Postcards on the Edge

[leegs]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Lead shot isn't used in current or recent production rimfire or centrefire cartridges.

Lead shot has not been used in shotgun shells for quite some time as well.

.

At least in the US those statements are not quite correct. It's true that lead shot is not allowed for shooting waterfowl, for a long time, but the vast majority of other shotgun ammunition uses lead shot. I'm quite sure that nearly all 22 rimfire ammunition is lead, with copper or brass plating. In centerfire rifles, again the great majority of bullets are lead with copper/gilding metal jackets. Lead bullets have been outlawed in California just in the past couple of years. I have used solid-copper bullets (no lead) for deer hunting for 5+ years, and this ammunition is getting to be more common, but it still represents a premium product not used by most folks.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Cutpurse Blues (may we suggest Tom Waits)

Old Subway Pros, Separating Drunk From Wallet

By MICHAEL WILSON

In the world of crime statistics, there is a certain subsection of victim on the city subways: a reveler who, overserved during a night on the town, nods off on a train. He wakes with a flapping, precision-cut hole in his trousers and cool, thin air where his wallet used to be.

This victim shakes his head in self-disgust, joining the besotted ranks to fall prey to a brand of criminal as old and established below the streets as a twisted root.
The police, long ago, coined a name for this criminal. The lush worker.

“Do they still exist?” said Lt. Kevin Callaghan, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department. “Yes.”

The lush worker sounds like a monster in a bedtime story, a stooped creature with a razor blade in one stealthy hand. Don’t drink, children, or the Lush Worker will get you.
But he is actually a middle-aged or older man who has been doing this for a very long time. And he is a fading breed.

“It’s like a lost art,” the lieutenant said. “It’s all old-school guys who cut the pocket. They die off.” And they do not seem to be replacing themselves, he said. “It’s like the TV repairman.”

Lush workers date back at least to the beginning of the last century, their ilk cited in newspaper crime stories like one in The New York Times in 1922, describing “one who picks the pockets of the intoxicated. He is the old ‘drunk roller’ under a new name.” While the term technically applies to anyone who steals from a drunken person, most police officers reserve it for a special kind of thief who uses straight-edge razors found in any hardware store.

The Police Department does not have a rough estimate of how many lush workers are out working lushes.

It offers an exact number: 109.

That is far fewer than there once were. What do we know of these 109 criminals? All but two are men, and overwhelmingly middle-aged or older, some born in 1947, 1943, 1938 and even, in one case, 1931.

They have all been arrested for lush working, or “lushing,” since 2006. They are persistent. One suspect arrested last weekend had 37 previous arrests under his belt — where, by the way, these guys like to hide razors, or in their hat brims or shoes or wallets.

And they are busy. “It happens every weekend,” said Officer James Rudolph with the police transit bureau that covers Manhattan below 34th Street, where many a young man goes to celebrate the weekend to excess.

“They’ll nudge them and see how incoherent they really are,” Officer Rudolph said. Then out comes the tool of the trade. “It’s unbelievable they don’t cut the person’s leg wide open. They’re like surgeons with a razor blade, for God’s sake.”

His commanding officer, Capt. Paul Rasa, said there had been 15 arrests of lush workers in that downtown district this year, and 35 complaints, which represent 28 percent of all the downtown transit grand larcenies in 2011.

This does not count unreported thefts. Victims, after all, are perhaps understandably ashamed to come forward to report being drunk enough to not have noticed the filleting of their pants by a man born in 1931.

“I had a guy take a swing at me once,” Lieutenant Callaghan said, recalling waking a construction worker with newly ventilated jeans. “He thought I robbed him.”

The victim of the theft on Sunday was 23 years old and referred to in a criminal complaint only as “a sleeping male.” The suspect, with 37 previous arrests, Robert Bookard, 48, is accused of cutting the man’s pocket and taking cash in a subway at the Brooklyn Bridge station at 3:40 a.m. A plainclothes officer saw the act and arrested him, finding three razor blades.

