You know you’re living in modern times when the chatter at the bakery counter isn’t about weather, or politics, or even the high price of gasoline, but instead about Facebook’s I.P.O

“I’m thinking of getting me some of that Facebook stock,” the bakery lady said.

“Really?” I asked, although she was talking to her colleague, not to the bearded man waiting for the loaf of country white, sliced.

“Oh, absolutely!” she said. “That stock looks good.”

A long-winded lecture on the risks of picking individual stocks spooled up in my mind, but I held my tongue. Who was I to be doling out investment advice? Maybe Facebook would live up to the hype. Maybe it was the next Coca Cola, IBM, or even Apple.

In the end, I couldn’t help myself. “You may be right about Facebook,” I said, as she handed me my bread, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket.”

She waved dismissively. “Oh, I know,” she said. “I’ve already got plenty of stock. My mother worked for K-Mart for forty years. They kept giving her shares, and now all those shares are mine.”

Then she told me more about her mother, who sounded like a dynamic and formidable woman. She’d spent her entire career at K-Mart, working her way up from the stockroom to an executive position as a buyer for the store. In return, K-Mart had rewarded her loyalty with a raft of benefits, including full health and dental for the entire family; contributions towards her retirement; even summer camp for the children!

“Summer camp?” I said. “Was it a special K-Mart camp?”

“No,” she said, “we just went to the camp we wanted, and K-Mart picked up the tab.”

“Wow, those were the days,” I said.

She smiled knowingly. “You said it.”

Neither of us broached the subject of her current employment, but I had a sneaking suspicion that her benefits were nowhere near as generous as her mother’s had been.

“We live in a different world now,” I said. “Long-term employees are considered liabilities.”

“Then there’s all that outsourcing,” she said.

I thanked her for the bread and wished her luck. Before I left, I gently suggested that she might want to talk to an investment counselor. Owning a lot of shares in any one company, whether it’s K-Mart or Facebook, is a risky proposition. Companies can — and do — fail. That’s the nature of the beast. And when a company fails, there go its shares…

She nodded and said it was probably a good idea, but there was a kind of resignation in her voice. The K-Mart shares had been good enough for her mother; they’d do for her, as well.

The conversation stuck with me. I liked that bakery lady. She was good at her job. Perhaps she even loved the work. No doubt she was happy for any paycheck in these difficult times. Even so, the fact that we live in a country of economic winners and losers has never been clearer. On the one hand, there are the Mark Zuckerbergs, high tech entrepreneurs whose inventions are transforming society, and who are reaping benefits reckoned in the billions; on the other, there are hard-working employees like the bakery lady, whose prospects have never seemed less promising.

This is not to single out the grocery industry, which operates on razor-thin margins. Surely there are still stories out there of stock clerks rising through the ranks to middle and, perhaps even upper, management. The big chains — at least the publicly owned ones — are simply doing what their shareholders expect of them: streamlining their operations and returning maximum profits.

Some would say that Mark Zuckerberg is an American hero, a job-creator of the highest order, a mammoth tax-payer, and titan of a new industry he practically invented. Why shouldn’t he be compensated at a titanic level?

You could go on to argue that the beauty of our system is that, by buying stock, even a grocery store baker can share in the creativity and wealth of the highest fliers in our economy.

Unfortunately, the deck is stacked against the little guy. Witness Facebook’s I.P.O., which is already under investigation for unfair practices whereby some institutional investors were quietly warned that the brand-new stock was overvalued.

Then again, that’s the nature of our financial system. Insiders, through means fair and foul, almost always have an edge.

Leaving the rest of us to pick up the crumbs.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 31 May 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com