The difficulty of neatly painting cars two different colors led to the patenting of one of the world’s most practical items — at least around gift-giving time — on this date in 1930. Five years earlier, Richard Drew, while working for the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company, had developed an easy-to-peel, glue-backed masking tape to ease the task of separating two-tone paint jobs on new cars, which until then involved moistened plaster tape. Then, he expanded its use by introducing a clear backing. The result, an immediate hit, became known as Scotch Tape. Now, it’s just one of 600 manufacturers of adhesive products produced by the nation’s economy, a sector that generates sales of more than $10 billion a year and provides jobs for over 22,000 people. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau, online at <www.census.gov>.
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I need a little help understanding how an administrator for an insurance company got hired as the manager of the Farmers Market. According to the cryptic “news” story in this past Sunday’s Dispatch apparently the county hired Tracy Madigan to manage the new Farmers Market. She holds two non-business degrees from Chapel Hill and none from NC State, where agricultural science and farming are a main stay in education. She is also a certified employee benefit specialist. That will be very handy for a one person shop. She very recently relocated back to Henderson and admittedly knows nothing about operating a Farmers Market. Does anyone know the job description for the position? I thought I heard the salary is in the range of $15,000 for a half year. (How much is the per hour rate? Farmers market is open for business two half days per week for at best six months a year or 30 full work days a year. $30,000 / (30*8) = $125.00 an hour.) For a county where the minimum wage of $7.25 is the norm for a 20 hour workweek that $125.00 an hour for an 8 hour workweek is looking like very good.
While I’m on this topic, the county used $8,000 of taxpayer’s money in the form of a grant to buy an unknown number of tables and chairs. At Lowes you can buy a folding table for $40 and $10 for a folding chair. How many tables and chairs could you buy with $8,000 of somebody else’s money?
The Farmers Market has the same propensity for failure as the paint recycler except this time the County cannot recover the thousands spent including the $125,000 one commissioner got for selling the land above a buried trash dump for the site of an $800,000 building.