Sunday, March 23, 2008
ABC News Goodies
I was watching ABC News this evening and was piqued by two different things that appeared as part of two different stories. Story #1 highlighted a return of the barter economy in the US. For anyone who has family members who either survived the Great Depression or spent a substantial amount of time going to garage sales, they may wonder why I am writing about the barter economy in the past tense. Bartering is simply an act involving an exchange between two or more individuals whereby the "true" cost of a good is realized (what the consumer is willing to pay and what the producer is willing to sell and still make a profit). For those who studied the Soviet Union, you will remember the statistic that 1/3 of the Soviet economy was kept afloat via the underground, or "barter" economy.
So on ABC News tonight, they highlighted upper middle-class individuals in a mall who find out that they can actually negotiate with the staff for a reduced price on a particular good--bartering. Many admitted to having no ideal you could do that, and those who were told about it admitting to being too embarrassed to try. Yet the journalist reporting the story noted that retailers were seeing more people who are negotiating the "suggested retail price," a result of what "some" call "the Ebay phenomenon." Since I generally pay attention to new theories surrounding human behavior, I wondered why I had not come across this particular "phenomenon," especially since so many ("some") were writing and talking about.
So I Googled the phrase "Ebay phenomenon," and I generally got a lot of hits to websites that tell you ways to make money on Ebay (hence anything whereby the average "schlub" can make a lot of money is regarded as queer or atypical, or as a "phenomenon"). A search of Lexis-Nexis turns up nothing related to a connection between using Ebay and bartering for merchandise, although it did turn up a similar story from a year ago--ironically enough on ABC News--about people making a lot of money after cleaning out their closets and selling their old stuff on Ebay.
No, this particular report, with its reference to "some" who are calling the new "bartering" phenomenon the "Ebay phenomenon" is actually a reference to one single story (sub. req.) that appeared today in the "New York Times." Titled EVEN AT MEGASTORES, HAGGLERS FIND NO PRICE IS SET IN STONE, reporter Matt Richtel explores this new trend in bartering, and even finds an expert to give him the full Monty. Richtel interviews "Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School (and they tell me that my research is too obscure), who tells us that
If I were to be a curmudgeon, I might think that this story was pushed onto ABC News by retailers battling a sluggish economy, looking at any way possible to bring bodies back to the stores, but I am not that cynical.
What should not escape notice, however, is how we should question any report that refers to the allusive "some" or "they," as in "they say..."
The second ABC News story focused on one crackpot scientist who is debunking global warming (and previously debunked Hazard waste residuals and second hand smoke science). The story gave us no sense of just how much evidence exists that separates the two (on one side those who ring the alarm bells about global warming vs. those who tells us to sit tight and continue to buy Hummers). In fact, the story shows a "scientific" conference where this individual was speaking, whereby the conference hall was filled by applauding audience members as this guy spoke.
But this isn't what got my dander up. What did get my dander up (and onto the shoulders of my black T-shirt) was a website used by a researcher for an environmental friendly to find out how much corporate money these "scientists" are taking for speaking out against those who raise the kind of alarm bells that result in regulations and lawsuits. Why is there a need for this kind of third party information in the first place? Because the US media--in their desire for "objectivity," tells only two sides of a story without giving their audience any context for the information. Thus there can be a mountain of information on one side and a penny's worth of information on the other side, and our media will present the two as if they are equal. So when you ask why the US seems to be so far behind the rest of the industrialized world on the issue of global warming is because most Americans have been falsely led to believe that the evidence on that issue is up for debate.
Back to the website. The reporter continued to talk about this website but never once gave its name. They did, however, show a couple of video shots while the "tree hugging" researcher brought it up on his laptop. It is affiliated with Greenpeace, and it is called "Exxon's Secrets" that in this case shows how much money Exxon pays out to hired guns in academia for PR purposes. Try it out. Results might surprise you. Granted, this is not to suggest that you should read the data uncritically, but instead strive towards the more information you have, the better off you will be.
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So on ABC News tonight, they highlighted upper middle-class individuals in a mall who find out that they can actually negotiate with the staff for a reduced price on a particular good--bartering. Many admitted to having no ideal you could do that, and those who were told about it admitting to being too embarrassed to try. Yet the journalist reporting the story noted that retailers were seeing more people who are negotiating the "suggested retail price," a result of what "some" call "the Ebay phenomenon." Since I generally pay attention to new theories surrounding human behavior, I wondered why I had not come across this particular "phenomenon," especially since so many ("some") were writing and talking about.
So I Googled the phrase "Ebay phenomenon," and I generally got a lot of hits to websites that tell you ways to make money on Ebay (hence anything whereby the average "schlub" can make a lot of money is regarded as queer or atypical, or as a "phenomenon"). A search of Lexis-Nexis turns up nothing related to a connection between using Ebay and bartering for merchandise, although it did turn up a similar story from a year ago--ironically enough on ABC News--about people making a lot of money after cleaning out their closets and selling their old stuff on Ebay.
No, this particular report, with its reference to "some" who are calling the new "bartering" phenomenon the "Ebay phenomenon" is actually a reference to one single story (sub. req.) that appeared today in the "New York Times." Titled EVEN AT MEGASTORES, HAGGLERS FIND NO PRICE IS SET IN STONE, reporter Matt Richtel explores this new trend in bartering, and even finds an expert to give him the full Monty. Richtel interviews "Nancy F. Koehn, a retail historian at the Harvard Business School (and they tell me that my research is too obscure), who tells us that
...the shift to bargaining in malls and on Main Street is a considerable change from even 10 years ago, Ms. Koehn said, when studies showed that consumers did not like to bargain and did not consider themselves good at it. “Call it the eBay phenomenon,” Ms. Koehn said.“The recession is helping to push these seedlings to the surface,” she added. “It’s a real turnabout on the part of the buyer and the seller.”
If I were to be a curmudgeon, I might think that this story was pushed onto ABC News by retailers battling a sluggish economy, looking at any way possible to bring bodies back to the stores, but I am not that cynical.
What should not escape notice, however, is how we should question any report that refers to the allusive "some" or "they," as in "they say..."
The second ABC News story focused on one crackpot scientist who is debunking global warming (and previously debunked Hazard waste residuals and second hand smoke science). The story gave us no sense of just how much evidence exists that separates the two (on one side those who ring the alarm bells about global warming vs. those who tells us to sit tight and continue to buy Hummers). In fact, the story shows a "scientific" conference where this individual was speaking, whereby the conference hall was filled by applauding audience members as this guy spoke.
But this isn't what got my dander up. What did get my dander up (and onto the shoulders of my black T-shirt) was a website used by a researcher for an environmental friendly to find out how much corporate money these "scientists" are taking for speaking out against those who raise the kind of alarm bells that result in regulations and lawsuits. Why is there a need for this kind of third party information in the first place? Because the US media--in their desire for "objectivity," tells only two sides of a story without giving their audience any context for the information. Thus there can be a mountain of information on one side and a penny's worth of information on the other side, and our media will present the two as if they are equal. So when you ask why the US seems to be so far behind the rest of the industrialized world on the issue of global warming is because most Americans have been falsely led to believe that the evidence on that issue is up for debate.
Back to the website. The reporter continued to talk about this website but never once gave its name. They did, however, show a couple of video shots while the "tree hugging" researcher brought it up on his laptop. It is affiliated with Greenpeace, and it is called "Exxon's Secrets" that in this case shows how much money Exxon pays out to hired guns in academia for PR purposes. Try it out. Results might surprise you. Granted, this is not to suggest that you should read the data uncritically, but instead strive towards the more information you have, the better off you will be.
