Category Archives: Market
Chocolate milk was on my shopping list last week. I’ve never been a big chocolate milk person, but when appraising my cereal options, I determined that if I took the healthiest, most sugarless cereal out there and added chocolate milk, not only was it edible but I ended up ahead sugar-wise than if I take the next healthiest option with skim milk.
When I got to the milk aisle, though, I saw something bizarre: Green milk. For St. Paddy’s Day, of course. Vanilla flavored. It looked grotesque. Green milk? Who the hell would drink green milk? Not that there is anything wrong with green beverages. Many of my favorite beverages are green. But the green milk just looked… really weird. I tried, and failed, to imagine what cereal would look like in it.
So of course I bought some.
The results are below. Taste-wise, it wasn’t as good as the chocolate milk but still not too bad. I can’t tell if my mediocre impression of the taste is more related to the fact that milk and vanilla don’t seem to go together, or my own inability to process milk coming in a green color.
Robin Hanson argues that our preference for product variety is costing us dearly:
It is interesting to wonder what sort of lifestyle we could manage if we worked three to ten times fewer hours on average. And it occurs to me that we could probably work far less, and still have just as much stuff, of just as high a quality, if only we’d sacrifice product variety.
Imagine that we made just as many cars, houses, clothes, meals, furniture, etc., each one just as big with just as high quality materials and craftsmanship. But instead of the making these in the stupefying variety that we do today, imagine that we made only a few standard variations, and didn’t update those variations as often. A few standard cars, standard clothes, standard meals, etc. Enough variety to handle different climates, body sizes, and food allergies, but not remotely enough to let each person look unique. (An exception might be made for variety in music, books, movies, etc., since these are such a tiny fraction of total costs.)
It’s a seductive concept. I mean, ten percent more is a whole lot. And all we’re sacrificing is the ability multiple things to choose from of the stuff we want? That seems like such a small price to pay. Indeed, it’s a price that we pay with great regularity. Levittown was built on the notion that people wanted houses and that if you sacrificed choice you could put unprecedented numbers of people in homes. Master-planned communities work on the same premise. It’s also an argument you hear in the Costco/Walmart wars. Costco is able to save people money because they have a significantly smaller product range while Walmart relies on other things.
Could we take this to its logical conclusion? Would we receive enormous dividends if we tried? I can’t dispute Hanson’s numbers – I have no idea if they’re accurate – but even if I concede them I am hesitant largely on the basis of what it would do to innovation.
In the comments, Hanson disputes the notion that variety and innovation are intertwined, but I have a lot of difficulty imagining how that’s not the case. Let’s take smartphones. Apple has, to say the least, a very limited product selection for the iPhone. Now, a whole lot of people love this. They reap the benefits that Hanson refers to. What about us Android holdouts? Would we accept all of the limitations of Apple if we could cut down the costs so considerably? I have never owned an iPhone and never plan to, but I absolutely would.
But would our version of the smartphone actually look like an iPhone? Wouldn’t an iPhone merely be “product variety” of the smartphones that came before it? So we wouldn’t all have iPhones, we’d have HTC Wizards or something even more rudimentary. That’s assuming that a smartphone isn’t considered a “variety” of PDA, which I actually think is a fair assumption. Even if the vast majority of product varieties are purely about aesthetics or self-image (which is debatable, depending on how you look at it), those few that aren’t are very, very important.
Presumably you could address this by arguing that every deviation from the standard must be justified on the basis of actually innovation. Of course, the more exceptions you carve out, the less savings you see. You might have to demand that once an innovation is accepted as the standard, everyone must adopt it. Otherwise you would have a whole army of products with different capabilities for some to save money and others to maximize product quality. Standardizing features presents its own problems. A reworking of the economy or at least of how innovators are compensated, if there’s any innovation still ongoing.
All of which is to say that the theory itself does sound attractive, but the complications involved represent serious concerns and compromises that would almost certainly undermine the entire project (and, I suspect, become subject to a great degree of rent-seeking).
I know some people object to the notion that “the market has solved this” but to some extent it already has. As mentioned, Apple maintains some degree of cost control on the basis of the uniformity of its products. Levittowns are constantly being built with a minimum of variation because of the savings that occur. But without nearly so much sacrifice of tomorrow’s innovation.
