Got home today and grabbed the mail out of the box. There were two interesting pieces in amongst the bills and junk. Neither one of them is making me smile right at the moment.

We’re obviously paying too much in taxes

The first piece of mail was from the city giving us a gift card to “shop locally.” In their letter they state that they got the money to send a gift card to every single residence in town through a federal distribution related to Covid-19 relief. As much as I like to support locally owned stores, this seems like a waste of money no matter where it came from. A couple of thousand dollars going into local businesses is great, but it’s hard to call it even a band-aid for the real problem of shutting down the economy over a bad cold. We’d be better off opening up everything and using this pittance to help with the Covid related medical bills of those truly in need.

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Not impressed with the new company’s ability to identify its customer base

The second piece of mail was actually two separate envelopes from the same company. Discovery Benefits is apparently changing names to, or being taken over by, WEX. So I got two pieces of mail from them, one referencing my current employer and one referencing my previous employer. Now, if I had just changed jobs recently I could maybe forgive this little faux pas. Or if I had used Discovery Benefits at some point at my current employer it might make sense. However, the only time I ever signed up for Discovery Benefits was back during my time with the City of West Fargo. That relationship ended over 13 years ago. That I’ve received two letters from them is actually kind of disconcerting.

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Big business doesn’t seem to be running any more efficiently right now than big government. This does not bode well for our nation’s future.