Tag: Consumers

The War on Self-Checkouts

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman reportedly visited a construction site in a foreign country. To his surprise, the canal builders used no heavy machinery and instead armed thousands of men with shovels. He questioned the bureaucrat about this odd...

Goodbye Christmas

Let’s stop using the birth of Christ as an excuse to expand the economy. Increasingly today, nobody cares about December 25th. Rather, it has become just a day for retailers to restock shelves with goods that they have in inventory in hopes of...

Things that Baffle: Part I

To “baffle” means to to defeat by confusing or puzzling. Do any of the following baffle you? Do American taxpayers understand their tax system? We get refunds because we’ve overpaid our taxes! By doing so, we’ve just made a...

I’m Happy that It’s Here, but Beware

From Thanksgiving to New Years, the scams, the charities, both good and bad, the telephone calls for the Police Sergeants Fund, the theft of packages off porches, the theft from cars in the Malls, on and on. They all come out of the wood work to...

Read the Fine Print

Most of the solicitations that we receive in the mail are not worth the paper that they are printed on. Department stores exclude most major purchases from their 15% or 20% coupons as a matter of course along with hundreds of exclusions if you take...

Today’s Consumer Better Be Sharp

Never before has there been more deceptive and clever advertising and products that are not what they used to be. If you are not a vigilante, you stand the chance of either over spending, getting a product that you do not want, or to be outright...

Is Black Thursday The New Thanksgiving?

Is Black Thursday The New Thanksgiving?

Each year it seems to get worse.  I can remember just a few short years ago when the stores battled as to which of them would open at 4:00 AM on Black Friday. It kept getting moved back to a point when I remember Midnight as the time that the...