And yet, as Lieutenant Callaghan put it, “the cutting is a trade that’s going extinct.” Why? Pick a theory. Today’s subway robber is of the snatch-an-iWhatever-and-run variety that has recently driven up transit crime rates. With victims displaying $500 iPads in plain view, or passed out with a phone in their hand, why bother with a razor and a wallet?

Maybe the cutting is just too difficult. Officer Rudolph believes the good ones practice at home with mannequins.

And maybe the old thieves just don’t have anyone to teach.

The police keep track of who among the 109 is in jail, and when they are released. Lieutenant Callaghan sounds almost pleased to notice a familiar face on the train.

“I say, ‘Oh, you’re back,’ ” he said. “ ‘Good to see you.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/ny...ef=todayspaper

[sunskyfan]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Looks like a solution to the housing crisis too ;).

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Hispanics Reviving Faded Towns on the Plains

By A.G. SULZBERGER

ULYSSES, Kan. — Change can be unsettling in a small town. But not long ago in this quiet farming community, with its familiar skyline of grain elevators and church steeples, the owner of a new restaurant decided to acknowledge the community’s diversity by adding some less traditional items to her menu. Cheeseburgers. French fries. Chicken-fried steak.

“American food,” the restaurant owner, Luz Gonzalez, calls it. And she signaled her move by giving her Mexican restaurant a distinctly American name: “The Down-Town Restaurant.”

Such fare was all but extinct in a place where longtime residents joke — often with a barely disguised tone of frustration — that the dining options are Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. After the last white-owned restaurant serving American favorites closed this year, it fell to one of the recent Hispanic arrivals to keep the burgers-and-fries legacy alive. Ms. Gonzalez even enlisted the help of neighbors to teach her to cook more exotic dishes — like potato salad.

For generations, the story of the small rural town of the Great Plains, including the dusty tabletop landscape of western Kansas, has been one of exodus — of businesses closing, classrooms shrinking and, year after year, communities withering as fewer people arrive than leave and as fewer are born than are buried. That flight continues, but another demographic trend has breathed new life into the region.

Hispanics are arriving in numbers large enough to offset or even exceed the decline in the white population in many places. In the process, these new residents are reopening shuttered storefronts with Mexican groceries, filling the schools with children whose first language is Spanish and, for now at least, extending the lives of communities that seemed to be staggering toward the grave.

That demographic shift, seen in the findings of the 2010 census, has not been uniformly welcomed in places where steadiness and tradition are seen as central charms of rural life. Some longtime residents of Ulysses, where the population of 6,161 is now about half Hispanic, grumble over the cultural differences and say they feel like strangers in their hometown. But the alternative, community leaders warn, is unacceptable.

“We’re either going to change or we’re going to die,” said Thadd Kistler, a lifelong resident who recently stepped down as mayor. “This is Ulysses now, this is the United States now, this immigration is happening and the communities that are extending a hand are going to survive.”

After years in which mostly white communities throughout the region used gimmicks to lure new residents with limited success, like offering free land or lengthy tax abatements, many are wondering if this unexpected multicultural mix offers one vision of what the future of the rural Great Plains may look like.

“The face of small towns is changing dramatically as a result,” said Robert Wuthnow, a Kansas-born Princeton professor who studied the Hispanic influx for his book “Remaking the Heartland: Middle America since the 1950s.” “The question is: Is this going to save these small towns?”

There has long been a strong Hispanic presence throughout the region, which is rich with difficult work in meatpacking plants and on farms, feedlots and oil fields. But over the last decade, as their population in the rural Great Plains spiked by 54 percent — a figure comparable to gains in metro areas in the region — Hispanic residents have pushed from hubs like nearby Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal into ever smaller communities, buying property on the cheap, enticed, many say, by the opportunity to live quiet lives in communities more similar to those in which they were raised.

