Personal Finance

Consumers are very conscious about who they give their money to. When some company offers them some incentives, it assists them in cutting down their overall expenses and increases customer flow to the business. A great way to achieve this is by offering promotional membership cards or loyalty cards to the customers. Loyal customers of a particular business get rewarded for their patronage with liberal discounts and promotional deals when they show their promotional loyalty cards. This arrangement benefits both the business and their customers.

Good savings
When these promotional gift cards are used by the customers, they save considerable money as a result of which they can spend more on several other things. This encourages customers to make more purchases from the store which they would not have otherwise made. Custom laminated wallet cards are perfect for rewarding loyal and frequent customers. They can just present such gift cards at the register to pay less amount of money.

Eco-friendly
Such promotional cards are eco-friendly as businesses can use those which are made using recycled material. These cards will get recycled again and will never end up in landfill creating environmental pollution.

Economical solution
Such promotional cards are easily printable from the store and there is no need to get huge quantities pre-printed in advance. Businesses just need to order blank stock and then print it on-site with their desired logo and business slogan. On the completion of one promotion, another one can be easily printed on the same cards. This results in huge savings for the company and also permits it to run various campaigns and promotions with different cards.

Excellent way of marketing
Marketing is one of the most important aims of distributing such membership and loyalty cards to the frequent buyers. The business gets name, phone, email and address of each of their customers which makes it quite easy for them to send different types of promotional material directly at their address at regular intervals. This provides businesses with a great insight into their customer demographics. Sending the marketing material using zip codes is nice but in this process business comes to know as to which zip code harbors largest numbers of their clients.

This is priceless marketing tool and this also makes the customer feel more privileged. Some limited offer coupons or in-store specials can also be sent to loyal customers when different goods they buy are recorded in their accounts in the database. This encourages them to revert and buy some stuff which seller knows they like.

FORTUNE — For dessert, New England baseball fans are following up their franks with another type of dog — a Cool Dog. It’s an oblong roll of vanilla ice cream, served on a spongy-cake bun with all the fixings on top (hot fudge and sprinkles, not mustard and relish).

Dan Weil, 55, is CEO of Cool Foods LLC, the Boston-based purveyor of the Cool Dog. It’s a very long way from his career as a printing executive, where he headed U.S. operations for Riso, Inc., a Japanese-owned document solutions company.

A Brit who landed in Massachusetts, Weil became President and CEO at Riso in 1995 and grew it from $60 million in revenue to about $165 million. So why, in 2007, did he leave Riso?

In part it was because of a clash with management, but also because Weil longed for a turnaround. “I was looking for something that wasn’t growing and needed new life,” he says. “Instead, I came across a product that met none of those criteria, and found it intriguing.” That was the Cool Dog, which went out of business in 2005 because it expanded too quickly and, he believes, because the previous owners hadn’t perfected the cake and toppings.

When Weil sought advice from Essex Partners, a career management firm for senior executives, they pushed him to understand the risks of what he was about to do. “In this economic environment, starting a new company is no picnic, so we challenged him to refine his ideas,” recalls Ralph Roberto of Essex. “But this is a smart guy. He wasn’t running away from corporate life, but running towards it in a new way.”

It helped that Weil already had a background in food; he is a partial owner of L’espalier and Sel de la Terre, both French restaurants. Still, Cool Dog was risky. “I learned it’s tougher to restart a failed company than to start something from scratch,” he says.

Weil acquired the company in 2009 after ensuring that all stock and debt holders approved. He self-funded the deal with $500,000 that covered both the acquisition and the working capital, which mostly went toward purchasing equipment.

Rather than making supermarket shelves the top priority, Weil first focused on family-friendly properties like minor-league stadiums and small-town ice cream shops. He also worked hard to improve the taste of the cake, which was too dry. “It took me nine months,” he says, “but I came up with a cake that was light and moist.”

