'Services' Archive
It’s only been a relatively few decades since credit has become ubiquitous and necessary to modern life. I know people who have abandoned cash in much the same way they have given up their landlines — with nary a thought. That annoying commercial about how people who write checks stop the flow of happy commerce? Yeah, that’s how we live now.
But it’s not just about the convenience anymore. Try to book an airline flight without a credit card. Try to order anything online. Yeah, there’s PayPal, but just try to order something from Lands’ End using PayPal. Heck, try to get decent insurance rates without your credit score being taken into consideration.
So the fact that credit card companies are cutting people off, scaling back on perks like miles, raising interest rates, and reducing lines of credit isn’t just inconvenient, it’s putting consumers between a rock and a hard place. We like to think that using credit is about prudence and we scorn people who can’t handle their credit responsibly, but because credit has become so intertwined in the way we live, credit is a necessity, not a choice. Even good credit card customers, the ones who always pay their bills on time, are being penalized by credit card companies. (It’s hard to make money on people who are prudent about debt.)
The new credit card laws will help, but gone are the days of easy credit. I don’t know if that means a cash economy is going to come back. Will paying with folding money take on a sort of retro cool? I just think that before we throw out the baby with the bathwater we take a look at how commerce has organized itself around the ubiquity of credit cards and dust off the old systems of payment — do you know where your checkbook is? — before the whole thing grinds to a halt.
One last note — a local coffee house gives you a discount if you pay in cash. It’s like they are living in the past! It’s refreshing. And it makes me feel just a little bit virtuous when I pull out a few battered ones for my coffee and scone. That’s the kind of happy commerce I like, and it doesn’t stop the flow at all.
If Meg Whitman, the former president and CEO of eBay, runs for governor of California as expected and starts promising on the campaign trail that she’ll run the state government like a business, watch out!
As The New York Times detailed, her track record in a decade as chief executive of the e-commerce site was mixed. Yes, she grew the auction site from 30 employees and $4 million in annual sales to an e-commerce behemoth with 16,000-plus workers and $8.5 billion in revenues last year.
At the same time, Whitman was the chief architect of eBay’s 2005 acquisition of Skype Technologies, which became an expensive boondoggle for the company. eBay’s written off more than half of the transaction’s $2.6 billion price tag. Skype has attracted more lawsuits and legal disputes than customers for eBay.
More importantly, eBay failed to wipe out product forgeries and fraudulent sellers under Whitman’s watch, leading many buyers to abandon the site for Amazon.com, Overstock.com, and other competitors. The company’s growth slowed significantly in the past two years.
The former eBay CEO formed an exploratory committee this month in preparation for seeking the Republican nomination for governor in 2010. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the incumbent “Governator,” cannot run for another term under state law, so it’s looking like a wide-open race for a post of dubious distinction these days.
Schwarzenegger and the state legislature just concluded a months-long battle on revising the state budget to close a $42 billion shortfall. California is one of the few large states where the annual budget must be approved by two-thirds majorities in both houses of the legislature. Many members of the Republican minorities in the state senate and the state assembly took a “no new taxes” pledge in recent years, and the Democratic leadership found few Republicans willing to compromise on that stance.
If Whitman prevails in the Republican primary next year, she’ll be running in a predominantly “blue” state that twice voted in Governor Schwarzenegger mostly on the strength of his Hollywood celebrity. After nearly seven years of more glitz than governing, California voters in 2010 may want a pragmatic politician to lead the Golden State.
We’re not only consuming less in this recession, we’re throwing out less.
And this is a bad thing. It seems that the garbage business is being hurt by the lack of, well, garbage. Less garbage means a lot less money in tipping fees, what trucks pay to deposit loads at landfills. This not only hurts garbage companies like the giant Waste Management or their much smaller competition. Municipalities that operate their own landfills are seeing a serious shortage in fees, which affects local budgets. Some cities are having to raise garbage pickup rates.
Recycling firms are also seeing a drop in sales. Recyclers don’t keep waste out of the landfill out of the goodness of their hearts or affection for the environment; they sell plastic, metal, and electronic parts. But prices are down for recyclable materials as well, in some cases way down. Listen to this story from NPR about our ports that are overflowing with recyclable goods that no longer have a market.
So while you would think that less waste is good — it means landfills have longer lifespans, for one thing — it’s really bad, because the entire infrastructure that is based on our throwing things out is now vulnerable. Less waste is better for the environment, but recyclers can’t stay in business. GIGO — good, NoGO — bad.
We have all been told that the best way out of this recession is to spend, spend, spend. But as I said in my previous post this week, we lost 70,000 jobs just on Monday. It’s hard to tell someone who got pinkslipped from Caterpillar to go out and buy a new couch or something.
