We’ve got mail
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We’ve got mail
KAI RYSSDAL: We call it our letters segment. Although it’s mostly e-mails that we do get. Here are a couple of them:
Leonard Steinbach from Cleveland, Ohio, wrote about a story we did on coffee. Starbucks and U.S. coffee sellers are bogged down in a trademark fight over Ethiopian coffee beans.
LEONARD STEINBACH: It seems like there’s a sip of irony in Starbuck’s objection to the licensing of regional names. This is really something from the company which uses the word venti, with an r in a circle next to it, to describe its largest cup of coffee. I guess they find it OK to register the Italian word for twenty.
RYSSDAL: Not quite twenty but something close to that is the number of times the Dow Industrials has broken its record high over the past month or so. Randy McLaughlin from Red Wing, Minnesota, is frankly a little tired of the news.
RANDY MCLAUGHLIN: Enough of the hype. There should be nothing special about the stock market reaching a “new record high.” It should be happening regularly, as the market is something that is expected to grow indefinitely. Do we note every evening on the news that the U.S. population just reached a new record? The real news is that after many years the stock market has finally caught up after a long downturn. Performance so far this century has been flat.
RYSSDAL: We received quite a number of e-mails about our series last week exploring the economic opportunities presented by global warming. Frozen Assets, we called it. And listeners were, well, hot and cold. Bill Marston from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, liked it.
BILL MARSTON: Thank you for your excellent series “Frozen Assets.” I had no fear that your coverage might be lightweight, despite those spirited and whimsical choices of headlines, because I knew your facts would be right and not specious. I’ll urge you to keep pushing the edge, however.
RYSSDAL: Put Wendy Penner from Williamstown, Maryland, in the “No, thanks” category.
WENDY PENNER: I don’t know what to make of your series on climate change. Was this a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” type of coverage? Delivering the cheerful news about new shipping routes from Canada to Europe opening and all the millions of dollars to be made while millions of people will suffer and die and we do nothing to mitigate the effects, strikes me as so irresponsible that I am almost speechless.
RYSSDAL: Finally, we ran a piece last week about the country’s biggest chain of car dealers cutting its orders from Detroit. Not a good sign for a slice of the economy already in trouble. The Wall Street Journal had the story about AutoNation first. We should have given them the credit on the air.
And that’s our letters segment. Even though it’s really e-mail. Keep them coming no matter how you do it. Head on over to our homepage. It’s Marketplace.org. And click on that link that says Contact.
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