business talk

[StarryNight]

ok, I'll be the first to admit I am new to the art/science of winding pickups. I have successfully built my winder and wound a couple of nice sounding humbuckers, and I'm looking forward to learning and winding more pickups as the years go on. My first intention was to build pickups for the guitars I'm making (also a new venture) to create a very customized instrument (maybe even sell them if I get good). However, I decided to post a small add locally stating that i'm in the R&D stage of designing pickups and if anyone would like to come down and try them out, give me some feedback etc., I would install them on their guitar and if they liked them they could buy them but no pressure yada yada. That was less than 48 hours ago. I have since received 14 emails from people interested in try/buying pickups. I was not expecting this kind of response but I'm plesantly surprised and now I'm wondering if I should persue this more seriously (i.e. invest in some stock etc.) Without revealing too much, can anyone give me an idea if making pickups as a one man opperation can be a profitable venture or is it more famine than feast? Does your business come mostly from word of mouth, local players or the internet? If I were to slowly invest more into it, what would be a good place to start re. stock, equipment, meters. I feel I'm in a good position as i only work 3 days a week at my day job and teach guitar in the evenings (which i'm ready to let go if i could).
thanks...

[SkinnyWire]

If you make a good product, you should have all the business you can handle. I've never advertised, but have had consistent business for years. By the second year, I was actually getting overwhelmed by orders and had to tweak my turnaround time to the point where the flow was sane since I have a full time day job. You can get the word out pretty easy over the net, and once you develop a base you really don't need to advertise ... IMO.

As a one man show, I think the biggest challenge is the routine/monotony of just cranking out pickups hour after hour. It can really grind on you after awhile and can sort of take over your life. If you're ready to take that on, you don't need a whole lot to get going in earnest. You've got the winder. A 9-10 pound spool of 42 gage will build a significant number of coils so maybe one of those and one 43 gage if you're looking to build some medium and high output winds. A bulk order of magnets - maybe 50 to 100 A2 and 50 to 100 A5 since those are the most common/popular grades, and a bulk order of bobbins and frames of various color. The most popular seems to be black. Double cream is out due to the DiMarzio trademark. Maybe half as many cream and some white just to mix things up. Slugs, screws, etc. Easy enough to put together the bits, and pretty inexpensive when you consider how quick you can make it back by selling a few pickups.

A decent DMM is really all you need as far as equipment goes. My magnet charger has become an invaluable tool as well and Gauss meter, but you can probably live without them in the beginning and buy them with profits as you go. An LCR meter comes in handy from time to time. You'll quickly run out of time to drop every one in a guitar for "real world" test.

Anyway, rambling on and I'm sure other folks here can help you a lot more. There are a million gear heads out there, and they change pickups like they change their underwear (I hope). You'll get a good bit of repeat business if you build good stuff, and that will drive your business via word of mouth. Advertise if/when you need to.

[Possum]

I'll chip in here. Don't be fooled by those first responses :-) Before even considering doing this as a living you need to spend a year or two figuring out how to make GOOD pickups, EXCELLENT pickups. And make pickups that aren't going to die onstage in the middle of someone's summer tour gigs. On the surface this stuff seems easy, but at its deeper levels, imagine spending 3 months of everyday pickup swapping, parts swapping, trying to nail a tone in your head and ending up with tone variations in say 50-60 sound clips you have to dig through, and while doing this, simultaneously trying to fullfill existing orders? Well, thats just what I've been doing lately and not done yet. Never done, really.

The biggest hurdle is gaining a world wide reputation for excellence in tone, and MOST importantly customer service. Can you deal with musicians endlessly talking about tone on the phone and never ordering anything, time wasters, people with drug problems calling you in the middle of the night, a customer who got a pickup of yours that died on him and who is angry beyond sanity, threatening to post on every guitar forum on the internet that your pickups are horrible and your customer service is the worst on the planet? At some point you'll encounter those problems and if you make the wrong move your reputation could be destroyed almost overnite, its happened here on this forum once even.

Then there is the parts problem, there are scores of parts you need to have on hand all the time, wire supplies that need to be kept current, band saw blades to buy, expensive test gear to buy, and very few suppliers. You won't get the best prices like the big guys do so your profit margin is much smaller than say Duncan etc. Several times suppliers have all run out of humbucker bobbins in the last few years so that none of the small makers could get them, what do you do then?

