Health Care Gift Cards

By Stefania Revelli

What’s Happening

• For BlueCross BlueShield of Florida, the line between health care and retail continues to get fuzzier; this fall, the company rolled out health care gift cards.

• Two different types of gift cards are available and can be picked up in Winn Dixie or CVS pharmacy stores. The $59 Blue Health Care card covers up to 10 weeks of limited health insurance and can be used towards the purchase of plans for routine and preventive medical care (including doctor, dentist, pharmacy, or lab work).

• The Family Blue Discount card ($19) gives users significant discounts on dental (10–50 percent), prescription (20 percent), and vision services (10–60 percent) for up to three months.

What This Means to Business

• These days even those who have insurance could use more help in the health department. Innovative signs that affordability and health care can coexist provides peace of mind when times are tough.

• A company that seemingly makes health care as easy, accessible, and affordable to pick up as laundry detergent is a health hero for consumers.

A Documentary Success

By Katie Elfering

What’s Happening

• The recipe for a perfect zombie movie: blood, guts, the undead . . . and a 12-year-old girl? That’s the premise of Zombie Girl, an award-winning documentary that follows tween filmmaker Emily Hagins as she writes and films a feature-length zombie flick.

• Zombie Girl showcases two years of successes and challenges that Emily faces while trying to film her project (budget issues, mom as film crew), as well as the challenges of coming of age (being a tween girl).

• Hagins is no novice to movie-making. A regular on the local indie cinema scene in her hometown of Austin, Texas, she’s also BFF with Harry Knowles of the Ain’t It Cool News Web site. Knowles even helped Hagins snag an internship on an indie horror production—at the ripe old age of 10.

What This Means to Business

• Fashion bloggers, musicians, and filmmakers: Gen We is already shaping up to be one of the most creative, productive, and passionate generations yet. Don’t be surprised to see continued creativity and an expanding entrepreneurial spirit coming from these young consumers as they continue to receive plenty of encouragement to create.

Exploding Overdraft Fees

By Hans Eisenbeis

What’s Happening

• Americans are shifting their rage from Wall Street and the credit card industry to their own banks. Why? Because in an effort to protect their margins, U.S. banks and credit unions have boosted overdraft fees a brutal 35 percent since 2007.

• An October 2009 study by the Center for Responsible Lending found that financial institutions brought in $24 billion in overdraft fees in 2008, a huge source of revenue that effectively profits from consumer pain.

• Banks argue that overdraft services prevent customers from being denied at the cash register when they don’t have enough funds to cover a purchase. But consumer advocates say the poor and the young pay a disproportionate amount of overdrafts, and banks should be required to get consumer approval for the practice.

What This Means to Business

• A major fight is brewing, and consumers have the momentum due to big wins such as the Credit CARD Act of 2009. Congress may well create new regulations to limit overdraft practices.

• The largest U.S. banks are proactively revising their overdraft policies and practices to be more consumer friendly. But a sea change is coming, and banks need to recast themselves as truly looking after the interests of their customers.

Nanobreweries

By Tim Barlow

What’s Happening

• Working in small batches within even smaller organizations, a new scale of brewery has emerged on the scene, making micro-breweries seem big by comparison.

• Nanobreweries, as they have been affectionately dubbed, are small—often just a few employees—and hyper-local in reach, which makes their fresher brews a community affair.

• Whether it’s amateurs-turned-pro like Heater/Allen Brewery founder Rick Allen, who brought 20 years of home brewing experience to his small business, or the husband and wife combo of Iowa-based Worth Brewing, nanobreweries are a personal and close-knit endeavor.

What This Means to Business

• Nanobreweries align with other returns to localism, from farmers’ markets to community gardens, as consumers eliminate the middleman and go straight to the source.

• From homes to cars, life is getting smaller in the United States. More consumers are giving the cold shoulder to quantity in favor of quality in smaller packaging.

Older Workers Report High Job Satisfaction

By Cree McGree

What’s Happening

• “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go,” is the happy refrain of older adults, who aren’t just punching the clock for the paycheck. Fifty-four percent of 65-and-older employees are “completely satisfied” with their jobs, compared with 29 percent of 16– to 64–year-olds, Pew Research Center reports.

• Just 17 percent of older workers say they work because they “need the money,” compared with nearly half of their younger cohorts.

• Good thing graying employees like their lot. The government estimates that 93 percent of the growth in the U.S. labor force from 2006 to 2016 will be among workers ages 55 and older.

What This Means to Business

• Meaningful work makes older adults feel vital, which helps explain why so many of them like their jobs. What is surprising, especially in a recession, is that money ranks so low as a motivator.

• Happy employees make for good business, giving employers plenty of reason to keep older workers around.

• Younger employees who “work for the weekend” may want to emulate their elders if they don’t want to be passed by.