Inside selling Apple

Macs Rawk. (but we already know this.) This story shows that from the inside.

At an Apple Store, workers don't seem to be selling (or working) too hard, just hanging out and dispensing information. And that moves a ridiculous amount of goods: Apple employees help sell $4,000 worth of product per square foot per month. When employees become sharers of information, instead of sellers of products, customers respond.

credit: FastCompany via Critical Miami

E. Coli in the frozen pizza aisle

Frak! My favorite fall-back food item just got fucked.

MINNEAPOLIS - General Mills on Thursday recalled about 5 million frozen pizzas sold nationwide under the Totino's and Jeno's labels because of possible E. coli contamination.

The problem may have come from pepperoni on pizzas produced at a General Mills plant in Ohio, the suburban Minneapolis-based company said. It said the pepperoni itself came from a separate supplier, not produced at the plant itself, but it declined to release the name of the pepperoni distributor.

The voluntary recall covers pizzas containing pepperoni that have been produced since July, when the first of 21 E. coli illnesses under investigation by state and federal authorities emerged.

credit: AP

What the fuck is going on with our food? [x-post'd at Omens and Oracles]

Getting greener 'Glades-style

A Web site to help Mia-muh become eco-savvy.

Wanamaker's Organ

Story from the NYTimes

What do you do if you buy a famous downtown department store and find an organ with 28,482 pipes occupying thousands of square feet of perfectly good retail space?
If you’re Macy’s, you let devotees of the instrument put in 61 more pipes and give them thousands more square feet to set up an organ repair shop.
Diapasons, it would seem, are as much music to Macy’s as cash registers, coin counters and customers at its Center City store here, a Philadelphia institution that was originally a Wanamaker’s. So the company let the Friends of the Wanamaker Organ, a private group of aficionados who have been helping to maintain the instrument for years, install another stop and set up a repair shop after Macy’s took over the store.

That's no ordinary organ...

The organ, the world’s largest operating musical instrument, has never sounded better, according to the store’s staff organist, Peter Richard Conte, who has been here 20 years and fills the place with warm waves of sound at noon and in the evening, daily except Sunday.
“In 1995 it was down to about 20 percent of the pipes being playable, maybe,” and only two keyboards working instead of six, Mr. Conte said. “Now it sounds loved again.”
With money from private donors and more than $100,000 from Macy’s this year, the staff curator, L. Curt Mangel III, with his assistant, the Friends and numerous organ groupies, now have 95 percent of the organ playing again. Next year they expect to have it all up and running for the first time in decades.

Built more than a century ago...

The instrument started life at the St. Louis International Exposition of 1904, when the Los Angeles Art Organ Company built it along orchestral lines, rather than according to the baroque organ ideal, as Bach and Buxtehude knew it.
It was a smash hit at the fair, but bankrupted the company. Then it languished in storage until 1909, when John Wanamaker bought it for the Philadelphia store that he was planning to open two years later.
His son, Lewis Rodman Wanamaker, saw the vast, 149-foot-high Grand Court center space in the building Daniel Hudson Burnham had designed for them as the ideal place for “the finest organ in the world,” and 40,000 people and President William Howard Taft came to the dedication ceremonies on Dec. 30, 1911.

The kicker, from Conte:

“Macy’s gets it — it understands how to use this instrument and market it to the public.”

Eye Infections tied to contact lens cleaning solution

from the NYT...

Acanthamoeba keratitis is caused by a parasite, can be difficult to detect and is hard to treat. This outbreak has involved at least 138 patients.

Last year, an outbreak of fusarium keratitis was caused by a fungus; there were 164 confirmed cases. It was linked to ReNu With MoistureLoc made by Bausch & Lomb, but how the product caused the problem is unknown.

Epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have linked the acanthamoeba keratitis outbreak to AMO Complete Moisture Plus Multi-Purpose Solution. Advanced Medical Optics of Santa Ana, Calif., manufactures the solution, which is used to clean and store soft contact lenses.