Then you need to have a commercial "image" that shows the world you're a serious player in the field so you need a professionally designed website, and you need to advertise to your target audience in national/worldwide guitar magazines. Ain't cheap.

Bottom line is you absolutely must be obsessed with pickup making or your products will just be ho hum, run of the mill, same as everybody else's. This takes years to get a handle on and obsessive experimentation with test gear, not to mention testing your pickups yourself at real live gigs or jams. You need to have professionals try your work and be prepared to be told your work doesn't cut it, in the beginning. You need to be an outside of the box thinker and not copy anybody else's work. Which means inventing unique pickups that nobody else makes or has even thought of. You need to be a good enough guitar player to be able to hold your own onstage with the hottest guitar player in town. If you're just a basic bedroom player how are you going to judge tone on a professional level? I spent about 10 years religiously going to blues jams twice a week, learning to play better, and watching what the professionals do, how they hear tone.

There are alot of big hurdles there, and as in the previous post, at its most basic it can be supremely boring and exhausting making the same stuff day after day after day. For me I can do about 3 days of intense production then I start to get burnt around the edges and have to back off, but I'm an old fart too :-) My advice is if you are toying with this idea just do it part time for a couple years, learn your craft, study your craft, burn up alot of wire in experiments til you know what coils do inside and out, get an LCR meter, guassmeter, magnetizer, good soldering irons, a good winding machine, and start throwing money out the door in this pursuit. AFter 2 or 3 years you'll know if this is for you or not. I've been doing this 6 years, almost 7 now and only went full time about 8 months ago. Its hard work and being a one man business in a supply/stock driven enterprise is always a struggle to keep up. Even with my very solid reputation I don't have more business than I can deal with, and who knows what the economy will do to my work, I don't see it getting better anytime soon. I do enjoy what I do, research is my real joy, and having customers happy with their guitars after using my work. I'll stick with this for a couple years and see how far I can take the business.

[belwar]

This brings up an interesting point .. How has the economy effected everyones business? I'll be upfront and say that the last month has been slower than i've ever seen it. Even business in Europe is slow. I'm not predicting a good Christmas season myself.

[JGundry]

I actually think that pickup and other guitar accessory sales will probably go up in a down economy. People who can't afford to make a big guitar or amp purchase will instead be looking to improve what they already with new pickups, effects, speakers...

As far as advice goes... If you can play and feel you have a good ear for good tone then that is your best tool. Make pickups you like. Get feedback from others and adjust. But ultimately it's your name on the pickups.

[Possum]

I haven't seen any change in my sales, but I don't do alot of product to begin with. On top of that a large part of my sales comes from overseas, the dollar is in the toilet so US goods are a bargain right now. I think making pickups might be fairly stable, the players who buy my stuff generally don't complain about my prices and are likely better off than the average Joe, so I don't see my sales plummeting from that market group. Thank God for the internet and Paypal is all I gotta say :-)

[SkinnyWire]

I had no drop off in sales. In fact, things are up a bit over the last few weeks.

[chevalij]

For me, sales have been the same. As for the business end, it can be a pain in the butt. Come home from a real job and go to work winding pickups. My wife wants to go out to a movie or something and I can't because "I have to wind pickups" She'll have plans on the weekend, but "I have to wind pickups". At first it was interesting and great. But after the first few hundred sets of pickups the fun wears off. The last thing you really feel like doing is experimenting because, well, you'd have to wind those freaking pickups!!! Of course, you can only wind when your suppliers have met the deadline on the parts you ordered two months ago and still haven't got!

And then some idiot calls or emails because he wants a tone like Gilmour on the bridge, John Frusciante neck and possiblly Hendrix in the mid. Oh yeah, they have a Squier strat made out of freakin Balsa wood with a hockey stick neck playing a Fender Frontman amp. They want every second pole to be A2 with the others A5 and can I mix the wire? Then they want to know what cap to use to get the Angus Young tone from their strat!!! Life would be great if it weren't for the customers :) Man I need a drink.....

[J S Moore]

You pretty much nailed it right on the head. I've lost count of how many times I've had requests for the impossible.

[kevinT]

For me, sales have been the same. As for the business end, it can be a pain in the butt. Come home from a real job and go to work winding pickups. My wife wants to go out to a movie or something and I can't because "I have to wind pickups" She'll have plans on the weekend, but "I have to wind pickups". At first it was interesting and great. But after the first few hundred sets of pickups the fun wears off. The last thing you really feel like doing is experimenting because, well, you'd have to wind those freaking pickups!!! Of course, you can only wind when your suppliers have met the deadline on the parts you ordered two months ago and still haven't got!

