Ever cheaper gasoline!

Early this month I was shocked at how inexpensive gasoline had become.

Yesterday, as I filled my tank at Costco, I found the price per gallon to be down to $1.899, which is just unbelievable! If you refer to my previous blog, this would have been $0.46 in 1977, the year I moved to America, while the price at the pump was an already low $0.60!

If there would be a time to tax fossil fuels in the United States, it should be now, and would go a long way towards repaying our debt, but instead we prefer watching our planet self-destruct.

Sad, indeed, while we may watch fuel prices continue falling...

Living in a bubble...

Many of us live in a bubble and don't even know or appreciate it.

Generally, it's a “good” bubble, where everything is routine, orderly, predictable and close to perfection. This has to do with our place of residence, our activity or lack-thereof, and in my case, retirement plain and simple.

If you're like me, we're no longer confronted to the ups and downs of the work place, the stress and the miseries that are part of it. So, it's easy to ignore the world at large, the rush hour traffic, the appointments as well as all the disappointments that come with a full day of labor.

Is bubble living good or bad?

It certainly can be cozy, but also fraught with danger of giving us a false impression that all is well, or not getting the true picture of the world we live in.

This is why getting out of our bubble every now and then, isn't not just a welcome change, it's a necessity of life.

My last day in the Air Force

This was just fifty years ago, a Wednesday, to be precise, as the next day would see my freedom from the asinine prison that was mandatory conscription.

I entered that jail on November 3, 1967, which would totally waste close to 16 months of my life.

On the eve of my liberation, I had no idea what my future might be, except for perhaps starting a real job, doing something somewhere, or maybe, embark on a dream career as a ski instructor that might take root if I passed a technical ski exam scheduled for the upcoming weeks.

Nothing was etched in stone, I was somehow elated, but in a total state of blur, my life has been frozen for too long and I needed to restart it...

The book I should write about skiing...

Most books about skiing are technical treatises that deal about weight transfer, body position and pole plant. All say little or nothing about speed.

In fact, they're all about tactics and don't say much about strategies. For example, most of what's been written is based on perfectly controlled snow surfaces that allow for carving and precise movement, but are too far removed from reality where speed control is crucial, snow irregularities and wavy surfaces abound.

So, I were to write a book about skiing, it would be much lighter on tactics (or technique, if you prefer) and more focused on strategies, like the best ways of harnessing fear, adapting to the ever changing environment that is part and parcel of that sport or how to ski certain terrain and snow condition, how to be progressive, when to do it or how to harness speed.

In a nutshell, it would be information all people could use or try to add to their day-to-day experience on the hill.

I believe that quantitative practice, or sheer mileage, is more important to gain skills than technical minutia that is often hard to incorporate into a person's way of skiing and generally falls into law of diminishing returns...

Peter Keelty, 1942-2019

Peter Keelty passed out from emphysema in Salt Lake City while I was skiing with friends in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Born on August 2nd 1942 in New England, skier, patrolman and eventually ski instructor in Stowe, Vermont, Peter soon became a ski rep for Salomon in New York City and Connecticut.

I first met and work with Peter on a video involving former ski racer Andy Mill when I worked for Lange. Always one to re-invent himself, a talented writer too, Peter was involved with ski newsletters and one of the co-founder of RealSkiers.com an online ski review publication.

Peter was a real nice guy, passionate about skiing and always ready to tell a good story. I last spoke with him on July 12, 2018 and truly regret not to have paid him a visit at his Salt Lake City home in the interim.

Ski lift riding odds...

There never seems to be a dull moment when riding a lift...

This past Wednesday, as I was skiing with my spouse, we rode twice the same lift with the same person on two different occasions! Did you understand what you just read?

Let me detail the story one lift ride at a time. We first picked up a single on the Iron Mountain high-speed quad chair. Let's call him the “Brit”, then two rides later another single joined us on that same chair that we'll call the “pilot”.

When we were totally frozen and decided to go home, we rode the triple Shortcut chair and who was our neighbor, but the “Brit”, who explained to us that after a four-year job stint in the USA, he was about to return to England.

Then, from the base of the Canyons, we rode what is called a cabriolet, a people mover that shuttles skiers from there to the parking lot, and who was next to us? The “pilot” who worked for Fedex and will soon move to Europe too and be based at the one of the company's European hubs, in Paris.

Now, you tell me, what could be the odds of this ever happening on the 41 lifts that count Park City Mountain?

Can Decathlon win the American consumer?

Decathlon, the French sporting good retailer that with 1,500 locations in 49 countries says to be the world's largest, plans to open a 47,000-square-foot store in Emeryville, California, in April 2019, in a former Toys R Us store, following the opening its own “lab store” in downtown San Francisco, a year before.

At about the same time, it will also open its first Canadian store in Quebec province. This the chain's second attempt at the U.S. market. Decathlon tried a first time in 1999 when it purchased the assets of MVP Sports Stores, a New England sporting goods retailer with 20 locations. It re-branded them as Decathlon, but shut them all down between 2003 and 2006.

While several major sporting goods chains have shut down in the U.S. in recent years, Decathlon differs most from them because it exclusively sells its house brands. It's one of the reason why it claim that its vertical integration allows it to offer extremely low prices.

It will be interesting to see how the sport-minded American consumer will take the Decathlon's bait and will be happy with its image-less and cheap, offering and if it will be able to motivate its staff by paying them close to nothing, and hoping to just cheer them up into excitement like they do in France.

Many Europeans concepts ranging from Club Med to Ikea have had a tough time successfully translating to the U.S. consumer. Hopefully, the giant retailer will have learned a few things about the American market from its lackluster experience at the beginning of this century...