Moms at Work

In 2004, 70.4 percent of women with children under 18 years of age were in the labor force. The more men and women do what they do in exchange for money, and the more work in the public realm is valued or honored, the more, almost by definition, private life is devalued and its boundaries shrink. It is a fundamental truth that the responsibilities of motherhood cannot be successfully delegated; not to day-care centers, not to schools, not to nurseries, not to babysitters. The value that mothers add to the world must never be over looked. What else could be as important as molding the lives of human beings? Yet we do not recognize mothers enough. Why do so many mothers spend so much time at work and so little at home? First of all there is the problem of financial stress, which is a definite problem. But more than that I think it is because mothers are not being valued enough and the male role in society is praised too much. Spencer W. Kimball asked a question in an address to Regional Representatives, that we too should all ask ourselves, “How can we help the wife and mother understand the dignity and worth of her role in the divine process of motherhood?”
Too often the pressure for popularity, on children and teens, places an economic burden on the income of the father, so mother feels she must go to work to satisfy her children’s needs. That decision can be most shortsighted. It is a truism that children need more of mother than of money. Financial strains are obviously a part of more mothers entering the work force, but in a 1995, a national study found that 48% of American working women and 61% of men claimed that they would still want to work even if they had enough money to live as “comfortably as you would like.”
According to Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her book Time Bind, the real reason for leaving kids at home to pursue a career is that women feel more valued at work than they do at home. Work feels more like home and home feels more like work. At work you get recognized for doing a good job as an “internal customer.” You are made an “empowered” employee to make you feel like the company cares about you, not just about making money. On the other hand, how many recognition ceremonies for competent performance are going on at home? Who is valuing the internal customer there?
And who can blame them? However hectic their lives, women who do paid work, researchers have found, fell less depressed, think better of themselves, and are more satisfied with their life than women who don’t do paid work. “Paid work,” says psychologist Grace Baruch, “offers such benefits as challenge, control, structure, positive feedback, self esteem…and social ties.”
Other than the problem women face of not feeling appreciated for being mothers and house wives is the problem that our society sees the “male” world of work as more honorable and valued than the female world of home and children. Too often women use the world as their standard for success and basis for self-worth. Folklorist Joseph Campbell said, “Women have come to believe that only the aim and virtues of the male are to be considered, and that male achievement is the proper aim for everyone, as though that is what counts. No indeed.”
“In the early stages of the women’s movement many feminists pushed for restructuring of work life to allow for shorter –hour, flexible jobs and a restructuring of home life so that men would get into the action,” explains Hochschild, “but over the years, this part of the women’s movement seems to have surrendered the initiative to feminists more concerned with helping women break through the corporate glass ceilings into long-hour careers.”
As more mothers enter the work force we are increasingly becoming a society taught by capitalistic companies, not by loving mothers. Companies realize that time invested in their employees to make them committed believers in the company, instead of just a cog in the machine, is well worth the effort. People who feel empowered by the company and who feel like they are appreciated for the value that they contribute work harder and longer. Most companies also offer free courses in “dealing with anger” or “how to cope with difficult people.” At home, people seldom receive anything like this much help on issues so basic to family life. Also, some companies stage events in response to loosing customers to competitors such as “Large Group Change Events” held in assembly rooms where they work as a group to talk about problems they, as employees, are facing and ideas for the company. The purpose of all these activities is to convince each worker to renew his commitment not to his spouse or church, but to his workplace.
A re-emphasis of the importance of stay-at-home-moms and a restructuring of work time are good steps in the right direction. It has been proven to work in countries like Sweden, Norway and Germany, which have created alternative architectures of time. Many sectors rely on 35-hour workweeks and continue to have economies that thrive. Swedish and German workers average six weeks of paid vacation a year while Americans average only two and a half weeks. Men must be willing to share in house work, parenting, and community participation while valuing work in the home as highly as work on the job. President David O McKay said: “The home is the first and most effective place for children to learn the lessons of life: truth, honor, virtue, self-control; the value of education, honest work, and the purpose and privilege of life. Nothing can take the place of home in rearing and teaching children, and no other success can compensate for failure in the home.”

