Friday, January 24, 2003

Peter van der Linden on the back in the african american legend: The story was just too ripe to ignore: a cow-town paper, in a guache attempt to emulate the sophisticated big city press, falls flat on its face. Sure enough the big city press was quick to lampoon their rural rival. Herb Caen was the first to jump on the bandwagon, reporting in The San Francisco Chronicle on July 26 1990: Being politically correct has its occasional problems. For instance, this correction in the July 21 Fresno Bee: "An item in Thursday's Nation Digest about the Massachusetts budget crisis made reference to new taxes that will help put Massachusetts 'back into the African American.' That item should have said 'back in the black.'" . . . . . . . It's still funny, but the joke is on those who think the joke is on the Fresno Bee. . . . The lessons of this piece of urban folklore bear repeating: there is more to the story than you saw reported in the big papers it was a deliberate substitution done as a prank, rather than an inadvertent act of the naive. the perpetrator got off scot-free this kind of prank is very common. Hint, hint. 1:48:01 PM    comment []

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An Institutional History of the Concept of Bounded Rationality, Matthias Klaes (PDF). 8:46:36 AM    comment []

Who's Minding the Store?: Overwhelmed by the complexities of today's marketplace, retailers are essentially letting vendors run much of their business. Here's the method to their madness. By Andrew Raskin, Business 2.0. Borders Group (BGP) used to pride itself on stocking its bookstores with the widest selection possible in a brick-and-mortar establishment. In its cooking section, for instance, there were always more than 10 titles about sushi, including Sushi for Parties, the more supportive Squeamish About Sushi, and The Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls, a definitive tome that explains, among other things, how to spell your name in makimono. Now, Borders is planning to yank half of those sushi how-tos from its shelves. Why? In part because HarperCollins, the nation's third- largest publishing house, told it to. Welcome to the world of "category management," a bizarre and controversial place in which the nation's biggest retailers ask one supplier in a category to figure out how best to stock their shelves. You'd expect HarperCollins to tell Borders which of its own books are hot, of course. But that's not what's going on here. Borders has essentially tapped Harper to advise it on what cookbooks to carry from all other publishers as well. Strange as it may sound, category management is now standard practice at nearly every U.S. supermarket, convenience store, mass merchant, and drug chain. And its use is growing because it works -- at least from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. . . . . . . . Lured by the savings and convenience of getting manufacturers to mind the store, retailers have ceded not only responsibility for their shelves but also any hope of differentiating themselves. According to this story, the practice began with Schnucks supermarkets, here in St. Louis. Print version of the Business 2.0 story. Coverage from last summer: Writers Are Wary of Market Research Plan, by David D. Kirkpatrick, NYT. Category Management Raises Curiosity, and Some Concerns, for Houses, by Steven Zeitchik, Publishers Weekly 4:45:10 AM    comment []