Tag Archives: meyer

Business/Economics, Idaho, Opinion, U.S.

U.S. Housing Collapse: No more ‘My Immigrant Idaho’, mass exodus begins!

Video

13 October 2022 (01:46-UTC-07 Tango 06) 21 Mehr 1401/17 Rabi ‘al-Awwal 1444/18 Geng-Xu 4720/13 октября 2022 года

Idaho’s reign as a top destination for domestic migrants (U.S. citizens leaving their states for The Gem State) was short lived, and is now reversing; more people leaving than coming in!

I’ve documented how for decades the entrenched, arrogant, leaders of Idaho boasted of how things were booming in Idaho, using domestic migration as one of their proofs.  They claimed that one reason for the influx of domestic migrants, was that Idaho was full of good paying jobs.  Anybody that has lived in Idaho for as long as I have knew that was a bold face lie!  I have experienced what I call revolving door employment for almost 20 years as employer after employer downsized or halted operations altogether!  If it wasn’t for the fact that my property is paid for, I would have been forced to move a long time ago.  (I am not here for the money, I love the climate and the space, which apparently is what many recent newbies to Idaho don’t like)

Here’s another wake up call for our fearless leaders: There was only a slight uptick in Idaho’s overall population, from 2010 to 2020.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the sparse population of the geographically large state of Idaho went from 1.8-million to only 1.9-million, despite a decade of ‘leaders’ telling us that the population was booming.  The overwhelming majority of that population growth took place in the Boise Metro Area (Treasure Valley, Southwestern Idaho region).

Here’s another reality check: More than 61% of land in Idaho is owned by the federal government. Less than 30% of available land is privately held.  So, in reality the relatively small population is partly due to lack of available privately owned land.  There is also the fact that one of President Joseph Robinette Biden Junior’s first executive orders (America the Beautiful Initiative, or 30×30 order)  makes it even harder to make land available in Idaho:

The state government owns land, and has been selling it off, not just to make more land available, but it has become a major revenue source for the state government (which might explain its mysterious budget surplus).

KTVB: Idaho turns to remote bidding to increase state-owned land sales

Men’sJournal: Study Finds Idaho Illegally Sold Public Land for 97 Years

Then there’s the fact that rich people from other states (Texas) are buying up private property and then using it to block access to public lands:

By 2020, moving company trackers had ranked Idaho as the number three destination, but now, just two years later an Atlanta, Georgia, moving assistance company reports that Idaho has dropped to 20th position, and the region of Eastern Idaho is experiencing a mass exodus!

While the Move Buddha report admits that people are changing their minds about moving to Idaho, the author still says Idaho is “The Place to Go”!  Move Buddha reports that the Eastern Idaho city of Rexburg, home to the Brigham Young University-Idaho, is bleeding residents, and blames it on lack of jobs.  According to Move Buddha’s “in-to-out” formula, for every 49 people moving into Rexburg, 1-hundered are leaving!  In Rexburg’s next door city of Idaho Falls, once the economic darling of Eastern Idaho, there are now 1-hundred people leaving for every 95 moving in!

But even the top five cities that people still want to move to are on the decline, with Southwestern Idaho’s Eagle leading the pack with a 56% decrease in Move Buddha’s “in-to-out ratio”.

107.9LITEFM: Idaho experiences largest migration drop in entire U.S.!

KBOI: Idaho sees a 60% decline in new people moving in from 2020.

The Center Square: It is not just Idaho, the entire Pacific Northwest is losing population.

29APR2022:

 

27APR2021:

05DEC2018:

There is still massive housing construction going on in Idaho, all across the state, it has been going on since the late 1990s.  Housing developers and politicians have always claimed it is because the population is booming, and it is necessary to keep housing costs down.  That is interesting, because homes prices/values skyrocketed, anyway.  Just this year, Bannock County jacked up the value of my property to where they now consider it worth four times what I paid in 1997, despite the massive home construction that is still going on around my neighborhood!  In 1997, my neighborhood was surrounded on the south and west sides by farm fields.  By 1999, the farm land was sold and huge housing tracts were under construction.  This never let up, year after year the city slowly moved westward, annexing County territory, farm land being sold-off and new housing development taking its place.  The claim was that the population and economy is booming, yet starting in 2001, I witnessed, experienced and documented the economic destruction in my part of Bannock County, and it has never recovered.

