I sometimes frustrate my dear wife when I leave crucial words out of sentences. It’s genetic. Mom does the same thing. So, without much in the way of context, I will say something like “I’m thinking we should use 53.”

“Absent words.”

“Oh. Sorry. When we go to Alexandria tonight, we should go on State Highway 53 instead of through Redstone.”

Absent Words replaced “What the hell are you talking about?” as a conversational lubricant.

Having been married for a while, though, she is increasingly able to fill in the blanks. Yesterday, I asked, “Is that thing going to be with those other things?”

“Yes,” she answered, “the ovulation kit will be with the feminine products.”

And so off to Safeway I went. It turned out that the ovulation kits were not with the feminine products. I know this because I spent a good half hour looking over every kind of tampon, cream, and gel that I never knew existed in search for it. Finally, I had to do what I always have to do when I am looking for something like an ovulation kit. I had to ask customer service.

It turned out that the ovulation kits were in a separate part of the store. Right by customer service, in the wide open front of the store. With the condoms, pregnancy tests, and just about everything else that kids would not want their parents or neighbors to know that they are buying. I am thinking that this is not coincidental.

Ordinarily, something like an ovulation kit - or condoms - wouldn’t bother me, but this is a small town and not a visit to the pharmacy went by when I was picking up my wife’s birth control where the pharmacist didn’t say “You’re still not trying?” For some reason, announcing that we are trying (by way of purchasing an ovulation kit) is more private than the fact that we’re trying not to. It’s not logical. The check-out girl (who lives five houses down from us) looked pleasantly surprised to see the kit.

My only other real experience purchasing feminine products (except birth control) was in college, when my then-girlfriend Julianne needed me to go to the campus convenience store and pick up tampons. And so, of course, the conversation ended with the clerk saying, as I stood in line in front of about five people, “Now did you want the tampons in the blue box or the green box?!”

Felix Salmon complains about a pricing innovation I had not yet heard of: ATM’s working off a percentage fee rather than a flat fee. Or, as these things generally go, whichever fee is greater. In the case he cites, it’s $3 or 3%.

Look, I’m not going to get all market-worshipper on this, but as far as price gouging goes, this is far less of a big deal than what we put up with at sports arenas, amusement parks, and so on. If I don’t like Holiday Inn’s charge, I really, genuinely can go elsewhere. Maybe this will take up like wildfire and all of them will be doing this and so at some point in the future I won’t have a choice.

Even then, though, the pricing model itself doesn’t seem particularly outrageous. In order to trip up to the percentage-based fee, that means that you have to be extracting more than $100. If you’re extracting more than $100, maybe you need to find the nearest branch of your bank. If anything, I think this fee is to guide people to do just that. Extracting large sums from an ATM machine actually does cost them more money. It means more regular restocking. So I can very easily see why they would be cool with people taking out $40, but wanting those who intend to take more out to think twice, go elsewhere, or pay extra.

Of course it does not cost them $3 per small transaction or an extra $3 for a transaction of $200. But the ATM, the security involved, and restocking all do cost money. Is Holiday Inn making money off the ATM? I would imagine so. Maybe it would be better if they provided it as a cost-neutral convenience. Maybe we should go to hotels that do just that.

But really, there has never been a better time for a consumer as far as this stuff goes. More and more places offer cash-back on purchases to the point that I almost never use an ATM anymore (not even my own bank’s). But more to the point, we need cash a lot less than we used to. $100 in cash goes a lot further than it used to with credit card swipers everywhere. And if there is one benefit to the increasing consolidation of banks, it’s that it’s more likely your bank has an ATM nearby just in case you happen to need one. The last couple of times I did use an ATM it was while traveling. A quick google and a quick drive and no ATM fees at all.

Now, maybe it’s not worth it to get in your car and drive for ten minutes in order to save $3 or $6. If so, that only suggests that the Holiday Inn’s convenience charge is reasonable.

My name has found itself on a new mailing list. Of that I am sure.

What’s curious is that my name on this mailing list is W.S. Truman. I never fill out forms by that name. None of my credit cards are in that name. My Frequent Flier Miles are not under that name. I mention my FFMs because I was recently told it was time to cash them in and I picked up a subscription to Forbes, The Atlantic, and ESPN Magazine. I suspect that one of those three passed my name along. I suspect it was Forbes because two of the three things I received in the mail today came from conservative organizations. One of them, on the envelope, asking a loaded question that my answer to was actually not the one they were assuming I would have.

My mom made a habit out of using different names whenever she would sign for things that could put her on a mailing list. She has four names, so it wasn’t hard for her to do (she used the dog’s name once, and Roscoe received a credit card in the mail*). For a while, she kept track of who put the lists out where. She wrote an great article about it that she published in her local newsletter. It was good enough that it should have been in a more formal newspaper or magazine (I got only some of her writing talent).

* - Yes, this is a true story. It said “Just call to activate” though I assume that calling would have meant a more lengthy process than that. Among other things, to be sure that they didn’t actually give a credit card to a dog.

Larry Downes got a lot of publicity with a screed against Best Buy, declaring its imminent demise:

To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.

I admit. I can’t do it. A few days ago, I visited a Best Buy store in Pinole, CA with a friend. He’s a devoted consumer electronics and media shopper, and wanted to buy the 3D blu ray of “How to Train Your Dragon,” which Best Buy sells exclusively. According to the company’s website, it’s backordered but available for pickup at the store we visited. The item wasn’t there, however, and the sales staff had no information.