Since its 2009 re-launch, the little dog has shown some bite. It’s currently sold at five minor-league ballparks, as well as the Seekonk Speedway, Gillette Stadium, Stew Leonard’s, and 20 iParty store locations (it was also at Fenway Park until just recently, but was pushed out by a larger novelty). Weil expects 2011 revenues of about $500,000.

In the novelty ice cream business, there’s competition from every shape-on-a-stick out there. But Weil is undeterred: “The product ought to be everywhere, not just baseball games but birthdays, cookouts, bar mitzvahs.” Recently, Zagat named the treat one of its 10 unique hot dogs. By 2020, perhaps it’ll be on the menu at the Ritz.

Dan Weil’s cool tips for going solo:

Setbacks happen. Be prepared, and flexible. “One place told me they would run the product as soon as we had it ready. But ‘as soon as’ became four months after I had it ready.”

Family matters. “Get your whole family involved.” Weil’s 18-year-old daughter, he says, is his “toppings queen” and selects all toppings for the demo bag he takes on sales trips.

Persistence pays. Restarting a company takes patience. “At first, Sysco (SYY, Fortune 500) didn’t invite me to any of the big trade shows,” Weil says. “They were giving me a year to see if I would fail.” He didn’t. Similarly, it took six months to get into Stew Leonard’s. 

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Americans are feeling pretty grim about jobs these days.

Only 29% of respondents to a poll released Friday believe more jobs will be available in their communities a year from now.

On top of that, a mere 44% said they believe that the same number of jobs will be available. And 26% take the even bleaker viewpoint that jobs will decline, according to the CNN/ORC poll.

As a point of comparison: The current frontline jobs forecast is slightly more pessimistic than Americans felt during the recession in 1991, and roughly the same as in the recession in 1982. (View the jobs picture in your state)

The CNN/ORC survey — conducted Aug. 5 to 7 — further found that seven in 10 respondents believe there are few jobs available in their area. Just 24% cited a normal number of jobs, and only 4% said many jobs are available.

It comes as no surprise that the labor market continues to struggle.

Thursday actually brought a ray of light, when the government reported that the number of first-time filers for unemployment benefits fell last week, dipping below 400,000 for the first time in four months.

But the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 9.1%, and signs abound that the economic recovery has hit a rough patch.

Last month, only 58.1% of Americans were employed for ages 16 and over. That’s a significant drop from before the recession, which began in December 2007 and lasted 18 months, and the lowest employment percentage since 1983.

A recent CNNMoney survey of economists found that the average chance of a new recession occurring to be about 25% — up from a 15% chance only three months ago.

In a gloomy assessment, the Federal Reserve on Tuesday said the recovery is “considerably slower” than expected, and announced it would keep interest rates low for another two years in a bid to prop up the economy.

Last Friday, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the United States’ long-held AAA credit rating. Global stock markets have been rocked since, experiencing dramatic swings both high and low. The Dow surged 423 points on Thursday, after a 520-point plunge the day before. 

First Published: August 12, 2011: 6:13 AM ET

By Anne Fisher, contributor

FORTUNE — Dear Annie: I recently left a 26-year corporate career to start my own consulting business, with my former employer as my first client. A friend sent me your column about how to drum up new business, and I’m doing everything it suggests, but I also wonder how to make the most of the Internet in getting the word out about my services. So far, I’m just using LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and a blog, but there must be more I could be doing online if I just knew where to start.

Also, how should I handle negative comments on my blog? When people make nasty remarks about points I’ve made, should I respond and get into a protracted argument, or just ignore them? – Flying Solo

Dear Solo: “A lot of people are singing the praises of online marketing and social media these days, but much of it is just a bunch of hype,” observes Patrick Schwerdtfeger, a serial entrepreneur who now heads the Entrepreneur and Small Business Academy, a nationwide network of small business owners based in Berkeley, Calif.

“A few businesses, however, really are using the Internet to explode their revenues practically overnight,” he adds.

How? Over the past seven years, Schwerdtfeger says he “tried everything” to build his own ventures’ credibility and exposure. “Some of my efforts succeeded. Most didn’t,” he admits.

