The Missus and I braved the crowds on Friday to go shopping and personally stimulate the economy. Well, actually, we did some returning and exchanging along with some purchasing. Well going form retail store to retail store, I started thinking about the differences in layout and experience, so I had to pick up Underhill’s How We Buy. I’ll be reading it over the next months (along with other books).

Still, I remember a talk given by Len Riggio, the brains behind Barnes and Noble, in which he said that bricks and motor retail is dead. Based on Friday, it felt like some places are deader than others. Here’s my completely subjective ranking of all the stores that we went to on Friday.  My ranking has nothing to do with the sales going on that day, but rather, just a feeling about the stores in general.

Dead: Levis Store; Gap; Paper and Presentation; AI Friedman

Dying: Banana Republic; Barnes and Noble (sorry, Len); Lucky Brand Jeans

Alive: J. Crew; Bed Bath & Beyond; Muji (loved this store); Wired Store; Diesel Jeans

Also, given my short legs, I’m starting to wonder what the distribution of sizes is for people in the Unites States. The way that sizes are in shops, it would seem that every guy in the world is only two-to-four inches different in waist and height than another.

So much for proportion.

The best line of the evening – approximately, “if dogs are man’s best friend, why can’t vampires and werewolves get along?” – was actually from Jesse’s girlfriend Marissa.

So, when the conversation is better than the movie, I gotta wonder, how hard is it to make the movie?

I’m still stuck on that movie camera idea from the last post.

Audemars Piguet

Yeah, but it is like $250K.

So, I started looking for other watches, and I found some that I liked that are more reasonably priced—just a couple of thousand dollars.  But, then I got to wondering about other things I could buy and use for the same amount of money:

A new electric guitar to make music?
A video camera to make movies?
Adobe Flash to make animations?

I need to figure out how to stimulate the economy.  Any thoughts are welcome.

sucker

One of my favorite blogs to read is “Riding the F-Train,” written by an old college friend who became a lawyer, quit that, and writes about poker.  His posts are usually great because he is writing about poker games and things actually happen.  There’s a lot of narrative there.

Recently, he had a post about what Barack Obama means for poker.  What I find more interesting is a simple gambling comparison between John McCain and Barack Obama (that I never read about during the election):

John McCain plays craps — a game of odds, chance, and “rolling the dice.”
Barack Obama plays poker — a game of progressive betting, psychology, and trying to “read” or “bluff” your opponent.

Sure there are several other reasons why Obama was the better candidate, but given their gaming preference, is it any wonder Obama wiped the floor with McCain?

(Even as I write this post, I know that it will get a ton of spam from gambling sites . . . )

It’s also a way to describe my old publishing friends whom I don’t work with anymore.

Last night, many of us got together for the second time in a week, and it was a lot of fun.  The Missus came along and had a good time as well.

The amount of shared good will and camaraderie within that group always struck me as something remarkable from a group of work friends, and as I move away from publishing, it seems unlikely that I will be cracking jokes about Comic Books, Jhumpa Lahiri and Sarah Palin at a work parties again.

What?  You don’t have a local Caribbean-inspired vegetarian place?  Just me?  Huh.

As I mentioned in Part 3 of my analysis of the new local coffee place in my neighborhood (Part 1, Part 2), you have to think of your customers, and in my section of Williamsburg there are two types of customers:  hipsters and Italians.  To be a viable option, you have to cater to both.

Actually, that’s a simplification:  beyond Italians there are several other types of blue-collar Brooklyn locals.  Do you think they want to go to Caribbean-inspired vegetarian place?  Or, the pizza place?

That said, the coffee place that I analyzed has started to follow my idea and offer breakfast sandwiches.  Not paninis, but we shall see.  Hopefully, they won’t end up like the last coffee place to close in my neighborhood.  (Which, coincidentally was in the location that the Caribbean-inspired vegetarian place opened in.)

Also, I’m waiting for the upscale Peruvian place to close down so that a decent Thai place can open up.  I think an inexpensive Thai place will do well in my neighborhood.  At this point, Thai is pretty familiar to anyone in NYC.  Or, at least more familiar than Caribbean-inspired vegetarian.

That last point about deconstructionism I find offensive.  (The rest is probably true.)

In the article likening derivatives to deconstructionism, Lanchester doesn’t do enough to differentiate between simple derivatives (e.g., “I’ll buy 100 pounds of wheat for $1 a pound next June:”) and complex derivatives (e.g., the dreaded Credit Default Swaps.)

His point person in all of this is Warren Buffet.  Lanchester claims, “Buffett dislikes derivatives.” He supports that with two quotes, like this:

The range of derivatives contracts is limited only by the imagination of man (or sometimes, so it seems, madmen). At Enron, for example, newsprint and broadband derivatives, due to be settled many years in the future, were put on the books. Or say you want to write a contract speculating on the number of twins to be born in Nebraska in 2020. No problem—at a price, you will easily find an obliging counterparty.

The second:

No matter how financially sophisticated you are, you can’t possibly learn from reading the disclosure documents of a derivatives-intensive company what risks lurk in its positions. Indeed, the more you know about derivatives, the less you will feel you can learn from the disclosures normally proffered you. In Darwin’s words, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

What Buffet is railing against here is a COMPLEX derivative.  But a simple Google search shows that, Buffet’s company Berkshire Hathaway holds, you guessed it, DERIVATIVES.  Let me say that again:  Buffet manages derivatives. From page 16 of their 2007 annual report:

Last year I told you that Berkshire had 62 derivative contracts that I manage. (We also have a few left in the General Re runoff book.) Today, we have 94 of these [ . . .  ].

This is what happens when The New Yorker allows people to over-articulate business issues.  So while both Deriddian deconstructionism and complex derivatives are bad, conflating the two is a bit of pompous cocktail chatter.

When Obama is president, I’ll be able to eat whatever I want.

Maybe I should try to blog everyday, like Tori.

• 7 day lobby or drive-thru hours, even in Center City Philadelphia and Manhattan
• Instant creation of ATM cards on the spot at the time of account opening
• Free “Penny Arcade” coin counting machines for both customers and non-customers
• No-Fee Visa Gift Cards for customers
• Lollipops and dog biscuits in the lobby and drive-thru
• Foreign ATM fee reimbursement (if you maintain a daily balance of $2,500 through the statement cycle)
• “No Stupid Fees, No Stupid Hours”

These guys were a model of customer experience brand building, but then unfortunately, all the work they’ve done on building that brand was undone when a judge unwound their post-TD merger brand because of another bank in Massachusetts.  Now, Commerce is known as TD Bank, which stands for Toronto Dominion.  Now, they are spending $20 million to brand that, but they are using the same slogan: “America’s Most Convenient Bank.”

Really?  TD Bank?  Even if they can’t keep the established Commerce brand, is the “established” brand of T Rowe Price TB TD Bank their best option?

And, can a bank called Toronto Dominion be “America’s Most Convenient Bank” without even a tinge of irony?