In the sparsely populated western half of Kansas, every county but one experienced a decline in the non-Hispanic white population, two-thirds of them by more than 10 percent.

At the same time, a vast majority experienced double-digit growth in Hispanic population, more than offsetting the declines in seven counties and many smaller cities and towns. Those places with the highest percentage of Hispanic residents tend to have the lowest average ages, the highest birth rates and the most stable school populations.

“These towns, I don’t know what they would do without Mexicans,” said Oscar Rivera, a Honduran immigrant who lives in a community of a few hundred people and travels through rural parts of western Kansas selling prepaid phone cards used to call overseas. “It would be like ghost towns.”

One such town is Bazine, about two hours from here and little even by the standards of its neighbors. The decaying strip of downtown stores was abandoned long ago, and empty houses dotted the surrounding streets. A few years back, the high school closed and the building was sold on eBay. There was talk about shutting the elementary school as well.

“The decline was happening,” said Patricia Showalter, the mayor, standing inside the little post office she runs. “And then the Hispanic people came.”

For the first time in more than a half century, the population grew in the latest census, inching up to 334 as the Hispanic population jumped to 86 from 4. Now every house in town is occupied. A new church, La Luz del Mundo, just opened. Though there are no new businesses on Main Street, some entrepreneurial newcomers sell homemade tamales door to door.

And, most importantly to those who had watched the town become ever older, the school enrollment is growing.

In neighboring Ransom, which is almost entirely white, the student population has declined to 34 from 62 in the last eight years. Meanwhile, in Bazine, the numbers have increased to 46, up from 35. The average age in Ransom is 15 years older than in Bazine.

In Ulysses, which grew a modest 3 percent over the last decade, much appears unchanged by the years. Livelihoods are still tied to the earth, where people grow wheat and corn in the dusty soil, drill for the generous deposits of oil and gas beneath the surface and feed cows inside muddy pens that line the roads. Churches — there are more than a dozen — still play an important role, and the pace is still slower than what one usually experiences in a bigger city.

But the influx of Hispanics, a majority of whom were born in Mexico, has left an unmistakable impact.

Rachel Gallegos remembers that as a young girl she was the only Hispanic student in her class and her parents’ Mexican restaurant was the first Hispanic business in town. Now, Hispanics make up two-thirds of the school population and own bakeries, clothing stores, car dealerships and computer repair shops, some catering to Hispanics and others simply filling vacant niches.

And when children become adults, a time when residents have historically headed to bigger communities seeking opportunity, her family was becoming rooted in the community — Ms. Gallegos said that of her nine siblings and their two dozen children, all but a couple remained.

Ginger Anthony, director of the Historic Adobe Museum, which chronicles the history of the onetime frontier town, discussed the changes with dismay, pausing repeatedly to reiterate that she did not want her criticism to seem “politically incorrect.” She is so unnerved, particularly by illegal immigrants, that she recently started locking her door — saying that the police-beat column in the local paper disproportionately features Spanish surnames.

“This wave of new people coming into the Midwest, it’s not always a good thing,” she said, as a co-worker nodded in agreement. “If you talk to the average working person, a lot of them are sort of fed up. Our town isn’t what it was.”

But Hispanic residents here say they have been mostly well received, even if the non-Hispanics sometimes keep their distance. There are exceptions, like when students at a neighboring high school showed up to a basketball game in sombreros and tossed tortillas onto the court.

Jose Olivas, a longtime community developer with Mexican American Ministries, said that it took years of pressure to hire Hispanic employees at schools and at some businesses. Now employers are taking Spanish lessons, and expressing preference for bilingual job applicants.

“For a while you had to be careful,” Mr. Olivas said. “But they’ve really changed their attitudes.”

Mr. Kistler, the former mayor, agreed that there were culture clashes, but said they were slowly dissipating.