To spare other solo fliers that trial-and-error approach, he has now collected his experiences in a book you might want to check out. Called Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed: Leverage Resources, Establish Online Credibility, and Crush Your Competition, it’s organized into 80 short chapters, each with step-by-step instructions on a different brand-building move.

Happily, most of these tactics are cheap or free and take less time than you might expect. For example, Schwerdtfeger suggests, “Contribute 50 intelligent comments on relevant industry forums. Offering a quick piece of advice on a forum is easy and can be done in 10 minutes or less, so you could accumulate 50 of them in a couple of days.” Include your phone number or email address in your forum signature.

A more in-depth approach to positioning yourself as an expert in your field: Publish articles online, through low-cost services like iSnare and EzineArticles, and include a link back to your website or blog.

The articles needn’t be longer than 500 to 700 words, Schwerdtfeger says, but they should be packed with enough insight so that people who come across them through a search engine will want to hear more from you and will click on the link at the end.

Don’t worry that giving away information online will make prospective customers less inclined to pay for your services. Instead, it’s more likely to prime the pump. Schwerdtfeger tells of a dentist in Boston, for example, who gave away a 20-page e-book called “Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex” online for free — and attracted so many visitors to her web site, and ultimately her office, that her annual revenues shot from $150,000 to over $1 million.

You mention that you’re already active on Facebook. If you haven’t already done so, Schwerdtfeger suggests you start announcing your blog posts on your Facebook page and using the “Facebook comments” plugin to encourage interaction with readers.

And what if, as you note, some of that interaction takes the form of snarky comments? Always respond to those, Schwerdtfeger recommends, but wait 24 hours first, to give yourself time to cool off. “Answer negative comments as best you can, but there will be some individuals you’ll never be able to appease,” he says.

“The important thing to remember is that your response is only 5% intended for the person who’s carping at you. The other 95% is intended for all the other people who will read the original comment followed by your response.” In other words, letting the exchange deteriorate into a virtual shouting match will just make you look hot-headed and unprofessional.

Schwerdtfeger has dealt with his share of hecklers, and he says he tries whenever possible to see potshots as a chance to learn something. A case in point: A “vicious” comment from someone about a podcast he recorded back in 2006 made him realize, once he thought it over calmly, that he wasn’t giving enough hard data to support his conclusions.

The criticism came after the podcast’s fourth installment and, says Schwerdtfeger, “If you listen to the whole series, you’ll notice that, starting in the fifth installment, my statements are backed up by a lot more supporting evidence. In other words, the later episodes are better than the first four.”

The moral of the story: “Ironically, sometimes negative comments are the best thing you can hope for. They tell you how to improve.”

Talkback: If you’re using the Internet as a marketing tool, what have you found to be effective and what is just hype? Leave a comment below.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — As millions of Americans continue to lose their savings in the stock market, others are stashing their money where they know they won’t lose it.

The magazine of a gun. A box of tampons. The belly of a teddy bear.

Kerrie Hopkins gave her cash-hoarding aunt a “lettuce safe” — a faux head of lettuce with a secret compartment.

“No one would ever suspect it’s anything but a perennially ripe leafy vegetable,” Hopkins told CNNMoney.

But when Hopkins’ aunt saw an ad for the same lettuce safe in a magazine, she promptly threw it out, sure that her cover had been blown if her home was ever burglarized.

Another woman, Kate McDonald, is keeping her cash safe in an envelope. Each time she adds money to it, she folds the envelope over, then wraps it in aluminum foil and places it in the freezer. “It gives new meaning to ‘cold cash,’” she said.

With the stock market plunging more than 10% over the past month, many people are stocking up on tangible assets like cash and gold. But of course they need a safe place to put it.

Earlier this week, personal finance site Mint.com asked its users to name the most unusual places they’re hiding their cash.

Answers ranged from an iPhone case, the back of a boom box, a box of Animal Crackers to an unused purse. There was also a door frame and a box of waffles.

