Scared to go out to dinner or to a club? This morning brings news that a fashionable preventive accessory is at hand.
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
It’s one thing for editors at women’s fashion magazines to shop the market to pass on to readers what they deem to be the latest and the greatest buys, often with one eye on advertisers who don’t mind “editorial” mention. It’s another when the New York Times does it. The Times Magazine, of course, runs fashion spreads every week that credit stores and designers. This morning, though, the paper features a story – complete with video clip — by its veteran fashion reporter Cathy Horyn, one that could just as easily have appeared in a glossy fashion mag. Horyn, in the company of ouside stylists, goes on a personal-shopping scouting expedition in search of steals and deals that might appeal to the 40+ woman fighting for wardrobe refreshment in these difficult times. A service to readers? A legitimate news story? A play to catch the eye of advertisers? All of the above?
A recent Harris Interactive poll includes numbers relating to the companies Americans most trust (at the moment, no Wall Street firm need apply). Some of the results, across a series of dimensions:
* Social Responsibility – Whole Foods, Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, Walt
Disney, Microsoft
* Emotional Appeal – Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Amazon.com, Sony, General
Mills
* Financial Performance – Johnson & Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, Coca-Cola,
Microsoft, Google
* Products & Services – Sony, Johnson & Johnson, 3M Company, Google, Kraft
* Vision & Leadership – Berkshire Hathaway, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola,
Amazon.com
Among the more salutary effects of the recession has been the puncturing of the high cost of taking your kid to a ball game. The most dramatic instance is the recent rollback of prices at the new Yankee Stadium, where the 
best seats are still way, way out of the range of the average fan but significantly lower than originally set. Examples, drawn from a story in the New York Times:
¶The full-season, front-row $2,500 tickets behind the dugouts will be reduced to $1,250, and those who have already purchased such tickets will get a refund or a credit.
¶Tickets along the first- and third-base lines that cost $1,000 a game will be cut to $650. Refunds and credits will apply as well.
¶Fans who have purchased $2,500 front-row season tickets behind and to the sides of home plate will not get a price cut. Instead, they will receive an equal number of front-row seats, for free, for the rest of the season, in what may be an attempt by the Yankees to fill up the empty spaces so visible on TV.
Interesting factoid from this week’s New York Magazine: over one out of four New Yorkers spend 50 percent or more of their income on rent. The traditional rule-of-thumb for how much of one’s gross income should be allocated to housing: 28 percent.
The Economist has a brief, intriguing piece about whether monitoring the volume of Google searches can serve to accurately forecast sales trends of specific products, stock price performance, etc.
Take this with a terabyte of salt but a social media marketing company just released the top 100 “social brands” of 2008, meaning brands that inspire or otherwise instigate the heaviest blogging, social networking, photo, and video sharing activities. In other words, the brands that set about triggering the most online yakking or “buzz.” Now, generating online buzz doesn’t mean that a brand is cool, or doing particularly well, or, well, much of anything, which you’ll probably surmise when you scan the top ten: (1) Nike; (2) Ikea; (3) Wal-Mart; (4) REI; (5) Target; (6) Adidas; (7) Sears; (8) Gap; (9) Victoria’s Secret; (10) Converse. I can guess what you’re thinking: SEARS?! Why would anyone socially network about Sears? Frankly, I have no idea, even though the retailer has been aggressively courting online attention through the usual channels: Facebook, Twitter, etc. On the other hand, what company hasn’t?
Though it comes as no surprise — should have happened eons ago – there are reports that GM is about to pull the plug on Pontiac. Back in my day, Pontiac was the epitome of the American muscle car, a time when Detroit was solidly welded to the idea that just as a man’s home was his castle, the wheels in the castle driveway were his, well, you know what. The link between cars and manhood, the idea that cars express a man’s sexual fantasies, active or repressed, was one of the chief obsessions of a Vienna-born psychoanalyst named Ernest Dichter. Vance Packard brought Dichter to public attention in his classic besteller, The Hidden Persuaders, which I talk about a bit in Shoptimism. Dichter famously observed that when a man looked at a boxy, four-door sedan he saw his wife. But when he checked out something like a Pontiac Firebird he saw a potential mistress, a beguling vixen, which is why Dichter advised car dealers to make sure they always kept a shiny muscle car parked outside the showroom door, if only to lure guys in to sell them boxy sedans.
For those of you who’ve told me how completely grossed out you were by the ear-biting commercial found several items down, I offer this soothing balm, with thanks to a friend on Facebook who for reasons I don’t understand posted it on his home page:
Responding to my post earlier this week in the Daily Beast, Kathryn Finney, founder of BudgetFashionista.com, sent me an email pointing out that one of the most interesting shopping blogs out there now is run by Goodwill of Greater Washington (DC): dcgoodwill.org. She also is a big fan of Housing Works, which operates numerous thrift stores that are “really cool,” Finney says, the Chelsea Thrift Shop on West 17th Street in New York being a prime example and “a crazy retail experience” to boot. Now, if only someone could divert the tour buses that currently stop on Canal Street.
