Big Plastic is teaming up with merchants to offer discounts, coupons, and provide another liquidation outlet for overstock items. Real money not welcome.
Monthly Archive for April, 2010
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The Times today has a piece on something I’ve wondered about when working at companies requiring credit checks on prospective hires: what does one thing have to do with the other? Very little, apparently.
Or so says The Times this morning. Consumer spending is up, and a merrier mood has taken hold (helped along, no doubt, by glorious springtime weather). But I’m not buying what some analysts perceive as a “rubberband snap-back” to those fat and happy years. Widespread conspicuous consumption is dead, at least foreseeably. In its place, what researcher Larry Cohen calls “conspicuous conservation“- mindful buying, spiked by a little splurge now and then.
Wonder what happens to the lucky McMansion after “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” packs up its gear and exits the subdivision? According to a piece in the WSJ, ” homeowners struggle to keep up with their expensive new digs. In many cases, the bigger, more lavish homes have come with bigger, more lavish utility bills. And bigger tax assessments. Some homeowners have tapped the equity of their super-sized homes only to fall behind on the higher mortgage payments.” What to do about it? The show’s producers have things covered: back in the boom, see, “the makeovers got a little out of hand because of competition among home builders aware of the free publicity that came with the show and who tried to outdo previous projects. These days, the show is backing away from the boom-era showpieces. We ’scaled back,’ says Conrad Ricketts, an executive producer for the show.” In other words, 2,800-square-feet is the new 5,300-square-feet. Five bedrooms, seven baths, five fireplaces, an outdoor kitchen? Ha!
IBM is running a campaign that keeps insisting that the company’s mission is to make the planet smarter. Following is a special edition of that campaign, 2+ minutes of IBM-ers, well-lighted, articulate, smartly bespectacled. And what does IBM get for its trouble? Online comments like this, lifted from a YouTube discussion board: “What a toss. Why don’t we speak in abstracts, and pretend they’re concretes, all the while I’m going to sell you something behind your back, and you think I’m helping you for your good, not for my pocket. Effing marketing.”
