Amazon has a horrible new feature--a customer-written "ProductWiki" on each book's page. Since the wiki is not supposed to include reviews, it's not clear what value customers are going to add to help people decide whether to buy a book (that's the point, right?) Worse, the now-vacant wikis produce browser error messages when I load an Amazon page. It all seems like trendiness, not customer service.
Phil Bowermaster at the Speculist is looking for examples of do-it-yourself innovations that represent "an unwillingness on [the inventors'] part to wait for big corporate R&D departments to produce what they want." This is an increasingly important--and increasingly recognized--phenomenon, on which I've blogged in the past.
Black Friday is not in fact the year's biggest shopping day, but it does kick off quite a shopping season. And now, reports the WSJ's Mylene Mangalindan, Black Friday has been joined by Black Monday: "On that day, consumers head back to work -- and their computers -- ready to shop after the long holiday weekend."
In a recent article in Economics Letters, University of Missouri economist Emek Basker examines whether sales increase if there are more days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Basker finds "a statistically significant increase in per-capita retail sales in November and December (combined) of approximately $6.50 per additional day over the relevant range." That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up: "The implied difference between the shortest and longest shopping seasons is $39 in spending per capita, or 20% of holiday spending in an average year."
Congratulations to my good friend Lynn Scarlett, who was confirmed on Friday as deputy secretary of the Interior. Lynn had been the department's assistant secretary for policy, management, and budget. She was was nominated as deputy secretary in February, but her confirmation was held up for months by a series of senators with unrelated grievances against the Interior Department.
Julie Frederickson of Almost Girl has organized a week of political fashion blogging, leading up to Black Friday:
Thus I am inviting you to participate in a fashion blogging event. Next Friday is Black Friday, the biggest shopping day in America. I am asking other fashion bloggers to join me in blogging about their own views on fashion, consumption, individuality, and the importance of fashion in our lives. I am encouraging any other fashion bloggers to join me in this endeavor, just make your own political fashion statements about your view on consumption and fashion and I will link up and we can hopefully dialogue about the importance of individuality in fashion! I would like this to grow organically so please email your fashion blogging friends to join the fun!
A slew of blogs are participating, and I will add my own thoughts over the next few days. For starters, I have to say that Julie's blog slogan, "Where Plato and Prada Meet," makes me feel really old. Back in the Dark Ages, when I was in school, girls who read philosophy did not follow fashion. (This essay suggests things may not have changed as much as I thought. For the record, it takes me 30 minutes to get ready in the morning, 45 minutes if I'm incredibly slow and do something complicated with my hair. But then I'm a nerd at heart.)
Greg Benford and Michael Rose have a cool new website featuring essays and promising a blog.
Authors in need of websites--or improved websites--should check out the site's designer, who specializes in authors at very affordable rates.
Megan McArdle has gift suggestions for the cooks in your life, with Amazon links.
The orange zester sounds like just the thing for my favorite new cake trick--chocolate orange. You take a regular chocolate cake mix, add zest from three oranges, and substitute orange juice for water. I use Duncan Hines devils food cake mix, and three oranges produce almost enough juice to replace the water the mix calls for. I usually make up the difference with Minute Maid, but you can just fill in with water if you don't have prepared juice handy. Or you can use four oranges. Yum.
UPDATE: On Thanksgiving, the orange-chocolate cake was a big hit with the extended Postrel clan. And I even got to give my sister-in-law's zester its first use ever.
I've only dipped into Robert Bruegmann's new book, Sprawl: A Compact History, but what I've read is terrific. Bob is a thoughtful student of architectural history and urban evolution and a keen observer of the contemporary urban scene. (I quoted him in a column on downtown development.) His work is not just contrarian and provocative but well-documented and persuasive. Don't take my word for it. Witold Rybczynski gives Sprawl an enthusiastic review on Slate.
This fascinating article from Saturday's NYT business section demonstrates two important trends: One, which has been famously documented in C.K. Pralahad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, is that smart international companies are figuring out how to serve the vast market of poor but aspiring consumers in developing countries. The other, which has been less noticed, is that information technology is making credit affordable even for tiny loans. That means retailers can now offer credit to people who need it to climb out of poverty, but who used to be too expensive to serve without exorbitant interest rates.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov. 11--Márcia Regina da Cruz, a 40-year-old janitor and mother of three, decided to splurge.
Ms. da Cruz, who lives in São Vicente, a coastal town an hour's bus ride from São Paulo, made a purchase in September equal to one-fifth of her monthly salary. She bought three irons--one for herself and two as gifts for her mother and sister - for 72 reais, or just over $32.
"It was a big purchase," she said. "I normally couldn't pay for it."
She could, though, because of a new policy at CompreBem, a supermarket chain owned by Grupo Pão de Açúcar, Brazil's biggest retailer. The plan allows her to pay for the purchase in 10 interest-free monthly installments of about $3.20 a month.
Big retailers in Brazil are lowering the bar for what they will sell on credit. Though the country's shops and department stores have long sold big-ticket items on installment plans, Brazilian and multinational retailers, like Wal-Mart Stores and Carrefour of France, have begun offering purchase plans with monthly payments that come to no more than one or two reais--about 45 to 90 cents.
The shift is an effort by retailers here to squeeze more spending from the big, but cash-short, bottom of the consumer base in Brazil, South America's biggest economy. Amid a tepid recovery that has yet to blossom into strong, sustained growth in retail demand, vendors are going to new lengths to help low-income Brazilians pay for everything from their weekly rice and beans to inexpensive items like clothes, radios, blenders and other goods. The installments are interest-free until a payment is missed, and then interest of at least 3 percent a month is charged....
Efficient information technology and credit screening make this trend possible, but they wouldn't work without sound monetary policy. Lenders have to be able to count on tolerable rates of inflation.
Slower inflation enabled stores to introduce payment plans for retail goods that many consumers once strained to finance--from tennis shoes and televisions, to refrigerators and home computers. So successful was retail credit, especially among the middle class, that price tags in many stores now highlight the cost of the monthly installment, with the total price in much smaller print below.
Yet a big portion of the consumer base still struggles with bare necessities. That is why vendors recently began applying their credit plans to low-cost items, too.
"You want to make it easy for even basic purchases," said João Carlos de Oliveira, president of the Brazilian Association of Supermarkets in São Paulo.
The approach was evident one recent Saturday evening at a Wal-Mart in southern Rio. Price tags offer telephones in 12 monthly installments of 3.57 reais. A plug-in electric grill sold for 12 monthly payments of 1.87 reais. Wines, domestic or imported, were offered for three interest-free monthly installments.
Wal-Mart and other big retailers use one central tool for such promotions: internal, or "private label," credit cards.
Because many low-income Brazilians do not have bank accounts, retailers offer their own cards to provide credit to customers unable to meet the conditions for traditional bank cards. With no annual fees and low salary requirements--stores compute card limits using monthly income stub--the cards offer many consumers their first experience with credit. They also give stores a platform to offer special card-only promotions, which foster user loyalty.
While items like irons and electric grills may seem like cheap consumer goods to Americans, they are actually household capital equipment--the sort of goods that represent accumulated wealth over time. This newly available credit thus enables not only short-term consumption but a higher standard of living over the long-term.
Thanks to a welcome push from Michael Martin, who uses TSOS in his Introduction to Design Culture class at Iowa State, I've finally added syllabi to this site's section on TSOS in the Classroom. The courses range from theology school classes to courses on commercial culture. If you've used the book in a course, please let me know.