For sure, America’s cash hoarders have moved beyond the traditional safe haven — their mattresses.

One person is hiding money inside the wood panels of a bed frame, while someone else has cash hidden in rolled up nylons in the back of a drawer.

“We actually mounted a smoke detector on the kitchen ceiling that we removed all the guts from,” said another cash hoarder. “Perfect spot for a cash stash. It was easily accessible from the step stool we kept in there. I don’t think a burglar would be checking the smoke detectors.”

Others joked that the best place they have hidden their money is the stock market.

“It’s such a good hiding place that even I can’t find it anymore,” one quipped.

Ba-dum-cha!

Retirement plans and 401(k)s were also on the list. And some people said they wished they had any money to hide.

Ouch.

Of course, hiding cash around your house can be risky, said David Hefty, president of financial planning firm Hefty Wealth Partners. Not only do you risk getting it stolen, but you get no financial benefit — whereas a savings account could at least earn a little interest.

“This is the typical fight or flight mammal response,” Hefty said. “These people are very fearful and have a large distrust with our financial system right now.”

So they may need to work with someone to overcome their financial phobias and develop a real strategy for saving their money, he said.

“What we’re seeing here is people with strong short-term memories,” said Hefty. “Those who need to hide cash have what we call ‘financial paralysis.’ They are seeing signs of another recession.”  

First Published: August 12, 2011: 5:25 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Rather than buckling down and waiting for the market’s roller-coaster ride to end, investors took their money and ran.

In fact, they yanked more than $14 billion from U.S. stock mutual funds and ETFs in the past week through Wednesday, according to Lipper. That’s the most since May 2010, the month when investors were shaken by the May 6 Flash Crash.

The exodus began last week, when the Dow tumbled 512 points on Aug. 4.

Investors came back from the weekend to AA+ credit rating. As investors reacted to Standard and Poor’s downgrade, the Dow sank 635 points. It was the worst day on Wall Street since the height of the credit crisis in 2008.

Stocks rallied back Tuesday, only to plunge again on Wednesday.

“An imperfect storm of downgrades, rumors, lackluster macroeconomic data and the ongoing euro zone debt crisis transformed a retreat by investors into something approaching a stampede,” said Cameron Brandt, director of research at EPFR, a global fund tracker.

Investors showed particular disdain toward financial stocks, according to TrimTabs, as investors feared that problems at European banks could spillover into the U.S. banking sector.

The Financial Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLF), which tracks the stock prices of financial companies such as Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), suffered a loss of $882 million in assets for the week, the firm said.

To take shelter from the turmoil this, investors looked for safety in less risky and volatile assets such as Treasuries, despite low yields and S&P’s downgrade.

They poured nearly $48 billion into money market funds, which are heavily exposed to short-term Treasuries, the most since January 2009, and $749 million in broader U.S. Treasury funds, the largest inflow since June 2010, Lipper data showed.

Investors also added $1.6 billion to precious metal funds, as gold prices soared to record highs above $1,800 an ounce.

They parked a bulk of the money in SPDR Gold Trust ETF (GLD) and iShares Comex Gold Trust ETF (IAU), two of the most popular funds for investors seeking exposure to gold. 

NEW YORK (Money) — My husband and I sold our home for a $175,000 profit that now sits in low-interest credit union accounts. We would like to have this money working harder for us, but we don’t want to invest in stocks. We also need liquidity since we plan to buy a new home (although my husband wants to wait a bit since he figures house prices will continue to drop.) Any suggestions? — Debra T., Pasadena, Calif.

After snagging a presumably tax-free $175,000 profit in this housing market, the last thing you want to do is jeopardize it, especially if you’re going to need it relatively soon to buy new digs.

If you’re planning to buy another house within the next few years with that cash, then your main goal should be to assure that all your dough will be easily and immediately available when you need it.

So even though you’d like this money to “work harder” for you, you don’t want to do anything to put the principal or any of your earnings (no matter how meager) at risk.

