Humor that nobody will get. And those who get it might be offended.

I was reading an article about how the LDS church has its own online bookstore app. I actually chuckled at one of the comments:

They have also announced an app that will automatically transfer the money in your savings account to the most charismatic person in your ward. This will save you the time of listening to his get-rich-quick sale while he slaps you on the back and calls you brother.

They, in turn, will have an app that will text their heartfelt apology to the judge (also in their ward) who will sentence him to 24 months, translating into wages of roughly 1.5 million per year.

I love technology.

Get-rich-quick schemes in Deseret were allegedly so common that wards stopped passing out phone directories for their church because they were being used in various money-making schemes. Indeed, there were three major employers in the town where I worked. A federal government installation, my employer (tangentially involved in a lot of people trying to get rich quick), and an Amway sort of company that sells snake oil. Edgar, a guy who was let go from my employer, got a multilayer marketing job afterwards and hit us all up for a chance to get rich quick, too. That these sorts of things appeal to Mormons speaks to their industriousness, though it certainly has its downsides.

Mitt Earnesty

In a thread over in TLoOG, I realized something noteworthy: I would actually be shocked if it came out that Mitt Romney cheated on his wife. I really would. Some of it has to do with the fact that he’s as stiff as a sitcom starched shirt, but there’s also the Mormon thing. I hadn’t though about it too much, but I really do have a greater expectation on the practice-preach. Particularly the ones, like Romney, who are somewhat understated about it.

I can’t say that I was surprised about Gingrich. I’d be surprised to find out that Huckabee cheated, but not shocked.

It could be related to the fact that, until Huckabee entered the race last time around, the Mormon was the only major candidate to have only married one woman. Giuliani and McCain had five between them. Fred Thompson would later enter with two, though he wasn’t a major candidate.

Businessweek ran an article on the Postal Service that’s creating a lot of buzz. Basically, it’s in pretty bad shape. What else is new? In this case, it’s actually running close to complete implosion:

Since 2007 the USPS has been unable to cover its annual budget, 80 percent of which goes to salaries and benefits. In contrast, 43 percent of FedEx’s (FDX) budget and 61 percent of United Parcel Service’s (UPS) pay go to employee-related expenses. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the postal service’s two primary rivals are more nimble. According to SJ Consulting Group, the USPS has more than a 15 percent share of the American express and ground-shipping market. FedEx has 32 percent, UPS 53 percent.

The USPS has stayed afloat by borrowing $12 billion from the U.S. Treasury. This year it will reach its statutory debt limit. After that, insolvency looms.

A few years ago, when the USPS was talking about cutting out Saturday deliveries, there were howls of protest. I’m not entirely sure how many would protest that now. The USPS would actually have been better off if this had happened five years ago, when the prospect of life without the Post Office might have seemed scarier.

The right has latched on to the notion that this is a public sector unions issue. But it does deeper than that. The main issue is that the USPS is an uncomfortable mixture of independent and governmental. They are independent insofar as they are expected to fund themselves. They negotiated their own deals with the unions and such. But they’re governmental insofar as the government can prevent them from doing some of the things they would need to do in order to become solvent again. It’s not just the unions that don’t want post office locations to close, but also congress. And their relationship with the government makes it difficult for them to raise prices to the extent that they can become solvent again. There’s really no excuse for them to be losing money on junk mail, for instance, but they can’t unilaterally raise the price. (Is there a junk mail lobby that stops congress from doing this? I’m not sure. It wouldn’t surprise me if this were an issue where of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs where the concentrated beneficiaries have undue influence.)

But ultimately, this brings to light the question of what, precisely, we want from the post office. And how much we’re willing to pay for it. The Postal Service incurs costs that UPS and FedEx don’t due to statutory requirements that they delivery to everywhere and that they do so every day. There are many that are suggesting that if left to the private sector, some places wouldn’t get mail delivery or would do so only at very steep rates. As though that is what is causing all the problems. While it is true that there are some places that UPS and FedEx won’t deliver, they are actually very few. Mostly parts of Alaska and on reservations. They really aren’t the problem. And FedEx and UPS actually charge pretty competitive rates whether a package is being delivered to the city or the country. I ran some checks on Glasgow, MT (pretty much defined as the middle of nowhere) and Denver and Seattle in a package shipped from Tampa. Sometimes the delivery was more expensive. Sometimes it was cheaper. But it was never a huge difference.

