I don't need anything I could buy at Target that would be worth the trouble of getting a car share car to go down there.
For me, my shopping dilemma has nothing to do with big box stores, since there are few of them I even am able to patronize. It's the little independent businesses on my street that sell all kinds of imported gizmos and do-dads from God knows where, probably China. And cheap! Cheap, cheap, cheap. I have to wonder just why they are so cheap and who suffered to make it so. But there isn't a big national bruhaha over the business practices of the "99 Cent Depot" or "Cheaper than Cheaper" so I really have no way of finding out.
I agree that it is sad that someone in China or another foreign country makes $12.00 a week making clothes or whatever else is sold in Wal-mart or Target. But at the same time, if we were to move said sewing operation out of that country, then that person is making $0.00 (okay, yes they could get another job, maybe) a week.
Mr. Mundis,
This is the best book I've ever read regarding debt and I'd recommend it to anyone. In addition to strategies for dealing with debt the book talks about how you got there and suggests simple tools/actions to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. I go to it often when I feel myself slipping toward plastic. It's not the easiest book to find. I saw it in B&N a few years back but I can't find it now. You can order it through Amazon. I'm sure I sound like an advertisement for the book but if debting has been a way of life for you really need to read this.
Thanks!
T
I have three reasons why.
One, I have a friend who, a few weeks ago, posted on her Facebook status update: Got a super shweet bonus. Yesterday she posted: wonder how long it will take me to find a new job. Obviously, the bonus was not the be all and end all.
And you wrote about the kid and the skateboard. Now, take a kid with no interest in skateboarding and offer him (or her) money to learn the trick, make it an intermediate or advanced trick, if the kid really has zero interest in skateboarding, you could offer them $1000, $2000 or more and he/she will never ever earn it. Skateboarding is hard, you fall off, you get scraped up. If you want to learn, all that is part of the process, if you don't, you'll give up.
And, I"m getting my master's in education. It's pretty much what all the educational research says (despite ever more new policies to the contrary) - kids do best (and adults) when they are motivated by internal stimulus and curiosity and will retain that knowledge much longer. They want to learn, they are motivated to learn, they will learn. Otherwise, they just keep it long enough to get the 'A' or the award and out it goes. That's why Jay Leno can stop people on the street and make them look like idiots. They had no interest in the first twelve presidents of the US to begin with.
My thinking on this topic dates back well before the Alfie Kohn book, to the early 1980s when I ran into a great article on "gaming" incentive plans.
The article presented long strings of attempts to come up with a metric that couldn't be gamed, always ending in failure. If the metric called for more production, the workers produced quantity over quality. If the metric only counted "good" units, the workers sped the line up enough to hit the metric (even if it meant producing even more bad units). If the metric put a ceiling on failed units, the workers slowed the line down enough to stay under the ceiling. And so on.
The article was compelling because, faced with workers finding a way around the metric, the reader automatically said, "Well, of course--but you could solve that by making the metric be X." Except that the article was always one or two steps ahead of you, coming up with that metric, and the reporting on how it was evaded by workers at some plant or office. It was really quite humbling to find that all your ideas had been tried and found wanting.
Sadly, I saw that article in some paper journal, and I don't remember enough about it to find it again.
Really, though, I base most of this on my own experience. I've just seen too many incentive plans over the years. I've seen some that were severely de-motivating, and I've seen others that were only a little de-motivating. I've seen some that paid out large bonuses (which are great to get), and I've seen others that paid no bonus at all. But I've never seen one that made employees more creative or more collaborative. I've never seen one that made employees try harder to produce good products or please the customer. All the plans I've seen either did nothing (except waste some time and generate some grumbling and ill-will) or else caused workers to spend time doing stuff that was something other than the most useful thing they could have been doing. (Because, after all, if it hadn't been for the incentive plan, that's what they would have been doing.)
Alfie Kohn's book was important in the evolution of my own thinking on this topic, though. The article I mention, and my own experience, offered some emperical evidence that incentive plans don't work. Kohn's work, though provides a basis for understanding why they don't work. With that understanding, it's not such a big jump to conclude that they never work (for any job that's not utterly trivial).
I got my coupon a couple weeks ago, and after doing some online research, I decided to get the Insignia box from Best Buy. It cost me $20 after the coupon. I read negative reviews of the cheaper Magnovox offered at Walmart. Actually, I bought two, one for me and one for my parents.
Let me tell you: this digital TV ROCKS!!! Before I got maybe 10 or 11 channels over the air, many of them fuzzy due to reception. Now I have 24 channels of perfectly clear digital TV (four of them are audio channels with a weather map for video). I obviously have much more programing to choose from. I also love the program guide that tells you what shows are coming up next. It is in many ways just as good as the kind of service you would get from cable, except for $0/month (not accounting for lost productivity on your part because of your new time-wasting options!)
Anyone in an urban area will greatly appreciate this box - get it NOW. I have heard that if you live on the outskirts of a broadcasting area, you might be screwed - because with digital, it's either all or nothing, so if before you were barely getting anything, now you might just get nothing at all.
I should also say that I shelled out for a high-gain powered antenna a while ago, and I don't know if I could get all these channels without it. It cost about $30.
OK, go on!!! Go order your coupons!!!!
I wouldn't describe my situation as 'suffering' under an incentive plan. It's worked well at my company to give our employees a kick in their already intrinsically motivated pants.
To draw the conclusion that incentive plans *never* work seems like a very hard line to take. This post feels like a book report done after reading something full of wrong ideas that appeal to you. Perhaps the case being made has been reduced for this summary and lost something.
(I recognize that it's easy to armchair quarterback someone else' work; I genuinely feel that there is some critical thinking left to be done on this topic.)