That essentially leaves you with two choices: a money-market mutual fund or some sort of federally insured account. In light of the debt problems in Europe and the still-uncertain fallout from the downgrade of U.S. debt, some investors have raised concerns about the security of money-market mutual funds.

I certainly don’t want to suggest that money-market funds are unsafe. I’ve got money in them myself.

But if you’re looking to make that big profit of yours work harder while keeping it accessible and completely safe, an insured credit union or bank savings account or money-market account is pretty much a no-brainer today. You can easily find accounts that return better yields than money-market mutual funds by roughly a full percentage point or more.

So assuming your credit union and your account qualify for the deposit insurance offered through the National Credit Union Association — which generally provides up to $250,000 in coverage — then that seems like a perfectly reasonable place to keep this dough.

The same goes for an FDIC-insured bank account. Depending on what your credit union pays, you might be able to eke out a higher rate on an insured savings or bank money-market account by doing a search on a site like Bankrate.com, Mint.com or BillShrink.

What you don’t want to do, though, is try to earn more by going to a bond fund, an option that could lose value if rates rise, or by investing in other putative secure vehicles that have strings attached (like annuities with their withdrawal charges) or that come with other drawbacks (think bank loan funds and auction-rate securities).

Nor do you want to invest this dough in some of the other supposed safe havens some advisors have been touting lately, such as gold, Swiss francs or dividend-paying stocks.

Whatever these alternatives may have going for them, the fact remains that their prices fluctuate. So, just as with stocks, it’s possible that when you need your money to buy the house, the value of these investments might be less than what you paid for them.

The story is different for money you’re investing for the long-term. But when it comes to money you’re going to need within the next few years — be it a down payment for a home, an emergency fund or, in the case of retirees, living expenses for the next year or two — this is definitely not the time to get fancy and stretch for returns.

As for the issue of when to buy your next house, I think your hubby has the right idea about taking your sweet old time.

Not that I’m suggesting you try to buy just when the housing market has hit bottom. That would be as futile as trying to time the stock market. But, really, what’s the hurry?

It’s not as if you’ve got to move quickly before house prices zoom out of sight. While the latest S&P/Case-Shiller housing report did show that its widely followed 20-city index gained 1% in May, that increase mostly reflects the boost housing sales often get in the spring.

Minus that seasonal effect, prices were largely flat. And since you’ve got plenty of cash to put toward a new home, you shouldn’t have trouble lining up financing, unless you have credit problems or job issues you didn’t mention.

Are you on track for retirement?

So as far as home shopping is concerned, you’re in the proverbial catbird seat: You’ve got the financial wherewithal to buy, you don’t have another house to unload, it’s a buyer’s market and mortgage rates are near all-time lows.

That’s about as good as it gets. Some housing market pros have expressed concern that bond yields and mortgage rates could climb in the wake of S&P’s downgrade of the U.S. Treasury’s debt and the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But if that happens, it’s far from clear how much rates would rise. No disrespect to the credit rating agencies, but expectations in the bond market ultimately determine interest rates, not a bunch of guys in ties on S&P’s sovereign debt committee.

So you’ll have to keep tabs on the mortgage market as events unfold. But given the weakness in the economy and the fact that investors are still rushing into Treasuries as a safe haven, I’d be surprised if we see any sort of spike in mortgage rates in the near term.

Bottom line: you and your husband seem to be handling your situation just fine. Now all you need to do is find that dream house, and hope that home prices start rising not too long after you do. 

By John A. Byrne, contributor

(poetsandquants.com) — In the past four years, UCLA’s Anderson School of Business  hired Deloitte Consulting twice to study the best practices of several top business schools, interview corporate recruiters of MBAs, and do a deep dive into the competitive landscape of graduate business education.

The outcome of that spadework resulted in a simple but crucial insight: All too often, many first-year students show up on campus unsure of what they want out of the degree. They have yet to set their sights on a specific field of study or industry. And if and when they finally do, corporate recruiters see less of a straight line to their industries and more of a zigzag that leads to questions about commitment and desire.

