The New Frugality - 3 reasons why
Posted by Bill McCollam in Economics, Marketing/Psychology, Personal Finance on April 26th, 2009
I often appreciate a blogger’s point of view and manner of communicating - while totally disagreeing with their perspective. A good example is Kevin Press’s recent post on Today’s Economy- The New Frugality: I’m not buying it.
Press cites recent items in the Economist and Time describing the New Frugality, then goes on to point out that - devastating as the downturn is to people that are directly impacted through job loss - most Canadians won’t in fact lose their jobs, and will therefore not significantly alter their consumption, long term. He’s wrong. Here’s three reasons why;
- The Markets. Whether you lost your job or not - billions of $ have been taken out of the economy. We all know people whose pension savings have been creamed. TSX is about 35% off last summer highs. Thousands of Canadians have fundamentally reset their retirement plans. Many are resigned to putting off retirement by many years, others are acknowledging the need to supplement retirement income with part-time jobs, and - you better believe - almost all have rethought their standard of living (pre and post-retirement). And as far as retirees are concerned - even if their wealth was mostly in investment certificates, savings accounts, bonds and dividend funds - you know they’re tightening their belts when they consider their yields in this new reality.
- The environment. We’re consuming our planet to death. And despite the naysayers - the awareness of this inconvenient truth is emerging. The linkages between climate change and consumerism are starting to surface. For instance, The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. I think this is sinking in. I often visit my old school and talk to students at Rotman. They get this, they understand that it’s just not cool to buy, consume, and dispose.
- The Social Internet. We are becoming a much more connected world. It’s a lot harder to be ignorant of stuff that happens to other people - whether it’s jobs being lost in Oakville or deforestation in Brazil. Ideas and opinions can be mobilized much more rapidly in a twittered world. Look at how quickly an idea spread - like the fundamental wrongness of multi-million dollar payouts to executives of bailouts. Obama got elected on the back of social media. Technorati lists 7024 blogs about frugality. Yes we can.
I believe that the crash of 2008 will indeed signal a fundamental change in social and consumerist behaviour. Already it isn’t right for the few to consume in a wasteful way without thought on the impact for the many. And soon, it won’t be fashionable.
Can you spot the phony headline?
Posted by Bill McCollam in Can you spot the phony headline, Potpourri on April 12th, 2009
Something a little different today. The following is a list of headlines that interested me recently. About half of them are authentic and half are simply my imagination. Go through them and click on Authentic or Not so Much. If the headline is authentic - there will be a link to the headline. Take a point for each correct guess. Use the comment to note your score.
Oh, and one last point… just because a headline is authentic - that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true.
- Somolia patriarch’s CIA connection
Allegations are emerging that Samaal Samaale, an influential elder in the largest tribe implicated in recent piracy outrages, was a key CIA contact in the early eighties. Authentic or Not so Much. - Paris liberation made ‘whites only’
Papers unearthed by the BBC reveal that British and American commanders ensured that the liberation of Paris on 25 August 1944 was seen as a “whites only” victory. Authentic or Not so Much
- Player assaulted over plagiarism of Second Life avatar
Popular Second Life game has spawned a nasty outbreak of violence at recent convention in Monterey. Authentic or Not so Much - Study shows grooming at red lights a bigger danger than cell phones.
Put away the cosmetics. Researchers at the University of Manchester have demonstrated that preening drivers are actually much more preoccupied than those that chat while driving. Authentic or Not so Much - COBOL code almost all gone at 50th anniversary.
According to David Stephenson, the UK manager for the software provider Micro Focus, “only about 7% to 8% of UK plc business transactions are still based on Cobol”. Authentic or Not so much - New rare orangutan find in Borneo
A hitherto unknown population of orangutans numbering perhaps 1-2,000 has been found on the island of Borneo, conservation researchers say. Authentic or Not so Much. - Ever Heard Of A Four-Eared Feline?
