Of Walmarts, SOBX and necessity

My daughter who lives in Reston, Virginia tells me that Walmarts in that part of the country are not very nice.

In her college years at Sweet Briar, she and her friends considered the Lynchburg, Virginia Walmart one of the cleaner spots to shop.

On the Crystal Coast of North Carolina, often known as the Southern Outer Banks, Walmart is a necessity whether you are furnish a new house or picking up things for your boat.

Traveling to shop has been a way of life in remote coastal areas is nothing new.

We were shopping for both the boat and house recently. We spent a couple of hours in the Morehead City Walmart. I found everything I wanted except a boat anchor, and I think they were just out of them since I got the anchor line and chains. The store was clean and bright.

There are things that Walmart does not carry so later I still stopped by one of our local hardwares where I do most of our shopping anyway. I needed some lag bolts.

It looks like we might be getting a Walmart in Cedar Point to go along with our new Lowe's Home Improvement Store in Cape Carteret. I suspect the damage to local business will be minimal since both have been available within fifteen to twenty minutes driving for a long time.

I can only take Walmart in mid-week and only about once a quarter. My contact lens solution was $2 a bottle cheaper, and I do not even want to think how much cheaper the anchor line and ropes were than if I had bought them at one of the specialty boating dealers who get plenty of my money anyway.

I think good local businesses can survive the competition from Lowe's and Walmart, they just need to specialize in quality products and maintain high levels of service.

I'll go to a local hardware store anytime over Lowe's. Recently I was pleased to find a local Ace Hardware that carried Echo trimmers. Lowe's doesn't carry them or the freshly roasted Methodist peanuts that all of our local hardwares have on their front counters. An Echo trimmer is the only kind I will use.

The challenge with Walmart is that we didn't have anything local to compete with it anyway.

Still when I am walking across the giant Walmart parking lot, I can only think about how nice a boat ride would be or maybe a walk on the beach.

The Southern Outer Banks are no Reston when it comes to shopping, and it is going to be a long time before we get much beyond Walgreen's, Lowe's, and Walmart.

In the Emerald Isle-Cedar Point-Cape Carteret area, we do not have a single chain restaurant beyond a few fast food ones. That's just fine with me, the restaurants and services we have are just about right for someone who doesn't like to shop anyway.

I figure 17 miles is about as close as I want to be to a Best Buy anyway. Anything for my photography addiction can't even be found in Reston so there is little hope ever for it here on the coast.

I think we might even escape the iPhone hype which is good since a bunch of them would screw up my new AIBRS.

The steam is here

The first days of June have exceeded expectations for heat.

I checked temperatures for Northern Virginia on June 8.

The high temperature was 97 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fortunately I am not in the land of suits but on the Carolina coast.

I managed to jump in the pool slightly after 7 am. The air was already warm on the walk over to the pool.

By the time I drove from Cape Carteret to Emerald Isle, the temperature was already over 80.

We were lucky it did not get much hotter during the day. I am thankful for sea breezes off an ocean that has yet to reach its summer maximum temperatures.

The water temperatures of around 75 degrees and the breezes they generate help to cool us down nicely in the evenings.

The best way to tell that summer is really here is when I get out of the air conditioned car and my glasses immediately fog up. It also happens to my cameras.

The fogging of the sun glasses happened this morning, and the camera fogged up tonight, so it should be official that summer and its steam are here.

It is a good thing that my blood has thinned. Well the weather is great for growing tomatoes.

Do you feel good at work?

There are times when you go into work with a great attitude only to have it smashed by the people around you.

Mostly this happens from managers who allow a negative attitude to penetrate their organizations.

Many corporations feel that they need to find and correct what employees are doing wrong. They spend many resources trying to make this happen.

What they should be doing is encouraging good behavior. I have seen employees disappointed when expected bad news turned out to be good news. Those kind of employees need to be out of any organization

The tone of an office is almost always set by the manager. The choice is pretty obvious, build a team where you focus on the positive or let a negative cloud hang over your team.

People respond by either wanting to be in the office or trying to avoid the office.

While you sometimes hear the theory that sales people need to be out of the office all of the time, they also need to be in the office enough to absorb the company's objectives and culture.

The vice president syndrome

The first time I made vice president, my son told me that I had finally made it to the land of empty suits.

My couple of stints as vice president did not do anything to convince me that having a big title made much difference.

I worked just as hard or harder as when I had a less exalted title.

I have also worked for a number of vice presidents.

There are a couple of things I will say about the role of vice president. In some corporations, vice presidents are almost gods with the ability to do almost anything they want.

As companies become smaller, the role of vice president is largely irrelevant. Often the CEO in small companies creates vice presidents only to make their own role seem more important.

That isn't too difficult since in a small company, the CEO has all the power. The vp role is largely ceremonial in those companies.

It can get a little worse. You can have a sales driven company with more vice presidents than sales people. At that point you have a reached a danger point of having more chiefs than Indians.