“I don’t know what you expect me to be able to do about it,” said the woman at the counter when I told her my storage garage wouldn’t lock.
My to-do project this weekend (weekends these days are Friday and Saturday) included two important things: I was going to go to the recycling center and drop off a lot of the cardboard boxes that have been cluttering up the basement. Then I was going to take some other stuff cluttering up the basement and take that to the storage garage. In case you can’t read between the lines, I am trying to get a handle on the basement.
The initial plan was recycling on Friday and then garage on Saturday, but Clancy was slow getting out of bed from having been on call and it was too late to go to the recycling center. So off to the storage garage I went. It was apparent pretty quickly that it would require two trips. After the first trip, though, I couldn’t get the door to lock. I figured that it might be related to the accumulation of snow and ice that they hadn’t really bothered to clean up. So on my second trip, I took a shovel.
Shoveling the snow didn’t help, though. It still wouldn’t lock. So I worked at it and worked at it and had no success. At some point, I slipped on the ice and laid there in pain for about ten minutes while waiting to get movement back in my arms. Then I worked at it some more. No luck. They do keep Saturday hours (9am to 1pm), I confirmed, so I decided to slap the padlock on there so that it wouldn’t look so obviously unlocked, and then come back Saturday morning.
It was noon wherebouts when I was finally able to make my way back out there. Hoping that maybe the heat would unfreeze something that maybe had gotten frozen, I tried one more time on Saturday before going to the front office. No luck, so I went to the front office.
I explained my problems and she looked at me and said “Well, I don’t know what you expect me to be able to do about it.”
I honestly wasn’t sure myself. I was hoping that I was simply doing something wrong and that she could fix it. Other than that, well, the ball was in her court. The ability to lock my belongings away safely was not tangential to our lease agreement. Indeed, they wouldn’t even lease the garage to me unless I had a lock ready to slap on it immediately. It was pretty central to the deal. She wasn’t particularly surprised by my predicament, only that I couldn’t lock it. She was used to people not being able to unlock it which was the way it usually went. Not very confidence-inspiring.
Without my mentioning my fall, she took note of all of the ice and snow and was apologetic about it. I give her points for that.
Think of the lock of the door I am describing as being like those locks high-ish on the doors of hotel rooms where you flip the knob up and slide a bar across. Except that instead of flipping a knob, you just slide it over and then use a padlock to prevent people from sliding it right back. The problem I ran into below is that it wouldn’t slide. The reason I thought that the snow might be a problem is that it was vertical garage door and if it didn’t get low enough then perhaps the bolt wouldn’t go into the hole the same way a deadbolt won’t work if a door isn’t completely closed.
The solution to my problem was apparently a hammer. She just took out a hammer and pounded away at the lock until it lined up. I slapped the padlock on there and we were good to go. I can only hope that I will be able to unlock it again when needed. She said that it’s okay to use hammers or whatever else to get the stubborn locks to work and that if I break the whole thing wide open they won’t charge me for it. Fair enough, I suppose.
I had arrived at noon in part because I didn’t want to stroll in there right as she was about to leave. As it turned out, she was about to leave anyway and left immediately after helping me out. If I’d actually tried to arrive at the last minute, I would have been greeted with a “Closed” sign regardless of the posted hours from 9-1.
Clancy thinks we need to find a new storage garage. I think it’s worth a whole lot of trouble not to have to relocate all of our stuff. Besides which, if we buy a house, our new storage garage may well be a garage. Or we’ll actually have room for all of our stuff.
As if we couldn’t have fewer cable options, Comcast plans to buy Time-Warner Cable:
Comcast and Time Warner Cable confirmed Thursday that they will enter into a $45.2 billion deal to combine the nation’s two largest cable companies, a mammoth proposal that will trigger close scrutiny from federal regulators.
Swooping in to top a competing bid by Charter Communications, Comcast will pay 2.875 of its shares to TWC shareholders. The companies’ respective board of directors have approved the all-stock agreement, which will see all of TWC’s 284.9 million shares acquired at a value of about $158.82 per share. Current TWC shareholders will own about 23% of Comcast’s common stock.
