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Business
Matters
October 8, 2002
Cheap and Chic
I would never admit to anyone that I went to the drug store and bought my own blonde touchup kit last month. That is, until I read in the NYTimes that I'm part of a New York trend.
Apparently working women all over Manhattan are lengthening time between trips to the hair salon, resorting to their own ingenuity instead. It's a fast-track way to save $500-$1000 annually after taxes. You've heard of botox parties. Enterprising hairdressers, start your engines.
The Stylish Guide to
"Roughing It"
Editor-in-chief Sarah Gray Miller, the vision behind the new magazine Budget Living stood on the "Today Show" this morning, announcing to the world that her top was from Wal-Mart, her shoes were 9 West, and the skirt was vintage.
This morning's NYTimes features a 40-year old venture capitalist who gave up the Paramount and now stays in Manhattan at an $89 a night Ramada Inn.
The motto, according to Miller is "spend smart; live rich."
With the stock market now worth exactly half what it was in March 2000, "spend smart" is tacked to bathroom mirrors at every income level.
Thinking Small with Colossal Impact
No company in America understands the psychology of American thrift better than Wal-Mart.
In an in-depth look at the $220 billion retail monolith, the Washington Post writes:
". . . Wal-Mart, rather, finds its niche in the Achilles' heel of American thrift, in the notion that a good bargain is a pleasure of which one ought never deprive oneself. If Sam's Choice cola is selling for $2 a 12-pack, you'd better buy four because, at that price, you're really making money."
At a time when yellow smiley
faces are the height of uncool, Wal-Mart's shines brightly. Worker complaints and discrimination lawsuits haven't dimmed Sam's common-sense drawing power.
Wal-Mart is the new hangout place, a center of cultural life. People in ads say they might as well work there, because "I'd be here anyway." Motor-home owners, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, regularly camp out in the Wal-Mart parking lot, and seniors attend store-sponsored Bingo games.
We can debate Wal-Mart's pay and promotion practices, but the company hires "real people", many of them unable to get higher-paying jobs at the mall: too old, too unattractive, clothes not good enough -- you know the story. Do workers want to work for such low wages? No, according to the Post. But they are eternally grateful that Wal-Mart gives them the opportunity to be actively engaged in earning a livelihood.
Penny-pinching Design
Ikea, several steps up the design ladder from Wal-Mart, operates on a similar price platform, selling furniture that's generally 30 to 50 percent below the competition's.
Because IKEA controls the entire design and production process, employees in every corner of the company are relentless in reducing costs, from the moment a successful product hits the floor.
The Other Side of Town
Just in case we think that all the big money in America went down the drain, Time takes an in-depth look at upscale housing in America. Post 911, many American homes
aren't just a place for seemingly-safe cocooning. They've become places to "huddle, socialize and strategize in an increasingly complex world."
Entrepreneurial Command Post
In mostly home offices across the country,
new business strategies outnumber live births or marriages.
An important new study on entrepreneurship cites the 10 million American adults involved in creating nearly six million new business concepts on any given day.
African American males are 50 per cent more likely to start one of these new businesses than other groups, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Those businesses also fail at significatly higher rates.
The Kauffman study concludes that men as a group are twice as likely as women to start a new business, a finding that supports the argument that women have been playing catchup the last few years. With women being more risk-averse, and also ultimately responsible for feeding kids in most single-parent families, they may be retreating from their recent record-setting entrepreneurial pace.
Commerce Is Content
The folks who brought us "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" have created "Live from Tomorrow", a variety news and entertainment show aimed at young people. "Live" has no commercials, because product endorsements are built right into the show. Producers say the commercial connections aren't seamless. They're highly visible and incorporated into the show in creative ways that get participants using products in game-inspired ways.
Seeing Is Believing
When I first saw the Metropolis photo of Montecasino, I thought it was Desert Passage in Las Vegas, a Marrakech-inspired experience.
Reading the article, I learned that Johannesburg has its very own Tuscan village, an "aesthetic escape from a racially split society racked by social and political change and spectacular crime rates." Apparently, Tuscan villas with "private Florentine court gardens" are springing up across South Africa, giving contemporary South Africans the ability to "pretend to be somewhere else."