Plastic Water Bottles : Unintended Consquences

from the NYTimes mag

This year, Americans will drink more than nine billion gallons of bottled water, nearly all of it from polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, plastic bottles. Water, together with other nonfizzy drinks, accounted for 90 percent of the growth of the entire beverage industry between 2002 and 2005. By the end of the decade, they are expected to outsell soda.

It's an oil issue:

Americans will throw out more than two million tons of PET bottles this year. Even when recycled, it is hard to turn scrap PET into new bottles. More virgin material is always necessary. PET is a petroleum product; it comes from oil. The Container Recycling Institute estimates that 18 million barrels of crude-oil equivalent were needed to replace the bottles we chucked in 2005, bottles that were likely shipped long distances to begin with —from Maine or Calistoga or Fiji.

Solution?

... the bottle bill is designed to hold industry accountable for the disposal of its products. This accountability has practical, not just philosophical, benefits: forcing companies to take back their empties has ensured they make their containers recyclable and build markets for the scrap. (It is because of the bottle bill that fleece jackets, mattresses and carpeting are now made from recycled plastic bottles; recycled bottles have become one of the most valuable scrap materials.) Nevertheless, defenses of the bottle bill often boil down to an insistence that the essential rightness of its principle, the idea of producer responsibility, simply outweighs its many other costs and inconveniences — particularly since the bulk of those costs and inconveniences are borne by the industry. That’s only just.

FUN FACT:

Globally, Nestlé owns 72 different brands of water, including Poland Spring, Deer Park and Arrowhead

Tribune, you suck

Cross-post with another on of my blogs. Bob Norman's post (link above)on Flower's boot from her beat at the Sun-Sentinel. Stupid newspaper penny pinchers.


Pulp writes:

And there are murmurings that this could be a Tribune Company-wide trend that could kill local movie coverage in a number of Tribune newspaper towns.

Otherr commenters note:

Tribune will have one central copy editing system operating for all of its newspapers in a few weeks. Local copy desk staffs around the country will work on the same CCI system producing their own newspapers. Once that happens, all Tribune newspapers can share previously edited stories with photos and graphics already attached. The newsroom is rife with speculation about which coverage and sections will be produced by Tribune, with a local designer to fit the chain-wide copy around the ads. Travel? TV? Books? National and international news? Business? Whatever the plan is, the Sun-Sentinel is moving to a universal copy desk to handle the changed workflow.

Yeah. Those of us in the biz know how important it is to make friends with the copy desk. Dude, how do I bring donuts to a universal desk. Not to mention -- papers are supposed to be local.

Another poster notes:

The S-S also is not replacing horse racing writer Dave Joseph, who left to work for the Bank Atlantic Center in Sunrise.

Bad, bad, bad news...

Poisoned Toothpaste in Panama -> from China

From the NYTimes:

Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China.

This is the second time this has happened.

Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that episode the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China.

Hillary and Wal-Mart

Things I didn't realize about Ms. Clinton and Wal-Mart:

• she was there for six years from 1986 to 1992, which was a long time ago. Not thrilled she was on this board, but let's keep the time frame in context for fairness. She doesn't seem proud of it:

Mrs. Clinton rarely, if ever, discusses it, leaving her board membership out of her speeches and off her campaign Web site.

Fellow board members and company executives, who have not spoken publicly about her role at Wal-Mart, say Mrs. Clinton used her position to champion personal causes, like the need for more women in management and a comprehensive environmental program, despite being Wal-Mart’s only female director, the youngest and arguably the least experienced in business. On other topics, like Wal-Mart’s vehement anti-unionism, for example, she was largely silent, they said.

• She gave back a $5,000 donation in 2005 from Wal-Mart because of “serious differences” with the company.

• Wal-Mart is based in Arkansas, duh. Forgot about that connection.There's still ties, via Bill and the company's top dog H. Lee Scott Jr.

from NYTimes. Photo credit: Richard Berquist of the 1990 board.

