Protecting Your Assets: A Well-Defined Credit Policy Is The Key

In - Protecting Your Assets: A Well-Defined Credit Policy Is The Key – an essay by Steven V. Moll, Associate Professor, The School of Hospitality Management at Florida International University, Professor Moll observes at the outset: “Bad debts as a percentage of credit sales have climbed to record levels in the industry. The author offers suggestions on protecting assets and working with the law to better manage the business.” “Because of the nature of the hospitality industry and its traditional liberal credit policies, especially in hotels, bad debts as a percentage of credit sales have climbed to record levels,” our author says. “In 1977, hotels showing a net income maintained an average accounts receivable ratio to total sales of 3.4 percent. In 1983, the accounts receivable ratio to total sales increased to 4.1 percent in hotels showing a net income and 4.4 percent in hotels showing a net loss,” he further cites. As the professor implies, there are ways to mitigate the losses from bad credit or difficult to collect credit sales. In this article Professor Moll offers suggestions on how to do that. Moll would suggest that hotels and food & beverage operations initially tighten their credit extension policies, and on the following side, be more aggressive in their collection-of-debt pursuits. There is balance to consider here and bad credit in and of itself as a negative element is not the only reflection the profit/loss mirror would offer. “Credit managers must know what terms to offer in order to compete and afford the highest profit margin allowable,” Moll says. “They must know the risk involved with each guest account and be extremely alert to the rights and wrongs of good credit management,” he advocates. A sound profit policy can be the result of some marginal and additional credit risk on the part of the operation manager. “Reality has shown that high profits, not small credit losses, are the real indicator of good credit management,” the author reveals. “A low bad debt history may indicate that an establishment has an overly conservative credit management policy and is sacrificing potential sales and profits by turning away marginal accounts,” Moll would have you believe, and the science suggests there is no reason not to. Professor Moll does provide a fairly comprehensive list to illustrate when a manager would want to adopt a conservative credit policy. In the final analysis the design is to implement a policy which weighs an acceptable amount of credit risk against a potential profit ratio. In closing, Professor Moll does offer some collection strategies for loose credit accounts, with reference to computer and attorney participation, and brings cash and cash discounts into the discussion as well. Additionally, there is some very useful information about what debt collectors – can’t – do!

Alberto Girri, or poetry as hermeneutic reason

One of the main factors that makes the poetry of the Argentine Alberto Girri (1919–1991) a whole world of its own is my argument that in a fragmentary world like the present, poets search for a formal integrity which in the act of reading creates not only their own inner world but also the readers'. It is important to insist on this turning point in which most of the Symbolist work is circumscribed. Later, this would be of capital importance for the avant-garde as well as for the post-avant-garde: Mallarmé's Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard would make poetry something absolutely modern. An original distribution of the white and black opened a new space for the text, shifting the then dominant phonocentrism. My close reading of this author as well as the given theoretical frame avoids the failure into an instrumental use either of the page or of the writing but ignoring physical reciprocity. What follows is, that this “shift” privileged heightened vision over audition of the “musical score”. Thus, an intense materialization of the language is achieved that increases the anonymity of the text. ^ Following this new arrangement of words, so to speak, Girri's poetic work now drives deeply inside words in order to lend them dignity from meaning. I conclude that the best way to “render” this poetry with religious aim (L. “re-ligare” to bind the fragmented) is by way of the philosophy of language. I also propose that Girri's task as a translator, mainly from English poetry, represented—with Jorge Luis Borges—a paradigmatic shift in the Spanish American horizon which had been under “logocentric” French rule since the time of Independence. This seismic change of perspective in late Modernism and post-Modernism is represented by a radical screening of Romance rhetoric, it was a shift not only over the inherited mother tongue but over his own work which was increasingly moving towards transcendent and/or metaphysical poetry. ^ Therefore, I did find that Girri's poem was constructed as a mirror closely related to that which was represented in the angelological tradition. ^

Deadlift

Up till now, Florida detective fiction has prowled through the hot, sexy, slightly bizarre babel of South Florida. Deadlift reveals a different Florida. DEADLIFT, set in the mid-1980s, is situated in central Florida in Winter Haven, located between Orlando and Tampa. DEADLIFT reveals Bubba Simms, a Sheriff's Department sergeant, who kills the man who raped his wife and, then, conceals the crime. He leaves the police community to become a private detective. While he searches for truth in his detective work, he is compelled to face the reality of his crumbling marriage. Bubba Simms begins to find the isolation of Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe. While the novel is action-driven, DEADLIFT depicts the humor, character, and community of a Florida that clings to the traditional South while being changed by the influx of others.