And then some idiot calls or emails because he wants a tone like Gilmour on the bridge, John Frusciante neck and possiblly Hendrix in the mid. Oh yeah, they have a Squier strat made out of freakin Balsa wood with a hockey stick neck playing a Fender Frontman amp. They want every second pole to be A2 with the others A5 and can I mix the wire? Then they want to know what cap to use to get the Angus Young tone from their strat!!! Life would be great if it weren't for the customers :) Man I need a drink.....

hehehehehehe that is funny. And you're so right.

I actually stopped promoting for the last few months to keep sales down because I just have too much to do around the house that I have been neglecting. It can actually be frustrating when you have a lot of other responsibilities including a full-time day job.

But on the other side of the coin it is fun and gratifying. Especially when you make folks happy because you're giving them the tone they seek. And it really is a ego booster when they start taking pickups, of well known makers (DiMarzio, Duncan, and some boutique makers), out of thier guitars and replacing them with yours because they like the tone that you offer more.

[StarryNight]

Man, I am so glad I started this thread! This is incredibly helpful - thank you all for replying. As with any business venture, it starts out as a creative idea which then becomes a responsibility and something that needs to be managed on many different levels. So many small business owners (myself included - I used to own an organic grocery store years ago) struggle with the boundries of personal life vs. 'the business' and I think we all look for that golden ratio which gives us energy as well as capital to keep going without burning out from stress and fatigue (or even bordom). I'm getting the feeling one of the caveats is customer satisfaction when the customer doesn't even know what their asking for. I heard a good quote the other day, 'the customer is not always right, but he is the customer...' The other thing I'm picking up :o is that this can be a tedious job. I'm not sure what to say about that as it's still very novel to me. Hopefully there's a way to keep sane watching all that copper go by - it is kind of hypnotic. I'd love to hear more stories (bad and good) what's your most frustrating customer experience? Do you ever listen to your clients on stage playing your pickups and say to yourself, 'yeah - I'm the reason he's getting laid tonight' :D

[chevalij]

Hopefully there's a way to keep sane watching all that copper go by - it is kind of hypnotic. I'd love to hear more stories (bad and good) what's your most frustrating customer experience? Do you ever listen to your clients on stage playing your pickups and say to yourself, 'yeah - I'm the reason he's getting laid tonight' :D

Listen to music, the TV anything other than just watching the winder spin. I've never though, 'yeah - I'm the reason he's getting laid tonight', but I do know that sometimes those pickups are the reason I didn't! "When are you coming to bed?" "How many more do you have to wind?" "Why is this stuff all over the house?" "The dogs eating wire out of the garbage!" Then, the grand finale... "How many sets did you sell this week?"

Anybody remember those Dunkin Donut commercials with the guy always saying "time to make the donuts" He was coming in the house and going out at all kinds of weird hours until he ends up passing himself?

[David Schwab]

That's funny... I always said "it's time to make the donuts" when I used to get up at 5:30 to get ready for my commute to my day job! Now I'm doing the pickups and guitar repair full time. My biggest commute is getting my daughter off to preschool. :)

I also listen to music while I'm winding. iPods are a Godsend! My wife is cool about me having a corner of the kitchen and is very supportive about me working all the time. She actually encouraged me to have pickups in stock, rather than waiting for orders, which has helped the turn around.

As far as helping the guy get laid... I think the pickups are the last ingredient in that equation! I know I never had a chic say to me that she liked my pickups! ;) (I'm retired from that scene though...)

I'd sure like an automated winder though...

Back to the business talk... I just updated my website and have online ordering. I have been making announcements over at the TalkBass forum, and as soon as I said the pickups were available I got a few orders. I agree that even though the economy sucks, pickups are cheaper than a new guitar or bass. I'm in more of a niche than the PAF and Strat winders, so there are fewer options for people looking for EMG sized soapbar bass pickups. I'm branching into P, J, and MM shapes next. After that some onboard preamps, which I'm going to have made for me.

The other thing I'm doing is selling parts and strings and stuff. That's extra income that doesn't require much work on my part besides shipping the parts off.

