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Cool Books Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s Cooking with All Things Trader Joe’s is not authorized by the retailer, but so far it has not done anything to stop it, reports Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the Wall Street Journal (11/3/08). The idea came from two former M.I.T. classmates, Wona Miniati and Deana Gunn, who first published the book a year ago, and have since sold some 20,000 copies. The breakthrough came when a story about the book appeared in the Sacramento Bee, causing Borders to begin stocking it. Obviously, this isn’t the way things normally work with cookbooks, sales of which “are primarily driven by chefs featured on the Food Network.” Not only that, but cookbook sales in general are declining. As Wona explains: “I used to cook from scratch but as my career took off and I had kids, the time I had for cooking was squeezed out.” The only real glitch is that Trader Joe’s sometimes discontinues items featured in the cookbook. In such cases, she and Deana post substitutions online (cookingwithtraderjoes.com). The co-authors say they recently laid in a fresh supply of 50,000 more copies.
The Customer Is Always Wrong Twenty-one writers — including “two comedians, a musician and a poet” — contribute essays to The Customer Is Always Wrong, edited by Jeff Martin and reviewed by Mark Lasswell in the Wall Street Journal (11/12/08). All of these writers have worked at retail, and nearly all of them “considered the work an ordeal.” Michael Beaumier, for instance, a regular on NPR’s This American Life, said his job in the “home section of a department store” was depressing because he had nowhere near the star-power of the kitchenware. In fact, his boss even told him, “It’s not about you. It’s about the merchandise.” Michael claims his boss could make a display of “toothpicks and used Kleenex,” and be sold out by afternoon. Another writer, Becky Poole, managed to find happiness at retail, however. Her job was at a wine shop “in the hipster-magnet Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and the store wasn’t so much a commercial enterprise as … a place to swap naughty stories, share thoughts, poems and songs.” The lesson here might be that retailers should never hire writers, poets or comedians. Or maybe it’s that they should just let them tell their stories and have a little fun with their customers.
Horse Trading in the Age of Cars Car dealers, “despite their seedy reputation in general, are often linchpins of their communities,” writes John Stoll, in a Wall Street Journal book review of Horse Trading in the Age of Cars,” by Steven M. Gelber (12/3/08). John bases this observation, in part, on his car-dealer father, who was “a leader in our church, who bought 15-passenger vans and gave them to homeless shelters.” His great-grandfather, on the other hand, felt his “crowning achievement was selling a black Packard to Al Capone in the 1930s.” Steven Gelber traces this conflict back to the mid-1800s, when haggling was the norm for just about every kind of transaction, among both men and women. But as most household products became standardized, pricing did too. Not so for horses, though, because there was nothing “standard” about a horse. And so horse-trading, and then car-selling, became something of a man’s game, with guys doing their best to trick each other into paying more than they should. As one ’70s-era car dealer bragged: “I make most of my money off my friends. They aren’t looking for you to screw them so you can really sock it to them.” He went on to boast about how he sold his own sister a fully-loaded car at top dollar. Steven suggests that this “moral obtuseness is virtually guaranteed by the structure of the business, in which supply outstrips demand.” Lucky for us, today there’s Edmunds.com. --
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