So at least in theory, we could simply have a stripped down USPS that delivers to the places that UPS and FedEx won’t at a fraction of the price. That still leaves the issue of door-to-door mail. Right now, the Post Office ostensibly has a monopoly on that, though when you try to pin down what exactly the monopoly consists of. It’s illegal to use mailbox and I’ve heard from at least one person that they can’t deliver “non-urgent” envelopes. But even if they could, I doubt they would do so competitively with the USPS. Or that they would want to so long as the USPS actually exists. So if you got rid of the USPS, would either of them step up? Would both? I would imagine that at least one would, but the price increase would probably be substantial.

So I think that the answer for the Postal Service falls into one of three categories: (1) beef it up and offer services that post offices in other countries offer, such as scanned mail and bill-pay, (2) raise prices and reduce costs as necessary to be profitable, or (3) marginalize losses by scaling down and becoming the sender of last resort. I think a lot of the services they would provide in the first would give a lot of Americans the heebie-jeebies. The second is difficult or impossible between the union contracts and congressional meddling to go forward with. The third would likely involve will-call and weekly deliveries, which would also be difficult to square with the unions. So all of these are pretty problematic, leaving to the fourth option: just pay the piper. Undo the legislation that forced the Postal Service to be solvent in the first place. That, I suspect, is what is going to happen.

Regarding the unions, I have three things to add. First, I agree with the left that union wages are not the primary issue. There are reasons why the USPS would spend a higher portion of its money on people: you need them to deliver door-to-door. You spend on people what FedEx and UPS spend on planes. And salaries at USPS are not actually higher than those at UPS, from what I understand. Second, while salaries are not the issue, the inflexibility regarding hiring and firing are. The most obvious route to solvency appears to me to be a reduction in services. But the cost savings would come from personnel reductions that would be hard to negotiate. Third, I do believe that the government has to live up to the pension promises that it made. I think that there is a grace period to such things, but the grace period has passed as far as the USPS is concerned. However, and this is important, this is why we should never, ever make these promises to begin with and making alternate arrangements for new employees to whom these promises have not been made. When you find yourself in a hole, the first step is to stop digging.

Bill Wyman wrote a worthwhile piece a few months ago about the universal availability of art:

If you were born to this it’s an unshakeable, seemingly permanent feature of the world. The rest of us marvel that a significant part of everything out there that should be digitized and made available has. And once it’s out there, getting your hands on it is a fairly simple process. The concept of “rarity” has become obsolete. A previously “rare” CD or movie, once it’s in the iTunes store or on the torrent networks, is, in theory, just as available as the biggest single in the world. (In practice, there are marginal differences, like having to do a few extra searches or wait a bit for a download, but that’s a big difference from, say, driving across town to a Tower Records to find that they don’t have a CD in stock.)

A rarity might be less popular; it might be less interesting. But it’s no longer less available the way it once was. If you have a decent Internet connection and a slight cast of amorality in your character, there’s very little out there you might want that you can’t find. Does the end of rarity change in any fundamental way, our understanding of, attraction to, or enjoyment of pop culture and high art?

The notion that “the Internet changes everything” is touted too often. But this is really an astonishing development. Many years ago, I was a Batman fan that bought a somewhat disappointing one-shot called Batman: Vengeance of Bane, which introduced an interesting but (within the story) inconsequential villain. When Bane went on to utterly defeat the Batman, the comic book that I had purchased for a couple bucks – that they didn’t even bother an embossed or triple-released cover, was suddenly worth $40. Unlike a lot of valuable comics at the time, this didn’t become valuable because it had an embossed cover or something like that. It was valuable because people wanted to read the story and they couldn’t unless they bought it (when they released a second print, the value dropped back down to $10). These days, they could have just downloaded it on the Internet, illegally for free or for a few bucks from DC Comics itself.