That primary finding has been the driving force in Anderson’s sweeping curriculum overhaul announced on August 8. The changes are part of an effort to more quickly get students to commit to a specific track of study and channel them into a more productive internship, which should, in turn, set them up for the best possible job offers in their chosen field.

Many schools, of course, have “majors” or “concentrations” of study. But Anderson is rearranging its first year curriculum so that MBA candidates can make these choices as early as possible. And as a clever inducement for students to make an early commitment, the school will offer a suite of certificates in as many as a dozen specific areas of study. Each certificate lays out a set menu of courses required for the additional credential.

From the start of the new curriculum this fall, the school will offer certificates in real estate, the management of technology, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. Subject to university approval, Anderson also hopes to roll out certificates in branding, healthcare, and entertainment. Ultimately, say school officials, they expect to have three or four in finance, at least three in marketing, and one in human resources.

“This structure will create very clear signaling of student preparation and interests by virtue of their selection of tracks, their sequencing of courses, and the availability of certificates,” says Judy Olian, who became Anderson’s dean in early 2006 after a stint as dean of Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. “Rather than this amorphous MBA, with a bit of this and a bit of that, this provides very clear information to the marketplace.”

Encouraging MBAs to commit: A losing proposition?

It’s a novel approach, but it could wind up discouraging students who are less willing to sign up for a specific subject and who use the MBA degree to explore different career choices. Olian maintains that the changes aren’t meant to be overly restrictive. “We’re not locking them in,” she insists. “We are an educational institution. We are not a prison. So if they make a mistake, they can change. But we’re looking for them to articulate their choice before they get here.”

Andrew Ainslie, senior associate dean of the MBA program, believes that the benefits of the new curriculum will far outweigh the costs. “From the student perspective, this helps MBAs signal their identity to the market,” he says. “What we’re trying to do is say to a student, ‘If you are interested in finance, we are going to make sure you walk out of this institution with the best finance preparation that we can give you.’ We are trying to help students identify who they are in the marketplace.’”

Besides the prescribed courses, there also will be what Olian calls an additional “deepening curriculum experience” and a 20-week client project tailored to a particular certificate. The mandatory research project will turn students into consultants for major companies, involving them in a wide range of projects that range from exploring new business opportunities to developing pricing strategies.

What have they done for job recruiters lately?

The consulting reports from Deloitte, one delivered a year ago and another one three years earlier, informed much of the thinking behind the changes. “Sometimes schools look inward for their curriculum reform and say, ‘This is who we are and here are the characteristics of our students,’” says Olian. “We wanted to know what the market wanted from us and that was has shaped this curriculum.”

The first study focused on the structure of Anderson’s careers and employment services. The second study, says Olian, examined the “whole value chain of the MBA educational experience, from admissions through recruiter perceptions.”

Among other things, the studies revealed a shortfall in the school’s curriculum on communications. That discovery led to a new communications course in the first quarter along with a series of “leadership introspection experiences” during orientation. Those changes were put through a year ago.

Deloitte also found flaws in how the school interacted with recruiters. “If you look carefully at the U.S. News rankings, it was pretty clear we weren’t doing great on the recruiter side of things,” says Ainslie. “The two big things we could fix there was good leadership in our career management center and this communications class.”

Anderson recruited Rob Weller, a 1991 Anderson alumnus who had worked at Goldman Sachs (GS), the Union Bank of Switzerland, and Trust Company of the West, as an executive-in-residence in 1997 at its Career Management Center. More recently, he took over as assistant dean of career services to forge better relations with corporate recruiters.

U.S. News ranks Anderson 14th in the U.S. with a “recruiter assessment score” of 3.9 on a zero to 5.0 scale with 5 being the best. By comparison, Berkeley’s Haas School, which is tied with Dartmouth’s Tuck School for seventh place, has a recruiter score of 4.1. The highest recruiter score in the last U.S. News survey belonged to Stanford, which scored a 4.6. Poets&Quants ranks Anderson 17th, largely due to lower rankings from the Financial Times and The Economist.

