So I tried to log on to Circuit City's web site and got this lame message:
Sorry, but in this day and age, any company who can't keep its web site up while updating its inventory is rather pathetic. Time to short their stock? They clearly don't have their shit together.
Design and aesthetics matter.
Apple's new store on Fifth Avenue in New York City demonstrates Apple's interest in design:
Mr. Jobs, a major stickler for design details, has been intimately involved in helping to turn the stores into hip, visually memorable shopping destinations. Mr. Jobs is one of the named inventors on a patent Apple secured several years ago for the design of a signature glass staircase featured in many Apple stores. A person familiar with the matter says Mr. Jobs himself was involved in the design of the glass cube atop the new Fifth Avenue store.In a recent interview, Mr. Jobs admitted that at one point he ordered workers to replace the metal bolts holding together the glass panels that make up the cube over the company's Fifth Avenue store. "We spent a lot of time designing the store, and it deserves to be built perfectly," Mr. Jobs said.
Apple stores have gained a strong following among young consumers, who flock to the stores to check their email using the free Internet connections and to snap photos with the digital cameras on display.
William Mon, a student at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., who will graduate later this week, says he tries to visit his local Apple store whenever the company introduces new iPods and other products. Mr. Mon, 21 years old, says that by using large open tables to display its products, rather than cluttering them on store shelves, Apple makes it easier for visitors to play with them.
It should be noted, as well, that Apple appears to earn a profit on the operation of its stores:
Revenue from the Apple stores was $2.35 billion in fiscal 2005, ended Sept. 24, or 17% of Apple's total sales, up from $621 million in fiscal 2003. Apple says the stores have been profitable for several years, providing $151 million in operating income in fiscal 2005. The Fifth Avenue store will be the company's 147th, with others scattered throughout the U.S., Canada, Japan and the U.K. "The numbers have been just astonishing in terms of the traditional retail numbers we look at," Mr. Wolf says.
If you're interested in how attention to design and innovation can help a company's bottom line you should take a look at Virginia Postrel's blog.
I can't remember the last time I used a public library--probably when I was 10. Over the intervening years bookstores have sufficed.
Sure, I have heard the now-common lament of the decline of the independent bookstore, but I have never had a problem finding titles at the so-called big box bookstores.
Tyler Cowen doesn't seem very upset at this situation either and I'd wager that he is more in the market for obscurity than am I, given that he is a professor:
Ever since the rise of the book superstore in the 1990s, we have been flooded with lamentations for the rapidly disappearing independent booksellers—cool hang-outs where the staff knows something about literature, the owners select each title with care, and bearded patrons sit at crowded coffee tables, talking about Jack Kerouac or the latest translation of Tolstoy. Thanks to the indies, it is thought, high-quality but inaccessible books can slowly build their reputations through reader word-of-mouth and eventually take the literary world by storm. This is what people fear is disappearing forever; just last week the famed Cody's of Berkeley announced it is shutting down because of Internet and superstore competition. But does this idealized vision ring true? What exactly are we losing with the passing of the independent bookstore?
As they say in the blog world, read the whole thing.
Then use that copy of the Village Voice for toilet paper, because the whining liberals are incoherent and stupid, especially when it comes to issues of mass retailers.
Chinese bike manufacturers find themselves having to compete with one another, a process which sounds suspiciously Darwinian:
During its heyday in the late 1980s, Flying Pigeon produced about four million bikes a year and employed more than 10,000 workers. When Mr. Sha took over as deputy general manager in 1993, bicycles were still king of the road. In that year, China produced 41 million bikes, and just 223,000 cars. Flying Pigeon and two other state firms -- Phoenix and Forever, both based in Shanghai -- controlled the market.But Flying Pigeon's ample profits were about to vaporize. First, the domestic market for recreational mountain bikes and racers took off. Consumers wanted them in trendy rainbow hues, and the fashion in frames and accessories changed by the month. But Flying Pigeon resisted change. It kept churning out black roadsters based on a 1930s Japanese design. It failed to modernize its old, inflexible production lines.
At the same time, another huge shift in the Chinese market was taking place, as bike sales in wealthy cities dried up. Until the early 1990s, rush hour in Beijing was dominated by cycles, their spokes whirring gently as they churned the air. But urban sprawl scattered populations and workplaces, stretching commutes to the point where buses and subways are now often the only practical choice for millions of workers.
Bicycles have been banished from Shanghai's major thoroughfares to help relieve chronic traffic congestion. Wang Fenghe, the 65-year-old director of the China Bicycle Association, recently gave up pedaling and switched to a car after a careless Beijing motorist shattered his knee in a collision.
Clearly, as the good folks at the Discovery Institute have told us, evolution doesn't exist; therefore, nothing can properly be considered "Darwinian"*. This news surely must be propaganda by Beijing ahead of the 2008 Olympic games, trying to show the world how they have embraced free markets.
*This is sarcasm. If you have trouble figuring that out may I suggest you have a tin ear for such, and, as a consequence, you should go see an audiologist post haste.
Keeping podiatrists busy, fetishists horny, and fashionistas knowledgeable. Never before has there been a service like this.
I generally advocate that idea that one should be able to do to one's body what one sees fit, and it is on this grounds that I think that I can't properly be called a conservative.
In any event, the Urban Grind has an interesting post about plastic surgery, specifically, the increasing popularity of hymen restoration surgery.
I commented:
Plastic surgeons argue that they provide the service because some religions place an emphasis on virginity prior to marriage, but it seems to me that the appropriate response is to impugn the religion that induces its female adherents to undergo surgery prior to marriage.
It's rather unfortunate that political correctness requires us to bow to the god of diversity and cultural tolerance, rather than impugn those religious or cultural values that devalue an individual's body and sexual history.
A good proxy for the wealth of a society is its willingness to spend money on aesthetic, as opposed to utilitarian, concerns.
A sleek, modernist rendering of the traditional Brita filter. For the modern, discriminating palate, for whom plastic is simply too utilitarian.
Via Apartment Therapy.
For more material on the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and wealth, you should, of course, be reading Virginia Postrel's blog regularly.
A Bugatti which tops out just under 253 miles per hour:
After seven years of false starts, a $1 million car billed as the world's fastest factory-produced automobile is about to arrive on American shores.Volkswagen AG is launching early next year the Bugatti Veyron, a curvaceous two-seater with air-intake scoops and a large radiator grille that prominently displays the Bugatti badge. For the German car maker, it represents an unusual bet on the high-end market at a time of cost cutting for the company and as U.S. car makers continue to struggle with slow sales.
The Bugatti Veyron boasts a massive, rear-mounted 16-cylinder engine with 1,001 horsepower -- roughly the equivalent of a couple of Porsche 911s combined -- and a rear spoiler that helps keep the car from spinning out of control at high speeds. It needs just 2.5 seconds to accelerate from zero to 62 miles per hour, and burns rubber so quickly that its makers had to hire France's Michelin SCA to develop a special compound for its tires. Its top speed: 252.9 mph.
Yet for all the car's horsepower, VW acknowledges that many of those who buy the Veyron will seldom drive it, let alone at its top speed. Few, if any, public streets in the world allow motorists to approach anything near the car's top speed. Repairs are another challenge. Bugatti officials say their dealers will have staff trained to handle routine maintenance needs, such as oil changes. For more complicated problems, the company says it will send over technicians from Europe.
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