Unlike the cruel and unusual punishment of the cat o’nine tails, this cute cat o’ four ears is nothing to be afraid of. Authentic or Not so Much. - Sesame Street to lay off the letters Q, X, Z, J, and the semicolon
In yet another troubling sign of the flailing economy, iconic television children’s show Sesame Street has announced layoffs, which the show’s producers say will affect 20% of its staff. However, the cuts don’t stop there. Authentic or Not so Much - Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million
A British Medical Journal paper says that males under 20 outnumber young females by 32 million, largely because of sex-selective abortion. Authentic or Not so Much - Google quietly announces acquisition of Zipcar
Citing a need a greater need for open, on-demand mobility, the Mountain View search giant announced in their blog the acquisition of Zipcar. Does this signal a new direction for Google? Authentic or Not so Much
Twitter economics
Posted by Bill McCollam in Economics, Marketing/Psychology, Potpourri on April 6th, 2009
Twitter is the latest big thing in social media and the digerati are all trying to figure out how to turn some of this popularity into money. Well - I can see the shape of it - if not the exact mechanics. But let’s level set first.
Twitter is a platform. It’s provides a way to transmit itty-bitty posts (<140 characters). That minimalist aspect is an important part of its character. But I think it’s the publish/subscribe model that’s really interesting. Basically you register, then tell them a bit about yourself. They you go looking for people that you care to follow. You can look for friends or you can look for people with interesting characteristics or common interests. You subscribe to (”follow”) them and maybe they follow you back. Then you er…. talk about stuff.
So far so good?
Okay. Now one more thing before we get to economics… All these ways of finding out who to follow and have them follow you - assume some kind of latent context. In other words - you have to know something about who you want to connect to before you connect to them. I can search for my pal Harry, or I can import all my contacts, or I can go looking for people that write about personal finance.
Now, here’s the good part. There’s also a convention called hashtags. This simply means ‘tagging’ your post with a code prefixed with a #. So I could create a tweet like, “brrr, sure is cold on this flight - wish the attendant would turn up the heat on flight #ac905″. Anyone can subscribe to a hashtag. So if, for instance, the flight crew were monitoring #ac905 - then they’d be able to fix the heat, or make an announcement, or ignore it. Here’s a whole database of tags.
So how to make money? I think of it as situational arbitrage. (Yeah, that’ll catch on…). Think of a situation where you want to exchange something of micro-value - but it’s just too inconvenient or socially awkward to actually do anything about it. I’ve talked about these situations before… you’re leaving a parking lot with 2 hours left on your ticket, or you’re getting tired at the driving range with half a jumbo bucket, or you’re at a supermarket with an unused coupon, or you want to get rid of an extra two tickets. What if everybody subscribed to twitter (and soon everyone will be walking around with devices able to), and there was a known convention around hashtags. So, when you go to the supermarket - you scan #Loblaw27 and see whose needs coupons, or #parkinglot3456 to see who needs an unexpired ticket.
There’s stuff to be filled in for sure…
- It’d be great if there was a micro-exchange function built into twitter so we could easily transfer a few bucks between tweeters.
- We need good way to make the context known. Short of just knowing that #flight number is the convention for airlines, how would we communicate that? I suppose the host location could put up big signs (This is #LOBLAW27 - but what’s in it for them?). What about a GPS mashup? What if we could simply open up a channel to anyone within a few hundred feet?
If you could figure these aspects out (and a way to skim a small value-add surcharge for the service) you’d have the thing licked.
Shop your High Interest Savings Account rate
Posted by Bill McCollam in Personal Finance on April 4th, 2009
I’m mostly an autopilot kind of investor and saver. I don’t enjoy researching investments and I only like reviewing our holdings when everything’s going in the right direction (and there hasn’t been a lot of that lately). But a facebook page caused me to review our bank account situation lately.
A friend of a friend had a fan link to ING Direct. I’ve been a client of ING for a few years so I looked over the page and I thought it was pretty good. But I was surprised by a comment from a fan that the High Interest Savings rate had been recently lowered to 1.85%. Holy cow! That doesn’t feel very high interest to me. So I shopped around a bit. There’s some excellent comparison sites out there. I always assume ING is near the top so I don’t often check them. But according to the comparison - Canadian Tire Bank has a rate of 2.5% plus a +1% 3 month promotional bonus.