The Justice Department is expected to take a look, but will ultimately approve it, most likely.
My first thought was, as with the proposed AT&T-TMobile merger, was that the administration would put a stop to it one way or another. But I thought Matt Yglesias made a great point on Twitter:
Worrying that mergers will reduce cable competition seems like multiplying zero by larger numbers.
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) February 13, 2014
From company-to-consumer, our choices were limited to one before and they will be limited to one if this happens. The only immediate difference from our end is that more people will be limited to Comcast and nobody will be limited to TWC. Customers could actually benefit. When I was in Arapaho, our cable company was bought out twice and each company offered better prices than the last for Internet (more on the cable vs ISP distinction in a minute). One of the real cost-drivers for cable TV are the negotiations with the channels. Since there is competition for cable in the form of satellite, that has always given the networks more leverage than the cable companies. Networks tend to win these battles. CBS recently smacked around TWC. This is probably not good for consumers, especially those that (unlike myself) favor a la carte programming and complain about having to pay for channels they don’t want to watch. One of the things the networks bargain for against the cable companies is the inclusion of more of their channels (and the subscriber fees to match).
If this does give Comcast more leverage than Comcast and TWC had previously, it could be a win for consumers. Further, most of the bigger concerns about Comcast – that they own NBC and were not only carriers of other networks but competition – were at least theoretically dealt with in the previous round of negotiations when Comcast purchased NBC.
What has me concerned, however, is the Internet side of things. Yet Yglesias’s Multiply By Zero also applies there as well. The primary concern I would have is that Comcast is in a better position to set itself up for direct competition than Time-Warner was, but I’m not sure if that holds water. Comcast+TWC still doesn’t have enough market position to easily challenge Netflix and Amazon to the point of throttling them, and they’re legally prohibited from doing so as a condition of the Comcast-NBC merger (despite the recent Net Neutrality reason that would otherwise apply).
To be clear, for a variety of reasons, the Internet in the US tends to be slower than in other countries and Comcast already does particularly poorly when it comes to Netflix. Also, the legal prohibition will run out, at which point it’s unclear in what ways Comcast would be able to use its new market advantage. And yet Comcast customers presently enjoy Net Neutrality rights that TWC customers don’t, as a result of letting a previous merger go through. It seems that more concessions could be called for this time around, benefiting consumers more.
Comcast is not promising to lower prices or slow the rate at which prices increase, though my parsing of the statement means “than it has been in the past” rather than “than if this doesn’t happen.”
My rather strong inclination here is to oppose the merger. Perhaps as a reaction to and rejection of the degree of consolidation we’ve seen thus far. Local cable and ISP’s don’t operate in a free market, which means that we’re not going to see the benefits that sometimes come with consolidation… but also means that – unlike with AT&T and TMobile – the costs aren’t the same, either. So after my initial “Ack!” response, I’m coming up short on reasons why this particular consolidation should seem particularly troublesome. I just hope the feds can negotiate some goodies.
A complaint I’ve heard from fathers – especially the primary caregiver sort – is the degree of scrutiny they sometimes receive from strangers of the female persuasion. Though I had never experienced this myself, it sounded quite credible to me.
Today is the first time I experienced it. There was an older couple of ladies behind me in line at the supermarket making goo-goo eyes at the baby. When we were outside, one of them informed – not in those precise words – that I was handling the unloading process wrong.
My process is: Take the cart to the car, unload the groceries, return cart, take baby from cart and carry her with me back to the car.
Her order was: Put the baby in the car, start the car with the air conditioning or heater on, unload cart, and then return the cart.
The concern, I suppose, is that the baby was cold while I was unloading the cart. The weather outside was actually quite pleasant, though. Starting the car is something I might consider doing if it were -20 or something, or the weather was just miserable, but I haven’t seen a need to do that just yet. Otherwise, the baby is more likely to get upset at my absence than she is at the temperature.
Like I said, she didn’t precisely tell me that I was doing it wrong. She just told me how “mothers” do it. She then asked if my wife did it that way and whether or not my wife knows that I do it that way. En route to telling her the story of this encounter, she now knows that I do, in fact, do it that way. And as to whether or not she does it differently, she doesn’t get the opportunity to because taking the baby while going grocery shopping is something I do and she does not have to.