Choosing Religion

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, In Europe God is (not) dead explains how after decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. Because of this, scholars and theologians in Europe are debating a hot question: Why? The reason may be because centuries-old churches, long favored by the state, are loosing their monopoly grip and Europe's highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious "firms." Which, they say, is providing a supply-side stimulus to faith. This article proves to me how the concept of what religion is, is becoming more and more skewed. The idea that wherever churches are a little more energetic and competitive, you've got more people going to church, shows how people are looking for the church that best applies to their views rather than trying to find out what God’s views are, and apply themselves to those.

Continuing in the article, America, where church and state stand apart, has more than 50% of the population worshiping at least once a month. In Europe, where the state has often supported -- but also controlled -- the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less. Historically, in 1776 around 17% of Americans belonged to churches. That is about the same as the current proportion of the population in Belgium, France, Germany and the U.K. that worships at least once a month, according to 2004's European Union-funded European Social Survey. In the U.S., the American Revolution ended ecclesiastical hegemony in the 11 colonies that had an established church and unleashed a raucous tide of religious competition. As Methodists, Baptists, Shakers and other churches proliferated, church-going rose, reaching around 50% in the early part of the 20th century. Now, upstarts are now plugging new spiritual services across Europe, from U.S.-influenced evangelical churches to Christian sect that uses a hallucinogenic herbal brew as a stand-in for sacramental wine.

This shows that spirituality can be sold as people choose the denomination that is most compatible with their view of life, and then select the particular institution that they feel best embodies that view. But this is not how God works.

Many are unwilling to regard religious teachings as commandments, about which we have no choice, rather than suggestions, about which we are the ultimate judge. Religion consumers shop in the market until they find what they like. But you cannot approach the gospel as you would a buffet or smorgasbord, choosing here a little and there a little. You must sit down to the whole feast and live the Lord’s loving commandments in their fullness. Cecil B. DeMille stated, after exhaustive research for the epic motion picture The Ten Commandments: “We cannot break the Ten Commandments. We can only break ourselves against them.” These are the laws of God. Violate them and we suffer lasting consequences. Obey them and we reap everlasting joy.

This is not an easy concept for many to embrace as the “guilty taketh the truth to be hard, for it cutteth them to the very center” (1 Ne. 16:2). It is not politically correct and is gives no excuses. It is absolute truth weather you want to believe it or not. Like the scriptures say, the word of God is “quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow” (Doctrine and Convenants 6:2). When you are living a lifestyle that is against what God teaches it is difficult to change so people opt to try and “serve two masters” by living according to what they want to do and still trying to live the God wants them to, but it doesn’t work, “for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other” (Matt. 6:24).