Translating the changes into jobs

The school’s identity has largely revolved around its prime location in southern California and its strength in finance, marketing, entrepreneurship, and operations. A vast majority of students who come to UCLA for an MBA fall in love with the place and stay in the area for the rest of their careers. “We are really well known for having a genuine culture of community, interaction, and students working with each other,” adds Ainslie. “That is a wonderful reason to come here but it is not clear how that gives us an advantage in the marketplace.”

Analysis of MBA job market trends by Weller, for example, showed that there are 9,000 MBA jobs listed in San Francisco and Silicon Valley each year, more jobs listings than New York and far more than southern California. Yet, the output of top MBAs from both Stanford and Berkeley is so small that it can’t satisfy demand. “That is a market we are trying to get our students to look at more seriously,” says Ainslie.

With the new changes, Anderson is trying to find middle ground between the University of Chicago’s Booth School “smorgasbord approach” of allowing students maximum flexibility in designing their MBA program and the Harvard Business School’s lockstep approach in which first-year students take all their classes together in sections of 90 students each.

“We still wanted some structure and a set of classes that students do together. But we wanted to offer the flexibility of taking classes early in such courses as finance, marketing and strategy that tend to lead to career paths,” says Ainslie

Will all these changes actually lead to m ***a***ore focused MBA graduates? Anderson certainly hopes so. “I hear from a lot of employers all the time that what they are looking for is early value from the MBAs they employ,” says Olian. “They don’t want to go through a retraining exercise. They want to have people they can count on from early on to be real contributors….”

More from Poets&Quants:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Amid the market turmoil, sales of security safes and vaults have spiked. While some shoppers sought to protect whatever valuables they had left, others needed a place to stash their newly-acquired safe haven assets such as gold and cash.

Port Charlotte, Fla.-based Value Safes said it sold an average of $13,000 in safes a day in the past week, more than tripling its daily average of $3,500 from the previous week. On Amazon.com (AMZN, Fortune 500), SentrySafe’s $170 1.2-cubic foot combination safe was among the site’s biggest “movers and shakers” Friday, with sales rising 44% over the past 24 hours.

Maximum Security, which sells safes for jewelry, coins, guns and other valuables, said it has seen demand climb by more than 30% over the past two weeks.

“People are just plain scared,” said Nancy Bryan, owner of Santa Ana, Calif.-based Maximum Security, who noted that sales started increasing about three years ago at the onset of the recession.

“What is happening to our financial markets is the most recent addition,” she added. “Folks are worried about the decreasing value of the dollar, burglaries on the rise in their neighborhoods … and even the possibility that the unrest we are seeing in other parts of the world slipping over to our country.”

Even though the ailing economy has forced many consumers to cut back, they aren’t skimping when it comes to protecting their valuables.

Brown Safe has seen sales of its high-end safes and vaults, which can run from a small $450 wall safe to a $120,000 custom armor luxury safe, rise 38% in the past three weeks. Its ultrasuede-lined “Man Safe,” which ranges from $6,000 to $8,000, comes with up to nine watch winders and is one of its higher-end models.

Brown Safe said many of its customers have been making purchases over the past few weeks because they no longer trust their banks and are uncertain about stocks.

Payson, Utah-based Liberty Safe said the 26% year-over-year spike in sales of its $900 to $5,000-plus safes over the last three weeks was also a result of the riots in England and other uprisings around the world.

Prestige Safe has seen sales shoot “through the roof.” Most of the recent demand has been for its high-end, maximum security products, said president Robert Tompkin. So far for the month of August, the company has sold 35 luxury safes compared with 20 in June and 25 in July.

The luxury models include safes like the “Jewel Vault,” which can endure two hours of fire and the “most severe attack conditions.” Safes such as these are used to protect watch collections, diamonds, jewelry or gold and other precious metals, said Tompkin.