There is nothing worse than a top heavy company filled with people who think their title exempts them from real work.

The kind of organization that you really want to build is one where titles don't matter.

Most people don't like those, but they can be the most productive of any organization.

A focus on getting the job done instead of awarding meaningless titles make more sense.

Keeping your credibility

Long ago I decided that my credibility was the most important thing that I had to lose in writing.

It is easy to make some wild statements to drum up traffic, but most of that traffic bounces quickly.

You bring people back to your blogs with quality content that is interesting and truthful. They become faithful and regular readers.

I am not trying to play any particular role as I write, except that of a writer who tries to present a balanced opinion even when it is nearly impossible to do so.

My degree is in history, and I have worked hard to stand back and look at situations to understand the facts and try to present them as logically as I can. I do that so that I can understand the situation, not necessarily so I can influence others.

I consider myself something of an expert on technology, sales management, leadership and on a number of places where we have lived. I have definite opinions, but I am always willing to hear another point of view. I value my reputation for expertise in those areas.

What I don't like are self-appointed experts who don't have the experience or knowledge to back their statements. I often see folks on forums that believe their opinion no matter how one sided or unsubstantiated is the only possible way to look at things.

It has been my experience that blanket statements are usually wrong. No place, person, or company is as bad or as good as we might expect.

To understand the truth and then make sure it becomes a positive factor in your decisions if a worthy goal for anyone.

If you help others understand the truth and interpret the facts in a way that keeps their options open and their minds moving forward, you have gone one step further.

This is how that I have built my credibility, and how I plan to keep it.

Selling the beach

No matter where I have lived, I have convinced myself that my particular spot is one of the greatest on earth.

Perhaps that is human nature. Still I like to think that I have lived in some gorgeous spots from Nova Scotia to Roanoke, Virginia.

We now live near the beaches of Emerald Isle, NC. It is pretty hard to deny its beauty. A couple of photos that I have taken in the area are among my all time favorites.

The first, Morning Waters, was a sunrise taken from the beach. The second, The End, was taken looking from Emerald Isle across Bogue Sound.

Since living in the area is almost as nice as the Southern Outer Banks pictures are beautiful, it isn't too much of a jump to selling property in the area as a Realtor®.

I really think this is a great area to live. It is easy to sell something you believe in unless you are trying to do it on city-data forum and you have anything to do with real estate.

I started blogging in late 2004 and have a tremendous number of posts about areas and things that have absolutely nothing to do with selling real estate.

While my Realtor® site and my ActiveRain site are definitely about selling real estate, it is really hard to argue that the first page of my Southern Outer Banks site has much to do with selling property. I might be promoting an area, but I am not doing much selling real estate or talking about my services as a Realtor® on a page with steamed crabs.

Today I got banned again from city-data forum for linking to my current Southern Outer Banks site and its Crab Feast article.

At the same time city-data forum is full of Google real estate ads. I am pretty sure that the city data forum folks have a special deal with Google to serve up members of the forum only to Google's paying customers.

I was very careful not to link to my Realtor® site while posting at city data forum and as you can expect I wasn't doing a whole of lots of selling my services as a real estate agent on a post about fried clams.

I may spend a lot of effort selling the area we live in, but that is not the same as being a real estate agent. City data forum must be making so much money for Google placements that they can't afford to have the chance that any forum members might wander across agents other than the ones that advertise on Google.

My latest site is about restaurants on the Crystal Coast. My guess is that the monitors at City Data forum would classify it as real estate site.

What I miss on the coast

There is not much that I miss on the coast or I would not be creating websites with titles like "Coastal Paradise."

I do miss some of the unbelievable lush green colors that we see in mountain valleys of Virginia.

It is the closest green that I have seen to that of summertime in Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes which I believe are the greenest spots on earth.

Even trips to New Zealand and Ireland with their fabled green have not persuaded me to back down.

The beaches of Emerald Isle in North Carolina cannot hold a candle to the green of the mountains this time of year. Of course, they have other attractions that keep me happy most of the time.

At the coast I also miss the hundreds of beautiful Irises that adorn many of the garden's in the interior of North Carolina and Virginia.

In New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the Irises would grow in the damp spots in the pastures.

We have lots of beauty on the coast, so I guess it is only fair that we save some of nature's spectacular decorations for the hills and mountains.

I had hoped to have more regular posts here at Ocracoke Waves, but I have been doing some all-consuming web work that has slowed me down.

My CoastalNC.org site and my Coastal Real Estate site have been completely redone after many hours of work.

My goal was to create a better user experience and make the information easier to find.

You can see some of the results of my work in the clickable buttons to my sites that are now in this blog's side panel.

I would love to hear any feedback. You can click here to email comments to me.

I have also started a real estate newsletter about coastal property which I will t try to do once a quarter, The first one is available for viewing and if you would like to subscribe, this link will get you to the form.

I have also chosen the Reston Backfence Online community for my first online ad. I will be interested to see what the response is.