Prices for homes are finally ticking down in Idaho, but don’t blame the Pandemic, the massive focus on property development, that was never justified, is to blame.  Now, the mass exodus that is beginning to take place will push Idaho’s housing market into the Pit of Hell.

U.S./Canadian Housing Hooliganism: DRUG LORDS, FOREIGN SPECULATORS & LLC MONOPOLIZING!

U.S. Disaster 2022: MORE WILDFIRES, BLAME HOUSING DEVELOPMENT SPECULATION GAME!

Idaho Collapse 2021: IDAHO HOUSING COSTS “LITERALLY MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE”! KILLING IDAHO’S ECONOMY! GET READY FOR THE CRASH-N-BURN!

Chubbuck & Pocatello 2019:

Photo by AAron B. Hutchins, July 2019.

IDAHO’S BRIDGE TO NOWHERE?

My Immigrant Idaho 2021: MEXICAN DRUG WAR TARGETS SOUTHEAST IDAHO, MORE THAN 200% INCREASE! CONNECTION TO PANDEMIC?

My Immigrant Idaho 2016: FEDERALES (pronounced the Spanish way) SAY IDAHO IS DOMINATED BY POOR IMMIGRANTS!

Chubbuck 2017: NO MORE XMAS LIGHTS? THE TRUTH ABOUT GENTRIFICATION

In this report, which chronicles the destruction of iconic Green T, the mayor of Chubbuck boasts it’s “…the beginning of some real good things coming in.”: POPEYES QUIETLY SHUTS DOWN FOUR IDAHO RESTAURANTS!

Bannock County, Chubbuck & Pocatello shenanigans, June 2016: Governor declares economy has “RISEN FROM THE ASHES”

Hoku-Gate, PaveGate now Amy’s-Gate!  It’s been revealed that Bannock County administrators were under investigation by the Idaho Tax Commission over massive local tax breaks given to California based frozen veggie food maker Amy’s Kitchen.

EXCEPTIONAL FAILED STATE: IDAHO POLITICIANS GIVE AWAY TENS OF MILLIONS TO COMPANIES THAT SHUT DOWN!

Here is an old photo, via Margaret Facer, of the Alameda Plaza Albertson’s, in Pocatello, from 1966.

A HISTORY LESSON IN ECONOMIC DECLINE: POCATELLO’S OLD FRED MEYER & ALBERTSONS ON YELLOWSTONE AVE (Alameda Plaza), DID NOT CLOSE DOWN IN THE 1990S  (This story is more relevant because Kroger owned Fred Meyer is now celebrating 20 years at their ‘new’ location [which used to be the Pocatello Mall] in Pocatello.  Their old location was just across the street [where the ‘new’ Winco is] in the Alameda Plaza, back in the 1990s!)

Business/Economics, Idaho

Fred Meyer expands recycling ops

11 December 2016 / 20:40 UTC-07 Tango 06 (22 Azar 1395/12 Rabi ‘al-Awwal 1438/14 Geng Zi 4714)

In 2010 I wrote about recycling your plastic grocery bags, recently Kroger owned (but Oregon based) retailer Fred Meyer completed a million dollar remodel of their Pocatello, Idaho store, including their recycling bin.

You can see a pic of their old recycling bin in my 2010 posting, their new bin has  apertures for plastic, paper, glass or trash.  

Apparently they’re not aware of the lack of glass recycling in eastern Idaho.

KROGER JOINS OTHER EMPLOYERS IN USING OBAMA CARE AS EXCUSE TO CUT EMPLOYEE HOURS AND BENEFITS

POCATELLO’S OLD FRED MEYER……DID NOT CLOSE DOWN IN THE 1990S

ANSWER TO COUPON THIEVES: KROGER OWNED FRED MEYER OR SMITHS

Business/Economics, Idaho, U.S.

Economic Recovery? WinCo about to close Store number 5 in Pocatello! Blame massive company expansion! Proof that employees know how to run a company better than elites!

13 February 2013, a visit to your local Pocatello, Idaho, WinCo grocery store will reveal shelves that are fast becoming bare.  All orders for Store number 5 have been stopped, the store will cease operations sometime in March.

The Pocatello store was the fifth store to open in Idaho, after Ralph Ward and Bud Williams started the grocery operation back in 1967.  Various stores were called Waremart Food Centers, or Cub Foods until 1999.