While back home, we went out to eat on the outskirts of the metro area in a town that allows smoking in restaurants (which is, of course, increasingly rare). It was an odd experience. They had a smoking and a non-smoking section, separated by nothing. Mom – who doesn’t smoke at the table anymore – made a comment about it. Which the guy smoking overheard and misinterpreted as a complaint and moved tables further away. It’s amazing how increasingly trained smokers are becoming.
It’s been a long enough time since I have had a cigarette that I stopped counting.
I’ve been increasingly impatient with Blu brand ecigarettes, though. The batteries seem to die too fast and I seem to be spending almost as much on replacement batteries as I am on cartridges. While saving money was not the reason for my transition from analogs to digital cigarettes, it was frustrating to watch the “savings” dissipate (Like smoke! Or vaper! Haha).
The reaction among the family has been mixed. My father wants to know when I am going to quit these things. My father-in-law, who hates cigarettes far more than anybody in my family, is quite supportive. His best friend made the switch and he was comfortable with them. He even came out to talk to me while I was vaping, demonstrating how non-offensive/non-existent the odor is.
Unlike when I was smoking, I made no real effort to minimize or hide what I was doing. Which actually felt quite nice. I would simply say “Hey, I’ve going to go outside and have a puff” and would go.
As it happens, my wife’s cousin’s husband is in a similar boat as myself. He made the transition a couple of years ago, though. So we chatted about that. Both of us were struck by how inconvenient we hadn’t realized that smoking had become. Both of us with wives that don’t like it and now kids (a new thing for me, not for him). You smoke, you come in, you wash up, you maybe change a shirt. Multiple times a day. Smoking jackets when it’s cold, smoking shirts when it’s not. You come up with all sorts of ways to minimize the impact of your habit on those around you, which in our SES is becoming almost entirely comprised of non-smokers.
He got started the same way that I did, with Blu. We had similar complaints about Blu and that told me that I really needed to try to find something else because it wasn’t just me. Blus look like regular cigarettes, more or less, which make them ideal for replacing the habit. Extra points because they’re extremely convenient and you can deprive yourself the excuse of smoking because you ran out of cartridges (you can just go to the convenience store and get new ones).
The Halos, which he had switched to, looked nothing like cigarettes and feel, if anything, like robotic cigars but not really. Honestly, what they remind me of are the cigarette thingies from Watchmen. Except that you are using a battery instead of a lighter to get the fluid to get things going. Okay, so they don’t look all that much alike. But I think of Watchmen every time I look at the tank on the thing.
It also reminds me a bit, oddly, of the “The Second Rennaissance” from Animatrix, the animated accompaniments to Matrix. In that, they told you the story of how the humans got displaced by the robots. Early on, when humans were in charge, the robots were made to look as much like humans as possible. Over time, as they started building themselves, they became more utilitarian in less human-like.
I needed to start with something that looked like a cigarette. Both as a matter of conquering my habit and to alleviate self-consciousness. Now that I can point to these things as having completely displaced my tobacco habit, though, I am beginning to care very little. No, these things don’t look like cigarettes. They look like something that works better than the ones that look like cigarettes do.
I ordered Halos as soon as I got home. They couldn’t have arrived too soon. The night before, I was scrambling about trying like heck to find some battery-cartridge combination that would give me my nicotine hit and put me at peace with the world and nothing seemed to work. With the exception of the snow day, it was the first time I found myself saying “I need a cigarette!” (because… no mechanical failures with those!). Had the Halos not been arriving the next day, it’s conceivable (though not probable) that I would have had a complete relapse.
But the Halos are thus far working great. The batteries last longer. The puff is stronger. I can see how much fluid is left in there and I can fill it myself. It will be much cheaper in medium and long term. (1ml of fluid from Blu costs roughly $2. 7ml of standard fluid from Halo costs $6. 30ml costs $20.) The only real downside is that it’s much more conspicuous and slighly less convenient… but I have little reason to care about the conspicuity and if I find myself in a jam I can go out and get a disposable. And I’ll still have my Blu stuff.