I pulled out the spreadsheet program. Say we were talking a full CDIC-insured balance of $100K… That’s a difference of $900 in year 1! Easy to check comments and reviews. Looks fine. And I didn’t find any negative service comments (I’ve had really bad service issues with another HISA bank - ICICI - so I always check).
So it took 2 minutes to signup with CT, and the account will be set up as soon as they process my cheque. Then I’ll simply move some funds from ING, into my transactional bank account and on to CT. (I would never link the accounts from two savings accounts - I think it’s important to keep a low-balance transaction account between them as a firewall - more about that in a future post).
The lesson for me is to occasionally comparison check HISA accounts - maybe once a quarter. Where there’s really no switch cost and no service differentiation - then price rules. The lesson for ING? Well I suppose I could say that the Facebook page led to me leave them - but I actually think that Facebook is a good play for ING… they aren’t able to differentiate on price and they have a good brand that a social media campaign can leverage.
I ain’t got no money, honey
Posted by Bill McCollam in Personal Finance on March 22nd, 2009
I’ve decided to stop using money.
On reflection it’s not that difficult. And there’s many, many reasons to prefer other forms of payment. Here’s my ranked order of how I prefer to pay for personal expenses;
- Credit cards
- Automated account withdrawals
- Debit cards
- Cheque
- Cash
Having credit as number one is easy. I can get 1 - 2% of the payment back with a reward program. In essence, if a merchant supports credit card payment - and you’re not using credit - then essentially you’re subsidizing those that are. Merchants pay the credit cards companies when customers use their cards (in Canada the average retail merchant discount rate is about 2% of price). So your first order of business should be to put as many of your regular expenses as you can on your credit card. Which card? Here’s a link to an excellent resource comparing and recommending Canadian credit card reward programs.
Besides the obvious (groceries, entertainment, meals, clothing, travel, gas, repairs), look into all your other expenses to see what can be put on the credit card (utilities, subscriptions, drugs, big ticket items - even some insurance premiums). According to a recent ScotiaBank poll only 24% Canadians are using credit cards for everyday purchases. This is a lost opportunity.
Besides rewards, another advantage of credit payment is, of course, credit. Given that you’re paying your balances off in full by the due date, you’ll get a month or two of float. Most cards will also provide you with extended warranties and purchase security (ie. a way to contest charges when purchases aren’t delivered whole).
Of course, you can’t put everything on a credit card. Taxes and investments for instance, and some other payments. Automated account withdrawals, debit cards and cheques are all really ways of paying cash - without the cash. The advantage of these methods over cash - include convenience and audit trails (and there some excellent resources available to help you analyse your expenses). I’ve used - Wasabe, Money and Intuit’s Quicken. Of course, you get these advantage with credit cards as well.
Finally cash. I started thinking about the instances that I actually use cash. And they’re almost all gone. My list of cash expenses is down to;
- Coffee shop,
- Cheap lunches at the food court, concession, or outside vendor,
- kid’s pocket money,
- Some gifts and gratuities,
- Very small store purchases,
- Foreign vacation spending (for a few reasons - cards aren’t always welcome and even if they are - you might be a little wary of identity theft).
As I thought about this - I’m fairly sure I could figure out ways to almost eliminate cash altogether. Some coffee shops have gift cards or coupons that I can buy on credit - and there are lunch counters that support debit or credit. My mission is to go 1 month and spend less than $20 cash. I’ll let you know how I do.
Natasha Richardson: no lessons here
Posted by Bill McCollam in Potpourri on March 19th, 2009
Sometimes really bad things happen and they simply don’t have a point. Natasha Richardson takes a reportedly mild fall on a bunny hill, initially feels fine, then reports a crushing headache an hour later, and eventually succumbs to coma and dies a couple of days later. The autopsy rules an accidental death caused by a clot from a ruptured artery. “This is a very treatable condition if you’re aware of what the problem is and the patient is quickly transferred to a hospital,” said Dr. Keith Siller of New York University Langone Medical Center.