So I have a better idea. Clear out the closets or the basement, rip up the old carpet, really get in there and dig out the garage. This is our chance to change the economy from consumer-driven to garbage-fueled. If we can’t be consumers, let’s be wasters!
Together, we can make a difference. Together we can keep the garbage flowing.
STREPSIADES: By god, Socrates, tell me, I beg you,
who these women are who sing so solemnly.
Are they some special kind of heroines?
SOCRATES: No—they’re heavenly Clouds, great goddesses
for lazy men—from them we get our thoughts,
our powers of speech, our comprehension,
our gift for fantasy and endless talk,
our power to strike responsive chords in speech
and then rebut opponents’ arguments.
–Aristophanes, The Clouds
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!
Don’t hang around, ’cause two’s a crowd
On my cloud, baby.
–M. Jagger and K. Richards, “Get Off of My Cloud”
Cloud computing is a long-established concept with a new name. The simple definition is that it involves using Web-based computing tools and storing information on remote servers maintained and operated by another company. This takes the place of traditional computing, where companies bought and ran software on computers they owned — mainframes, minicomputers, or PCs — and stored all of their data on those computers, or on big disk drives.
The cloud concept has been around for years under a variety of labels. It was known as client-server architecture for a while. Corporate enterprises would put all of their data on a central server or series of servers, and then access that data over the Internet through a “thin client,” a terminal or a stripped-down version of a PC that could get you on the Net. Later, the concept was recast as “software as a service.” Again, the idea involved using computers that didn’t have multiple software programs installed, as in the Microsoft vision of the world, but using the Web or the Net to access specific programs, such as salesforce.com’s customer relationship management suite.
From those permutations we come to cloud computing, which is being offered by various companies in different guises.
The two biggest promoters of cloud computing might be Amazon.com and Google. Both are essentially providing the use of their worldwide server networks, for free or for fees, depending on the level of service (and data storage) you require, along with a set of Web-based tools. Their offerings include Amazon Web Services and Google Apps. The cloud computing concept has attracted a number of computer hardware and software vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Oracle, and SAP. Microsoft will soon unveil something that may or may not be called “Windows Cloud.” Dell tried to trademark the term “cloud computing,” but was denied this year by the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Cloud computing differs from such concepts as autonomic computing, grid computing, and utility computing, although those technologies may be utilized in some cloud computing schemes.
The big question in cloud computing is: Can you trust putting all your data — your family photos, copies of important documents, personal health records, corporate trade secrets and strategic plans — on a computer owned and run by someone else? Will it be secure? Many Web surfers already make that leap of faith in using popular applications like Facebook, Flickr, or Gmail. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation recently inveighed against the idea of trusting any for-profit corporation, even Google, to safeguard your information.
In short, it’s going to take a significant conceptual leap to go from keeping everything on your PC or in your corporate data center to putting everything on the computers and networks of a trustworthy third party.
In my last post, I posed the question: What’s next for Walgreen? In-store surgery? Boy, was I on the wrong track. While the nation’s #1 drugstore chain won’t be installing in-store operating theatres anytime soon (that I’m aware of), it will be opening apparel departments in most of its 6,000-plus stores tomorrow, April 1. This is no April Fools hoax! The drugstore chain’s first line of private-label clothing — called Casual Gear — will include clothing basics, such as hoodies, Capri pants, socks, and T-shirts, priced at $7 to $15. While Walgreen already sells some basic apparel, including T-shirts, bras, flip flops, and slippers, those goods aren’t exclusive to Walgreen.
The new Casual Gear line is made exclusively for the company by Wonderbrand LLC, a San Francisco-based firm formed by underwear maverick Nick Graham, the founder of the popular Joe Boxer line sold in Kmart stores.
Walgreen’s foray into the world of “low fashion” is unpretentious, and the company hasn’t done much to promote the launch. But the low-profile debut is at odds with Walgreen’s overall private-label strategy, which has been aggressive. No stranger to private-label goods, Walgreen offers its own brand of everything from over-the-counter medications, including aspirin and cough syrup, to personal care products like whitening strips for teeth and eyeglass wipes. Indeed, Walgreen’s own-brand business has grown from about 12% of general merchandise sales in 2000 to 20% today.
The reason Walgreen and other retailers — supermarkets come to mind — love private label goods is that they foster customer loyalty and, more importantly, return a higher profit margin to the retailer. So Walgreen takes its store-brand business very seriously. It recently upgraded the packaging and logo for Walgreen-brand products under the new “W” brand and — in another blow to struggling Starbucks — is even testing in-store beverage bars, called Café W, at some 200 locations.
While leggings and lattes may seem like a departure for a pharmacy chain, they fit right in with Walgreen’s strategy to drive sales and customer traffic.