“People haven’t taken security as seriously as they are now,” said Richard Krasilovsky, president of New York City-based Empire Safe, which carries both simple and luxury jewelry safes and bullion vaults ranging from $2,000 for an ordinary safe to over $150,000 for a customized vault.

“Before now, people had the money to replace valuables they lost — but today it’s like, ‘Oh my God, I just lost everything I had left,’” he said.

Desperate times typically lead to an increase in theft, he added, and wealthy consumers are more likely to take measures to protect their valuables from burglaries and even previously trustworthy housekeepers.

While Empire’s sales have already increased more than 20% in the past week, he said the biggest increases are yet to come.

“Sales don’t surge right away with something like this,” said Krasilovsky. “It’s like a tsunami — when you see the waves coming, you’re freaking out about so many things that it’s not until a little later that people have time to register what happened — and then we’ll start getting really slammed.” 

First Published: August 13, 2011: 10:43 AM ET

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Jobs may be coming back in many states … but don’t let it fool you.

Most of them still have a long way to go to recover from the recession, especially when factoring in the number of job seekers flocking to those places.

California, for instance, needs to create 1.8 million jobs to keep up with its population growth, according to figures crunched by the Economic Policy Institute for CNNMoney. That’s 11.2% more positions than there are today.

To come up with its jobs deficit figures, the institute calculated how many positions would have to be created in a state to get back to pre-recession levels, taking into account the growth in the working-age population.

The Golden State, despite its deep economic troubles, has seen this group expand by more than a million people since the recession began in December 2007. That places additional pressure on the state, where the unemployment rate is still 11.8%, the second highest in the nation.

Because of unemployed workers migrating to find work and the steep competition for jobs in those hot areas, even states that are doing well can still end up with a large “jobs deficit.”

Texas Governor Rick Perry is very proud of the state’s job creation efforts. His office set up a website titled “Texas Brags” to herald Texas’ “ongoing success and endless opportunity.”

Over the past two years, 40% of the new jobs in the U.S. were created in Texas, Perry told attendees at the National Conference of State Legislatures summit in San Antonio Wednesday. It’s one of only three states to have more jobs now than before the recession.

But Texas has also seen a population boom since 2007. The number of working age residents grew by 6.6%, nearly twice the national average.

This explosive growth means that Texas would need to create another 629,000 jobs, or 5.6% more positions, just to reach its pre-recession employment level, when factoring in this population growth, according to the institute.

Perry’s office acknowledges that the state has to create even more jobs since people are flocking to the state in search of work. It will continue to focus on luring companies with its business-friendly policies.

“It’s not surprising that companies, individuals and families are looking to Texas,” said Lucy Nashed, a governor’s spokeswoman. “It’s the epicenter of job growth in the U.S.”

Having a relatively low unemployment rate doesn’t mean that a state has no jobs deficit.

Take Utah, for example. The state’s unemployment rate is 7.4%, far below the nation’s. But it has the 8th largest jobs deficit, and needs to create 10.9% more jobs in order to climb out.

That’s because the Beehive State has seen its working age population grow by 6.7%. Much of that increase is due to children entering the labor force, though some is migration into the state, said Pamela Perlich, senior research economist, Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Utah.

“When you have more labor force entrants, it gives you more of a challenge,” Perlich said.

Only one state in the nation is actually doing better than it was before the recession and has no jobs deficit, when factoring in population growth. Not surprisingly, it’s North Dakota, which at 3.2% has the lowest unemployment rate by far.

North Dakota has created 18,100 more jobs than it needs to keep up with its expanding labor force, which grew slightly faster than the U.S. population.

There are jobs to be had in many sectors, including energy, agriculture, health care and transportation, said Michael Ziesch, research analyst with Job Service North Dakota, the state’s employment services department. Right now, there are 14,580 open positions.

Ziesch knows that North Dakota’s secret as a jobs powerhouse is out. Nearly every day, he gets a call or an email from an out-of-state resident asking about the opportunities there.

“We are becoming a destination state,” he said. 

First Published: August 11, 2011: 6:14 AM ET