There’s no scarcity anymore, except that which is imposed by the producers to price certain people out. Any book released today will likely be available, in perpetuity, forevermore. Due to the virtual abolition of the public domain, it may never be free. But it’ll be available. As someone that once ached to find copies of CDs out of production or comic books that had a single run years ago, this is a pretty amazing development. Once, I purchased an entire set of 60 comics just so that I could finally get my hands on the four that I didn’t have and that were hard to get. It would, of course, be nicer if I could get it for free, but it’s pretty amazing that I will likely be able to get ahold of – one way or another – anything that came out since around 2005.

This is great for me. And in some sense it’s good for the producers to the extent that they can continue to make money off old things without firing up the printing presses again, though at the prices they will sell them at and the availability of the stuff for free online, I’m not sure how much money they’re actually going to make. Not only is it free from Bit Torrent, but you never have to worry about any DRM glitches. So there’s the argument that, if they want to sell these things, they should make them so cheap that it’s not worth taking any sort of risk on Bit Torrent, and that they should make it available. Sure, maybe a lot of people won’t pay for it, but they’ll make more money in the end than they do if they put together a package at a price and with restrictions that people won’t abide by.

From a practical standpoint, I think this is wrong for two reasons. First, people who aren’t geeks really don’t seem to care all that much about DRM. Kindle and its offspring have demonstrated that people are willing to pay what are really outrageous prices when the delivery system is sound. Even before music downloading went from AAC to MP3, Apple was sitting pretty.

Second, I am becoming increasingly convinced that people internalize price. That art, when sold cheaply, becomes cheap. Someone that pays $15 for a CD is likely to have an investment in that artist. Someone that pays a couple bucks for the three songs off the CD that they want will likely forget about the artist. They won’t have an attachment. They won’t – for lack of other things to listen to – listen and relisten to the CD until they find out that there are actually four other songs that they come to like. So while from a fan’s standpoint – to the extent that fans are willing to concede that the record labels, artists, and the like should be compensated for their trouble, which isn’t always the case – it shouldn’t matter to the record labels whether they make $1000 selling a copy to 100 people or the same amount selling to 400 since the marginal costs are so low, there’s an argument to be made that making their product cheap actually does do them harm, by making the services they provide seem less valuable. And from an artist’s standpoint, by making their music more disposable.

More on this to come.

I actually went up to Redstone without a substitute teaching gig. I was looking forward to actually having time to spend up there rather than spending most of my day at school. On the agenda was a stop at the Copper Cafe, a trip to Walmart to pick up a Site2Store order and fill a new glasses prescription, and heading over to to Snippy-Snip to get a haircut. As it would turn out, I arrived at about the time I would have gotten out of school anyway. I figured that since I didn’t have to get up at 5:30am and didn’t have a day full of trying to manage a classroom, I would not need as much time at the Copper Cafe to unwind. As it would turn out, I didn’t care and stayed there until close anyway. So that had me getting out at 6pm and rushing to try to get everything done.

When I got there, I looked at the hours of the eye center and the hair cut place. I don’t typically get my hair cut at Walmart, but figured I might this time just to consolidate my chores into a single location. The eye center was open until 8 (an hour later than usual) and the hair place until 9. Perfect. I went to Site2Store first, where there was nobody managing the station. I waited there for about twenty minutes before someone coming off break noticed me there and (though it wasn’t her department) kindly offered to help me out. She didn’t know what she was doing, though, and so it took me half an hour to realize that the stuff hadn’t arrived yet. By and large, Walmart was not living up to the convenience that I have come to expect from it.

