Category: Uncategorized

The ouster of Home Depot’s Chief Executive, Robert L. Nardelli, and his replacement with Frank Blake, has brought a new sense of customer service and the end of some executive perks, so an article in the NY Times explains.

My own experience with Home Depot is mixed. They are the biggest store around, in many locations, so they are unavoidable when you need lumber, gardening tools, paint, lighting. Or maybe they are not. One could get much better service at OSH, which is friendlier and smaller.

Home Depot has instituted, for the past couple of years, something called, “self-service checkout”. This is a way for the customer to check himself out, by scanning products and acting as the cashier. It is perhaps the biggest time waster I’ve encountered. Idiotically, it still takes a human being on a podium to direct every transaction by telling each customer how to work the incomprehensible scanners. How is this saving Home Depot money? Is it wise for HD to alienate customers with this foolish system?

Aside from the fact that the stores are dusty and ugly, (compared to Lowe’s) there is rarely an employee around to help find things. Practically every visit to the store means hours of wasted time waiting for help and then either standing in line to check-out or the above mentioned self-service torture device.

And there is some racism in the different Home Depot stores. At Roscoe and Woodley, they check your receipt as you leave the store. In whiter Woodland Hills, they do not. Are there no shoplifters in Woodland Hills?

Home Depot, like Ford and Sears, forgot that the customer comes first.

$55K Clean-Up Program Commences In Van Nuys

(CBS) LOS ANGELES Bureau of Sanitation crews will pick up abandoned shopping carts in the Van Nuys area within 48 hours of a complaint, under a six-month pilot program approved Wednesday by the Los Angeles City Council.

Councilman Tony Cardenas initiated the $55,000 program as part of an effort to clean up neighborhoods in the 6th District he serves.

“We are wheeling out the blight in the Valley,” Cardenas said in a statement. “By giving Valley residents the power to pick up the phone and see a 48-hour turnaround on these junky, abandoned shopping carts, we are giving them cleaner environments and a deeper sense of community pride.”

Those living within District 6, which includes the communities of Van Nuys, Arleta, Sylmar and Sun Valley, should call 311 to report abandoned shopping carts.

Mattresses, gang tags, illegal dumping, streetwalkers, illegal workers and Ori B. Fogel’s slum mall on Kester and Victory will have to wait for their own pilot program.

Today I was driving east on Chandler, approaching Coldwater Canyon, when a young dark haired man nervously came around the corner. He was wearing a baggy gray sweatshirt and dark jeans. A woman pushing a baby carriage, and a homeless man, followed by a young woman, were running after the gray sweatshirt guy. I rolled down my window and heard, “He stole my wallet! Get him!”

I saw the suspect crouch behind a parked car. I backed up my car. The young woman and the homeless man confronted the thief and he surrended the wallet to the woman that he had stole it from.

I asked the out-of-breath woman if she needed a ride. She said yes and got into my car. I immediately dialed “911” and reported the crime. The suspect began to walk slowly back south down Coldwater towards Magnolia. As I drove 15 mph, with the suspect in full view, I screamed for the cops to come. It was the California Highway Patrol whom I was speaking to. They needed to patch my call into LAPD. As the suspect calmly walked….with his victim sitting next to me in my car…the operator cautioned me “not to follow him. If you hit him, he could sue you…” My emergency flashers blinked, as I slowly drove south down Coldwater, watching the every move of the criminal.

We got back to the Ralph’s parking lot, where apparently this young woman had been robbed just outside the front entrance, near the watermelons. I saw the suspect cross the street and walk into Walgreens. Still no LAPD. We went inside Ralph’s and again dialed 911 using the store land line. The cops finally showed up.

Two cruisers: One with two female cops, the other with two male cops. They went into Walgreens but the suspect already had escaped. Courteously, kindly, professionally the police took our report. One officer said he suspected that “a gang of Armenians” who have been coming to the Valley to engage in street crime, such as purse snatchings, might be responsible for this latest incident. The victim, a student from Germany, was grateful that I had stayed with her to file the report.

Nobody was shot, nobody was hurt, nobody was caught…yet.

We need to enact a tax, payable at the gas pump, to hire another 20,000 LAPD officers to make our city safer. We need all “911” calls to go directly to the LAPD, not the highway patrol, because the majority of mobile emergency calls have nothing to do with vehicle accidents.

I’m sure there are more of them than I can name, but there are quite a few members of the thespian community living very discreetly here on Hamlin Street.

I thought about them after the Swoosie Kurtz post of the other day. Swoosie has attained some level of fame and respect, which has emboldened others to speak up on her behalf. But who will speak up for the lesser known among us who may be equally as talented but have names less known to the public?

Beans Morroco lives on my street. He has quite a resume and makes regular guest starring appearances at our gym.

Kevin Brophy (and his wife Amy) and their brood are vastly overtalented and fun folks. Kevin is dashing and drives a red convertible and he is the one you want to invite to your dull Christmas party when you need a spike in the energy level. He appeared in the 1993 film, “Fearless” as well as “Hell Night” and “The Seduction” and this just about sums up the best aspects of his Errol Flynn like persona.

Frank Schultz is best known as the actor who rented his home to fellow actor and acquitted murderer Robert Blake ( who lived here during his Van Nuys trial). Schultz is a world traveller and graduate of Berkeley. Frank had a red house that burned down and he rebuilt it as a white house with a white roof and currently rents to whites. I couldn’t find out anything else about Mr. Schultz.

Maybe he should change his name to Swoosie Schultz.