[SkinnyWire]

For me, sales have been the same. As for the business end, it can be a pain in the butt. Come home from a real job and go to work winding pickups. My wife wants to go out to a movie or something and I can't because "I have to wind pickups" She'll have plans on the weekend, but "I have to wind pickups". At first it was interesting and great. But after the first few hundred sets of pickups the fun wears off. The last thing you really feel like doing is experimenting because, well, you'd have to wind those freaking pickups!!! Of course, you can only wind when your suppliers have met the deadline on the parts you ordered two months ago and still haven't got!

And then some idiot calls or emails because he wants a tone like Gilmour on the bridge, John Frusciante neck and possiblly Hendrix in the mid. Oh yeah, they have a Squier strat made out of freakin Balsa wood with a hockey stick neck playing a Fender Frontman amp. They want every second pole to be A2 with the others A5 and can I mix the wire? Then they want to know what cap to use to get the Angus Young tone from their strat!!! Life would be great if it weren't for the customers :) Man I need a drink.....

Indeed. That's why I jacked up my turnaround time. To more or less build in some family time. Gotta be able to step back when the joy is gone.

I call those kinds of orders "silver bullet" orders. I just tell them they're asking for a silver bullet when they want one pickup that covers every type of music ever invented all at the same time.

[SkinnyWire]

Man, I am so glad I started this thread! This is incredibly helpful - thank you all for replying. As with any business venture, it starts out as a creative idea which then becomes a responsibility and something that needs to be managed on many different levels. So many small business owners (myself included - I used to own an organic grocery store years ago) struggle with the boundries of personal life vs. 'the business' and I think we all look for that golden ratio which gives us energy as well as capital to keep going without burning out from stress and fatigue (or even bordom). I'm getting the feeling one of the caveats is customer satisfaction when the customer doesn't even know what their asking for. I heard a good quote the other day, 'the customer is not always right, but he is the customer...' The other thing I'm picking up :o is that this can be a tedious job. I'm not sure what to say about that as it's still very novel to me. Hopefully there's a way to keep sane watching all that copper go by - it is kind of hypnotic. I'd love to hear more stories (bad and good) what's your most frustrating customer experience? Do you ever listen to your clients on stage playing your pickups and say to yourself, 'yeah - I'm the reason he's getting laid tonight' :D

When you start out, the positive feedback is sort of enough to keep you going. At least it was for me. Folks being happy with the pickups and claiming they're the best ever or you nailed exactly what they were after makes you feel good about cranking them out. Honestly, with a little attention to detail and a good product dissatisfaction should be virtually non-existent. For the flake or two that comes along, I recommend instant action to make things right in their mind whether it's a refund or whatever. Don't spend the time to argue with them if at all possible.

You'll go through stretches though where maybe there's not as much feedback but you're pumping out the pickups and, as another fellow alluded to, it's the holidays and the wife wants to go across country for two weeks to be with family or the house needs this or that fixed. For example, I'm falling way behind on home repairs and a couple of years ago I had to go out of town for 10 days over Christmas. I was answering e-mails while on vacation and the orders were piling up. I thought about it most of the time and it was very difficult to enjoy myself. It literally took a year and a half to dig out from under it ... to get the turnaround time back down to a reasonable level that also leaves "space" for living.

And it does become difficult to experiment when you constantly have to fill orders. Do as much as you can up front to learn the craft.

Those are just the challenges of having a career AND a pickup business AND going it alone. If you can focus just on pickups as a business and have a couple of employees it might be a little different. I'm not trying to dissuade you at all though.

[Possum]

One of my problems, is I'll get excited by a research project and get lost in experiments and let the orders get a little too old sometimes. I think its a mistake to stop experimenting, there are too many upper level pickup makers who only have a standard line-up of products and they never seem to grow much past that.

I probably lose a fair amount of orders due to my long waiting line, but there is a benefit that may be worth the lost income. I've found that the guys who don't have the patience to wait for something good are more than likely customers that can be the most trouble. If they can't get it now then they don't want it, well thats fine with me because you know its a guy who really doesn't appreciate what you're making enough to wait for it. I really like to do things in a slow methodical way, I find if I hurry myself pushing pushing pushing I end up being a nervous wreck and make too many stupid mistakes. So I'd rather make a little less money and have happier customers as a result.