Certainly a tragedy but don’t look for rhyme or reason. The blogs and discussion forums are full of dubious wisdom;
- beware the ice under the snow,
- never ski without a helmet,
- never ski, never let your kids ski,
- don’t ski in foreign countries,
- be sure to get a CT if you bump your head,
- don’t bump your head, and on and on.
All pointless - just like Natasha’s death. Just a random, statistical outlier. I pity people that allow their lives to be diminished (or worse, their children’s lives) because of some deep meaning they take from this.
I’m not saying that wearing a helmet isn’t a good idea. And if this makes someone a little more careful on the slopes - fine. But don’t wrap yourself in a ball of cotton. Your chances of dying from a fall on a bunny hill haven’t changed since last week. They’re still microscopically tiny.
Geocaching: Fun, frugal and good for you
Posted by Bill McCollam in Potpourri on March 16th, 2009
So what if I told you I had found an activity that you and your best friend could do together that was fun, frugal and was good for you? Oh, and it is good for the environment and ‘green’. And best of all (from my perspective) - it involves playing with gadgets. No silly - it’s geocaching!
Lyndsey and I got into this last spring and we had a blast. Basically you take your GPS (less than $15o where I shop), fire up the browser and check out www.geocaching.com. Sign up (it’s free), pick a silly nick (we’re longpulleyrose - don’t ask…), find a cache near you, jot down the coordinates, pack a lunch and head out for an adventure!
Here’s how it works… (and this may sound a little goofy). Other grownups have gathered together certain trinkets from around their house. And they’ve put these trinkets in a weather-proof container (these range in size from film cannisters, to tupperware, to ammo boxes). Then these other grownups have gone outdoors to some remote public place, trekked around for a while until they find a likely hiding spot (like a dead tree trunk or a hole in a fence post). Then they carefully note the GPS coordinates and hide their container. All the while making sure no civilians (muggles) are in the neighbourhood. Oh, and they include a little log book in the container too. Then these folks come home, and post the coordinates in the web site. Often with clever little clues.
Sometime thereafter, intrepid adventurers (yours truly comes to mind) kick up their browsers, find the coordinates to the nearby caches and go hunting. When, (if) they find the cache, the idea is to open it up, log the find, swap one of the trinkets for one of your own, and keep score on the website. God’s truth - some people have logged >2,000 caches found! I think we’re at 25 or so.
We’ve mostly stuck to nearby caches - and you wouldn’t believe how many wonderful places I’ve discovered within 10 miles of our house - that I didn’t even know existed. And this isn’t as easy as it sounds. Our GPS will usually get us to within 10 feet or so (barring tree canopies) - but some of the trails are challenging and even when you’re near - these can be very, very tricky to find.
Lyndsey and I can be a little competitive - so for a while we were keeping seperate scores of finds. But that got to be too much bookkeeping (after I lost 4 times in a row) - so now its a team event.
So go out and enjoy (and if you do signup - be sure and pm us at longpulleyrose).
The cost of kindness
Posted by Bill McCollam in Economics, Marketing/Psychology on March 15th, 2009
I experienced a random act of kindness this weekend. It was quite nice and made me ponder the economic implications.
Geoff and I were at the checkout line in the grocery store (…by an odd set of circumstances - Geoff at seventeen isn’t exactly the grocery shopping type). As happens on the odd time that Geoff and I go shopping together - the groceries included a few items that don’t normally make it into the cart when someone more responsible is in charge. So, as we’re waiting our turn, the lady ahead is going through a little file of coupons that she has with her. She selects a few applicable coupons and hands them to the clerk. Then she looks over our groceries on the counter, flicks through her coupons a bit more and puts a coupon for $1.50 off the frozen pizzas that the boy has added to our cart. She mumbles something, turns and leaves, almost before I had a chance to thank her.
The checkout clerk rings in our groceries, and applies the coupon. Wow, like finding money!
We’ve never really gotten serious about coupons in our household. Lyndsey’s quite careful about meal planning and pays attention to the weekly grocery specials. But coupons have always felt like a little too much work. (And to be honest, I can barely make out the fine print).