But my friend decided to buy some other blu-ray discs. Or at least he tried to, until we were “assisted” by a young, poorly groomed sales clerk from the TV department, who wandered over to interrogate us. What kind of TV do you have? Do you have a cable service, or a satellite service? Do you have a triple play service plan?

He was clearly—and clumsily–trying to sell some alternative. (My guess is CinemaNow, Best Buy’s private label on-demand content service.) My friend politely but firmly told him he was not interested in switching his service from Comcast. I tried to change the subject by asking if there was a separate bin for 3D blu rays; he didn’t know.

The used car style questions continued. “I have just one last question for you,” he finally said to my friend. “How much do you pay Comcast every month?”

My friend is too polite. “How is that any of your business?” I asked him. “All right then,” he said, the fake smile unaffected, “You folks have a nice day.” He slinked back to his pit.

Best Buy is on my blacklist of companies. They’re one of the Evil Corporations. I’m not a fan. I shop there sometimes, but only because I need to and there is no Fry’s around. What’s funny about this, though, is that the one thing Best Buy always did so much better than Circuit City is that they didn’t have the overly aggressive salespeople. I could shop in piece. And honestly, I can’t remember a problem even on more recent trips. So I don’t know if they changed their business practices from when I went there all the time (and the few times I’ve been recently I lucked out) or whether I just come with a “Don’t tread on me” demeanor.

His follow-up suggests that his experiences are not unique.

I also heard from plenty of current Best Buy employees, both via Forbes and through private emails. Best Buy has a strong sales culture at the stores, and some employees took the article personally. I called out some of their (non-obscene) comments on the original post, in part because I think they inadvertently highlight what’s wrong with the company’s current strategy.

Employees, I learned, are strongly conditioned to see every customer who walks in the store as a potential target, one who needs to be coerced into buying something other than what they came looking for.

But you can’t treat the customer as an adversary in a battle of wills. You can’t provide superior service when you’ve been drilled to view each person who walks into your store as prey. You can’t be a trusted source of expertise on consumer electronics when, as many former employees told me, failure to follow the company script means getting your hours cut or simply being fired.

A shame, if true. Since I consider Best Buy to be an Evil Corporation, I won’t mind if they go. I hope it provides an opportunity for Fry’s to expand. Fry’s has a bit of a different business model, with more of a bookstorish emphasis on “kick back, relax, have some coffee!” Of course, bookstores themselves are alleged to be in trouble. So Fry’s might choose to play it safe (one of Borders alleged mishaps was overexpansion, if I recall).

Web’s post the other day reminded me of one of life’s little irritations. To pull down the curtain of fictionalization for a second, one of my previous employers was involved in the photo-imaging industry. You know those kiosks where you get digital film developed? Those. Also, behind-the-counter stuff. Said employer is a relatively major player in the industry, but you have almost certainly never heard of them. Why? Because they house brand everything. If you go to Walgreens and use our product, everything will say Walgreens. Same with CVS. The former #1 player in the industry used their own well-known brand name, but #2 and #3 (who may be #1 and #2 now), one of which I worked for, don’t. Nor does anyone else I am aware of.

As a general rule, I like to patronize former employers. When I can, I get my hair cut at the chain where I used to sweep hair when I was a teenager. Some of it is simple loyalty (a couple employers I feel no such loyalty to, though - nor do I refer to them as “our”). In this case, though, it’s because I know the product back and forth. I know what it can do and I know what it cannot do as well. And it’s a product that I generally believe to be a good one. Maybe one of our (errr, their) competitors is better. But I know what I am getting when I use the product that I tested for the better part of two years.

Except that I never know if that’s what I am using. There is nowhere I can find out if that’s what they’re using. I ask the guy behind the counter and he looks at me like I am an alien. “It says CVS. It’s a CVS scanner.” Well no, it’s not. It’s a conglomeration of products that you purchased for other people. When I print something out on my printer at home, I don’t say it’s a Trumwill Printer. It’s a Canon or a Samsung (depending on which I use).

I get, of course, that they want people to believe it’s theirs. And most of the time I believe it to be harmless when companies did this. My former employer made more money on sales where this occurred, and I liked things that made my former employer more solvent. But for my particular needs, it’s kind of irritating.

Per Bakadesuyo:

A total of 68 15-min. observations of customers’ behavior at a food supermarket suggests that only about 7% of shoppers observe the item limit of the express lane. The averages tended to be about four pieces.

I’d be curious to know the methodology on this. This doesn’t even make sense to me.

If they were measuring people that had more than 10 items, surely more than 7% went through the regular checkout lane by default. Express lanes are usually a minority.

If they were measuring people with 11-15 items, that might make more sense, but how many people have 10-15 and is it enough to really draw from? When I go to the market I usually only have a couple items or a ton.

I may have broken the rule yesterday, though. Our local express lane is actually 15 items and I had… roughly 15. I didn’t check. There was nobody in the express lane. The usual excuses for scofflaws, I suppose. Nobody said anything!

Megan McArdle tweeted yesterday about the dangers of going to the pharmacy on the 1st of the month. I didn’t think anything about it until I was told there was a 90-minute wait yesterday. That’s pretty unusually high, so I guess there is something to it.