“At first every community, including Ulysses, was very unwelcoming, but a lot of that was because we wanted to hold on so tight to what we were,” he said. “In the last five years, we’ve really seen that they’re here, they’re staying, they’re part of the community. We’ve kind of gotten used to each other.”

Part of that has been dictated by demographics.

At the hospital in town, exactly half of the 102 babies born last year were Hispanic. And in a telling sign of the future of the community, 13 babies were listed as having one white and one Hispanic parent.

Changing Face of the Rural Plains

Growth in the population of Hispanics in the Great Plains — especially in rural areas, where even small growth can have an outsize impact — is filling some of the void left by a declining white population. The Hispanic population in the seven Great Plains states shown below has increased 75 percent, while the overall population has increased just 7 percent.

for below legend: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...ns.html?ref=us



Arizonans Vie to Claim Cross-Cultural Fried Food

By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Florida has its key lime pie, Idaho its potatoes and Georgia favors grits as its official state food. Arizona, hungry to lay claim to a state food of its own, is circling the chimichanga.

There is a fierce rivalry here over who exactly dropped the first burrito into a vat of hot oil and thus invented the chimichanga. But evidence supports the contention that the first mouth to savor the fried concoction, and the first stomach to churn in torment from it, may well have been that of an Arizonan.

There is little doubt that chimichangas have become hugely popular here, so much so that a movement is under way to make the chimi the state’s official food. With Arizona’s centennial coming next year, Macayo’s Mexican Kitchen, a Phoenix chain, has started a petition drive to lobby the Legislature to officially adopt the chimichanga, as lawmakers have done for the bolo tie (official neckwear), the saguaro blossom (official flower) and the Colt revolver (official firearm).

“It’s just like Arizona itself, a mixture of cultures, all wrapped up,” said Sharisse Johnson, the president and chief executive of Macayo’s. Ms. Johnson insists it was her late father, Woody, who was tinkering in the kitchen in 1946 when the chimichanga was born. “We grew up hearing that story,” said Ms. Johnson.
Hold up there, says Carlotta Flores at El Charro Cafe in Tucson, which dates to 1922. She is equally adamant that her great-aunt Monica Flin accidentally knocked a burrito (actually, a burro, which is the king-size variety of a tortilla wrap) into boiling lard in the early 1950s and, because there were youngsters around at the time, adapted a Mexican curse into the whimsical word chimichanga.

“This is the story of our family,” Ms. Flores said from her kitchen.

There are other Arizona restaurants that say they invented the chimichanga, too, and there are other versions of the etymology of the word, one of which suggests that “chimichanga,” which is nowhere to be found in official Spanish dictionaries, translates roughly as “thingamajig.”

Uncertainty is part of the very essence of the chimi — as connoisseurs refer to it — since one is never sure of exactly what a particular chimichanga contains until one pokes through its crunchy flour shell with a fork and ferrets around inside.

There are those who say the chimichanga, which can be stuffed with beef, chicken, pork or even fish and be swamped with cheese, sour cream, salsa and guacamole, might have immigrated to Arizona from south of the border, which raises hackles in this state, where immigration is so contentious an issue.

But Mexicans do not tend to embrace the chimi as their own, even though chimichangas can be found on menus in northern Mexico, usually as chivechangas. Much like the food produced at Taco Bell, the chimi is generally seen as an Americanized take on Mexican cuisine. (Incidentally, Taco Bell, which has tried but failed to establish a foothold in Mexico, does not offer the chimichanga, although it does have the chalupa, which exists in Mexico and is a fried corn tostada with the sides turned up.)

Some state lawmakers see naming the chimi as the official food as a good way of helping Arizona refurbish its tattered image, while others argue that the state has more pressing priorities. Gov. Jan Brewer, who would be the one to sign a chimichanga bill if it cleared the Legislature, has told reporters that she enjoys chimis but has not declared whether she would be willing to immortalize them.