I did the double career thing for 5 years with Shrapnel album design work and doing pickups and it got to be too much to handle. I had some orders get six months behind, not a good feeling. I thought going full time I'd catch up but I never do :-)

I've already grossed more than I made with Shrapnel but profit margin is kind of slim in this business especially my PAF repro's which take endless time to make all the parts etc. Young guys who sell a few pickups think they've hit the motherload of a way to make money but they don't count up the money their StewMac kit bucker cost versus the long hours to make one set and the money they lose on Ebay and Paypal :-) This is a BUSINESS after all and bottom line is profit you can live on. So again bottom line is you better really LOVE doing this before you go full time, because it will dominate your every waking hour and you may not win any popularity contests at home banging away on the guitar all the time, listening and listening and listening for those tiny things to tweak.

As far as horror stories go, I already mentioned those in my first post, those things really happened. How to avoid that is have a CLEAR STATEMENT of your business policies on your website. A clear explanation of your warranty. Any loophole you leave open someone will try to crawl through. Basically though NEVER treat a customer badly, get sucked into arguments or tantrums, customer is always right even if he is wrong, do anything within reason to make them happy. All it takes is one pissed off guy to spread the word that you're a bad person and your business could be finished before you even get started. If you can't make them happy send their money back even if you don't do refunds.

Jason Lollar told me when I started "don't go too fast." Well I kinda did :-) Realistically you shouldn't be selling anything to anyone until you're about two years into the "dark craft." What you think you know before putting in the work and experience, you will find out later you really didn't have a clue what you were doing. I had alot of blind luck and only a couple years later did I realize why some of the early pickups I designed worked the way they did and why some of them never worked well. I was really lucky to have Jason help me get started and the pickup forum to compare notes with others out there who had more experience than I did....

[Alabam]

ok, I'll be the first to admit I am new to the art/science of winding pickups. ...

Me too.
Reading all the good advice from the old hands here was very informative, thanks lads.
I live on a working farm, make my own pickups for pleasure and not for business, and still find i don`t have much time to do it.
If your pickup is innovative enough it would be great if you could pass it on to one of the big makers, get recompence, sit back, and experiment with new pickup designs.

[Edward R]

All this business end of the deal talk is pretty interesting. It got me wondering about the number of pickups people make a week, month, or year. If you want to chime in on this that would be interesting, although it may be a little personal. I would imagine that the numbers must be pretty large. I wonder how many a Duncan or Dimarzio do, or even Gibson or Fender on the replacement end of things.

I find all this fascinating, it is truely small business in its purest form, I think. It seems that if your product is good, and can deal well with your clientele, things can grow nicely. Good luck with it all to everyone - you are better guys than me! I make a couple for myself once in a while, but couldn't imagine doing it full scale!

ER

[belwar]

Seymour duncan manufactures about 22,000 a month if I remember correctly. that was as of three months ago

[Possum]

I wouldn't dare show any of the big guys one of my designs, they would say yeah nice idea but we're not interested. Then six months later you'd see your product with their name on it and tweaked just enough so they'd say it was their design, and their lawyers would laugh at you. There aren't any really unique pickup designs that haven't been done before anyway. Even the Lace Alumitone is something that Seth Lover messed with years ago. I remember seeing somewhere a crude version of it mounted on a piece of wood. Then look at DM and how they steal patents when the inventor forgets to renew it. There are some not so nice things about the pickup business. Duncan is a cool guy but I think he's feeling the pinch from China and us smaller guys who can do a better job of things because we're not making mass amounts of product and can pay attention to each single order in a way no factory operation ever could.

[SK66]

I had to laugh!
The trill is gone!
You eventually get to where I was several years ago. Lead time goes up...initially because it HAS to. Then prices go up trying to knock back some of the demand and make it "worthwhile". And sometimes it's just NOT.

I don't make my living with this, not even close. I don't need the extra money, my real job keeps getting more demanding, my health pops up occasionally, I'd like to stay married this time, and I do have other interests in life.

Anytime you take something you enjoy and make it a job it becomes...well, A JOB.

I may make 1 pickup a week, I may make a set each night. It depends upon the demand and my mood. Demand is fairly low, and I like it that way. I do absolutely no promotion, my website fairly well sucks design wise (I have a new one done(drupal based, but I probably won't put it up because I don't like it...I'll probably do another instead...eventually). I keep lead times longish because I find that even if I "have to wind", it just doesn't work well if I'm not in the right mindset. I feel like if you're just "winding because you have to" you're only slightly above letting a machine do it all...and a machine will be more consistent.