Do other nations have pharmacies like we do? Where pharmacists get paid a lot of money to handle the drugs? I must confess some ignorance as to the necessity of all that. My sister-in-law is a PharmD (pharmacist with a doctorate). I should ask my wife. I haven’t seen her but for bits and pieces lately, though.

The image above is from the TBS TV show 10 Items Or Less. It’s funny in little bits, but there’s only so much entertainment to be had in watching a show focused around such… uhmmm… people that have not lead successful lives due at least in part to rather poor judgment on their part.

Coupon Shoebox has a piece up on ways to “increase your frugality” that range from the questionable to a couple that are okay.

Television programming: I have high speed Internet. I have Netflix. This means that I have access to TV shows the day after they air, and that I have access to movies — some of them using instant play with my TV via my Web-connected PS3. So, why am I paying more than $70 a month for TV service?

This one is fair enough… for the time being. But, as I will state more thoroughly in a future post, this model only works because others are paying for cable. If people start cancelling cable en masse, what do you think the odds are that the makers of television programs will take the hit and allow people to consume their product at lower prices? They are already hitting up Netflix hard and Hulu’s free offerings have diminished. Television programming is expensive at least in part because it is expensive to produce. The free (or cheap) ride will only take you so far. If you want TV programming, in the longer run, you’re going to have to be willing to pay for it.

Magazines: We are in the process of culling our magazines. Most have online versions, and there is no reason to be paying for magazine subscriptions when so much of what I read in terms of news and commentary is online anyway.

The same applies here, though to a much lesser extent. Content is not nearly as expensive to produce in the text form as the visual. Given this, I do believe that one way or another, it’s the content-producers that will have to make the adjustments and people in general are going to have to make due with lesser quality. So this one works, more or less.

Paper books: I love reading and I love books. But my husband recently pointed out that electronic versions of books for readers like the Nook, Kindle and iPad are much less expensive than buying hard copies. With the amount of reading I do, it would be relatively easy to recoup the initial cost of buying an electronic reader. Plus, electronic books would reduce the clutter in our home.

Errr, no, the electronic versions are not “much less expensive” than the hard copies. Unless you’re looking specifically at new release hard covers. A much better way to reduce spending on paperbacks is to buy used. Of course, buying used paperbacks won’t let you buy a neat new gadget under the banner of frugality, now will it?

Clutter: Speaking of clutter, we’ve got more of it than I like. I could definitely live without it. We’ve been practicing more mindful spending, so that we aren’t bringing in more clutter, but we could get rid of a lot of the stuff that we have.

Unless you think you’re going to make a lot of money getting rid of the existing clutter, this has little to do with frugality. More mindful spending does, of course, but that’s a thing unto itself.

Meat: I’m not saying I’m going vegetarian. But I have found that I don’t need so much meat. Meat is expensive, and it can affect your health if you eat too much of it. We’re looking into preparing more meatless dishes. This should lower health care costs down the road, as well as mean more money in our budget now.

This strikes me more as health sanctimony as it does frugality. McDonald’s hamburgers can be the cheapest food around.

Christmas presents: With the holidays just around the corner, many are already preparing for holiday shopping. But do you really need more stuff? You can save money by purchasing fewer, more thoughtful, presents. It’s hard to resist the consumer call of Christmas, but we are trying.

Well yes, spending less on gifts for others will save money.

This really isn’t the point of a well thought-out piece, but after reading the opening paragraph:

California police will now be able to conduct warrantless searches of optical disc (DVD, CD, BluRay) factories to look for piracy and seize pirated discs, under a bill just signed by California Governor Jerry Brown (full text). Even those who think copyright law has gone much too far, or cherish fair use, shouldn’t defend such blatant, commercial piracy, which does nothing but deny creators the market for their artistic products. One need only look at China to see how such infringement can destroy creative industries.

My thought was that raiding the factories here will only mean more of the piracy will be done in China. Yet another way our government is pushing industry abroad…

(I agree with the piece, but that was the first thought that came to mind.)

As most of you know, I am a critic of the iPhone. Truth be told, though, if you say that the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market, I won’t entirely disagree. The question, of course, is “best for whom?” For people that want a phone of its type (simple, tightly integrated design, thin, no keyboard, outstanding app selection), it is far and away the best. But that’s sort of giving it a heck of a home field advantage. Tim Lee sums up my thoughts better than I have yet to be able to:

A good way to visualize this is by thinking of a computing platform as a funnel. At the narrow end of the funnel is a human user with an extremely limited capacity for absorbing information. At the fat end of the funnel is “the world”—the collection of websites, devices, people, organizations, or other entities with which the user might wish to exchange information. The job of a computing platform is to connect the two—to filter and organize the vast amounts of information at the fat end of the funnel into a form that is digestible by the user at the skinny end. {…}

This explains why iOS has been losing ground to Android even though most people agree that the iPhone is the best single smartphone on the market. There are tens of millions of people who care most about the narrow end of the funnel. They want the best user interface, and are willing to make compromises on other fronts to get it. Most of these customers will opt for an iPhone. But there are hundreds of millions of customers who care more about some other factor. They want a phone from their favorite carrier, a phone with a physical keyboard or a removable battery, a phone with their choice of app store, a phone they can get for free with a contract, a phone they can get with a pre-paid plan, etc. No single phone (wireless carrier, hardware manufacturer, etc) can satisfy all of these diverse customers. Only a platform designed to support many different phones from many different manufacturers on many different networks can cope with this kind of diversity.