This was compounded by the fact that the eye-center was not open until 8, but rather was closing at 7. Fortunately, the lady there was really nice and stayed after to help me order the new pair of glasses. I had initially intended to get two pairs, a regular pair and prescription sunglasses. My current glasses are transition lenses, which I like okay but Clancy thinks looks impossibly goofy. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my sensitive eyes really do need all the help I can get to protect them from the Giant Ball of Torment in the sky. So I got another pair of transition-lensed glasses. Maybe a pair of prescription sunglasses at a later date. The cool thing was that the frames I chose were all of $9. It came down between a $9 pair of Puritans vs an $84 pair of Wrangler (apparently, they make glasses frames). I prefered the latter, but not to the tune of $75. We’ll see how reliable the Puritans are. Puritan actually makes pretty decent slacks. They outlast Dockers so long as the button thread doesn’t become loose.

There was a 30-45 minute wait at the hair-care center, so I took care of some shopping while I waited. Apparently, they don’t sell my prefered boxers anymore. I wasn’t sure if they were Hanes of Fruit-of-the-Loom, but I previously got one of those two and liked them and then the other and didn’t like them. I felt inside the bags to see which ones were the more clothy, but both were made of the same stuff from the ones I didn’t like. And none of them had the neat designs (both now only offer plaid and camoflouge, it would seem). I’ll live. I got a couple grocery-type items that the Callie Safeway was without, saving quite a bit along the way (even accounting for the Safeway card). I don’t shop at Walmart for the low prices, generally, but it’s a nice benefit. On groceries in particular. With that, a huge container of laundry detergent, some toilet paper, and a poster frame, I was done and ready for my haircut.

Having never gotten my haircut at Walmart before, but having been an off-and-on Walmart shopper for some time, I expected two things from my haircut: it would probably not be very good, but it would probably be pretty cheap. I was wrong on both counts. It was a full $2.50 more than I would have paid at Snippity, and it was actually a really good hair cut performed with minimal guidance on my part (I usually have to request more be taken off the back at least once and that my sideburns be evened out, she did both without prompting). With the tip it was $18.50, but I’ll take that over a bad hair cut for $15.

So apparently AT&T is looking to buy out T-Mobile. A while back I wrote that the cellphone industry was actually a good example of mergers benefiting the customer. Having four national carriers is better than having a whole bunch of regional ones with roaming fees and spottier coverage. Jack Shafer makes a similar argument in favor of the merger:

Before you start howling—”Now there will be just three wireless companies to screw me instead of four”—calm down long enough to read this July 2010 57-page report published by the Government Accountability Office. It found that a decade of industry consolidation had brought lower prices to consumers—”approximately 50 percent less than 1999 prices”—and better coverage. Also, the GAO found, consolidation provided “smoother, more uninterrupted service” in some areas and reduced roaming fees for many customers.

Plus, today’s wireless devices can do things the 2000 versions couldn’t dream of. Over the past decade, as the industry winnowed itself down through mergers and acquisitions, wireless phones became all-purpose devices, able to run thousands of applications and make speedy connections to the Internet. Many smartphones stowed in consumers’ pockets and purses are more powerful than the desktop computers of just a few years ago, making them so popular that Deloitte predicted last year that sales of smartphones in 2011 would just about equal those of desktop and laptop PCs. The appeal of fancy handsets—not underlying networks—drives competition in the wireless industry now, the GAO study states.

And yet… and yet… I still can’t bring myself to viewing it as a pretty bad idea.

Pursuant to my previous post on the matter, I’m still not opposed to mergers. Arapaho is actually getting a boost as AT&T buys out one of the regional carriers. AT&T will be able to offer better service at an equivalent price. It’ll be a win, as far as I am concerned, as AT&T customers will be have more access to the state of Arapaho and Galaxy’s customers will get to be a part of a national network. But AT&T and T-Mobile are both national networks. Two of the only four. The only two GSM carriers. If T-Mobile users wanted to be a part of AT&T’s network, by and large they can simply join AT&T. If AT&T customers want cheaper plans, they may have the option of switching to T-Mo if they’re in an applicable area.

Given the nature of the business, it’s a lot to ask for if you want more than a handful of major competitors. But for markets to work, you need choices. More than two. More than three if possible. And in this case, it is possible. T-Mobile is making money.

