It’s sort of new! And not at all improved! But it is less expensive. We’re talking about Procter & Gamble’s Tide Basic, a detergent that’s been rolled out in about 100 stores in the South. Quite plainly, it’s a cheaper product. It doesn’t have the same cleaning capabilities of the regular Tide, though it does cost about 20 percent less.
Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!
Today’s monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was surprisingly positive. Meaning only that it was less negative than most people expected it would be. Nonfarm employment, the number worth paying the most attention to, was down 247,000 in July—compared with 395,000 in June and an average of 645,000 during the …
Ten Ways to Save a Little Money, or Make a Little Bit on the Side
Create a little side business to take advantage of the recession-era atmosphere. Start raising some chickens. Avoid car dealerships for oil changes and routine maintenance. Consider selling your home and relocating to a cave. And other ways to improve your financial outlook, if not necessarily your quality of life.
The man who forecast the financial crisis. In 1975
I just checked out a copy of Chris Welles’s 1975 classic, The Last Days of the Club, from my favorite library. It’s the story of the unraveling in the early 1970s of the New York Stock Exchange’s virtual monopoly on stock trading. Wrote Welles of the NYSE’s member firms (“the Club”):
Through one of the most systematic and long-standing,
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To Save Money, Run Your Household Like a Small Business, or a Golf Course
Advice aimed at increasing efficiency and lowering costs in the business world is often just as valid when applied to the individual. To minimize your cell phone bill, follow the pattern set by small businesses trying to rein in expenses. And to conserve water (and decrease your water bill), look to golf courses, where water usage is …
But Dude! I Was Almost Done With My Novel About a Really Cool Coffee Shop Owner
The golden age of free wi-fi and free spots to plug in your laptop are disappearing. Coffee shops—at least coffee shops in New York City—are increasingly asking customers to leave if all they’re doing is sponging off the wi-fi and adding to the shop’s electricity bill.
Budd Schulberg on Sammy Glick’s grand debut
When I learned last night (via a Tweet from Greg Mitchell—yeah, Twitter still worked back then), that Budd Schulberg had died, I immediately pulled down from the shelf a copy of What Makes Sammy Run?, the book that made Schulberg famous (back before On the Waterfront made him immortal). I bought it at a thrift store years ago and have …
Goldman Sachs would like to go back to doing what it was doing, thank you
Jenny Anderson has a very entertaining piece in today’s New York Times (that I’m kind of amazed didn’t make page 1) about business-as-usual returning at Goldman Sachs:
“We did not have a near-death experience,” said Gary D. Cohn, Goldman’s president. The government saved the financial industry as a whole, but it did not save
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How to Bring Your Grocery Bill Down to $15 a Week
Some folks were less than impressed with a trio of bloggers featured on The Cheapskate Blog who limited their food expenditures of $50 a week. A few commenters were downright angry—outraged, insulted even at the idea of the blogger experiment. Well, maybe they’ll be more open to reading about a pair of bloggers living on a weekly …
Credit Card Fee Watch: Now There’s a Fee For NOT Buying Stuff
Credit card issuers are an inventive bunch, always creating new ways to entice consumers into signing up for cards, and to charge those consumers all sorts of fees for using those cards. I’m constantly shocked by the number of letters we receive in the mail from credit card companies—these guys have to be keeping the postal service in …
It’s a Deal: Give $3, Get $10 Off at Macy’s
Reading Is Fundamental is teaming up with Macy’s for a summer promotion that simultaneously supports children’s literacy and gives shoppers discounts. In exchange for a $3 donation to RIF, you’ll receive a coupon for $10 off of purchases of $50 or more in-store merchandise. The promotion is in effect through August 31. More details here.
An entirely too self-referential post about media clouds and Swedish bank rescues
Patricia Cohen has an interesting story in today’s NYT about Media Cloud, a very cool-sounding system designed by some folks at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (including my old friend Yochai Benkler) to track the flow of topics and ideas through the media. This passage bothered me a just little, though:
Using some of the
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