Armed & Dangerous talks about the success that Android has been having:

More interesting, perhaps, is what is not happening in the latest figures. Tragically for the contrarians, it is Apple’s U.S market-share growth rather than Android’s that has stalled. Android share growth continues to bucket along at about 2% a month, while Apple’s shows no increase in the latest figures.

The future is another country, of course, but right now it looks like those of us who thought that multicarrier iPhone was going to be largely unable to fix Apple’s long-term positioning problem were correct. The iPhone’s market isn’t exactly saturated in the normal sense, but sales volumes are only growing as fast as the smartphone userbase as a whole; the multicarrier ‘breakout’ only netted Apple about a 1% competitive gain, and that gain now appears to be over.

Apple is now relying on smartphones for 68% of revenue, so they’d be very vulnerable to an actual drop in marketshare. I’ve taken a lot of flak for saying the company looks like a late-stage sustainer with a principal product line about to experience disruptive collapse, but this is yet another straw in the wind. If next month’s figures show an actual share drop, expect it to be self-reinforcing and get the hell out of Apple stock.

It sounds ominous to talk about how much of Apple’s revenue comes from smartphones. That could just as easily be pointing out the other thing: Apple is actually making money from its smartphones.

There are a lot of questions as to why Google has taken it upon itself to purchase Motorola. Here is Farhad Manjoo’s take:

That’s why I’m betting that this deal will represent a turning point in how Google operates Android. Today, the platform is “open” but chaotic—because phone-makers get the software for free and can do whatever they want with it, Android is available on some good phones as well as lots and lots of cheap, bad ones. In the aftermath of this deal, Google will seek to exert greater influence over hardware companies. Eventually, the deal will help reduce the number of new Android devices that are released every year, and the few that are released will be of generally higher quality—and sell for higher prices—than what we see in the Android device market today.

This won’t happen overnight. Indeed, in a conference call announcing the deal, Google executives argued that the huge purchase won’t change anything about Android. The Motorola division will run as a separate entity within Google. This arrangement is meant to reduce Motorola’s ability to get preferential access to Android over other handset makers that use the OS. This is a signal that at Google, “openness” is still the ideal.

My hope is that Google’s main plan is to create a flagship product. That there are many products and designs that carry different versions of Android is not as much a problem as the fact that there is no real central design that they are all drifting from. If Google can create a serious of flagship products, it would be in the best interest of Samsung and others to fly relatively close to the formation so that the Android apps created for the Flagship will work on their product. Motorola is one of the big makers of Android phones, and with direct ownership over the product, it’s possible that they can be central enough to get the others to “fly right.” That’s my hope anyway.

It also allows them the opportunity to actually make money with their product.

The big news with Apple is, of course, the departure (and likely imminent death) of Steve Jobs. Not being an Apple guy, I don’t have much to say about it other than that I wish the best for him. Despite my disagreements with the direction he took it, he did make everyone take smartphones seriously. Before him, there was serious resistance on the part of carriers because they couldn’t control a smartphone the way that they could control feature phones where ringtones and apps could be required to come from the company store. Jobs didn’t do me any favors, since I was perfectly willing to seek out a product that not everyone else was using, and preferred the niche devices over the standard that Jobs set. But… he introduced smartphoning to a whole lot of people.

However, even though I am not a Mac user and an iPhone user, there was one thing that he did that I loved. One of his “failed” ventures was a company called NeXT, which worked on OSes. In addition to kind of setting up their own shop, they created a front-end shell for Windows 3.1, which was the first Windows operating system that I ever used. Windows 3.1 relied on Program Manager, which was as user unfriendly as it was inflexible. NeXT made Windows 3.1 really easy to use and set the standard for how I would later customize Windows 95 and beyond.

ebooks: Footnotes & Hyperlinks

Since it was discovered that Amazon is selling more ebooks than actual books, there’s been a new wave of proclamations that print is dead and ebooks are the future. Here’s Megan McArdle:

Printing and distributing books is a large industry with significant economies of scale. If too few people buy print books, the cost of the remaining books will start to rise. Eventually, more and more applications will switch to the winning medium, even if individuals miss being able to flip through books. There will be specialty applications, but they will be very expensive.

The problem I see with this is that it does not seem to me that economies of scale are going to be the death of (or cause of irrelevancy of) the publishing industry. Publishing has become more flexible than ever. Print-on-Demand is a growth industry. The overhead on getting a book ready to print - absent other costs - has gotten so low that John Q Public can do it. The more expensive part, really, is product selection, marketing, and editing. These are things that you have to do whether going digital or print. And once you’ve done all that legwork for the ebook, why not offer a published version as well?

So will printing become more niche? Probably so. The gadgeteer in me loves it, but for the fact that DRM means that it’s not just physical books being tossed by the wayside, but actual ownership of the books. But I don’t think that it will ever reach the point of being actually niche. It still offers a product that eBooks don’t. You don’t have to worry about batteries. You can read during take-off and landing of airplanes. You have total ownership (including the ability to trade back and forth as much as you like). And it’s decoration. The first three strike up a crucial difference between CDs and MP3s, though the last part applies to both.

