Might as Well Rub It In

Thrift bashing is popular these days. Now it’s spreading within the business.

Westside Savings & Loan, a small Los Angeles thrift, last week announced its earnings for the fiscal year ended June 30, using the opportunity to take a swipe at its own industry.

“In an industry fraught with bankruptcy and bailouts,” began Westside’s announcement, “Westside Savings & Loan officials have reported a fifth consecutive year of record profit.”

Big Changes on the Farm

A landmark consumer item instantly recognizable to generations of Americans and virtually unchanged since Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency is getting a face lift.

“This is like changing the Campbell’s soup can,” says Steven Levine, president of Uncle Milton Industries in Culver City. What Levine is changing is the Ant Farm, which his father, “Uncle Milton” Levine, gave the world in 1956.

Unchanged since 1962 was the outside box, featuring an ant character in top hat and apple-cheeked boy and girl grinning at the labyrinth of tunnels dug by their clever critters. But Levine has commissioned an ant box, featuring livelier graphics, an Ant Farmer dressed in overalls and “up-to-date kids.” The yellow and green background is unchanged. Asked why he decided to tinker with a proven success, he says, “For one reason, the box looks like 1962.”

His father, now 75 but still a daily visitor to the office, “is a big advocate of ‘If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.’ I had to sell him on (the new box), but now he likes the Ant Farmer,” Levine says.

To appease his dad, though, the box for the larger Giant Ant Farm still features the original top hat-adorned ant.

Fax Is Faster Than Elevator

You already know about the cellular junkie, the freeway driver who can’t stay off the phone. Well, the evolution of techno-man has reached a new (low) point: the “fax potato.”

According to new market research from Mitsubishi Electric Sales America in Cypress, facsimile communication has become so popular and convenient that workers fax documents between floors in the same building rather than taking the time and trouble of delivering the materials in person.

And who’s on the cutting edge of this fax craze? The West, says the study. But we know there can’t be any fax potato mutants here. We’re already home to aerobics freaks, tennis addicts and Jane Fonda.

Scholars Rake In Dollars

Established retailers should do so well.

Dollars for Scholars, a temporary retail store operated by students of the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown Los Angeles to raise scholarship money, surpassed its own goal during a 10-day run that ended Aug. 25. Students sold more than $113,000 in donated merchandise, $13,000 more than projected and a marked improvement over last year’s $67,000.

All in all, things went about as expected, although there was the little girl who, as her mother shopped, went around and collected color-coded price-tag dots off the merchandise and stuck them on her face.