I’m not sure if this small incident will change our minds about using coupons - but the social and economic aspect of that lady passing along the coupon really interests me. I’m thinking she wasn’t a big frozen pizza fan. So she didn’t clip that coupon for herself. I’m thinking she clipped it because it was a decent discount and she wanted to get some utility from it. From her point of view, the value she got from providing that random act of kindness obviously was greater than the marginal cost of clipping and carrying the coupon.
Where it gets interesting is when the transfer of value becomes more about economics and less to do with kindness. Consider:
- My daughter was telling me the other day about an incident in a school parking lot where someone leaving a spot wanted to sell their unexpired ticket to someone coming in for half price. The other party thought they should get it for free and it almost came to blows,
- I’ve wondered about those refillable popcorn deals where you just present the empty bucket for a top-up (do patrons ever fill up on the way out and pass it on?),
- …and what about golf balls at the driving range. I don’t know about you - but half a jumbo bucket is usually plenty for me. I’d easily sell the second half to someone else.
Obviously the problem with transactionalizing these transfers - is that it subverts the economic assumptions built into the prices. Presumably parking lots make assumptions around pricing based on consumers utilizing less than the maximum utility available on their ticket. Same for coupons, popcorn and golf balls. I’m guessing that random “acts of kindness” are incidental and don’t signify. But imagine if you were to really leverage and transactionalize this.
What about coupon exhange sites and even gift card exchange sites? The latter is an idea that I think is fantastic. More on this later….
What’s your financial EQ?
Posted by Bill McCollam in Marketing/Psychology, Personal Finance on March 14th, 2009
People enjoy self discovery. They like to develop insights about themselves and compare those insights with others. This was brought home earlier this week when I took a BBC quiz, Brain Sex. (It’s a fun test, designed to determine the gender tendencies of your brain… so guys are supposed to do better with the spacial, logical dimensions and girls are better at the emotive, emphasizing aspects). All good fun.
Anyway, I took the quiz one night and sent it to Lyndsey afterwards. Sure enough, I did better on estimating angles (masculine) and she did better with the memory (feminine) aspects. Our teenage daughter asked for the link and did the test as well - saying that she really enjoyed these quizzes. We all got to compare scores and aptitudes. (Okay, okay - we’re a bit of a geek family).
It got me thinking about financial personalities and attitudes. One of the biggest challenges in the financial services industry is getting people past their inertia. By and large, people don’t really like to think about savings, budgeting, managing risk, investing etc… they know they should - but it just feels like a burden. I wonder if quizzes and financial personality tests could help people address this important part of their life?
After all, many people are very aware of their IQs, their EQ’s and even their MBTI. Indeed, many of us use the insights from these tools to help us in our professional and personal lives. Are there personality dimensions that are analagous to these instruments that would provide people with similarly useful insights into their finance related personality? And could they be positioned in a way that would make them fun to engage with? (ie. easy to take, easy to compare, easy to remember etc….). I took a quick look for finance personality tests. The ones I found seemed shallow and clunky:
- http://myvesta.org/tests/moneypersonality/
- www.marketpsych.com/personality_test.php
- http://www.independent.co.uk/money/invest-save/what-is-your-financial-personality-763687.html
This feels to me like an ownable space. And imagine the benefits of owning and branding the definitive financial personality test.
Make a decision, any decision…
Posted by Bill McCollam in Marketing/Psychology on March 9th, 2009
A few of us were talking about open vs. private communities and how the ratio of such communities may be indicative of corporate culture. It’s an interesting thought.
The notion in the argument was that the ratio of open to total communities was some kind of proxy for organizational openness. And that too low of a ratio was - in some sense - a bad thing. I don’t think it’s an obvious thing, but I do get the main point.
It seems sensible that more inputs drive innovation and better decisions. This is one of the main ideas behind James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds. Surowiecki provides many examples of open inputs driving better decisions that reliance on a few ‘experts’. Closing debate or promoting groupthink are said to create less than optimal (or even tragic decisions as in the case of Challenger). But I’m not sure that’s really what’s going on in Corporate closed communities.