To me, the promise of eBooks is not as a replacement for printed books. Rather, it’s the creation of an entirely new medium. It doesn’t seem like the publishers have really caught on to it, though. The electronic nature allows eBooks the ability to do something that’s much harder to do in print. Namely, hyperlinks.

Never has this become more apparent than listening to the audiobook for the Game of Thrones series. Here you have an unbelievable number of characters and families sprawling all over the Seven Kingdoms. At the end of every book is an appendix giving a rundown of all of the families. Obviously, with a book you can always flip to the back, but with electronic text, you can simply tap on a name whenever it appears and be reminded. “Jacen Bloke, Duke of Westerland, son of Aron Bloke, twin brother to Jaren Bloke, died on the Battle of the Riverfront” and so on (all descriptions wouldn’t need to be the same - they might just need to contain the relevance of the mention).

My first attempt at writing a novel was a little over fifteen years ago, though it took place last year. Because I was dealing with a 15-year leap in time, there were a lot of various things I referred to that the main character wouldn’t explain in his narrative because everybody knows who President Tsongas was. So I used a lot of footnotes. Two of my four novels have, for different reasons, an obscene number of characters. I have an appendix in back to help keep them straight. Of course, it’s hard to put things in an appendix that don’t give away stuff that happens in the novel. Not a problem with footnotes or hyperlinks. I’m still developing in my mind a detective series in a fictitious state. There’s a good chance I would be using footnotes there the same way I did in the first novel I tried (and failed) to write.

But what can be done with footnotes is simply nothing compared to what you can do with hyperlinks. Books have a more standard beginning, middle and end. It’s much easier for ebooks to be fluid, to be able to go back and forth between the main story and background. Some people don’t give a rats arse about background. You could actually give readers the option to skip it. Or, if they skipped it and they wish they hadn’t, a single place they can go in order to see all of the background stuff.

Right now, ebooks are just books in digital format. Change that, and you change everything. You allow for the telling of different kinds of stories. You allow for something that makes printed books really obsolete, and not just because they don’t have a power button.

I have a problem with the belt holsters I put my cell phone in. Namely, if they’re the “right size”, they’re actually too small. By which I mean that they fit too snugly. This is a problem because I take the phone in and out of the holster and all sorts of unintented screen-presses happen. The best ones are a little too large for my phone. I found one the right size on eBay a while back. I wanted a spare, but when I went back to get a backup, it was gone. So I ordered a few different kinds, but none were right. Finally, I saw something very similar to the first on eBay. And I ordered it. And it wasn’t the same one as in the picture. The ad warned me that it might not be, but I had hoped.

Since the seller seemed to sell all kinds of cell phone belt holsters, I wrote the seller this question about the:

“Hello, I ordered this product a while back, but it was too small for my HTC Touch Pro 2. I would like something just a little bit larger. Do you have something for a phone that’s a little bit larger? In fact, the one in the picture is exactly like one I have that fits my phone. What model is that for?”

To which they responded:

“Hello. Yes. This product will fit your HTC Touch Pro 2 perfectly.”

Me: “I know it should, but I find it too tight a fit. I am looking for one the next size up. Do you have any that hold a phone that’s maybe just a little bit larger?”

Them: “This is the one that you need for your HTC Touch Pro 2. It is made for the Touch Pro 2.”

Me: “Which model is the one in the picture for.”

Them: “I don’t know. What kind of phone do you have?”

Me: “I have a Touch Pro 2, but I am looking for one that’s slightly larger. I think the one in the picture is what I want.”

Them: “This item will fit your Touch Pro 2.”

Domino’s Pizza is bragging on their new website where you can track your pizza order. They also have a little feedback/comment section.

It seems like it’s popular among companies to ask for feedback. A lot of places will even offer a reward (or more common, a chance at a reward) for feedback.

I actually like Domino’s new method. Instead of ten questions that you don’t know how to answer because you don’t know how they will be received (some places will penalize for anything lower than a “perfect” score, so if you think you think you are doing them a favor by giving a 9/10, you are actually giving them a demerit. Anyhow, Domino’s appears to be a more informal process. Simply leave a note (”too much garlic”) and that’s that. The messages get posted, and pride does the rest.

I don’t expect that I will be ordering any pizza from Dominos in the near future, but I have to give them credit for the simplicity of the concept.

In the airport, they had some plush toys. Including some airplanes that were marked NorthWest Airlines. NWA was, of course, swallowed up by Delta a couple of years ago. This lead me to wonder, did the plus toys have NWA’s logo and all despite the fact that it no longer exists, or because it no longer exists?

I don’t know what the merchandising rights on such things are. Do the airlines pay to have the toys made, or do the doys pay the airlines for use of their logo and so on. Is it advertising, or is it merchandise?

If it’s merchandise, then I would think that it would probably cost less to use the NWA logo than Delta’s logo, since NWA is defunct and therefore demand is low. But if it’s merchandise, why pay anybody? Why not just make something up? A three year old kid wouldn’t care.

Which makes me think its advertising, and that in Delta pay in fact be paying to put their logo there. If one of the main goals in advertising is to keep a brand in our consciousness, toys aren’t a bad way of doing that. On the other hand, it’s been two years since NWA went away. Why is that there?

Tangentially, the distinction between advertising and merchanising was one of the main factors in Alan Moore’s big break from DC comics many years ago. He was supposed to get a cut of any Watchmen merchandising, but DC simply classified just about everything it sold with Watchmen on it (except the comic book, of course) as “advertising.”