Deciding on the War

The war in Iraq is already lost and the president is doing a terrible job according to approval ratings, which are at an all-time low. This seems to be the general consensus of Americans, but how do they come to this conclusion? Are people making educated decisions when it comes to the war and the president or is everyone really confused about the whole thing? I conclude that most people are more confused and riding on the anti bandwagon than anything else. I come to this conclusion by looking at the flawed way that people make decisions in that they are dooped into advertising style branding and falling for the trends of what is most popular. This is happening due to the overwhelming amount of information that creates a paradox of choice.
Opinions are more often bought as a lifestyle than made up in one’s own mind. We make choices based on experience but when it comes to choosing to like or dislike the president and the war we have little personal experience. So we not only use our own past experiences, but also the experiences and expertise of others. While gathering information, we need to know that the information is reliable, and we need to have enough time to get through all the info that is available. Information about current events and news now comes through more sources than ever before which make it neither reliable, nor does it give us enough time to go through it all. TV shows and channels provide information to be gathered but many times news is masquerading as entertainment, and is concerned less about the facts and more about high ratings. Also information is gathered through newspapers, magazines, opinions through music and movies, and now the expanse of the internet. Unfortunately, providing useful decision making information is not the point in all these kinds of news/information sources. Since there are so many options and different opinions, it makes it difficult for marketers to differentiate their products from similar ones. Instead of changing their product, they change the branding of the product to make customers think that its different, which is a lot easier. So now products are sold by associating the product with a glamorous life style. Many people fall for the branding done by advertisers and media companies and are buying into certain opinions because of the lifestyle associated with them instead of reading the facts and coming to their own conclusions.
People also accept what is most frequent and popular instead of accepting the facts. Lets say you may go to the source and read the data/news yourself to come to your own conclusion but then you hear of some vivid story from a friend that is rare but much more attention grabbing than the data you have studied yourself. It’s likely that you will give more weight to this extremely vivid information based on personal, detailed, face-to-face accounts than the information you gathered on your own. In one study, researchers asked respondents to estimate the number of deaths per year that occur as a result of various diseases, car accidents, natural disasters, homicides, etc.-forty different types in all. The results showed that the people surveyed thought that the deaths caused by accidents were equal to the amount of deaths caused from dieses, when in fact disease causes 16 times more deaths. Death from homicide was thought to be as frequent as death from stroke, when in fact eleven times more people die from strokes than by homicide. In conclusion, vivid deaths were overestimated and more mundane causes of deaths were underestimated. Continuing in this study, the researchers looked at two newspapers published on opposite sides of the U.S., and they counted the number of stories involving various causes of death. The frequency of newspaper coverage and the respondents estimates of frequency of death were almost perfectly correlated. People mistook the pervasiveness of stories about homicides and accidents as a sign of frequency of the events profiled. The same thing is happening with the coverage of Iraq. It doesn’t take long to see how every other article online is about President Bush’s and the Iraq war’s low approval rating. I think it is because of the regularity of negative aspects of Bush and the War that they have such low approval ratings.
So how come people are so susceptible to accepting trendy opinions and over-played news stories? I think it is because the amount of information is piling up and people are becoming overloaded and no one has the time to go through it all on their own.
Much of human progress has involved reducing the time and energy we spend for each of us to get the necessities of life. We moved from hunting and gathering to subsistence agriculture to when not every individual had to spend all his time everyday on filling his stomach. One could specialize in a certain skill and then trade it for other products. Manufactures made life easier still by selling food and clothing at the same general store. The variety was small but the time spent procuring them as small as well.
The same goes for finding information to make an educated decisions on issues like the war in Iraq. In the past, all information was taken from newspapers or from a few channels on TV. The variety of news was small but the time spent procuring it was small as well. But now thanks to the internet and democratization of information, this is the end of spoon fed orthodoxy and infallible institutions. We now have the tools to question authority. In theory, a society that asks questions and has the power to answer them is healthier than one that simply accepts what it is told from a narrow range of expert and institutions. But with too many sources of information, we become overloaded and opt to take the easiest source of news as the reliable one. If professional affiliation is no longer a proxy for authority, we need to develop our own gauges of quality. But the problem is, with so many choices, choice no longer liberates, but deliberates creating a paradox of choice.
In the past few decades that process of simplifying and bundling economic offerings in the general store, and bundling the news in the limited amount of channels, has been reversed. Increasingly the trend is moving us back to time-consuming foraging behavior once again, as each of us are forced to sift for ourselves through more and more options in almost every aspect of life including making up our minds on the situation in Iraq.
As the number of choices we face continue to escalate and the amount of information we need escalates with it, we may find ourselves increasingly relying on secondhand information. And as communication increases and becomes more global, each of us, no matter where we are, may end up relying on the same secondhand information. News sources like CNN tell everyone in the country the same story, which makes it less likely that an individual’s biased understanding of the evidence will be corrected by friends and neighbors. When you hear the same story everywhere you look and listen, you assume it to be true. And the more people believe that it’s true, the more likely they will repeat it, and thus the more likely you are to hear it. This is how inaccurate information can create a bandwagon effect leading to a broad but mistaken consensus.

Is everyone mistaken? Maybe, maybe not. But make sure its your opinion and not someone else's that your caliming to be your own.

In defense of peer-to-peer file sharing.