Despite their sky-high caloric count and artery-clogging outer coverings, chimis sell by the hundreds of thousands annually here. In but one sign of their popularity, Donald Beaty, a murderer who was put to death by lethal injection in Arizona in May, ordered a last meal the day before he died that consisted of a double cheeseburger with fries as well as a chimichanga.

“Everything in moderation is acceptable,” said Ms. Flores, whose restaurant sells them like hotcakes. “If a chimichanga becomes a habit that might be a problem. But I haven’t seen anyone come in who’s addicted to them.”

Just in case, El Charro has a vegetarian version, which is still deep fried, and chimichangas are also found on the dessert menu, filled with fruit. One upscale French style restaurant in Phoenix even offers a lobster chimichanga, an appetizer featuring basil beurre blanc and avocado corn salsa, priced at $18.50.

“You know your chimichanga is authentic if, an hour after eating it, you feel a log gently rolling around in your stomach,” Tom Miller, a Tucson author who has tried chimis at dozens of different Arizona restaurants and considers himself somewhat of a chimiologist, wrote in “Revenge of the Saguaro: Offbeat Travels Through America’s Southwest.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/us...20Fried&st=cse

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Animal McMansion: Students Trade Dorm for Suburban Luxury

Jaron Brandon, a sophomore at the University of California, Merced, studying in the Jacuzzi of his six-bedroom house.


By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

MERCED, Calif. — Heather Alarab, a junior at the University of California, Merced, and Jill Foster, a freshman, know that their sudden popularity has little to do with their sparkling personalities, intelligence or athletic prowess.

“Hey, what are you doing?” throngs of friends perpetually text. “Hot tub today?”

While students at other colleges cram into shoebox-size dorm rooms, Ms. Alarab, a management major, and Ms. Foster, who is studying applied math, come home from midterms to chill out under the stars in a curvaceous swimming pool and an adjoining Jacuzzi behind the rapidly depreciating McMansion that they have rented for a song.

Here in Merced, a city in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley and one of the country’s hardest hit by home foreclosures, the downturn in the real estate market has presented an unusual housing opportunity for thousands of college students. Facing a shortage of dorm space, they are moving into hundreds of luxurious homes in overbuilt planned communities.

Forget the off-to-college checklist of yesteryear (bedside lamp, laundry bag, under-the-bed storage trays). This is “Animal House” 2011.

Double-height Great Room? Check.

Five bedrooms? Check.

Chandeliers? Check.

Then there are the three-car garages, wall-to-wall carpeting, whirlpool baths, granite kitchen countertops, walk-in closets and inviting gas fireplaces.

“I mean, I have it all!” said Patricia Dugan, a senior majoring in management, who was reading Dario Fo’s “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” in her light-filled living room while soaking a silk caftan in one of two master bathroom sinks.

The finances of subdivision life are compelling: the university estimates yearly on-campus room and board at $13,720 a year, compared with roughly $7,000 off-campus. Sprawl rats sharing a McMansion — with each getting a bedroom and often a private bath — pay $200 to $350 a month each, depending on the amenities.

Gurbir Dhillon, a senior majoring in molecular cell biology, pays $70 more than his four housemates each month for the privilege of having what they enviously call “the penthouse suite” — a princely boudoir with a whirlpool tub worthy of Caesars Palace and a huge walk-in closet, which Mr. Dhillon has filled with baseball caps and T-shirts.

The pool table in the young men’s Great Room is the site of raucous games and taco dinners. “You definitely appreciate it when you visit your friends at other schools and they say, ‘O.K., sleep on the floor,’ ” Mr. Dhillon said.

A confluence of factors led to the unlikely presence of students in subdivisions, where the collegiate promise of sleeping in on a Saturday morning may be rudely interrupted by neighborhood children selling Girl Scout cookies door to door.