There IS alot of satisfaction in doing it well. And that keeps me going. My intent was to SLOWLY grow a small "retirement business" to move into in about 8 yrs....It rapidly took over. I plan to keep my hands in it and start building again when I'm closer to retirement, but that might change. Right now I'm still with it because I do get satisfaction from it, I enjoy the creative experimenting, and I have it "balanced" with my current life.

[chevalij]

I do pretty well in my real job (Aerospace engineering), so the money isn't the thing right now. My biggest enjoyment in this whole thing? Getting that email from somebody who just installed your pickups and crapped their pants on the first chord or note :)

[Possum]

Your pickups give people diarrhea? Say, I have this constipation problem, can you help? Just kidding :-)

SK, boy I hear that, if I force myself to work, I make the stupidest mistakes, if I work and make myself feel rushed to do as much as possible in a nite, I screw up and end up winding pickups 3 times over. I love to tinker so usually will fool myself into working, I'll be thinking, man I'm burned out and don't want to do anything tonite, maybe I'll just sit down and fool around and put some leads on bucker coils and listen to some good music, next thing the whole night is gone and I've done a good amount of work and did it right and enjoyed it. When I wind I want to be in a mood where I'm thinking this set is going to knock this guy's ears off, he'll really love what its going to do to his guitar. To me its like enjoying a good meal, its just winding some coils but I like to do it in a slow artful way so I can be proud of the work. Everytime some impatient customer pushes me too hard to get his stuff done, I'll do it but this just sets the scenario for mistakes to happen. Sometimes I get really overwhelmed by having a long list of back orders, so I'll group them into pickup types like teles and do all those in a batch instead of jumping around, that helps and it feels good to make progress, but I never seem to catch up. At least I don't have a year waiting list like Tim White is rumored to have. My best customers are the mature types who have infiinite patience and appreciate they are getting something no one else makes. I don't have the luxury of a "retirement" I"m 58 years old, no health insurance and live hand to mouth like most people in this country, and will probably work until I keel over dead :-) You can probably guess who I'm not voting for :-) (hint....ugly short old white guy, with anger management problem....).

[Ruel]

You pretty much nailed it right on the head. I've lost count of how many times I've had requests for the impossible.

+1!:D

[Edward R]

Now Possum, not to be a sour-puss or anything, but.... Do you think it is really the governments fault you don't have health insurance and a retirement account?

But you can probably tell whom I am not voting for :) (hint... pretty tall young black guy with truth management problems....)

Just poking some fun at ya.....

[Possum]

Well, lets stay away from the political thing. Unfortunately though, I do have a huge bone to pick with this country. We are the ONLY Western industrialized country that has no health care system for its citizens. I had health care once at an ad agency I worked at. It was great until I got sick and couldn't work, they dropped me like a hot potato, health insurance vanished, the agency threw me away to die basically. If you think it can't happen to you, good luck. If I had been in Canada for instance, it would have cost me almost nothing to see a doctor and I would have care regardless of whether I had a job or not. I doubt we'll see much improvement on this and certainly not from the old guy who wants to give me a $5000 "credit" to buy health insurance. If you don't have the money to buy health insurance in the first place a "credit" is worthless. INdividual health insurance averages about $10,000 a year anyway :-)

As for having no retirement, I've been self employed for almost 30 years as an art director/designer. Basically hand to mouth existence. almost every self employed person I know is in trouble with the IRS, has no health insurance and lives day to day. There isn't "retirement" for almost everyone I even know in my age group. Social security, ha. I think the idea of a "retirement" anyway is a huge facade and a phony sense of security that doesn't exist. I've known guys who worked 40 years at one company, had a pension etc. and got dumped one day and were left with nothing, no pension, thrown away for being old. How does anyone even survive such a thing? I would much rather be living by my wits day to day than plan for some future security that is questionable at best. I watched my wife's Dad, who had 3 pensions from the military and two jobs with major corporations, die totally broke without a dime, basically left to die in rehab, with all his insurance policies run dry, and his pensions spent down to nothing, savings all gone, all of it happened within one year, his bad health destroyed his financial security and almost thankfully he died soon after. There is no security for anyone, you can be pretty well off and end up losing it all very quickly. Pretty shameful and very common in this country, sadly...

[David Schwab]

You can probably guess who I'm not voting for :-) (hint....ugly short old white guy, with anger management problem....).

