Category: Economics & Business

Consolidation

Good-bye Famous-Barr, Filene’s, Foley’s, Hecht’s, Kaufmann’s, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May and Strawbridge’s.

Hello Macy’s.

(May Company stores Lord & Taylor and Marshall Field’s are expected to keep their name.)

Retailing Giant Takes Shape as Federated Agrees to Buy May.

Thousands of layoffs are also expected, although other merchants, including Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom, are reportedly already lining up to take over some of the locations that Federated may jettison.

How about some reform?

From The Denver Post:

Investigations of alleged kickbacks and overcharging in the title industry are proceeding on several fronts.

In California, state Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi said Tuesday that he was investigating kickbacks paid by title insurers to developers, lenders and real estate agents who referred homebuyers to the insurance companies.

The action came a day after the state of Colorado announced a consent agreement with First American Title Insurance Co., based in Santa Ana, Calif., to refund consumers nationwide $24 million as a result of its probe.

If a piece of property has been sold a few times, what exactly is being insured by title insurance? That the title insurers did their job right the previous times? What are the actual risks? I know I might have an auto accident, so I have auto insurance. I know that my house could be hit by lightning (my previous house was), so I have homeowners insurance. Has anyone ever had their title questioned?

I’m shocked, just shocked

“I got the impression [real estate agents] weren’t working solely in their clients’ best interest.”

From The New York Times:

But a recent study by two University of Chicago economists suggests that home sellers should regard agents with some caution. The study does not suggest that agents are inherently untrustworthy. Rather, it says, the housing market remains inefficient, and the incentives for agents to maximize profits for their clients aren’t powerful enough. …

Professor Levitt had fixed up and sold several houses in Oak Park, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. When working with real estate agents, he said, “I got the impression they weren’t working solely in their clients’ best interest.”

Along with a colleague, Chad Syverson, Professor Levitt set out to prove it by comparing data on homes that agents sold on behalf of others with those that they owned and sold for themselves. They analyzed sales from 1992 to 2002 of 98,000 homes in suburban Chicago, of which 3,300 were owned by real estate agents. When the economists constructed an analysis that controlled for amenities, location and the adjectives used to describe the houses, they found that agent-owned homes, on average, stayed on the market 9.5 days longer and commanded median prices that were 3.7 percent higher than comparable homes owned by clients.

Wind power

From an article in The New York Times:

With every turn of the giant blades of the 136 windmills here on the edge of a mesa, the stiff desert breeze is replacing expensive natural gas or other fuel that would have been burned in a power plant somewhere else.

Wind energy makes up a small fraction of electric generation in this country, but the rising price of natural gas has made wind look like a bargain; in some cases, it is cheaper to build a wind turbine and let existing natural gas generators stand idle. Giant, modern wind farms like the New Mexico Wind Energy Center here may become more common if prices continue to rise.

The center, 150 miles east of Albuquerque, opened in the summer of 2003 and is one of the largest in the country. The power is bought by the state’s largest utility, Public Service of New Mexico, and provides about 4 percent of that company’s electricity over the course of a year. In March, when demand is low and winds are usually strong, the project generates 10 percent of the electricity the company supplies.

You’re hired

From the Telegraph:

A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing “sexual services” at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners — who must pay tax and employee health insurance — were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her “profile” and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job — including in the sex industry — or lose her unemployment benefit.

Screw you Intuit

It seems that Intuit will pull the plug on some features of older versions of Quicken this spring.

Retirement of Online Services for older versions of Quicken

As of April 19th, 2005, in accordance with the Quicken sunset policy, Online Services and Live Technical Support will no longer be available for Quicken 2001 and 2002 users. These services include online bill pay; downloading financial data from your bank, credit union, credit card, brokerage, 401(k) or mutual fund accounts; downloading stock quotes, news headlines and other financial information into Quicken; uploading portfolio information from Quicken to Quicken.com; and access to the investing features on Quicken.com including portfolio tracking, any watch lists you have created, One-Click Scorecard?, Stock Evaluator and Mutual Fund Evaluator. To continue using these services and maintain access to live technical support from an Intuit representative, you will need to upgrade.

NewMexiKen runs Quicken 2002 and it serves perfectly well. I don’t use many of the features that will be “retired” on April 19th, but I find this policy apprehensible. I don’t remember any warnings on the box that I was just renting some features of the software for a couple of years.