The official WinCo web site says the current name stands for Winning Company, but I swear I remember being told, by WinCo employees I knew during the name change, that WinCo was the creation of a school kid who won a contest for coming up with the new name. Supposedly WinCo actually stands for the U.S. states that the grocery chain operated in at that time: Washington, Idaho, Nevada, California and Oregon.

Click pics to make bigger

In 1985 the employees of the company became majority owners in the business.

Since the name change WinCo has been expanding.  That expansion has picked up pace ever since the downfall of competitor Albertsons (once a Idaho based grocery store chain, but not anymore).

Since 2006 Albertsons has been passed around to several new owners (despite the website making it look like it’s still owned by the Albertsons family):  A Minnesota based company called Supervalue, an affiliate of evil Cerberus Capital Management called AB Acquisition, and CVS.  Finally in January 2013 evil Cerberus Capital Management became sole owner (I wouldn’t be surprised if they liquidate).

According to Albertsons’ website they are down to 450 stores across the country (WinCo has a ways to go, with only 85 stores and 14,000+ employees).  But employee owned WinCo is exploding.  In the past ten years they’ve built a giant distribution center south of Boise, added new stores and another distribution center in California, and expanded into Utah. Now Pocatello will get what many loyal WinCo shoppers have been demanding, a giant new WinCo.

But wait, there’s more.  WinCo has announced a new store for Bellingham, Washington, in the Old Joe’s Sporting Goods building (at a cost of $7 million).  WinCo just spent $5.1 million buying land in Gilbert, Arizona. The property is currently a car dealership, but will become WinCo’s fourth store in the Grand Canyon State.

There are some concerns for WinCo, like a lawsuit in Vallejo, California, which is trying to stop the building of a new store based on environmental reasons.  Also, some of WinCo’s new HQ management jumped over from the sinking ship known as Alberstons, which causes many WinCo employees to worry.

I’ve known some WinCo employees who had a tough time dealing with WinCo’s employee policies (which are very strict compared to publicly held companies), but it’s hard to challenge those policies since they are supposedly approved by fellow employees.

Also in California, a mom and pop grocery store in Merced is shutting down, they blame Walmart and WinCo: “Things are changing in the industry. It’s getting harder and harder every year to compete, especially family-owned types of businesses such as ours.”-Gary Lowe, General Manager

In today’s economy an employee owned company is as close as you can get to a family owned operation, and there’s less of a chance the company will be sold off just for the value of its assets (like Sears and Kmart), so my money’s on WinCo (too bad you can’t buy stock in privately held WinCo, lucky employees, and besides I don’t really have any money to invest).

Pocatello’s new WinCo store number 117 was built on the Old Fred Meyer building site (aka Alameda Plaza) right next to a former Albertsons (on the land I used to do property management, for JP Reality who then sold out to General Growth Properties).  Number 117 is at least twice as big as the Old Fred Meyer building.

The New Fred Meyer building is located where the Old Pocatello Mall used to be.  So now Store number 5 will be called the Old WinCo, and the Old Fred Meyer will now be called the New WinCo, and everyone will forget there was an Old Fred Meyer just like they’ve forgotten about the Old Pocatello Mall.

That’s progress!

Idaho, Technology

Plastic Grocery Bags, Recycle Them!

Ok, I was watching a local East Idaho TV news program. They ran a national story about getting sick from reusable grocery bags. What got me was in their intro to the story they said that plastic grocery bags just ended up in the landfill. Well not if you recycle them!

When plastic grocery bags first went into use one of the main selling points is that they are recyclable, and therefore will not fill up landfills. The reason they end up in your local dump is because shoppers are not bringing them back to the stores to be recycled.

The Walmart in Chubbuck has bins for dropping off your old plastic grocery bags. So does the Fred Meyer in Pocatello. I believe you can recycle them at your local WINCO. If you’re not sure go ask someone at the Customer Service counter at your favorite store. Just make sure your bags aren’t covered in schmutz.

Why spend money on reusable grocery bags, that they now say may be germ factories, when you can use free plastic grocery bags THAT ARE 100% RECYCLABLE? Please don’t throw them in the trash!

And guess what, it’s not just plastic grocery bags you can recycle. Bread bags, cereal box liner bags & more. Here’s a website for more info on plastic bag recycling: www.plasticbagrecycling.org