Amen brother! You mean these two? ;)

[David Schwab]

Now Possum, not to be a sour-puss or anything, but.... Do you think it is really the governments fault you don't have health insurance and a retirement account?

You haven't seen the movie "Sicko" have you?

Or better yet, live anywhere in Europe for a while... Heathcare is all free, or dirt cheap.

Don't believe Mister Potato Head's lies. If you try and get health insurance for a family it will cost at least $3,000 a month. So what's that $5,000 going to do for you?

[belwar]

Ok - First off I try and avoid political conversations, particularly when business is involved. So I post this message trying to avoid showing support for any particular candidate, I post it only for humor value because both sides tend to get a laugh from this one... Enjoy

... and lets end the politics discuss on this thread - We'll only make enemies of each other and loose the friendlness that makes this place great.

[David Schwab]

I thought Abe Simpson was perfect, but Palin is Peggy Hill all the way! Only Peggy is way smarter.

When I Googled Peggy Hill I found I was't the only one!

I still call them Mister Potato Head and Winky!

[StarryNight]

I'm not bragging or anything; we've got some serious political problems of our own up here in canada. Just a quick anecdote about health care. I had to take my wife to emerg a couple of weeks ago. She was in a lot of pain when we arrived and was placed in priority sequence (i went to the nearest hospital). after about 5 min. we went into triage where she got some pain killers and was examined by a doctor. After a few hours of waiting, her surgury was booked (she signed some papers) but the soonest was 4am so she got put into a hospital room shared by one other woman and spent the night. I picked her up the next morning and we went home. No one even mentioned the words money or insurance to us or ask us what we do for a living or how much we make (and she's recovering just fine). Now, it's not always like that. Bigger cities have longer wait times in emerg and there are cutbacks happening left and right. fyi, The guy who created socialized health care in canada is Tommy Douglas in 1962. Anyway, back to pickups!

[Possum]

Your same scenario in the US would be far different, and you would come home with a likely bill and presicriptions of probably around $1500. If she required surgery you would be out thousands of dollars. If it was an ongoing health problem thats serious you could lose your home. If you had insurance, they would bend over backwards looking for ways to say sorry we don't cover THAT. In the US, health care is a gigantic, huge money making machine, its ALL about making money, not about healing people or keeping them well. Thats why the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies avidly fight to take away the right for people to buy vitamins and herbs and supplements without a prescription, every year they try to pass legislation in that pursuit. We have a law here that actually says ONLY DRUGS CAN CURE DISEASE. So if you have a website selling say valerian and say it can cure insomnia, you could go to jail for claiming an herb can cure a disease. Unfortunately pharmeceutical companies have most politicians in their pockets so our health care gets worse and worse and over-medicating kills thousand and thousands of people every year. The truth is the medical system killed my wife's Dad, their antibiotics they used trying to rid him of an incurable staph infection he got IN a hospital, made him deaf, incontinent, and they eventually cut off his lef to rid him of the infection in his knee. the level of care we saw was abhorrent, doctors walking by his bed and prescribing medecines he was allergic to that would have killed him, not even reading his chart. Pretty bad.....wife had to threaten one at the top of her lungs, with malpractice before he would stop trying to give him something that would have killed him on the spot....

You really should watch SICKO despite what you may think about Michael Moore. People who criticize his movies invariably are the ones who've never watched them :-)

[belwar]

A staunch republican salesman I work with (very hardcore - Keeps a picture of Reagan in his office, doesnt believe in global warning, so on and so on) was the one who told me to watch sicko. I was so shocked that HE told me to see it! As a transplant Canadian in America, the movie really hit home.

[Ruel]

Your same scenario in the US would be far different, and you would come home with a likely bill and presicriptions of probably around $1500. If she required surgery you would be out thousands of dollars. If it was an ongoing health problem thats serious you could lose your home. If you had insurance, they would bend over backwards looking for ways to say sorry we don't cover THAT. In the US, health care is a gigantic, huge money making machine, its ALL about making money, not about healing people or keeping them well. Thats why the FDA and the pharmaceutical companies avidly fight to take away the right for people to buy vitamins and herbs and supplements without a prescription, every year they try to pass legislation in that pursuit. We have a law here that actually says ONLY DRUGS CAN CURE DISEASE. So if you have a website selling say valerian and say it can cure insomnia, you could go to jail for claiming an herb can cure a disease. Unfortunately pharmeceutical companies have most politicians in their pockets so our health care gets worse and worse and over-medicating kills thousand and thousands of people every year. The truth is the medical system killed my wife's Dad, their antibiotics they used trying to rid him of an incurable staph infection he got IN a hospital, made him deaf, incontinent, and they eventually cut off his lef to rid him of the infection in his knee. the level of care we saw was abhorrent, doctors walking by his bed and prescribing medecines he was allergic to that would have killed him, not even reading his chart. Pretty bad.....wife had to threaten one at the top of her lungs, with malpractice before he would stop trying to give him something that would have killed him on the spot....