More on the Pet Food recall

"Also Friday, the company that produced the food expanded its recall to include all 95 brands of the "cuts and gravy" style food, regardless of when they were produced."

95 brands --- all really from the same place. That the Iams food is made by the same company that make that cat food for Food Lion's generic label.

The power of marketing. The illusion of choice.

And I wonder if the company plays a bit of a re-packaging trick. The recall notice on the site also notes:

"If you are in possession of a variety or multi-pack, please be sure to check the individual can or pouch rather than relying solely on the date coding on the side of the carton."

Why would the carton have a different date coding?

Expanded Menu Foods recall list here for Cats

For Dogs

Purina said as

"a precautionary measure, it is voluntarily withdrawing its 5.3 ounce Mighty Dog® brand pouch products that were produced by Menu Foods, Inc. from December 3, 2006 through March 14, 2007."

The product isn't on the Menu Foods recall list, but since Purina uses them for that product, it's taking that extra step as a precaution. Good for them. That's good business, as in responsible.

Hill's® Pet Nutrition is doing the same thing with it's Science Diet for cats.

P&G Pet Care did so for Iams and Eukanuba and noted of reports of illness in cats. No dogs so far.

More from Iams and anFAQ .

The Barista Bitch Session

Click link above; credit to Romensko.

Quit bitching about the names of everything. Yes, there is a “tall" size. No, it’s not the smallest size – that would be the “short.” Somewhere along the line, it got dropped from the menu, but can still be ordered. It doesn’t make much sense to me either, but I didn’t come up with the nomenclature for this shit. Order by the names on the menu, because I’ve had people ask for a "medium coffee" and get inexplicably pissed off when I give them a grande. Which is a medium coffee. If you eat at McDonald’s, you put a “Mc” in front of just about everything – get the f+ck over yourself and get used to it

Vice President of Cake

From Newsweek:

If you've ever puzzled over why packaged foods contain "polysorbate 60" or "mono and diglycerides," Ettlinger's new book, "Twinkie, Deconstructed ," is a treat you'll want to try. Chapter by chapter, Ettlinger—the author of previous food books like "Beer for Dummies"—decodes all 39 ingredients in the little crème-filled cakes. He explains their uses and the processes by which raw materials are "crushed, baked, fermented, refined and/or reacted into a totally unrecognizable goo or powder with a strange name," which then appears on a label full of other incomprehensible and barely pronounceable ingredients. Unraveling it all was a major undertaking—and Ettlinger received no help from Hostess and its parent company, Interstate Brands Corp., despite appealing directly to the Vice President of Cake.

At the heart of the book is the fundamental question: why is it you can bake a cake at home with as few as six ingredients, but Twinkies require 39? And why do many of them seem to bear so little resemblance to actual food? The answer: To stay fresh on a grocery-store shelf, Twinkies can't contain anything that might spoil, like milk, cream or butter. Once you remove such real ingredients, something has to take their place—and cellulose gum, lecithin and sodium stearoyl lactylate are a good start. Add the fact that industrial quantities of batter have to pump easily through automated tubes into cake molds, and you begin to get the idea

But it charges money

This would be so much cooler if there was no membership fee. Two versions: Bad Cop , Good Cop.

Hmm, wait ... it seems that Good Cop is for free.

"What the newspaper industry needs right now is a good publicist"

In January, the Newspaper Association of America announced it was launching a new marketing campaign. Sample copy: "Wait till you see what's in tomorrow's newspaper.... It's not the paper you grew up with. America's newspapers are now delivering their product on Web sites, podcasts, and e-mails." The tagline: "Newspaper. The Multi-Medium."

Catchy, huh? Forget the journalism; it's all about media platforms. Here's another idea: Big picture of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, with an inset photo of the wounded Iraq veterans who spilled their horror stories on Capitol Hill this week. Below, in an enormous bold red letters: "WHO GOT THIS STORY? A NEWSPAPER, THAT'S WHO."

As every good flack knows, public image is a precious thing. Use it or lose it.