I say “illegal” music downloads help music more than it hurts it. It helps bands like librarys help publishers, it the helps radio, and it helps bands on tour.
These music sharing networks are a lot like librarys as explained by Stephen J. Dubner in his Freakonomics blog. Libraries help train young people to be readers; when those readers are older, they buy books. Downloading helps people apprecieate music and when they get older they buy music. Libraries expose readers to works by authors they wouldn’t have otherwise read; readers may then buy other works by the same author, or even the same book to have in their collection. Downloading songs helps young people develop a taste in music. It expands their horizons and gets them to purchase more for their collection. Libraries help foster a general culture of reading; without it, there would be less discussion, criticism, and coverage of books in general, which would result in fewer book sales. Downloading also leads to more discussion and coverage of lesser known bands.
A recent trend is using pirated music to help radios develop playlists as explained in this Wall Street Journal Article. The theory is that the songs attracting the most downloads online will also win the most listeners on the radio, helping stations sell more advertising. In turn, the service may even help the record labels, because radio airplay is still the biggest factor influencing record sales.
It makes sense for bands to give away their music to make more money on tour as explained here by Chris Anderson. The one thing that you can't digitize and distribute with full fidelity is a live show. That's scarcity economics. No wonder the average price for a ticket was $61 last year, up 8%. In an era when digital products are commodities, there's a premium on experience. No surprise that bands are increasingly giving away their recorded music as marketing for their concerts, which offer something no MP3 can match. Live performance is the fastest growing part of the music industry, up 16% in 2006 to a record $3.6 billion in North America.
For example, starting on June 25th and for 20 days, the band The Format will be giving away their entire 2006 full length, Dog Problems to all comers. The disc will be made available on the band's official website without restrictions. The band explained, “Owning our own publishing and master has allowed us the freedom to experiment,. We’d be doomed if we sat around and waited for things like radio play to come around. We’re just not that band. We understand the reality; kids aren’t buying music. We’re going to see if we can’t pick up 20,000 new sets of ears by offering the album for free. We’re betting that the money lost on those record sales will come back when people come see us live this summer. This will be a chance to share the album with your friends who haven't bought it or fileshared it.”They say file sharing has likely contributed to the continuing decline in the music business. U.S. music sales were down 7% last year after a 3% drop the year before. But I think that is because people have more options of where to get their music from other than the record store. People’s taste in music is becoming more diverse and less mainstream.

My Independent Movie Theater

I want to start my own independent movie theater and I think it’s a good idea. At the Jackson Hole Film Festival, June 7-11 2007, more than 750 movies were submitted and only 93 were accepted for the festival. What happens to the other 657 movies? Thousands of movies are sent into film festivals that only allow less than one hundred to be shown. With the increase in technology that makes independent film making easier and more widely available, more and more independent films are going to be made. Just look at how many independently made videos are on youtube.com where in July 2006, they announced that they hit 100 million videos served per day. There is an increase of independent movies being made but there is no increase of venues to show them.
My independent movie theater will also take advantage of strategies that conventional movie theaters can’t. My theater can maximize profits using the economic theories of supply and demand, which states that when demand is high and supply is low companies should raise prices, and when demand is low and supply is high, they should lower prices. Traditionally in a movie theater, a hugely popular movie will cost just as much as a less popular movie that’s on its 5th week of release. This strategy doesn’t make much sense. Just as retail stores mark down inventory to move it, the independent theater can mark down movies to lure more customers. We all know that millions of Americans who won’t shell out 8 dollars to see a not-so-great-movie in the theater will happily spend 3 or 4 dollars to watch the same movie on their home TV when it comes out to rent. To further this argument that lowering prices of less popular movies in the theater will increase box office sales, Americans spent 1 billion more on movie rentals than on movie theaters in 2002, which suggests that there is a lot of cash being spent at Blockbuster that theater owners could be claiming instead. If less people are going to a certain movie that costs 8 dollars, then the price will be lowered to 5 dollars to get more people into the seats. This strategy will maximize profits.
In a traditional movie theater, they only get to keep 25 percent or so of ticket sales in the first few weeks of a movies run. The percentage of ticket sales that the studio takes decreases each week that a movie is in the theater. During the film's opening week, the studio might take 70 to 80 percent of gross box office sales. By the fifth or sixth week, the percentage the studio takes will likely shrink to about 35 percent. This is why movies rely so much on concessions to make a profit.
On the other hand, in the independent movie theater, the price that the theater makes per ticket could be increased. This is possible because instead of having to show a big production studio’s movie in your theater on the big production company’s terms, you can show it on the terms between you and the independent filmmaker himself. Independent filmmakers are used to having to pay submission fees in order to get their movies shown in film festivals let alone make any money back. And more than anything, they just want their work to be seen. So more often than not, the independent theater could collect as much as 75 percent or more of ticket sales beginning opening night.
My independent theater could also make money off charging independent filmmakers to show trailers. Traditionally again, studios pay theaters for showing their trailers after the fact, based on the number of people who saw them. Studios send a couple of new trailers every week to the theater and then the theaters have to call in their numbers every night to the studios, and then the studio gives them 'x-amount' per person. This process could also be side stepped in an independent theater where a flat fee could be charged for an independent filmmakers trailer.
In addition, tidbits like local advertising and concessions can generate revenue for my independent theater as well. The theater could have slide projectors that show ads for local businesses that play before the movie begins. Having 15 advertisements that cost 100 dollars a week each can easily add up to as much as 6,000 dollars a month.
Then it comes down to just getting independent filmmakers to give you quality movies to show, and then getting people to come to the theater to watch them. Since independent films are inherently lesser known, this poses a slight problem. For it to really work, the theater would need to be in a big city where there are film schools and where film festivals take place. You could advertise just like any theater does but emphasize cheaper prices and that the films are independent. Like with any company, the best kind of marketing is through word of mouth. Recommendations that come from your peers are 100 percent more effective than a recommendation that comes from the company itself because your peer is speaking honestly and is unlikely to have an ulterior motive (i.e. they are not receiving an incentive for their referrals.) So, the independent theater would need to translate its idea to the public in a way that it is intriguing enough to get them to interact with it and then share it with others.
To get the news out there that this theater exists you can use pre-existing social networks, chain Emails, electronic mailing lists, a website, and blogs to spread the word, and you can put the theater’s website on every ticket stub and box of popcorn sold to motivate more participation. On the website, the trailers for any independent filmmaker’s movie could be uploaded and then people could vote with their Email addresses on which movie they would want to see most. They could also comment on the movie’s blog and forward the trailer to friends so they can vote as well. Then once the movie has enough votes to sell out a few showings, you email all those people who voted to tell them when the showings would start. Instead of pushing films into theaters with lots of marketing money, audience pull will be the way that more films get into theaters. In addition, to pass advertising onto others, by spreading the message across the Web like a virus, is at no cost to the Independent Movie Theater.
So there’s my idea.

