To: William Peavey who wrote (8725 ) 9/20/1999 11:41:00 PM From: C.K. Houston Read Replies (3) | Respond to
She said the White House asked the NFR to run a "Y2K in April" campaign for last April where they would push people to plan and buy at that time ... ... Kathy Hotka is the Vice President of Information Technology for the National Retail Federation and she gave a session on year 2000 issues for retailers. The NRF is the largest retail trade association in the world and includes the leading department stores, discount stores, mass merchandise specialty and independent stores and it is one of the few trade associations that has a technology staff. NRF represents 1.4 million retail concerns that employ more than 20 million people ...She said the White House asked the NFR to run a "Y2K in April" campaign for last April where they would push people to plan and buy at that time. The NRF passed on that one too because they didn't feel the message was appropriate for several reasons, one of them being the crossed message that the everything is alright and all the stores will be open in January but you still need to buy now ...There wasn't much interest as they listened to possible technology problem until she mentioned that there was going to be a lot of people walking around with fifty dollar bills in their pockets. (The extra money the Fed is printing is in fifties.) Do the math -- if you need a quick extra few billion, you can print it a lot faster if you do big bills. It is kind of like the old Soviet Union production quotas. The quota for glass was in pounds instead of area, US production is figured in acres. The Soviet glass factories easily made their quotas by making all their window glass half an inch thick. Kathy asked them what they would do when a customer buys a bottle of wine and gives them a fifty, and the next customer also has a fifty, and the customer after them too. They began thinking very hard after that.greenspun.com Year2000.com Announcement List, Special Mailing September 20, 1999