Sheetz is a local gas station and convenience store with a make-to-order kitchen where you’re ordering from a kiosk. The food is good, though overpriced. But they offer breakfast food throughout the day and I was in the mood for a breakfast burrito and biscuit sandwich.
While I was there, I saw a thing for gift cards. Which I thought was cool because I needed to get some gift cards for Christmas for my sisters-in-law (my wife’s sisters, and my brother’s wife). So I got a couple $25 cards as well as a name-your-own-amount card, for which I was going to go with $50.
Half of the transaction was denied, though. Though it should have been $100, it came out as $50. No matter, just swipe it again for the second $50. Transaction denied. Over and over again. Cancel out the whole thing and start from scrach. $100 becomes $50 and transaction denied on the $50.
I think the problem was that with the open-ended one. Even though I was only putting on there the same amount for that one card as for the two $25 cards, I suspect that card security freaks out with open-ended or high-amount gift cards. Which would make sense, when you think about it. I mean, if you had stolen someone’s credit card, getting a high-amount gift card is a better use for that money than most. It’s practically as good as cash. A way to suddenly have access to a large amount of funds without the credit card catching up with you mid-shopping-spree. And Amazon sells just about everything.
There are two reasons, though, that this doesn’t entirely make sense. First, those cards have to be activated. If they have to be activated, it seems to me that they can deactivate it upon being notified that it was an invalid sale. Or alternately you would still be able to trace it back. Wouldn’t you? It would be on Sheetz’s records what was purchased, and Amazon’s record what card was activated by that purchase and what was purchased with that activated card. On the other hand, that sounds like headaches? But I’d think it would actually make the loss prevention more effective rather than less, in the overall, because unlike them taking the card to Best Buy and then driving home (and no one knows where “home” is), Amazon has the address they sent it to.
The second reason why my theory might not pan out is that not only did my Discover Card not work (Discover’s card security seems to be higher than most, it gets blocked on a hair-trigger) but my debit card did as well. If they have my debit card, and access to my PIN number, gift cards would be secondary to ATMs or cashbacks. Then again, ATM’s may have cameras and there are withdrawal fees. But if you can shake that particular tree, it’s not “as good as cash” that you’ve got… it’s cash.
I guess there’s a third reason: If these things pose such a credit risk, why offer them? And if you can’t use credit cards to pay for them, how do you? If I’m getting a card worth $100, I’m not likely to have $100 on me.
In the end, I just took the two $25 cards and I’ll order the other gift card online.
Somehow – and I’m really not sure how – my wife ended up with a subscription to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. They just started arriving one way. If asked, I would have been vaguely interested in a subscription to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, but Clancy? Not really. Not really at all. Around the same time, Ladies Home Journal started arriving. If Bloomberg BusinessWeek was sent to her by mistake when I was the household member that might have been interested, Ladies Home Journal was a mistake altogether because there is nobody in this house remotely interested in reading that.
But Bloomberg BusinessWeek has turned out to be very good. Much better than the magazines I affirmatively subscribed to. So when I got a card from Bloomberg telling me that it was time to get a renewal at a ridiculously inexpensive rate, I figured it was worth it to do so. No free ride lasts forever and it was easily worth it.
Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have noticed that the card from Bloomberg was addressed to me and not Clancy. So the “renewal notice” had nothing to do with the fact that they’d been sending it to her.
And so… now I’m getting two copies of the magazine. His and hers.
Which is okay, I figure. My father and I are both named William Truman and now he can get a copy.
The OrdTimers are debating the recent trend of more and more retailers being open on Thanksgiving.
The thing is that I went to the local supermarket today and picked up our Thanksgiving Feast. A chicken, some turkey, potato salad, bread, mayo, pimento spread, and on and on. Before long we’re probably going to do it the old fashioned way by making our own, but we’re not quite there yet. And while I am sorry for those who have to work and don’t want to, it’s a real convenience being able to roll up there on Turkey Day and get everything. And, while I am there, baby oatmeal.
This is slightly different than what is being complained about, which is the shifting of Black Friday to Thanksgiving Day itself.
