Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

Here are a few assorted interesting links from the past month; ideally, I’d have liked to blog about a few (if not all) of them, but there’s only so much you can do in a week.

• Derivatives: The stupidity of the Indian media on derivatives (Rediff)
• Pop goes the economy: The correlation between economic performance and champagne purchases (The Economist blog)
• Information overload: Why we’re powerless to resist grazing on endless web data (WSJ)
• Old-School Economics: Why the recession was bound to happen anyway (NYT)

With a sluggish economy, it was only a matter of time before stores adopted the any-which-way-they-can to make money attitude.

The NYT has a post on how a lot of the megastores are willing to negotiate with the customer on what the prices may be.  This includes such big names as Best Buy, Home Depot and Circuit City. Here’s an excerpt:

“We want to work with the customer, and if that happens to mean negotiating a price, then we’re willing to look at that,” said Kathryn Gallagher, a spokeswoman for Home Depot.

…

“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.”

Wow. Un-freakin’-believable.