In the relatively brief period that I have known about World Market, I have found some great values (a particular, very-sturdy kitchen cart that was over 50% off comes to mind), but I know this is no deal.
I happen to consider this wine a great deal; it’s one of my favorites. $7.99 ain’t so bad. However, I know I can regularly pick this up at my friendly, neighborhood Trader Joe’s for $6.99. Thank you, World Market, but no thanks.
I just saw a commercial that said something like “if you walk 30 minutes a day, you’ll live a year longer!” Or, if you do the math, if you walk 30 minutes a day, every day, for about 50 years, you’ll extend your life by the same amount you spent doing all the walking.
I think I’d rather have a drink instead.
Somewhere in the past, I argued that for our electricity supply to become greener, more people needed to want to buy greener electricity. And for that to happen, companies needed to brand themselves and their product. That is a difficult problem considering the end product is the same and profits are driven almost entirely by keeping production costs low. There is however a proposal to improve the situation. The proposal to encourage people to pay for more expensive electricity requires that electricity companies be able to deliver extra products. We should let those companies deliver telephone, internet, and/or television programming.
Why should we do that? Well, there are a number of reasons. For one thing, it would be nice to have an extra option to avoid the cable company that we all probably hate. But the primary benefit is that the companies can bundle products. This will encourage brand building. It will increase the awareness of options. And the bundled products, which typically result in consumer savings, generate a little breathing room for someone to consider putting the savings toward cleaner power. Similarly, the promise of cheap, clean power can be used as a bargaining chip to draw customers away from the current providers that the customers probably want to get away from anyway.
In today’s NYT business section, Tyler Cowen writes why reducing the middlemen from health care won’t make it a “free lunch.” The basic point is that lower overhead costs are generally created by shifting the costs to health care consumers, generally in the forms of either fewer available treatment options, or longer waiting times for treatment.
This is not groundbreaking, but it reminds me of some information from an EconTalk podcast with Richard Epstein. From the time starting at 33:58:
“Often Times, the sale of drugs goes down in absolute units when they become generic… but what happens is, if you don’t have a brand name, it’s harder to sell it. And if there are 11 guys making it, nobody wants to advertise it. So that the thing tends to disappear from consciousness… Ironically, one of the things you could argue respectably now is that lengthening the patent term will actually help consumers in addition to producers by making sure that somebody’s keeping that drug in everybody’s face.”
The basic economic analysis predicts the presence of generics will dramatically shift the supply curve which seems to predict an increase in quantity of drugs at reduced prices. But the lack of advertising pushes the demand curve even further in the opposite direction. This seems to indicate a dramatic monetary savings at the cost of fewer people getting the drugs they want or need.
I had to share this with Rachel because February 30th has become a running joke between us. Due to some cunning planning on my part, our first date was on August 30th. It follows that our 6-monther would be on February 30th. Realization of this fact went down the “we’ll have to do something on the 30th… wait… what? Oh it’s February!” path.
Not to be outdone, she tracked down the website of the calendar provider, which also provides some grumpy response emails, with the following being my favorite:
“…yet another in a long line of crimes against humanity perpetuated by you pinko tree huggers.”
But it occurred to me that this could be a business opportunity. Sell intentionally, subtly inaccurate calendars as gag gifts. Add a day, remove a day, start a month on the wrong day, shift some holidays. And with that add dual-layer packaging. The first layer, to be removed by the gift-buyer, clearly identifies the content. The second layer makes it seems like a run-of-the-mill calendar.
I think it would be funny to see how long your friends take to notice the problem, if they notice the problem, or if they don’t notice at all and spend half the year being very confused… maybe bonus points should be added for selling with it a CD that will alter the calendar in Outlook to match the wall calendar.
“Our brand name sucks. So let’s buy a better one. Then kill it by substituting our crappy name for theirs.”
That appears to be the rough plan of what AT&T is doing to Cingular.
AT&T, which took full control of No. 1 U.S. mobile carrier Cingular with its $86 billion purchase of BellSouth last month, will launch on Monday a campaign to mark the change.
“We did not enter that decision lightly,” Wendy Clark, vice president of advertising at AT&T, said in an interview. “We came to understand that consumer customers and business customers alike are looking for a single provider. We heard it so consistently across the marketplace.”
[...]
The new AT&T was formed in the merger of SBC Communications and AT&T in late 2005. Adding to the mix, in late 2004 Cingular bought AT&T Wireless, eradicating that brand for its poor reputation among customers.“The good news is there is a difference between AT&T and AT&T Wireless,” Clark said. “We have benefited significantly…by having 12 months under our belt as the new AT&T.”
Unless this is part of a “New Coke” strategy, Wendy Clark might need to polish up her resume.
UPDATE: Colbert helps us all understand:
