Business Casual

WICHITA — Maybe you’ve heard the local wisdom that Wichita has the most fast food joints per person in the country. It’s the reason there’s so much obesity here, the wisdom goes. There are a bunch of fast food places, but it’s not even close to the top (or bottom, depending on how you look at it).

Using the US Department of Agriculture’s new Food Environment Atlas, I looked only at the markets with more than 100 fast food restaurants (Sedgwick County has 424) to screen out small counties with large rest-stops .  Sedgwick County was 53rd in the country with one fast food place per 1,124 people. That equals out to $485 per person per year spent on fast food.

Now, it does have the most per person among big counties in Kansas, ahead of Shawnee (1 per 1,162 people) and Johnson (1 per 1,282), although Trego County has the most when all counties are included. But the winners of the most fast food places per person among big markets were – no surprise – tourist places, such as Atlantic City, NJ (no. 1), Washington DC (no. 2), Manhattan (NY, no. 3) and Myrtle Beach (no. 4).

I wrote an article a couple weeks ago that pediatricians were the highest paid profession in the Wichita area, according to a state wage survey, with one caveat: some occupations, including surgeons aren’t listed in the survey.

Well, I got an angry email from one pediatric practice saying pediatricians are among the lowest paid doctors and they objected that they were being cast in a negative light. They sent me a list of doctor pay, as proof.

The story was accurate as far as it goes, but it was incomplete. According to this list of 2010 national median wages in Group Practice Journal, pediatricians are, indeed, among the lowest paid (although still well compensated). Here is the list:

1. Orthopedic surgeon, $500,672

2. Radiologist, $478,000

3. Urologist, $413,941

4. Gastroenterologist, $405,000

5. Cardiologist, $402,000

6. Dermatologist, $375,176

7. Anesthesiologist, $370,500

8. Otolaryngologist, $368,777

9. General surgeon, $357,091

10. Opthamologist, $343,945

11. Emergency medicine, $268,787

12. Neurologist, $236,500

13. Rheumatologic Disease, $224,000

14. Endocrinologist, $218,855

15. Hospitalist, $215,716

16. Internal Medicine, $214,307

17. Pediatrician, $209,873

18. Family Medicine, $208,851

My friend Malcolm Harris, who is a real economist and a professor at Friends, would probably differ with me on that last blog post. We had a chat the other day about this, and he maintains that the two downturns are different. This one is really just a typical recession and we have to work out the economic overhang — in this case, work off the bad consumer debt — and that Keynesian spending isn’t the solution. As long as world trade isn’t cut off, we just have to work out way through it.

Stores will now be able to offer discounts to cash payers following a settlement between the government and credit card companies,  according to this release from the National Retail Federation:

“Allowing merchants to offer a discount for lower-cost forms of payment will begin to inject competition into the credit card market, a step that the card companies have resisted for far too long,” said NRF Senior Vice President Mallory Duncan. “Credit cards are still going to be welcome in retail stores, but consumers are going to flock to the cards that give them the biggest discount.”

“Credit card ‘swipe’ fees have literally swiped billions of dollars out of the pockets of unknowing consumers for years,” she said.  “Consumers are fed up with credit card fees and this is a landmark step in beginning to bring these hidden fees under control. This is tremendously important in the effort to bring real competition and lower prices to this market.”

Federal law allows retailers to give customers a discount for cash or credit, but card industry rules have made it difficult to do so in practice. Card companies have also blocked merchants from giving a discount to customers who use debit cards or who use lower-fee credit cards.

That’s nice, but my guess is NRF doesn’t care much about the consumer and their pocketbook. They want their members to be able to encourage customers to use cash instead of credit cards, which cost the merchant a few percent of the purchase price. By giving customers a cash discount, store and customer cut out the credit card company and split the savings. Nice, but doesn’t it sound like we’re going backward in time.