The only alternative may be the Evil Empire and Microsoft Money but this kind of business model deserves to be scorned.

On the other hand

Kudos to CompUSA (at least locally) for permitting an exchange without a receipt or the original packaging (stuff I usually have). Even though the product was defective, NewMexiKen anticipated something of a hassle. There was none.

Carpet bomb

Forty-eight hours before the scheduled installation, NewMexiKen is called this morning to be told the carpet won’t be available. The house is a nightmare — bookcases emptied, guest room bedding stripped, knick-knacks packed, furniture shifted onto non-carpeted floors. I’d even pulled the carpet back and ripped up some tack boards that had been damaged by water and needed to be replaced.

For once I didn’t put everything off and look what happens.

It seems the mill is out of this particular favorite and won’t have more for a week — or until after three of the Sweeties and their mothers have arrived for a visit.

Aarrgghh!

UPDATE: This deal was through Costco, which relies on a sub-contractor, which in turn uses a local agent (an interior designer). The sub-contractor tells me that the local agent is not supposed to promise a date and that the window for installation is usually two-to-three weeks (not one).

In other words, the local designer told me what I wanted to hear (that installation could be this Friday) in order to make the deal.

I don’t know if she was a carpetbagger, but she certainly was a scalawag.

Who donates, and where

If each American who voted for John Kerry spends $100 in 2005 on a Blue company instead of a Red company, we can move $5 Billion away from Republican companies and add $5 Billion to the income of companies who donate to Democrats.

The website Choose The Blue provides a complete rundown of money American corporations donated to the political parties during the 2003-2004 election cycle. The data was compiled from information in the public domain, including Federal Election Commission records (FEC.gov) and the Center for Responsible Politics.

Some that might be of interest:

Wal-Mart was 81% Red; Target 78% Red. Costco was 98% Blue.

Shell Oil was the only Blue gasoline company; Toyota the only Blue auto maker.

Microsoft, Cisco, eBay, Yahoo! Oracle, Sun, IBM and Adobe were Blue; Intuit was Red.

Sony was Blue; GE and Kodak were Red.

The Pittsburgh Steelers were Blue, but the Suns, Jets, Saints, Dodgers, Tigers, Red Wings, Rockies, Browns and Arizona Cardinals were Red, as was NASCAR.

Amazon was 61% Red. Barnes & Noble and Powells were 100% Blue.

Getting down to business

Functional Ambivalent has a couple of notable pieces today — I’m About 70% Sure This is Dead Right: Project Blue Christmas is Dead Wrong and Once in a While, I’m Glad to Be Old. The first of these has some need-to-be-said comments about Wal-Mart. The second — well, just been there, done that (both sides of the table).

In addition, I am attempting to flatter Tom so he will restore me to a higher place on his blogroll. Once one achieves glory at “Every Day,” it’s so discouraging to be classified among the “When I’ve Got a Moment.” (Regardless of however deserved my demotion may have been.) In fact, if I don’t get moved up soon I may take another hiatus.

Worth waiting

That may soon change as a glut of liquid crystal display flat-panel televisions, called L.C.D.’s, enter the market, a result of a boom in new factories. According to several manufacturers and analysts, the prices for L.C.D. flat-panel TV’s will drop in the new year, falling by as much as 30 percent by the end of 2005. The prices of plasma flat-panel TV’s are also expected to fall significantly.

From a report in The New York Times

The evil empire

From The Wall Street Journal —

Brad Anderson, chief executive officer of Best Buy Co., is embracing a heretical notion for a retailer. He wants to separate the “angels” among his 1.5 million daily customers from the “devils.”

Best Buy’s angels are customers who boost profits at the consumer-electronics giant by snapping up high-definition televisions, portable electronics, and newly released DVDs without waiting for markdowns or rebates.

The devils are its worst customers. They buy products, apply for rebates, return the purchases, then buy them back at returned-merchandise discounts. They load up on “loss leaders,” severely discounted merchandise designed to boost store traffic, then flip the goods at a profit on eBay. They slap down rock-bottom price quotes from Web sites and demand that Best Buy make good on its lowest-price pledge. “They can wreak enormous economic havoc,” says Mr. Anderson.

The nasty people, applying for rebates. Shame on them.