This city of 79,000 is ranked third nationally in metropolitan-area home foreclosures, behind Las Vegas and Vallejo, Calif., said Daren Blomquist, a spokesman for RealtyTrac, a company based in Irvine, Calif., that tracks housing sales. The speculative fever that gripped the region and drew waves of outside investors to this predominantly agricultural area was fueled in part by the promise of the university itself, which opened in 2005 as the first new University of California campus in 40 years.

The crash crashed harder here. “Builders were coming into the area by the bulkload,” said Loren M. Gonella, who owns a real estate company here. “It was, ‘Holy moly, let’s get on this gravy train.’ ”

But visions of an instant Berkeley materializing in the cow pastures were premature. The stylishly designed university planned for a gradual expansion, adding 600 new students a year. That has meant phased dorm construction, which is financed with tax-exempt bonds repaid by student revenue. There is room for only 1,600 students in the campus dorms, but 5,200 are enrolled.

With hundreds of homes standing empty, many of them likely foreclosures, students willing to share houses have been “a blessing,” said Ellie Wooten, a former mayor of Merced and a real estate broker. Five students paying $200 a month each trump families who cannot afford more than $800 a month.

The university’s free transit system, Cat Tracks, stops at student-heavy subdivisions. There are also limitless creative possibilities, with décor ranging from a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority bedroom motif to an archetypal male nightstand overflowing with empty bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Not all neighbors are amused.

“Everybody on this street is underwater and can’t see any relief,” said John Angus, an out-of-work English teacher who paid $532,000 for a house that is now worth $221,000. “This was supposed to be an edge-of-town, Desperate Housewifey community,” he said. “These students are the reverse.”

Mr. Angus pays $3,000 a month, while student neighbors pay one-tenth of that. “I think they’re the luckiest students I’ve ever come across,” he said somewhat bitterly.

Nevertheless, students quickly learn that the cul-de-sac life is not risk-free. Lance Eber, the crime analyst for the Merced Police Department, said vacant houses were frequent targets of theft, most recently of copper wiring. They also attract squatters, who sometimes encamp beneath covered patios, he said.

Ms. Wooten related a cautionary tale about four students living in a house foreclosed by a bank who continued to send rent checks to an owner who had skipped town. When the bank gave them two weeks’ notice to move out, the students went into Erin Brockovich mode and researched their legal rights. “It bought them at least three months,” Ms. Wooten said. “By golly, they’re still there.”

She added, “There are some odd scenarios going on around here.”

They include the case of absentee landlord parents like Rhonda Castillo and her husband, who bought a house for their son, Jason, when times were flush in 2005. Jason was in the first class at the Merced campus.

The untimely investment was ultimately less important than “an investment in our son,” Mrs. Castillo said. “It gave him a preview of real life: buying groceries, preparing food, doing the laundry and taking care of the yard.” (He is now in medical school, and four female students rent the house.)

Indeed, managing a four- or five-bedroom house — not to mention all the cars — can be tricky business for young people.

Sitting in her kitchen, a planet of granite, Katilyn McIntire, a human biology major, explained how she and her four roommates rotated cars — one parks on the street, two park in the garage and two in the driveway. Whoever is getting up for an 8 a.m. class parks last. After an unsuccessful attempt at tending the yard with a hand mower, they now pay $50 a month to a gardener.

The student equivalent of “keeping up with the Joneses” has emerged, too.

Jaron Brandon, a sophomore and a senator in the student government, does his homework in the Jacuzzi in his six-bedroom house, on a waterproof countertop that he rigged over the tub.

Seeking housemates, he posted a beguiling ad on Craigslist: “For a small amount more than a nameless house in the suburbs,” it read, “you could be living in a mansion right by school.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/us...mansion&st=cse

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Jaron Brandon, a sophomore and a senator in the student government, does his homework in the Jacuzzi in his six-bedroom house, on a waterproof countertop that he rigged over the tub.