On the other hand, here are some reasons I might be wrong:

While the consolidation used to be good for the nationalizing of networks, it could be good now due to spectrum scarcity. AT&T has the nation covered, but they (like Verizon and the others) will be upgrading to 4G. That, combined with more users, may mean that there isn’t really as much room for four as I would have guessed.
1. The government could lean on AT&T to make some much needed changes about contracts and phone carriage agreements that could be for the betterment of the industry.
2. Though pretty much everybody is saying that this dooms Sprint, they could end up a winner in all this. They’d be the only national discount carrier standing. If they can get out from under their customer service reputation, it could me three major carriers rather than two major, one B-minor, and one C-minor national carriers, which is what we have now.
3. It gives me another reason to hate Apple and the iPhone.

Are Amazon’s days as a (mostly) tax-free merchant coming to an end?

Retail analyst David Strasser, a managing director at Janney Montgomery Scott, suggests that they could be. “There’s a lot of momentum building,’’ he said Friday. “(Amazon founder) Jeff Bezos has built a company strategically around avoiding sales tax. But they’re going to have to deal with this,” he added.

Wait a minute. Hasn’t Amazon successfully fended off pesky state tax collectors for 16 glorious years? Yes, but the battle has entered a new stage as Amazon builds warehouse/fulfillment centers in more locations, states grow hungrier for revenue, and a rising sales tax rate (it now averages 9.64% nationwide) puts retailers who do collect tax at an ever bigger disadvantage.

There was a time when I would have scoffed at the notion. And truthfully, I think that it’s great that online retailers got that benefit when they were just starting out so that we would get used to buying things online (which was once considered scary by some and foolish by others). Besideswhich, it seemed that what you saved in sales tax you lost in shipping (wherebouts). These days, though, you can almost always get something cheaper online with or without sales tax. When I lived in a state that did collect sales taxes from Amazon sales, I still purchased from Amazon.

But what started off as a perhaps-needed inducement to get people to shop online has basically become a tax loophole. It has also incentivized inefficient behavior, purchasing something from across the country rather than from down the street. And it puts some states at a real disadvantage. People who live in Pullman, Washington, for example, have to pay the sales tax while people who live six miles down the road in Moscow, Idaho, do not. And whenever I am on eBay, I remain glad that I am not a Californian because it seems that most of the stuff I order is from California. And, of course, Barnes and Noble’s early online push had to compete with Amazon while the former (generally) had to collect sales tax and the latter (generally) did not. Does it make sense to punish B&N for having storefronts and reward Amazon for not having them?

Of course, there are three things stopping us. First, people like the idea of tax-free and so it’s often an unpopular thing to do. I don’t think I am completely alone in coming around on this, though. And there has been movement in many states to see if they can find a way to collect it. That brings us to the second problem:

The back story is well known: In 1992, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Quill v. North Dakota, that only sellers with a physical presence (“nexus” in taxspeak) in a state are required to collect that state’s sales taxes. Just shipping into a state by say, FedEx or UPS, isn’t enough to establish nexus. Consumers still owe “use” (meaning sales) tax to their states, but few bother to pay.

Several years back, there was a big to-do in Delosa when the State Treasurer went after the State Insurance Commissioner (both were expected to be vying for the same job in the next election) for not paying sales taxes on some furniture he bought from abroad. It was expected that the Treasurer was trying to make his potential future opponent look bad as a “tax-dodger” but instead it just reminded everyone that they’re “tax-dodgers” too, in this regard. About the only place this is regularly enforced is with cars, because they can easily verify what they need to when you go to register it.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. So the second problem is that there is a jurisdiction problem. I guess it’s hard to make a company that doesn’t have so much as a business license in your state pay taxes to it, though I’m not sure how this differs from income taxes. I know that as the resident of a state with an income tax and as an employee of a company without one, my employer is still legally bound to take withholdings for my home state. It’s one of the things that has been holding up my contract. I suppose they make some sort of distinction between collection and withholdings, or employees and customers. But the courts have spoken.

So then we have to the third problem, which is that the entity in the best position to do anything about it is not the one that would reap the benefits. Congress would be essentially seen as “raising taxes”, which is a political liability, without actually getting any of the revenue that comes with it. If they’re going to be tax-raisers, they might as well have an interstate sales tax that they collect themselves, if that’s constitutionally permissible (just about everything else is under the commerce clause).

