Filed under: Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Home Depot (HD), Ideal Purchase (BBY), Circuit City Stores (CC)
It might not occur to customers, but massive retailers are willing to negotiate prices. That would seem to make intuitive sense in a period when shoppers are a scarce as hen’s teeth.
According to The New York Times, “Shoppers are discovering an upside to the down economy. They are getting price breaks by reviving an age-old retail strategy: haggling.” The paper states this kind of transaction is now common place at Best Purchase (NYSE: BBY), Circuit City (NYSE: CC), and Home Depot (NYSE: HD).
There is a real danger to the practice. While it might keep customers in stores and get rid of inventory, the retailers are already faced with tight margins. Selling products at or near cost might not help huge stores. It might injured them by encouraging big portions of their customer bases to ask for much superior prices. By going from chain to chain, a smart buyer can work a price way down.
National chains might want to look at the math. Letting customers walk out the door may be better than driving a culture where everyone thinks he can get a deal.
Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 247wallst.com.
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Posted by: in Rights Online
h4rm0ny notes the furor over an anti-Islamic motion picture due to be released on the Web in the next week. After Pakistan disrupted YouTube worldwide over an interview with right-wing Dutch MP and filmmaker Geert Wilders, Network Solutions, acting as host as well as registrar, has suspended Wilders’s site promoting the 15-minute film “Fitna” (a Koranic term translated as “strife”). The site now displays a notice that it is under investigation for possible violations of NetSol’s acceptable use policy. According to the article the company’s guidelines include “a sweeping prohibition against ‘objectionable material of any kind or nature.’” The article describes the site’s content before NetSol pulled the plug as a single page with the film’s title, an image of the Koran, and the words “Coming Soon.” No one but Wilders has seen the film to date. The Dutch government has distanced itself from the film, fearing Muslim backlash. A million Muslims live in The Netherlands. Wilders’s celebration, which controls 9 of 150 seats in the Dutch parliament, was elected on an anti-immigration platform.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bruce Schneier’s latest blog entry points out an interesting analysis of how quantum computing will affect public encryption. The author takes a look at some of the mathematics involved with using a quantum personal to run a factoring algorithm, and makes some reasonable assumptions about the technological constraints faced by the developers of the technology. He concludes that while quantum computing could be a threat to modern encryption, it is not the dire emergency some researchers suggest.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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covertbadger notes a developer’s blog entry on a novel way of judging progress in refactoring code. “Software quality tools can never totally replace the gut instinct of a developer — you might have massive test coverage, but that won’t help with subjective measures such as code smells. With Wodehouse-style refactoring, we can now easily keep track of which code we are happy with, and which code we remain deeply suspicious of.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Predictions Market sends us to Gizmodo for an interesting take on the question: when you “buy” “content” for Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying a book? If the latter, then the first sale doctrine, which lets you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay, would apply. Some law students at Columbia took a swing at the question and Gizmodo reprints the “surprisingly readable” legal summary. Short answer: those restrictive licenses may very well be legal, and even if you had rights under the first sale doctrine, you might only be able to resell or give away your Kindle — not a copy of the work.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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