At Montecasino, "the sky glows aquamarine with a scattering of pinkish early evening clouds." Forget lions, tigers and modern-day Zulu warriors.
What I want to know is, does it rain in this shopping center? At Desert Passage, it rains, complete with lighting and thunder -- but only over the pond so that I didn't get wet. I say, if it doesn't rain at Montecasino, South Africa, then Montecasino just isn't the real deal.
Don't worry. French and Dutch
neo-Modernism is on the way, in our evolving need to find real heroes.
Linda Enke, Compass
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At a time when the stock market is going up and down, it’s getting harder and harder to live well affordably. While stretching the dollar is an age-old challenge “Budget Living,” a new magazine hitting newsstands today, hopes to make it hip to achieve a frugal lifestyle. They say cheap has become the new chic and editor-in-chief Sarah Gray Miller has tips on how to “spend smart, live rich.”
NYTimes
Manhattan Leads a Surge in Lower-Cost Hotels 10-8-02
All across the country,(budget-minded business travellers) are choosing low-cost lodgings, and both the national hotel chains and local developers are moving to accommodate the demand. Mark Lomanno, president of Smith Travel Research in Hendersonville, Tenn., says there has been a rise in the industry's two cheapest hotel categories — economy and midscale without food and beverage — the last year in many large cities, including Boston, Detroit, New Orleans, Orlando and San Francisco.
This spurt in budget hotels is Manhattan's first since the 1964-1965 boom to handle visitors to the World's Fair, according to Sean Hennessey, a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers who specializes in the New York lodging market.
The vision, Sam Walton wrote in his autobiography, Made in America, was to take his stores to "little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoring," places where the competition wasn't, where real estate was cheap, and where one could avoid the costly zoning negotiations and political imbroglios that can come with settling stores in urban areas. Located 35 miles south of D.C., La Plata is one such town.
Business 2.0
How Ikea Designs Its Sexy Price Tags 10-02
Ikea plans to open nine more stores in North America in the next year alone. By 2013, it expects to have 50 of the flag-festooned big-box furniture outlets open for business. Despite Ikea's limited presence, the company is already the seventh-largest furniture retailer in the United States. It's also one of the fastest-growing, enjoying 25.5 percent sales growth in 2001, even as sales in the industry as a whole grew by just 1.9 percent, according to trade magazine Furniture World. "Not only does Ikea have monster stores and great prices, it has also created a unique niche," says Howard Davidowitz of Davidowitz & Associates, a retail consulting firm. "It's the quintessential power retailer in America."
The national tragedy of 9/11 reinforced a trend that was already under way: the home is not just everyone's castle, it's becoming a resort, an island of comfort in an ocean of insecurity. It's command central for the modern family in all its configurations, the place to huddle, socialize and strategize in an increasingly complex world. Says Kacey Fitzpatrick, who heads Avalon Enterprises, a design and construction firm in Mountain View, Calif.: "The families I work with are trying to find a balance between comfortable refuge,multifunctioning utilitarian facility and showplace."
Some 10 million American adults are involved in the process of starting nearly six million potential new businesses at any one time with African Americans 50 per cent more likely to start a business than whites, according to a new report that answers who is involved in start-up ventures in the United States.
"The creation of a new firm is more widespread in the U.S. than getting married or the birth of a baby," said Larry Cox, Director of Programmatic Research at the Kauffman Foundation. "The next successful entrepreneur is as likely to be the person next door as the scientist tinkering in his or her lab."
"Live from Tomorrow is an example of an attempt to organically integrate a new kind of advertising into TV and eradicate the 30-second commercial," said Matti Leshem, executive vice president of production company Diplomatic, and Davies' partner in the venture. "There are clearly brands out there who, like us, are willing to think about reaching consumers in a way that is completely recontextualized."
I first heard about Montecasino at an otherwise boring expat dinner party in Lomé, Togo, the small West African city where I live. My source was a tall fiftyish South African named Ebeth--short for Elizabeth, she explained, as Joburg is short for Johannesburg. Her husband was a geologist. They were dedicated birdwatchers--in short, straight out of central casting. I could picture her on a patio overlooking a vast lake, with a white-jacketed servant keeping the hippos at bay.
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