So what happens now? Amazon relies pretty heavily on its affiliates. When one or two states threaten to collect sales taxes, Amazon can write off that state’s affiliates. But when every state does it, they could lose all of their affiliates and a lot of their utility. That would leave an opening for an affiliate-based rival to offer nearly as wide a selection as Amazon, but with sales tax. Amazon might indeed win such a war based on price, but it would hurt. Or Amazon and Affiliazon could both lose to eBay, which has an amazing selection, good prices, and is nearly impossible to tax, though also has a chaotic marketplace (hard to find what you want) and trust issues.

Of course, even if Amazon itself throws in the towel, the overall inefficiency problems are not solved. It still makes sense to order something from across the country on eBay than buy something across the street. It would ultimately just put Amazon in similar footing with B&N, Walmart, and so on. Which would be good for the competitors, though it doesn’t really solve this problem:

State officials have long lamented the shortfall and sought ways to collect a bigger portion by using a mix of education and threats. California, for instance, expects to be shortchanged $1.15 billion in 2010 from e-commerce and catalog sales, according to estimates from the state Board of Equalization.

Amazon is surely responsible for some of that, but so are a lot of others, who are not such easy targets.

Best Buy is looking at taking a page from Walmart. A good page, though:

Shoppers at Best Buy”Every Day Low Price” is the mantra at Walmart, and now it seems Best Buy is considering adopting the concept as it tries to compete with online retailers and get consumers to shop during non-promotional events.

“We have to move rapidly in recognizing the transparency of pricing,” Mike Vitelli, executive vice president and co-head of the North America division at Best Buy told Bloomberg News.

According to a Best Buy spokeswoman, any shift in pricing strategy is in the very early stages of discussion, and there are no more details to share at this time. Why then, tell a national news agency during interviews conducted at Best Buy’s Minnesota headquarters?

I go to Safeway about twice a week and then Walmart about two weeks of every three. When I was living in Cascadia, I went to Safeway or Fred Myers once a week and then to Walmart once a month or so. A lot is made of Walmart’s low prices (some suggesting they are illusory, others that they are real, others conceding the latter point but arguing that they are low for bad reasons), but cut-throat price-point is never really why I shopped at Walmart. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s mostly about convenience. This includes price in a couple of ways. For instance, Walmart carries inexpensive options for those times when I don’t need something of real quality. But another thing is, independent of the actual price-tags, the pricing structure.

I have a Safeway card and used to have a Fred Myers card. With the Safeway card, prices on Safeway products are often competitive with – or maybe even better than – Walmart’s. However, it creates the problem where when I go to Safeway, I don’t know how much I am going to actually pay for anything. So I end up buying things based on whether they are on sale rather than whether I need them on a given trip. I have a utility room filled with softdrinks from a 2-for-1 sale from when they were really cheap, but if I were to have gone up there yesterday they would have been twice as expensive. All because of when I purchased it.

Walmart is not above that sort of thing (and somewhat recently has been getting worse about it), but at Safeway it is more often the rule rather than the exception to the rule. Walmart’s pricing has historically been blissfully straightforward. Prices fluctuate as they do with everything, everywhere. And when they are trying to get rid of something they will mark it down, but you don’t have to worry about time-consuming coupon-clipping, stocking up on things when they’re on sale and having to bite the bullet when they are not, or things like that. At least, you don’t have to worry about it nearly to the degree that you do at Safeway and the like. There is, to me, a value in (relatively) transparent pricing.

And then, of course, there is Best Buy. Never a company I hated more than nonetheless managed to get my business. And one of the big reasons I hate them is their opaque pricing. With Best Buy, it’s less to do with a “Best Buy card” (I don’t know if such a thing exists) and more to do with mail-in rebates (you can get a good deal, but only if you jump through these pointless hoops where we increase our margins by betting that you forget!) and huge markups on convenience items. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Best Buy’s way of doing things. Such things are uniform with restaurants that charge you $2 for a drink that costs them 10 cents while making considerably less margin on the food you actually went there for and with theaters that make their money on charging a lot of money for cheaply purchased and/or produced goods like popcorn and coke.