Every now and again you hear about police of health inspectors shutting down lemonaid stands. Conservatives like to point to this as a case of regulation gone amuck. The former libertarian in me agrees wholeheartedly, enthusiastic for bottom-up business in general, whether a taco truck or shrimp sold out of the back of a GMC Jimmy. On the other hand, people like to know where their food is coming from, that it has been safely handled, and so on. And I get that, too.

But what I really think of when I read stories like this is: lemonaid stands suck. I mean, the whole point of it is to give kids a chance at learning about business and making a little bit of money and all that. But seriously, lemonaid stands suck. You typically end up making less than minimum wage. And in the south, you’re burning up while doing so (probably anywhere else, since you typically sell lemonaid in hot weather). So the lesson you learn is that hard work is for chumps. Which of course, may be a valuable lesson in itself, I suppose. But it’s not the lesson that the parents are trying to teach.

Of course, our kids are being taught salesmanship in any event, if they belong to the scouts, a sports team, a band, or pretty much any organization that needs fundraisers. As Bill Engvall says, we’re raising a generation of Amway salesmen. Except Amway products have more value than what you’re charged to sell, and you’re allowed to develop your own markets (more on this later). It started off with candy bars, which was ingenious because we would want to eat them all. And spoiled parents would let their kids do just that (mine wouldn’t). I suspect that the problem here came to be that the candy bars would melt, parents wouldn’t want to pay for them, and the company didn’t want them back. So they shifted to beef jerky, which was actually kind of cool. I loved (and love!) beef jerky and I would use my lunch or paper-route money to buy them. You can imagine my irritation one year when, after I was done, Dad bought the rest of them for me. “Now you’re going to be generous? The year I already bought half of them?” I wonder if he just had a spurt of generosity, or if he was impressed at my salesmanship (not knowing who my primary customer was). The primary problem with the beef jerky was that you didn’t have your own market. Suddenly everybody on the little league team was selling beef jerky at once. So the people that don’t want to buy it just say that tbey bought it from somebody else, and those that do want it have to choose who they’re going to buy it from. It becomes a popularity contest. Which, come to think of it, may be a valuable lesson in itself.

The last few years they moved on to something really, really worthless. Mail-order meals. Because everybody wants nachos sent to them by some company in Des Moines. It saves us from the hazard of having to handle this food. But how do you sell nachos with 6-8 weeks of delivery time? You don’t. And you begin to hate the sales process. And capitalism. Which, come to think of it, may be…

The young lady at the local supply store lets me have my frou-frou coffee for free, more often than not. About 60% of the time, since I have started keeping track. Not one to accept a glass 60% full, I’ve been trying to figure out what her schedule is and under what conditions I get it for free and under what conditions I have to pay for it. Is if it some supervisor is around? Some coworker? When I buy something else? When I don’t buy anything else? (I’ve determined it’s not the last two). Most likely, she’s just being randomly generous. And I should appreciate the free coffee I get.

But still, more free coffee is better than less free coffee.

In writing about the the whole incident a while back regarding Apple’s factory workers in China, Dave Pinson makes the following point:

I can see how it might be tough for a company like Dell to manufacture low-margin laptops in the U.S., but doesn’t Apple have high enough profit margins that in can afford to manufacture some of its gadgets here? If New Balance can make some of its high-end sneakers here, why can’t Apple make some iPads and iPhones here? It can’t be for a lack of workers — Apple’s home state of California has a 12.9%. unemployment rate. Maybe it would mean lower profit margins — or maybe Apple could pass on the higher labor costs to its cult-like customers — but it still seems worth trying.

I’d actually be really curious to know what the markup would be if they made in in California. Or, for that matter, South Carolina. You would think that if anyone could afford to absorb some of the costs, it would be Apple. They remain an American company, though, and presumably do the vast majority of their design and R&D work here. My phone is an HTC, which is full-on Taiwanese, though they also do work in the US and are hiring from Washington to North Carolina. HTC actually used to be an English acronym High Tech Computers.

Incidentally, I got a couple new watches over the last couple of months. One I wrote about here. The other is a brown watch from the US Polo Association (though as near as I can tell, the watch doesn’t have anything to do with polo, and is not exactly the fine watch one might expect from our polo-playing elite, nor is it a sportsish watch). It has a little American flag on it. Want to guess where it wasn’t made? The watch was really cheap, so I wouldn’t expect them to make it here. But it was made in… Japan. That I don’t get. It can’t be that much cheaper to make them in Japan than to make them here, can it? I understand that with Made in China or Made in Thailand, there are tradeoffs. Maybe good tradeoffs, maybe bad ones. But it saves them money and so presumably it saves you at least a little bit. But… Japan?

I’ve gotten a couple of new watches over the last couple months. One of them is kinetically powered, meaning that you wind it and it is supposed to power as you move your arms. Apparently, I don’t move around enough in my sleep because every morning the watch is stopped or running very slowly. That I don’t move around a whole lot in my sleep would be news to my brothers. Clancy reminded me that I jerk my legs a lot in my sleep, so maybe I should put it on my ankle at night. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same site that sold me the watch was selling a watch-shaker a couple weeks later, to keep kinetic watches powered (which kind of defeats the purpose of having a self-powering watch). Coincidence?

