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The Waiting Is the Hardest Part (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

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Joan Rivers used to tell a really mean joke about Elizabeth Taylor, who (like so many of us) lost her girlish figure in middle age: “She’s the only woman to stand in front of a microwave oven and scream, ‘Hurry!’”

Microwaves (for you kiddies) were the latest time-saving miracle technology back in the ’80s, and the suggestion that anyone was in that big of a hurry to eat was funny. And I was reminded of Joan and Liz, celebrity fixtures of my youth, last week when I interviewed Matt Jones, CEO of Legacy Capital in Little Rock, for a feature that will appear on ArkansasBusiness.com this week.

Legacy hasn’t lost any customers during the pandemic, he said, although revenue based on assets under management will suffer along with client investment accounts. And people seem to be postponing the purchase of important-but-not-urgent life insurance policies.

The main thing COVID-19 has done to his business, Jones said, was slow it down. Especially the parts that require communicating with Charles Schwab Corp., the primary custodian of Legacy’s client assets, which has most of its thousands of employees working from home for the duration.

“Opening accounts and getting paperwork that a person processes, those times have probably gone from same-day or 24 hours to 48 to 72 hours,” Jones said, “and I would expect that to remain like that until they are back with the bulk of their staff working from office space.”

The big life insurance companies have also become less efficient, he said. “When we’re submitting an application to issue a policy, it might have taken three or four days before; it’s taking one to two weeks now.”

Thus my mind wandered to Joan Rivers’ catty remark about impatient Liz Taylor: Technology has speeded up so many tasks that the waiting has become the hardest part.

With Legacy’s employees doing a lot of WFH — “work from home” — and Schwab’s employees working almost exclusively from home, the problem is not that they don’t have access to the internet, that time-saving miracle technology of the 1990s. It’s that they don’t have the robust, multiscreen computing systems and the broadband speed they enjoy in an office designed for efficiency.

But I suspect it’s even more than that. Did it take two weeks to process a life insurance application in the pre-internet days? Or has the staffing for specific functions also been gradually streamlined — “right-sized” — for a system built around the high-powered computing systems? Were there more warm bodies devoted to the processing in the olden days? It may be that there are simply too few people to process paperwork the way it used to be done.

We may never live in a post-COVID world, just as we have not achieved a post-influenza world, but pandemic conditions will eventually end and a new normal will emerge. The industry spotlighted in this issue of Arkansas Business is commercial real estate, an industry that was changing and may be permanently transformed by the pandemic.

Neiman Marcus filed for Chapter 11 reorganization last week, and the fact that it wasn’t at all surprising is as ominous as the bankruptcy itself. There was already a glut of empty retail space. Restaurants were a bright spot, but some will not survive, and there won’t instantly be enough new restaurateurs to absorb those specialized spaces.

There’s a lot of chatter about more people working from home permanently. (I didn’t get the feeling that Matt Jones is eager for that to happen in his business, although he did say that being unable to spend two days traveling for a three-hour meeting has made him think that a lot of business travel will be reconsidered going forward.) If home becomes the permanent workplace for even more people, the kind of technology that has powered the efficiency of modern offices will have to go home with employees, too.


The quarantine has laid bare the digital divide that still plagues America, especially in the rural areas that are plentiful in Arkansas. Households with multiple children and only one computer — or none — have struggled with online learning. Internet access is still an issue. I noticed that Farmers Bank & Trust of Magnolia is offering students Wi-Fi access in the parking lots of 10 of its branch offices through the end of this month.

My husband, who teaches at the University of Central Arkansas, offered anecdotes about homebound students trying to write papers on their cellphones since they no longer had access to computer labs. Even hungry Liz Taylor cannot possibly have been that frustrated.


Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.
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