~ William Powers, National Journal

A Wal-Mart November

I doubt there is a connection but it's kinda ironic.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) on Thursday forecast flat November sales at U.S. stores open at least a year, sounding a sour note for the start of the vital holiday shopping season and sending its stock lower in early electronic trading.

The world's biggest retailer also said October U.S. same-store sales rose a paltry 0.5 percent, its smallest gain in more than two years and below its lowered expectations.

Total sales rose 11.7 percent to $25.71 billion for the four-week period ended October 27.

Good luck to those kids doing the Wal-mart November thing. I hope it picks up for them in the coming years,

Starbucks, O Starbucks

Yeaaaah.... you know ....

The Starbucks Aesthetic

October 22, 2006
By SUSAN DOMINUS

WHEN Bette Gottfried, a 48-year-old regular at a Starbucks in Ardsley, N.Y., saw that her favorite coffeehouse was promoting a film, she wasn’t immediately interested. “At first I was leery,” said Ms. Gottfried, dressed in workout clothes, wearing her hair in a ponytail and sitting near the window with her daily decaf mocha (“low-fat milk, no foam, no whipped”). “I thought, ‘Who are they to get involved in the movies?’ ”

Ultimately, however, she decided to take her 9-year-old daughter to see the film, “Akeelah and the Bee,” precisely because of the involvement of Starbucks. “I trusted seeing the movie, because it was promoted here,” she said. After all, she liked the company’s coffee; she had already bought and liked several CD’s it produced and sold, compilations of music by Carole King, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Why wouldn’t she like a Starbucks movie? She did, and now she’s considering picking up its latest cultural sales item: “For One More Day,” a book by Mitch Albom.

But Ms. Gottfried’s question is a valid one. Starbucks is clearly very good at selling coffee, but why should it become involved in the movies — and books and CD’s, for that matter? And why would consumers trust its taste in books and films any more than they’d trust, say, Simon & Schuster’s taste in Ethiopia Gemadro Estate decaf?

Yeaaaah.... you know ....

In an early misstep, Starbucks started offering Joe, a literary magazine that appeared in 1999 and lasted all of six months before Mr. Schultz decided, on the basis of slow sales, that the product “didn’t add any value.” But since then Starbucks has successfully promoted a slew of hits, from the Ray Charles CD “Genius Loves Company,” a joint venture with Concord Records that won several Grammy Awards and sold 800,000 copies at Starbucks alone, to a recent CD of Meryl Streep reading “The Velveteen Rabbit.”

Interestingly enough:

The heart of that audience is a group the company refers to as its “core customers” — educated, with an average age of 42 and an average income of $90,000.

And this part, sigh:

A major player in the company’s music business is Timothy Jones, manager of compilations and music programming. Mr. Jones, 58, ran a small independent record shop in Seattle until 1987, when his business folded and he started managing the Starbucks across the street. Customers there asked if they could buy the mixes of Ella Fitzgerald and Miles Davis he was playing, and that’s how it all got started.

Mac

Starbucks: An expression of my hypocracy

sent by Tamika who snatched it from Netscape Home Page in the “What’s New” section

The Dirty Little Secret of Starbucks Coffee

That Starbucks coffee you're sipping on the way to work, as a mid-morning pick-me-up and an afternoon treat could be making you fat. Very fat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a.k.a. "the food police," has issued this startling pronouncement: A 20-ounce Venti banana mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream contains 720 calories and 11 grams of saturated fat, while a banana cream crunch bar chalks up a stunning 630 calories and 25 grams of saturated fat. By comparison, a McDonald's Big Mac has 560 calories and 11 grams of saturated fat.

Look out Starbucks! You may be the next target on CSPI's hit list, reports Reuters. This is the group that made a big name for itself several years ago attacking movie theater popcorn. Just recently they made headlines for suing KFC owner Yum Brands for frying the KFC chicken in oils that are high in trans fats, which are solid fats found in partially hydrogenated oils. Trans fats are known to clog arteries and raise the risk of heart disease and obesity. CSPI executive director Michael F. Jacobson cleverly said, "Regular consumers of Starbucks products could face Venti-sized health problems."

