Here’s your chance to recoup: Topps is coming out with a Bernie Madoff trading (tradeless?) card. Buy a few, stash them in a safe deposit box, and leave them to your heirs. Who knows, some day they might be worth something!
Monthly Archive for March, 2009
Not surprisingly, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, the number of Americans electing to spend money on liposuction and tummy tucks is down and more down — a double-digit decline last year and no doubt a comparable or greater one in 2009.  It would be one thing if the lousy economy curbed one’s appetite, but that’s hardly how anxiety works. As noted in a previous post, the American candy business is booming right now, which some say reflects a general longing for inexpensive self-indulgence.
You’re middle-aged.
You think that you have more stuff than you need.
You want to collect experiences, not possessions.
You want things that don’t tie you down or require maintenance.
Some of the stuff you have embarrasses you.
You reject marketers’ pressures to spend more money on possessions rather than on education, health care, and other social goods.
If you meet most or all of these conditions, consider yourself a “Middle-Aged Simplifier,â€Â someone who’s very trendy right now in the view of John Quelch, a professor at the Harvard Business School.
There’s a lot of blather out there now about how social networking sites — LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, etc. — provide the tools and then the windows 
needed to construct, then display, ourselves as carefully crafted branded products — in limted editions of one, you — all in the service of attracting friends, lovers, or an employer. While the proponents of this call it self-branding, I call it self-delusion.
What would happen if, instead of retailers telling us what we had to pay for things, we paid retailers what we thought their products were worth – in other words, what if the marketplace adopted Customer Suggested Retail Prices? Well, evidence suggests we would likely pay prices that very closely match the prevailing ones. A study just published in the Journal of Marketing found that our prices, on average, would only be about 14-percent less than established retail prices. Why? In a controlled study anyway, most of us wish to affirm that we are indeed fair-minded and would rather not be perceived as penny pinchers.
There’s increasing customer agita over news that Apple may be getting ready to raise the cost of an iTunes tune to $1.29. 
In the book, I devote a good number of pages to the psychology of pricing, and how and why a price ending in $.99 really does signal value to a great many of us. My prediction is that the thirty-cent increase, if it comes to be, will have a sginificant impact on downloads. Apple has no doubt done a ton of testing on this issue, and may well have decided it needs to drive bottom-line profits at the expense of top-line sales, a legitimate enough move given the huge market share iTunes enjoys. Still, a 30-percent price hike and crossing the boundary of a buck may open the field wide for vigorous competitors.
Amount of trans fat, calorie count, artificial preservatives, all that and much more we know by checking food labels. However, a story in The Times today reports that it’s a challenge to identify where food ingredients come from in the first place, as in which brands of what peanut butter might contain nuts shipped by a contaminated peanut grower. In an separate story, the obfuscation inherent in cell phone bills — a long-time peeve of mine — comes in for discussion.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece that raises the question of what ever-improving smart phones will do to our need (or imagined need) to lug around a attache stuffed with iPod, laptop, digital camera, etc.
While the nightmares haunting the newspaper business have been widely discussed, there’s been less attention to similar fall-out that afflicts online business models across other industries. The problem is that we’ve been conditioned by “free” — free magazines, free newspapers, free social networks, free travel guides, and free porn beyond the wildest dreams of the Marquis de Sade. The simple fact is there’s not enough advertising to support free online services, certainly not during a recesssion/depression, or under any circumsances long-term for that matter. Thus does the sun set on business models collectively known as Web 2.0. Bottom line: get ready to start paying as you go.
