Enotes

We're being surveyed to death but do you notice any appreciable uptick in customer service? You can't buy a taco anymore without being inundated with requests to take surveys. You can't conduct any business on the phone, hardly, without being asked to take "a quick, three-question survey on the quality of my service." Granted, many survey requests, from JC Penney to Del Taco, are accompanied by a chance to win something. Your name will get tossed into a cyber hat to win cash and prizes. Or so they say. This increase in requests for survey taking has been going on for several years. Yet I am still seeing the same level of crappy service. Or, at the very least, there doesn't seem to be any noticeable difference in service, other than being asked to take a survey about said service. I don't want to broad stroke brush the service industry, as I have been a part of it and continue to be in an indirect way. But what is happening with all the feedback tha...

Will she or won't she? Rest assured that there will be a time when Hillary Clinton isn't so much in the public consciousness during President Obama's second term, but it's hard to imagine that time right now. As if Hillary needed another vehicle with which to prove her moxie, reaffirm her popularity and look presidential, shes doing so right now as she handles the batting practice pitches that Republican Senators are tossing her during the Benghazi hearings. Will she or won't she? That's the question on everyone's lips right now---supporters and detractors. It's no longer a question of If Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, former Senator and outgoing Secretary of State, would make a good president. That query has long ago been answered (to recap: YES she would). It's now a matter of whether she chooses to pursue the world's highest office in her bid to become the United States' first female Commander-in-Chief. The Benghazi hearings...

McDonald's has been covering its, ahem, bases for years. The fast food chain's second most famous signature sandwich (after the Big Mac), the Quarter Pounder, has been tightly covered with a disclaimer ever since it hit the market. The beef patty, McDonald's has long put into tiny print, weighs the requisite four ounces "before cooking." After it hits the grill, it's anyone's guess. But a Quarter Pounder can be called a quarter pound, using the "before cooking" caveat. I wonder how Subway is going to put the toothpaste back into the tube. The sandwich chain has been called out, big time. Already they're calling it a "scamwich." A photo hit the Internet the other day, visual evidence that a Subway Foot Long sub comes up a tad short. A full inch, in fact. The poster of the pic, a customer from Australia of all places, captioned the photo of the Foot Long with a tape measure on top of it, with "Subway pls respond....

Unless you're a member of Jimmy Hoffa's immediate family, do you really care what happened to his body? I mean, anymore? The former Teamsters boss, who vanished on July 30, 1975 outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant at Telegraph and Maple, has been rumored to be buried, ground up, etc. in a variety of locales, from Michigan to New Jersey. In the 37+ years since Hoffa's disappearance, there has been no shortage of theories as to his final resting place, nor a shortage of "insiders" who purport to know the real deal. The latest tipster is 85-year-old Tony Zerilli, son of reputed Detroit mob boss Joseph Zerilli. The younger Zerilli says that Hoffa was buried under a field in northern Oakland County, and that investigators could find Hoffa there right now, should they choose to look. Zerilli unveiled his story to WNBC-TV. Zerilli has some credibility, apparently. He  was in a position to know secrets---including the fate of Hoffa, who was the former president ...

It doesn't take much to give us Spring Fever in Michigan. It's cold and flu season, but some of us will be coming down with an incurable case of Spring Fever as the temps are expected to hit and surpass 50 degrees on Friday and Saturday. That's all it takes, you know---a day or two of 40+ degree weather to make us think of baseball, Easter and flowers. Get ready to see folks in shorts and flip flops this weekend. I only partially exaggerate. Flip flops, maybe not, but certainly shorts. I have joked with out-of-towners who live in warm weather climates that while they may think of temps in the low-60s as being "cool" this time of year, people in Michigan would be walking around naked if the mercury touched that mark in the dead of winter. Just a day or two, that's all we need, of unseasonable warmth and you can get a new lease on life. Your countenance changes. You become more optimistic. You wonder whether Punxsutawney Phil will need shades and a glass o...

How long before video stores go the way of travel agencies? Remember the local travel agent? They'd advertise on local TV and they had tiny offices with globes on the signs and maps on the walls. You'd ring them up if you wanted a surrogate to get you the best deal on a hotel in Chicago or a rental car in Boston. Then the Internet struck, with its multitude of websites, and the American traveler became his or her own travel agent. The middle man, as so often has happened after the Internet, was cut out, like a tumor. Why pay someone to do something that we could do for free, and still get discounts to boot? So I wonder about the fate of the corner video store. Actually, you may have to drive past quite a few corners before you find a video store these days. NetFlix, the Red Box kiosks, the Internet (of course) and more people owning BluRay discs than DVDs, are all contributing to the slow death of the local video store, I'm afraid. But some of it is the vid...

Well, that didn't take long. The year 2013, the year of the next Detroit mayoral election, was hours old when the first salvo was fired by a candidate at another, and---surprise---it had the tinges of race baiting to it. Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon, by all indications a pretty smart guy, said something un-smart that was clearly aimed at presumed candidate Mike Duggan. Napoleon told a reporter that Palmer Woods, one of the city's jewels when it comes to neighborhoods, wasn't really a part of Detroit. Come again? Palmer Woods is where Duggan has recently taken up residence as he presumably prepares for a run at Dave Bing's job---whether Bing runs for re-election or not. Duggan, as we all know, is white. The day after saying flat out that Palmer Woods is not Detroit, Napoleon backpedaled. "Palmer Woods is not Detroit? Nothing is further from the truth," Napoleon wrote on Facebook. "It is one of our prized neighborhoods. However, the Pal...