What’s particularly frustrating is that I absolutely love the watch. I love watches and clocks in general, and this is one of the coolest looking ones I have ever had. But it’s usefulness is rather limited.

I am thinking I should maybe give it to a sexually frustrated teenager who has to gratify himself constantly. I would guess that’s about the only way to make sure it keeps a charge.

Walter Olson brings back the “Cash For Clunkers is why used cars have become so expensive” argument:

Guess what’s the newest trouble to hit the car business? As news outlets around the country are reporting, the price of used cars has lately soared to a modern-day record, with some cars commanding more used than they sold for when new. News accounts commonly finger the Japanese earthquake and high gas prices as reasons, but there are some problems fitting either reason to the case. While the earthquake affected the supply of new cars, it’s the previously driven kind that has scored the more impressive price jump. And while the rise in gas prices would explain a relative shift in buyer demand from SUVs and trucks toward smaller vehicles — which has indeed happened — the strength of the used-vehicle market lately has been such that even the thirstier vehicles have advanced in price, $4 gas or no.

No doubt there are multiple reasons for the price spike, including the severe general slump in new-auto sales in recent years, which has reduced the volume of newer cars coming onto the resale market. But — as Washington scrambles to take undeserved credit for whatever passes for normalization in the auto business these days — it’s worth remembering that an artificial scarcity of used cars isn’t just bad for the poor as a group: it’s bad in particular for the upwardly mobile poor, since in most of the country landing a job means needing to line up transportation to get to that job. When it suddenly costs $6,000 instead of $3,000 to get wheels, the move from unemployment to a paying job faces a new and discouraging barrier.

At least he points out that there are “multiple reasons,” which is something that a lot of C4C critics have glided over in the past. Even so, he acts like C4C is the driving factor when there is comparatively little reason to believe it’s more than just a contributor. I wrote about C4C here and here. My basic view is that Cash For Clunkers was an idiotic proposal, a poor way to go about reducing emissions and destroying a lot of capital along the way, but that it’s hard to blame all - or most - of the increased cost of used cars on the law. I previously pointed out that some of the cars where the price increase is the highest, late-model used cars for instance, were not the ones taken off the road. While it’s possible that there is a cascading effect (people can’t buy a targeted, fuel-inefficient vehicle and instead buys an ineligible care taking that one off the road) you would still see the biggest impact on the cars that were targeted and more impact on cars from that period and not more recent cars. Instead, it’s the other way around, suggesting that the biggest reduction in used car availability (where increased demand is meeting decreased supply) is a result of people buying late-model used rather than new vehicles and - more likely - holding on to the car that they have.

Olson cites this article, among others:

Bill Visnic, analyst and senior editor at Edmunds.com, said the auto industry went from selling 16.5 million new cars annually before the recession, down to 10.5 million in the depths of the crisis. He said the average age of a used vehicle on the road today is in excess of ten years old, as well, meaning that overall more consumers are keeping their older cars.

“About five million people or so dropped out of the market,” Visnic said. “A vast number of those people would have been trading in a used car when they bought a new one. That’s a big whammy when the replacement rate has been lagging so much.”

Consumers looking to buy used cars will find that prices are up markedly, Visnic said. The Wall Street Journal reports that prices for used cars are up 5% this year at wholesale auto house Manheim. He said the Car Allowance Rebate System, which was introduced in 2009, also set off the price hike in the used market. The government program dubbed “Cash for Clunkers” offers economic incentives to U.S. consumers for turning in their used cars for a newer, more fuel-efficient vehicle. In turn, instead of ending up on the used car lots across the country, those vehicles went to junkyard graves.

So there has been a reduction of 6 million car sales per annum. Cash for Clunkers may be responsible for - at maximum - 1/7th of that. That assumes that everyone who totaled their car in 2009 would have sold it in 2010. Given that a frequent (and valid!) criticism of C4C is that it didn’t even increase the sale of new cars because it merely time-shifted purchasing (they bought in 2009 what they might have waited a couple years to get rid of), it seems likely that a lot of them would still have the car.

Be that as it may, it is likely that it is contributing to the problem to at least some extent. The “lost capital” that I lament is going to have some effect. And it is another reason to dislike this bit of free pudding policymaking. But there are a lot of other factors at work (an economy that went to hell, primarily) that swamp the effects of the policy.

Humor that nobody will get. And those who get it might be offended.

I was reading an article about how the LDS church has its own online bookstore app. I actually chuckled at one of the comments:

They have also announced an app that will automatically transfer the money in your savings account to the most charismatic person in your ward. This will save you the time of listening to his get-rich-quick sale while he slaps you on the back and calls you brother.

They, in turn, will have an app that will text their heartfelt apology to the judge (also in their ward) who will sentence him to 24 months, translating into wages of roughly 1.5 million per year.

I love technology.

Get-rich-quick schemes in Deseret were allegedly so common that wards stopped passing out phone directories for their church because they were being used in various money-making schemes. Indeed, there were three major employers in the town where I worked. A federal government installation, my employer (tangentially involved in a lot of people trying to get rich quick), and an Amway sort of company that sells snake oil. Edgar, a guy who was let go from my employer, got a multilayer marketing job afterwards and hit us all up for a chance to get rich quick, too. That these sorts of things appeal to Mormons speaks to their industriousness, though it certainly has its downsides.