The Wal-Mart effect

I finished reading The Wal-Mart Effect by Charles Fishman and here is my conclusion.

Wal-Mart, the largest company in history, is constantly being questioned about its practices. The way it treats its employees, the way it treats its suppliers, the way it treats its communities, and its motivation are under constant scrutiny from the public. Yet millions of people vote with their debit cards everyday to keep Wal-Mart around. Whether you shop at Wal-Mart or not, it has an effect on you as a consumer. There are always two sides to every criticism which I will show through this report. The objections to criticisms of Wal-Mart, and their positive sides, make me personally a fan of Wal-Mart.
The statistics of Wal-Mart, the world’s most powerful company, are staggering. Ninety percent of Americans live with in 15 miles of a Wal-Mart and 93 percent of American households shop at least once at Wal-Mart in a year. Wal-mart’s sales in the U.S. are equal to 2,060 dollars spent there by every household in the last year. This year 7.2 billion people will shop at a Wal-mart store. Wal-mart is also the largest retailer in both Mexico and Canada. Wal-Mart has 1.6 million employees. Wal-Mart is not only the largest company in the world it is also is unchallenged by its so-called rivals being as big as Home Depot, Kroger, Target, Costco, Sears, and Kmart combined.
The core of Wal-Mart’s success and everyday low prices stems from founder Sam Walton himself. Hard work, accountability, frugality, and constant improvement are some of Walton’s values that still last to this day. The typical worker at Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville Arkansas puts in 58 hours a week. They work 15 percent more hours than their competitors.
The level of frugality of Wal-Mart is unprecedented as they pass every last penny of savings on to the customer. Suppliers are required to give Wal-Mart toll free numbers to call them, offices at Wal-Mart headquarters are furnished with mismatched office furniture given to them from suppliers, and staffers who travel only have their tipping reimbursed up to 10 percent for a meal. Accountability is emphasized to the point of the dollar performance of Wal-Mart’s sales in every category. For example, Wal-Mart keeps track of the number of items per hour each of its checkout clerks scans at every cash register, at every store, for every shift as a means of measuring their productivity. These obsessive data gathering habits drive home the importance of accountability to the point where there is no hiding.
This culture, instilled by founder Sam Walton, to this day remains unchanged but the scale of Wal-Mart has. Walton died when there were 370,000 employees and sales of 44 billion. Now there are 1.2 million more employees and 240 billion more dollars in sales. These practices of get to work early, check your numbers constantly, and don’t spend money you don’t have to spend, got Wal-Mart to where it is today, but now these practices have transformed Wal-Mart into what seems to be borderline exploitive if not illegal because of its change in size.
Much of criticism towards Wal-Mart has to do with low wages, unrelenting pressure on suppliers, products cheap in quality as well as price, and offshoring of jobs.
First, on the topic of low wages; Wal-Mart declares proudly that the hourly wage of store employees is almost twice the federal minimum wage. However, for a single mom that means that she is taking home only 290 a week, hardly enough to support a family. Wal-Mart says that their retail jobs are meant as supplemental income; not to support a family. The problem with that is for two thirds of Americans Wal-Mart is the single largest employer where they live.
Wal-Mart wields its dominating power to transmit its relentless dissatisfaction with price towards its suppliers to keep those everyday low prices. Wal-Mart has the ability to reach deep inside the day-to-day operations of its suppliers and shape their operations, choices, and product mix to their liking. They form “partnerships” with their suppliers to take down the barrier between vendor and retailer to take costs out of the system. But too often this translates to businesses being chewed up and spit out by Wal-Mart’s bullying system. Wal-Mart takes control away from suppliers of everything from redesigning packages to computer systems if the supplier wants to sell at Wal-Mart. Wal- Mart tells its suppliers straightforwardly what it will pay for their goods. Wal-Mart’s suppliers cant consider themselves serious players unless they are doing business with Wal-Mart, then once they are doing business with them they are doing it on Wal-Marts terms and they no longer run their own business.