You really should watch SICKO despite what you may think about Michael Moore. People who criticize his movies invariably are the ones who've never watched them :-)

Makes me wonder why a lot of Filipinos would want to migrate to the US. I mean we may not be doing great here but IMO, nothing beats being home, especially when things are not looking good.

[David Schwab]

You really should watch SICKO despite what you may think about Michael Moore. People who criticize his movies invariably are the ones who've never watched them :-)

Yeah, the same people think Bush doesn't believe in global warming, but he does. He said it's real, but he didn't like the fact that the biggest polluters didn't want to join in doing something about it, so he wouldn't either.

I love the part in the movie where Moore anonymously sends money to the guy who runs the anti Moore web site so the guy's sick wife can have an operation, and the guy wont have to shut down the site!

That and taking the sick 9/11 rescue workers that the Gov wont take care of to Cuba for free medical treatment!

Really, everyone, rent that video!

[Possum]

I like the part too where his buddy dislocates his shoulder doing a flip on a crosswalk, Moore takes him to a hospital, then Moore keeps asking where do they pay their bill at the hospital and couldn't find such a place :-)

[Possum]

That was in the UK, forgot....

[David Schwab]

I like the part too where his buddy dislocates his shoulder doing a flip on a crosswalk, Moore takes him to a hospital, then Moore keeps asking where do they pay their bill at the hospital and couldn't find such a place :-)

Oh yeah, he goes to the "cashier" window, only to find that you don't PAY the cashier... because the service is FREE. The cashier pays YOU, so you have cab fare home! And the guy wasn't even a UK citizen, he was just a US tourist.

And that's how it is everywhere but in the US my friends. No one pays for heath care. Why is that? Because the insurance companies are greedy and corrupt here and want to make a lot of money off you being sick.

I had to switch doctors several times at my last job because they had to keep switching insurance companies because the premiums were going up and up. Now that I'm self employed I had to get insurance for my kids and myself. So I found a state run HMO, but it was like jumping through hoops.

My wife started working full time, and had to change doctors with her new insurance, after having to switch doctors several times at her old part time job at A HOSPITAL, because they kept switching insurance companies. And she can't afford to insure us.

Now with her new insurance they wont cover preexisting conditions for six months, and she has asthma and just had cataract surgery (the cataracts were caused by the steroids used to treat her asthma when she was in the hospital two years ago) and luckily she got in an asthma study where they are giving her free meds!

She talks about when she lived in Spain and Italy, you could walk into any pharmacy and get what ever you need, dirt cheap. Asthma inhaler? $2 in Spain, and about $150 here.

This should not happen in this country, but people here think it's normal, because we are told we don't want socialized health care, even though we have socialized public schools and postal services, so that the rich people can keep getting richer, and we have less and less choices for heath care.

Until everyone stands up and demands something different, we will continue to have the shortest life span of any developed country in the world, and have the worst heathcare system.

This is a wealthy country, but where's all the money going? Surely not to help the people who live here.

[chevalij]

I had a job interview in Boston a few years back. The pay they were offering was decent, but they kep ranting about how good their insurance plan was. I didn't really get why that was so important until now. Guess I'm just a dumb Canuck :)

[Possum]

We also have the highest infant mortality rate in the industrialized world as well. The sick thing is when you try to have this conversation with anyone in government etc. they snicker and say "oh sure, you want us to end up like the CANADIANS?" Like they have some incurable disease or something. Closed minds. The other part I enjoyed and was amazed at was the interview of the French doctor couple, Michael asked them if they were paid poorly and struggled being socialized medecine doctors. Their house was beautiful, they had a really nice expensive car, and he was making a high income....making sick people well for free. If McCain wins Suz will probably discuss emigrating to Canada, but unfortunately so will alot of other people and they have really tightened up who can come over. We are both self employed so wouldn't be a drain on their economy, but mostly they want young people, farm workers and the like...