To some extent, it’s the nature of the beast. But it’s really nice to be able to buy something and so rarely notice that if I had waited a week it would have cost half as much. To be able to go in, get something, and get out without feeling like I had been ripped off because I did something wrong. It’s, perhaps oddly, something I am willing to actually pay more for. When I was in Cascadia I gave Costco a try. They had some really good prices there, but the pricing seemed particularly erratic depending on the deal they got on a particular product on a particular week. That, combined with the fact that I had to tailor what I purchased to what they had in stock, made the whole experience pretty off-putting for me.

There are a lot of things not to like about Walmart (Made in China, underpaid staff, pricing out the competition), as Web and others are quick to point out. But this (along with their generous hours and the convenience of having so many things at a central location) has definitely been a plus. And I hope that Best Buy follows through (and Walmart reconsiders its drift in the other direction). I shop there because it’s often my only (one-stop) option, but when I can I shop at Fry’s because they seem to price much more consistently and transparently. Yeah, there’s a pretty good amount of price-fluctuation (wait a week, save a bundle) because it’s technology, but there’s not nearly as much of it. And anything that makes Best Buy more like Fry’s is a winner, in my book.

Any of my northeastern readers have any experience (or hear of others’ experiences) with them? I am apparently a customer of theirs now.

Also, for anyone looking for a TV, Woot is hawking the model I own. I think. The specs appear to be the same. They’re offering it for a $100 less than I paid for it eight months ago. It’s been a pretty good TV. Not nearly as nice as my parents’ Samsung, but a few hundred dollars less expensive. The non-HD stuff isn’t terrific, unfortunately. That and the lack of PnP are my only two complaints. But you can’t beat their pricing. With the other cheap brands, Philips and Sanyo, you can see why they’re so cheap. Less so with Vizio.

So the iPhone is finally coming to Verizon. I have to confess, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind is that I stand a chance to be proven entirely wrong by something I have been saying (usually with the “it’s quite possible that…” or “I suspect that…” without a firm commitment of knowledge that I do not have) for quite some time now. AT&T’s network doesn’t suck so much as the iPhone sucks as a phone (you know those famous dropped calls? Never happened to me… but I never had an iPhone) and/or consumes so much data that it would be hard for any network to keep up. If the Verizon iPhone seriously outperforms the AT&T iPhone, I will be proven wrong.

Apparently, some people on the other side of the debate – those that believe that Apple can do no wrong and every problem that the iPhone has is AT&T’s fault – are going through similar second thoughts.

Granted, most of this doesn’t actually address the dropped call issue. Even so, suddenly The World’s Worst Carrier is having upsides when compared to The World’s Best Carrier. AT&T offers simultaneous voice and data, which Verizon doesn’t. Verizon’s plans are more expensive. AT&T’s tiered data plan – which was previously proof that AT&T was evil – can save you even more money vis-a-vis Verizon unless you’re a hard-core user*. Verizon doesn’t do international well (and won’t at all with the iPhone) And, of course, Verizon’s network isn’t perfect, though only Manjoo will come out and say so.

I carry no brief for AT&T. I was a satisfied customer for many years, but now I am a satisfied Verizon customer. Because of the deal we get through Clancy’s work, we don’t even pay more for Verizon than I would through AT&T. Truth be told, when our contract is up and AT&T is in the area (which they should be soon and almost certainly will be a year from April), I don’t know whether we will stay or switch. I had considered switching back to AT&T as soon as they came to town and simply paying the early-termination fee, but at this point I am skeptical that we will.

All of that being said, both AT&T and Verizon have their plusses and minuses. It’s Verizon, not AT&T, that refuses to activate any phone that isn’t theirs. It’s Verizon, not AT&T, that mandated data plans first (and AT&T’s has huge loophole that they don’t seem to have any interest in closing). But it’s Verizon and not AT&T that works out a lot of deals with employers and the like for better prices.