Because of Wal-Mart’s constant pressure for everyday low prices, some manufacturers have to make their products cheaper by changing the quality of the products themselves to be able to sell them at Wal-Mart’s low price. The core value of Levis blue jeans for example, is quality and durability. But to sell at Wal-Mart, a cheaper kind of denim is used and simpler designs. This creates a serviceable but utterly undistinguished pair of jeans that are both inexpensive and cheap, which turns inside out what Levis jeans have stood for for 150 years.
Eventually there are no more efficiencies to be wrung out of the supply chain; eventually the only way to lower costs is to manufacture outside of the U.S. There is no question that Wal-Mart is accelerating the loss of American jobs to low wage countries like China. Some people say that we are buying ourselves out of jobs by supporting Wal-Mart but Wal-Mart says that they created 100,000 new jobs in the U.S. in the year of 2004. But the truth is that actually when a new Wal-Mart opens up people don’t buy more products, they just shift where they buy those products. Much of Wal-Marts business comes at the expense of other retailers. So when Wal-Mart “increases” jobs, all it is really doing is taking the jobs away from other retailers that already existed in the community that have gone out of business because Wal-Mart came into town.
Even with all these negative viewpoints of Wal-Mart, I feel that Wal-Mart is the up most example of what is possible within the realm of a democratic free market. Wal-Mart is a testament to what American capitalism is all about. Wal-Mart does affect everyone, even if you don’t shop at Wal-Mart, but I don’t think it is capable of ever taking over completely.
When it comes to low wages; it’s true that Wal-Mart makes 10.3 billion in sales, but if you distribute that across the 1.6 million employees that’s only 6,400 dollars per employee. Wal-Mart makes 3 dollars an hour in total profit spread out over the year, so they wouldn’t be able to afford to pay 12 dollars an hour, even if they wanted to. There isn’t enough money-at least not without raising prices.
Most companies will beg for the opportunity to have Wal-Mart sell their product because Wal-Mart has such a large market share, but that doesn’t mean that a company needs to go through Wal-Mart to be successful. Some companies make it a conscious business strategy to not sell in Wal-Mart because the perception is that things sold in Wal-Mart are not quality products. No one really likes shopping at Wal-Mart; most people just go to buy things. Trekking through a Wal-Mart to find what you need feels more often like a chore than shopping. There will always be opportunity for other businesses to survive if they make their emphasis customer service and quality instead of price. Just yesterday (6/6/07) in the Wall Street Journal, there was an article entitled, “Not copying Wal-Mart Pays Off for Grocers”. It said, “The supermarkets are winning back shoppers by sharpening their differences with Wal-Mart's price-obsessed supercenters, stressing less-hectic stores with exotic or difficult-to-match products and greater convenience. Last year, sales at supermarkets open at least a year rose 4%, the biggest increase in five years, according to retail consultants.”
We have all seen U.S. factories being shut down to go overseas but at the same time, finding cheaper stuff is still too addictive for American consumers to give up and no one connects the two. Consumers will never be able to say no to a lower price even if it means we are buying ourselves out of jobs. What Americans need to realize is that continuing education is the only solution to offshoring. If we are constantly adding value to our work by increasing our ability to compete with the work of the world, and educating ourselves, then less jobs will be lost weather Wal-Mart encourages offshoring or not. Offshoring is not Wal-Mart’s fault.
Wal-Mart’s relentless goal of always low prices may persuade some suppliers to produce under sweat shop conditions or side step environmental rules, but where does Wal-Marts responsibility start and stop? Shouldn’t it be the government’s responsibility to enforce laws? According to Wal-Mart, their responsibility is to obey the law and deliver low prices. Even though they could potentially use their power to solve some of the environmental and labor problems that the industries that it relies on create, where is the line? And once you open the door to considerations other than what’s required by law, to considerations other than what’s required to improve efficiency and decrease cost; where will the demands end? What won’t people ask of Wal-Mart?
I salute Wal-Mart and its efforts to be the best retailer in history. If I start a business I want to be able to know that there is no limit to my company’s potential. I enjoy everyday low prices and I also know that Wal-Mart just ads to innovation, better quality, and better customer service everywhere else.