So what does CSPI want Starbucks to do? List the nutrition information on its menu boards. That information is easily available on the Starbucks Web site, but it's not the same thing as seeing 720 calories right next to the price of that 20-ounce Venti banana mocha Frappuccino with whipped cream you're about to order. "Customers can ask for nutrition information, but when you're talking about a transparent business in a busy world, that's not enough," union organizer and Starbucks barista Daniel Gross told Reuters in an interview. He wants Starbucks to use healthier shortenings that do not contain trans fat and to publicize the smallest size drink. It's called "short," and even though it is available in every Starbucks, you'll never see it on the menu. The union says Starbucks baristas gain weight when they work there since they are given unlimited free beverages and leftover pastries during their shifts.

What does Starbucks have to say? A company spokesman issued a statement saying the firm is "actively researching" alternatives to high-fat products. By this fall, it also plans to eliminate trans fat from seasonal baked goods (but not all baked goods). "In our beverage ingredients, we have reformulated any component that contained significant artificial trans fat content," the spokesman said.

I guess that explains what's happened to my middle....

Treasure Islands

Credit where credit is due.

Op-Ed Contributors
By JOSHUA REICHERT and THEODORE ROOSEVELT IV

June 15, 2006

PRESIDENT Bush is expected to declare the northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument today, thereby creating the largest marine reserve on earth. The president's decision caps a century of protection efforts by both Republican and Democratic presidents beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and including Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. But none ever proposed the sweeping level of protection for these islands that is being put in place by the Bush administration.

While we and others in the conservation community have not always agreed with President Bush's environmental policies, we believe it is important to acknowledge a significant policy achievement when it occurs — and one is about to occur.

Beginning 160 miles northwest of Kauai, and extending roughly 1,200 miles into the Pacific Ocean, the uninhabited islands, reefs, shoals and atolls of this archipelago make up one of the most remote and relatively undisturbed coral reef systems in the world. The area marked for protection covers roughly 140,000 square miles of ocean, larger than all of America's national parks combined.

Almost 70 percent of the tropical, shallow-water coral reefs in American waters are in this one place, together with 7,000 species of marine and terrestrial life, a quarter of which aren't found anywhere else. More than 14 million seabirds make these islands their home for at least a part of the year, along with the last population of the endangered Hawaiian monk seal.

The president's plan for the monument designation has the distinction of receiving broad support from the Hawaiian people and from Hawaii's Republican governor, Linda Lingle, who recently closed state waters in the northwestern Hawaiian Islands — everything up to three miles from shore — to commercial activities, including fishing. Many Native Hawaiians, who consider these islands an important part of their cultural and religious heritage, would also like to see commercial fishing ended in federal waters, which stretch three to 50 miles from shore.

In the plan to be announced by the White House, commercial fishing will be phased out over five years. What's more, the president's action will spur efforts to compensate the few remaining fishermen in the area for surrendering their permits to the government, which would then retire them. While it is still too early to know whether these efforts will be successful, such a buyout package would provide for an early end to fishing in the archipelago and offer reasonable compensation to the fishermen who have earned part of their livelihood there.

Just as we have protected spectacular areas on land from destructive activity, we know it is equally important to do so for the sea. The president's announcement is an important step in what we hope will be greater efforts to safeguard the ocean, while also addressing broader problems of overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction.

There are few opportunities for a president to protect such a large swath of ocean or land at little cost to the government, while garnering strong regional support. This is one, and we applaud Mr. Bush for taking the initiative to preserve one of the world's most spectacular marine environments.

Joshua Reichert directs the environment division of the Pew Charitable Trusts. Theodore Roosevelt IV is an investment banker.

Team Jolie

I can't help but respect her, despite all the celebrity ho-ha.

The actress also acknowledges to Cooper that she gives a third of her income to charity and jokes, "Yeah, well, I had a stupid income for what I do."

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