AT&T took a lot of flack when they sued over Verizon’s commercial with the maps. And Verizon’s maps were entirely accurate. However, they were also misleading. AT&T’s 3G coverage isn’t remarkably wide, but the map leads one to the impression that AT&T’s data coverage is weak. It’s not. The main difference is that with AT&T, a whole lot of those areas not covered by 3G are covered by slower data service. With Verizon, it’s 3G or nothing. Any place you don’t see on the map, the best you can ask for is “1X” which means that you can text message but that’s about it. AT&T was stupid about suing over a (technically) accurate ad, but their claims about being misleading were not entirely false. Speaking is misleading, though, AT&T’s ads about being the “fastest 3G network” are technically accurate, but are also misleading in the sense that they assume a completely wide and free network. With all of those iPhone users (and perhaps even if you discount them) the average user, unless they’re alone and beside a tower, is going to get slower speeds with AT&T than with Verizon.

In any event, if Verizon’s adoption of the iPhone goes off without a hitch and all of those people complaining about dropped calls start talking about how much greater Verizon is, I pledge to post that I was indeed wrong. It’s been known to happen, from time to time.

* – The author of the first piece (courtesy Wesley) actually says something incorrect. You can’t get $15/mo from Verizon unless you have a web phone, which is dumber than a smartphone but smarter than a regular phone. There was a brief window where they offered a tier as an “introductory” sort of thing, but that was discontinued and current users will not be grandfathered in when their contract expires. Regarding the tiers, I use web on my phone with regularity and I have yet to cross the 200mb barrier. Only about a third of users do. Besides which, even if you stay within the 2GB barrier, which all but less than 5% do, you’re still saving $5 a month. It’s only those that go over that are paying ($10) more. On the other hand, Verizon is planning to switch to AT&T-style tiered pricing.

Whole Foods they are not, but some interesting maneuvering regardless:

Of the “key elements” Walmart announced, several are ones I reported on last March: shorten travel distances between farm and distribution centers, support smaller farmers than it had previously bought from, bring back staple crops to areas where they had vanished because of competition from California and Florida, and bring fresh food into “food deserts” both in cities and, importantly, rural areas without supermarkets. {…}

But the company did give a timeline for the main news: reformulating its private-label “Great Value” foods over the next five years to reduce sodium by 25 percent, added sugars by 10 percent, and removing “all industrially produced trans fats.” This is what the nutrition community will be parsing for months, and where Walmart can preempt, and even help, industry initiatives like ConAgra’s announcement that it will reduce sodium in its foods by 20 percent over the same period, or the New York City health department’s National Salt Reduction Initiative, which is building public awareness of hidden sodium and trying to coordinate industry to reduce it voluntarily. The long timelines for sodium reduction are a recognition of how hard it can be to make lower-sodium foods taste “good” to people used to high sodium: unlike trans fats and sugars, where there are easy or easyish substitutes, lowering sodium really does change familiar packaged-food flavors. {…}

The announced target for added sugars will disappoint many who would like sodas and soft drinks abolished, and the soft-drink question came up immediately (okay, I was the first question on the first conference call, and I brought it up). Sodas are turning into a third rail, and her reply deftly avoided it. Consumers already know they can buy diet soda, she said. When they buy candy or cake (she didn’t mention soda—that came under “choices” they know are already available), they want to have an occasional indulgence. “Our focus,” she told me, “is where the customer doesn’t expect added sugar: flavored milks and puddings, fruit juice and canned fruit, breakfast items like muffins, granola, and French toast.” In a second conference call she ticked off more items, and added that breakfast pastries, breads, crackers, cottage cheese, and yogurts are often sources of hidden sodium and sugars. Dr. John Agwunobi, the company’s vice president of health and wellness added that another of the company’s promises this morning is to eliminate the price difference in reduced-fat, reduced-sugar, and whole-grain items, so that these will not cost more more than ones with higher fat and sodium, as is often the case now. (This equaling of price does not mean, as some have hopefully thought, that Walmart will make healthier options less expensive than less-healthy ones. Dream on!)