Free Distribution

The one problem I’ve had with the distribution of everything on the Internet has been: how does anyone make any money off of all this? I never pay for anything that I get off the internet. I also never pay attention to advertisements on websites so I don’t see how anyone is making money that way either. The thought came to me after reading a post by Chris Anderson entitled, Ebooks want to be free. What about audio books? Feb 4, 2007. Talking about his book, The Long Tail, being pirated, he says, “My publishers want to make money, and I like them so I usually do what it takes to keep them happy, but in truth I just want to be read/listened to by the largest number of people. Leave it to me to figure out how to convert that reputational currency into cash--just get me in front of the biggest audience and I'll do the rest. My agent doesn't want to hear this, but I'd rather take a smaller up-front advance or lower royalties in exchange for more liberty in distributing free versions, because I think I'll actually be better off in the end.” What does he mean when he says, “just get me in front of the biggest audience and I'll do the rest?” What is he going to do? Because up until now I have read his book, his blog and anything else I can find that he has done and I have yet to pay one red cent. As I looked more into this I discovered that there are some advantages to distributing your stuff for free like more publicity, word of mouth and making revenues in different ways. But from my point of view I would say making money by giving it away is still a long shot. The more stuff is given away for free on the internet, the more people avoid buying the real thing, expecting it to come out for free at some point on the internet anyway. Whenever I hear about anything that has come out I always search for it online first to see if it is out there for free somewhere. And if its not I’m patient enough until it is.
“Free ideas spread faster than expensive ones,” says Seth Godlin in his post called You should write an ebook March 28 2007. Explaining how his first ebook, Unleashing the Idea Virus came about, he says, “I brought it to my publisher and said, "I'd like you to publish this, but I want to give it away on the net." They passed. They used to think I was crazy, but now they were sure of it. So I decided to just give it away. The first few days, the book was downloaded 3,000 times. The next day, the number went up. And then up. Soon it was 100,000 and then a million. The best part of all is that I intentionally made the file small enough to email. Even without counting the folks who emailed it hundreds of times to co-workers, it's easily on more than 2,000,000 computers. I didn't ask anything in return. No centralized email tool. Here it is. Share it. Some will ask, "how much money did you make?" And I think a better question is, "how much did it cost you?" How much did it cost you to write the most popular ebook ever and to reach those millions of people and to do a promotion that drove an expensive hardcover to #5 on Amazon and #4 in Japan and led to translation deals in dozens of countries and plenty of speaking gigs? It cost nothing.” So with this story it looks like giving away your stuff for free serves as a marketing and publicity tool. Bands also use this technique by giving away their music for free and making the profit at the live shows.
Cory Doctorow wrote an article for Forbes.com entitled Giving It Away, where he explains in more detail how profit can be made from giving your books away on the internet. “Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales. But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber lost sales, I'm ahead of the game.” Many people aren’t going to buy your stuff anyway so you might as well give it to them for free; people like me who are moochers who never buy anything until it is made for free.
The most important thing that an author can have is the peers of others recommending their book. Doctorow continues, “Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.” That is a main advantage that free distribution provides-people are a lot more likely to buy something from a peers recommendation than from a companies.
“Having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans' tireless evangelism for my work doesn't just sell books--it sells me.”
So up until now I may not have paid anything for all the entertainment that I get off of the internet, but I am a fan of some people that I wasn’t a fan of before the internet made it possible for me to discover them. Possibly in the future if they offer something like an event that can’t be ripped, pirated or distributed for free, perhaps then I will end up paying them something. But who knows when or if that ever that will happen.