It’s often been my observation about Corporate culture that any decision is better than no decision. I’ve often listened to passionate debates covering topics as varied as channel conflicts all the way down to trivial debates over graphical styles. Sometimes, occasionally - it really, really mattered. But way more often - it just didn’t. We simply had to make a decision.
And getting to decision is tough sometimes. Waiting for consensus simply won’t work. Somebody’s got to be in position to make a call - then they have to make the call. Good leaders can do that quickly and with grace. And (to finally make my point), it’s often easier for all concerned if some of the debating and decisions, along with the winners and losers, are kept close.
(At least at one stage of cultural maturity… I can imagine a culture where you can openly debate, get the right facts out, and then make a public call - with heads all held high - but that’ll take a little more doing).
Achilla Orru and his thumb piano
Posted by Bill McCollam in Potpourri on March 7th, 2009
I met some interesting people this week.
I attended the New Pioneers awards ceremony last Thursday at the Royal York. My company sponsored some of the awards and we had a table. It was a long day and I got to the awards session a little cranky and really really hoping the ceremonies would be fairly quick. Registration and the pre-ceremony reception didn’t bode well. Very long line-ups and all the signs of an event run by folks for whom event management is a part-time job; messy queues, no people traffic control, and lotsa speeches from the politicos.
So, as sponsors, we hosted one of the award recipients at our table. And this soon changed my attitude about the evening. Let me back up…
The event was put on by an outfit called Skills for Change. This group helps new immigrants and refugees get training (job skills, language etc…) and find employment in Canada. It’s non-profit and they seem to be making a difference. These are real people who seem to care tremendously about what they do.
The award recipient at our table was named Achilla Orru. He was a musician originally from Uganda. He was blind. Achilla is a small man, about 35 years old and was dressed in a suit. He didn’t look like he was used to wearing suits. He was smiling when I met him, and I soon realized that Achilla is always smiling. He lost his sight in Uganda when he was 6. At about the same time he discovered a talent for music and specifically for an ancient instrument called the lokembe (or ‘thumb piano’).
Achilla invited us all to his next performance. Here’s a sample of his music. He’s a nice man and listening to him will make you feel better. It did for me. I’ll pass along any concert information I get.
Free at last, free at last…
Posted by Bill McCollam in Economics, Marketing/Psychology on February 28th, 2009
Consider the perfection of zero. Marketers have long understood how powerful a concept ‘free’ is to consumers. In his upcoming book, Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail and executive editor of Wired) examines zero and the implication of zero in a digital world.
The key point is that zero has always had a huge psychological attraction for consumers. We’d much rather pay nothing than something - even if the something is very small and even if the nothing has ’strings attached’. In his recent article, Anderson points to Gillette - the inventor of disposable razor blades. For two decades the invention went no where - until Gillette latched onto the notion of giving away the razors and selling the blades. Voila - a market is born.
Anderson turns from razors to the 21st century, where huge companies like Google and Yahoo have built enterprises on zero. Free searches for free content. With the diminishing cost of storage, bandwidth and computing power- it’s approaching a point where it’s cheaper to give it a way than to meter it. Anderson contemplates the existing business models built on free - and how these are evolving.
I was thinking about all this in regard to Financial Services.
The mutual fund industry was founded on a brilliant application of zero. That’s precisely what many consumers believe they are paying for fund management, record-keeping and associated financial advice. (Maybe at some level some consumers are aware of MER’s - but usually only in the same limited way that razor owners are aware that the blade refill they’ll need are a little pricey). In fact, the industry has been so good with promoting the ‘free advice’ model - that it’s made it very hard for the ‘fee for advice’ models to lift off.
Could there be an advice analog for the Google model? Google works by helping consumers find content and charging advertisers for the opportunity to get access to these consumers in the moment. So could advice be provided to consumers (for free), and be supported by sponsored, contextual advertisement of a more robust kind of advice. Or for products that meet the needs being advised? I think so. You’d need to work out a way to provide and compensate for the advice - and you’d need to create some kind of reputation management around the providers. But that’s doable. And I’m thinking many many consumers would prefer advice in this mode than the traditional.