Mitt Earnesty

In a thread over in TLoOG, I realized something noteworthy: I would actually be shocked if it came out that Mitt Romney cheated on his wife. I really would. Some of it has to do with the fact that he’s as stiff as a sitcom starched shirt, but there’s also the Mormon thing. I hadn’t though about it too much, but I really do have a greater expectation on the practice-preach. Particularly the ones, like Romney, who are somewhat understated about it.

I can’t say that I was surprised about Gingrich. I’d be surprised to find out that Huckabee cheated, but not shocked.

It could be related to the fact that, until Huckabee entered the race last time around, the Mormon was the only major candidate to have only married one woman. Giuliani and McCain had five between them. Fred Thompson would later enter with two, though he wasn’t a major candidate.

Businessweek ran an article on the Postal Service that’s creating a lot of buzz. Basically, it’s in pretty bad shape. What else is new? In this case, it’s actually running close to complete implosion:

Since 2007 the USPS has been unable to cover its annual budget, 80 percent of which goes to salaries and benefits. In contrast, 43 percent of FedEx’s (FDX) budget and 61 percent of United Parcel Service’s (UPS) pay go to employee-related expenses. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the postal service’s two primary rivals are more nimble. According to SJ Consulting Group, the USPS has more than a 15 percent share of the American express and ground-shipping market. FedEx has 32 percent, UPS 53 percent.

The USPS has stayed afloat by borrowing $12 billion from the U.S. Treasury. This year it will reach its statutory debt limit. After that, insolvency looms.

A few years ago, when the USPS was talking about cutting out Saturday deliveries, there were howls of protest. I’m not entirely sure how many would protest that now. The USPS would actually have been better off if this had happened five years ago, when the prospect of life without the Post Office might have seemed scarier.

The right has latched on to the notion that this is a public sector unions issue. But it does deeper than that. The main issue is that the USPS is an uncomfortable mixture of independent and governmental. They are independent insofar as they are expected to fund themselves. They negotiated their own deals with the unions and such. But they’re governmental insofar as the government can prevent them from doing some of the things they would need to do in order to become solvent again. It’s not just the unions that don’t want post office locations to close, but also congress. And their relationship with the government makes it difficult for them to raise prices to the extent that they can become solvent again. There’s really no excuse for them to be losing money on junk mail, for instance, but they can’t unilaterally raise the price. (Is there a junk mail lobby that stops congress from doing this? I’m not sure. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were an issue where of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs where the concentrated beneficiaries have undue influence.)

But ultimately, this brings to light the question of what, precisely, we want from the post office. And how much we’re willing to pay for it. The Postal Service incurs costs that UPS and FedEx don’t due to statutory requirements that they delivery to everywhere and that they do so every day. There are many that are suggesting that if left to the private sector, some places wouldn’t get mail delivery or would do so only at very steep rates. As though that is what is causing all the problems. While it is true that there are some places that UPS and FedEx won’t deliver, they are actually very few. Mostly parts of Alaska and on reservations. They really aren’t the problem. And FedEx and UPS actually charge pretty competitive rates whether a package is being delivered to the city or the country. I ran some checks on Glasgow, MT (pretty much defined as the middle of nowhere) and Denver and Seattle in a package shipped from Tampa. Sometimes the delivery was more expensive. Sometimes it was cheaper. But it was never a huge difference.

So at least in theory, we could simply have a stripped down USPS that delivers to the places that UPS and FedEx won’t at a fraction of the price. That still leaves the issue of door-to-door mail. Right now, the Post Office ostensibly has a monopoly on that, though when you try to pin down what exactly the monopoly consists of. It’s illegal to use mailbox and I’ve heard from at least one person that they can’t deliver “non-urgent” envelopes. But even if they could, I doubt they would do so competitively with the USPS. Or that they would want to so long as the USPS actually exists. So if you got rid of the USPS, would either of them step up? Would both? I would imagine that at least one would, but the price increase would probably be substantial.

So I think that the answer for the Postal Service falls into one of three categories: (1) beef it up and offer services that post offices in other countries offer, such as scanned mail and bill-pay, (2) raise prices and reduce costs as necessary to be profitable, or (3) marginalize losses by scaling down and becoming the sender of last resort. I think a lot of the services they would provide in the first would give a lot of Americans the heebie-jeebies. The second is difficult or impossible between the union contracts and congressional meddling to go forward with. The third would likely involve will-call and weekly deliveries, which would also be difficult to square with the unions. So all of these are pretty problematic, leaving to the fourth option: just pay the piper. Undo the legislation that forced the Postal Service to be solvent in the first place. That, I suspect, is what is going to happen.

Regarding the unions, I have three things to add. First, I agree with the left that union wages are not the primary issue. There are reasons why the USPS would spend a higher portion of its money on people: you need them to deliver door-to-door. You spend on people what FedEx and UPS spend on planes. And salaries at USPS are not actually higher than those at UPS, from what I understand. Second, while salaries are not the issue, the inflexibility regarding hiring and firing are. The most obvious route to solvency appears to me to be a reduction in services. But the cost savings would come from personnel reductions that would be hard to negotiate. Third, I do believe that the government has to live up to the pension promises that it made. I think that there is a grace period to such things, but the grace period has passed as far as the USPS is concerned. However, and this is important, this is why we should never, ever make these promises to begin with and making alternate arrangements for new employees to whom these promises have not been made. When you find yourself in a hole, the first step is to stop digging.