Unlike many in my cohort who either like shopping or hate Black Friday, I have no problem Black Friday but wouldn’t be caught dead at one of those sales. The prospect of going on one of those sprees makes the hair on my arm stand up. I don’t like shopping on good days, unless it’s for one of a few narrow areas of interest. And yet, I think Black Friday is fine for those who enjoy the experience. For those who take pride in the Good Deal. People who actually enjoy the chaos of it all. That’s not me, but it’s some people.
I remember when the Playstation 2 came out, my friends and I formed a party and went from one retailer to another trying to find a place that had it. We had no luck, but it was fun as all getout. I wanted one of those things, but I mostly enjoyed being on a mission with friends.
As y’all know, I’m an Android guy and not an iPhone guy. A lot of Android guys make fun of Applytes and their tendency to form camp out lines so that they can be the first to have a new iPhone or Apple product. I admit that I roll my eyes at them, but I kind of thing I am wrong to do so. For them, I’d imagine that it’s like the Playstation 2. You’re an enthusiast waiting in line with a bunch of other enthusiasts. I can imagine worse things.
But the movement onto Thanksgiving Day I see as more problematic. Mostly because, unlike Black Friday which would be a day without meaning save for the day that comes before it and that a lot of people get the day off, Thanksgiving Day is already its own thing and this is trampling on it. I honestly don’t even think that any specific retailer wants to trample on it. It’s a collective action problem. If Retailer A is closed on Thanksgiving and Retailer B is not, then Retailer B gets the sales. If both are closed, then everybody waits for Friday and no damage is done. In fact, Black Friday might even be better because people won’t cut their shopping trips short in order to get back home with their families. The only way this calculus is wrong is if everybody who does such things goes shopping both days and so they shop more and spend more. In which case, Retailer A could maybe wait until Friday anyway.
But I’m glad the local supermarket was open. For situations like Murali’s, I think it’s good to have some restaurants open as well. But not every place needs to be open, and when employees are overwhelmingly against the idea, it’s not a bad idea to consider that.
The first MP3 player I ever used extensively was WinAmp, which may be going the way of the dodo:
Winamp is shutting down. The website and all of Winamp’s web services will shut down on December 20 and the desktop player will no longer be available for download.
Even if you don’t remember Winamp, you may remember the demo MP3 that played when you installed the app: “Winamp, it really whips the llama’s ass.”
As the article notes, the landscape of music-on-the-computer has changed a great deal over the years. But WinAmp isn’t really a historical relic for me. It’s what I still use. I’ve never really had reason to use anything else. Indeed, I use it now the same way I used it then.
I started my MP3 collection when WinAmp was on top, so I geared how I use it to Winamp 2.1. By which I mean, my music collection is organized in a series of folders and filenames. I actually have two copies of many of my MP3’s. In some cases, I have three. I have one set that is a folder for the artist all in one big bulk. Then, if I liked the artist enough to make road trip CDs, I would have another one with each folder denoting 80-minutes worth of music. When my car could play MP3 CDs, I added another set that just had the artist’s discography from beginning to end.
Sometimes I just wanted to listen an artist on random, so I’d just go to the first set of folders. If I wanted to listen to the good songs with the lackluster ones cut out, it would be the second. The third was if I really liked an artist’s entire catalog, if there were specific CDs that I wanted to listen to from start to end, or (as is increasingly the case) I was just too lazy to cut up the artist’s catalog into 80-minute chunks of greatness.
MP3 players today are all geared towards having managed libraries, which doesn’t work as well with my setup. The libraries do arrange by album and whatnot. I’m sure there are ways I could arrange them myself. Though in that case, it wouldn’t transfer so easily to my car which doesn’t have anything so fancy as iTunes.
So I’m not a huge fan of the library system. On my phone, in my car, almost everything can handle just plain old folders with the songs organized by folders and filenames. With hard drive space so cheap, having multiple copies of the same file doesn’t cost much if anything.
WinAmp tried to get into the library mode. I suspect that most of its recent improvements were improvements on that corner of the house where I never treaded. In that sense, I guess, WinAmp’s possible retirement – unless Microsoft revamps it – doesn’t mean that much to me. I can probably use the most recent version indefinitely.