Vroom, vroom (small is the new big)
Posted by Bill McCollam in Economics, Marketing/Psychology on February 22nd, 2009
Apparently size does matter. A lot - at least for American drivers.
Darren Dahl, a consumer-behavior consultant and professor of marketing at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business says that the big car may be too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to give up, according to a recent Newsweek item. Dahl states that, “If you’re someone who likes to have some feeling of security, power, control, etc., then a large vehicle can provide that.”.
Many of the comments in the article reinforce the notion that readers are especially concerned about the safety of small cars. One poster contemplates driving a smaller car and remarks, “… the thought of myself driving one on the way from knoxwille to memphis or from bristol to atlanta with the many big rigs/14or 18 wheelers mixed on the interstate able to crush me into a package 6 inches thick by 6 foot wide by 10 foot long gives me nightmares …“. Of course, this is all wrong-headed and will reverse in a generation or less.
The reason that (some) Americans won’t drive smaller cars is that they’re comparing them to the vehicles around them and they’re intimidated by bigger cars (whether for reasons of safety or ego). But, baby - this is all going to change…
It’s one of the silver linings of a severe shock to the economic system. People simply won’t be able to afford to take such self-indulgent positions. Already sales of new, big cars are down significantly. Sales of used cars, and fuel-efficent cars are steadily climbing. As the average size of vehicles decreases - then the feelings of American drivers (relative to their neighbours) will also shift. In 10 years - big cars will be an oddity. They’ll be a remnant of the past, only pursued by anachronistic throwbacks. You’ll look across the road at these drivers the same way you look at someone sitting in their vehicle these days with a cigar in their mouth and a kid in the back seat with the windows rolled up.
Sad and selfish.
Signature move (TBD)
Posted by Bill McCollam in Marketing/Psychology, Potpourri on February 22nd, 2009
I don’t really have a signature move. But I’d like one.
Many of us remember the Michael Jackson moonwalk, Fonzie’s thumbs up, John Wayne’s swagger/hitch, the Ali shuffle and Carol Burnett’s ear tug. I heard recently that Denzel Washington has a move that he’s actually had added to his movie contracts. Apparently, early in his career, Denzel was admired for his very distinctive walk (especially as seen from the rear). So, in order to capitalize on this walk - he and his agent try to write it into every movie he does. The last scene in all his movies, if this is true, must be of Denzel walking away from the camera.
I’m not sure if this is true in all or most of his movies. I’ll hunt down a few of his 49 films and investigate (stay tuned). But it is an interesting story. If you could have a signature move, some unique mannerism that would forever remind people of you - what would it be?
Requiem for the newspaper
Posted by Bill McCollam in Economics, Marketing/Psychology on February 21st, 2009
I enjoy the newspaper. Especially weekend mornings with coffee. It’s free time. Before chores, before lugging out the office work or even before the gym. Just slow, easy perusal. If I’m to believe the pundits - this is a dying activity. And that’s a shame.
The reasons are familiar; nobody’s buying print advertisements, Gen X and Y’ers have better ways to connect and the publishing raw materials are too expensive. I haven’t personally checked out the circulation statistics and the economics - but most of this is plausible.
I suppose I could sit at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings with my laptop and emulate the newspaper experience - but much would be missing.
There’s a social aspect to the paper that I’ll miss. It gets passed around the family at the breakfast table and along with working out who has dibs on the comics and the front section - we also have a chance to talk about the items that interested us most. I somehow can’t see us all sitting in front of laptops sharing links.
And there’s something refreshing about the finite aspect of a newspaper. There’s only so many sections and pages. You can have a start and an end, and then be done for the day. The web is… well - infinite, isn’t it? I do need to get to the chores eventually.
And on a more serious note, I worry about the vacuum of serious investigative journalism. In the Toronto Star in just the last few months I’ve followed exposes on diploma mills, immigration scams, and charity scams. I get that there are bloggers that dig stuff out. (I guess. I don’t actually recall reading any…). But I can’t imagine a blogger investing the time and resources into a serious longer term investigation. It doesn’t appear that regulatory bodies can do this adequately - so what fills this vacuum?