No doubt he does not understand why, the whole world over, the building codes keep electrical services out of a wet bathroom. Some one needs to bring him up to speed with Building Regulations before he becomes another subject for the Darwin awards.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

No doubt he does not understand why, the whole world over, the building codes keep electrical services out of a wet bathroom. Some one needs to bring him up to speed with Building Regulations before he becomes another subject for the Darwin awards.

I put him no more that 12 to 14 inches from ground on the faucet. Hope the laptop isn't leaking any voltage!

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

I put him no more that 12 to 14 inches from ground on the faucet. Hope the laptop isn't leaking any voltage!

Don, sometimes it is quite interesting to see natural selection in progress right before ones eyes....

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Don, sometimes it is quite interesting to see natural selection in progress right before ones eyes....

Short-circuiting the student loan debt trap . . .

(Chris, you made me do it . . . .)

[shiny!]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Short-circuiting the student loan debt trap . . .

(Chris, you made me do it . . . .)

LOL! Literally!

[Chris Coles]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

We might laugh, but it is really deadly serious

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Retail's Wide Divide


this is not Occupy Best Buy . . . or is it?

As the busiest retail weekend of the year begins late Thursday night, the differences between how affluent and more ordinary Americans shop in the uncertain economy will be on unusually vivid display.

Budget-minded shoppers will be racing for bargains at ever-earlier hours while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.

Toys “R” Us, Wal-Mart, Macy’s, Kohl’s, Best Buy and Target will start their Black Friday sales earlier than ever — at 9 and 10 p.m. in some instances — with dirt-cheap offers intended to secure their customers’ limited dollars. A half a day later, on Friday morning, higher-end stores like Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom will open with only a sprinkling of special sales.

The low-end and midrange retailers are risking low margins as they cut prices to attract shoppers, while executives at luxury stores say that they are actually able to sell more at full price than in recent boom years.

Paying less than full price seen as gauche

“We’re now into a less promotional environment than we were before the recession,“ said Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks. In the third quarter, for instance, Saks reduced the length of an annual sale to three days from four, and excluded the high-margin category of cosmetics from another regular sale.

“Those in a more modest income situation are the people who are going to the Wal-Marts and the Best Buys and the Targets at 8, 9, 10, 11 p.m. with little kids in tow because they can’t afford a baby sitter,” said Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultant firm. “It’s a very unpleasant shopping experience, frankly, for a lot of people.”

Meanwhile, many affluent shoppers will avoid the scene altogether, he said. “The women who are shopping the fourth floor at Saks are not Black Friday shoppers,” he said.

Neiman Marcus sold out of Ferraris at $395,000 each within 50 minutes of making 10 of them available in its "fantasy" catalog. (dog sold separately)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/business/black-friday-sales-show-divide-between-shoppers.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Occupy Retail . . .

A Few Temporary Stores or a Neighborhood

Jake Bagshaw and Nicole Buffett set up Piper and John General Goods, one of six pop-up stores opening in Oakland.

By JESSE HIRSCH and REYHAN HARMANCI

To Alfonso Dominguez, calling his project to populate a mostly vacant stretch of downtown Oakland with locally minded retailers Popuphood is both literal (“The stores are popping up!”) and a bit of a tease.

Although the six stores, including a furniture company to be housed in a shipping container, will operate under a six-month arrangement of free rent, he hopes the shops will sign long-term leases.

“I know people have an idea that oh, it’s temporary and it leaves,” Mr. Dominguez said, referring to the pop-up concept. “But what we’re doing is making an incubator for the new economy, rethinking the way retail works as a way to survive.”

Mr. Dominguez’s experiment, which has been created with Sarah Filley, an urban planner, officially opens on Dec. 9. It is one of dozens of local iterations on the pop-up concept springing up during the holiday season. And like Popuphood, many of the newest entrants to the pop-up world are pushing the concept farther from its origins as a creative use of vacant storefront space.

These days, a pop-up experience can mean anything from a seasonal Toys “R” Us store to a $60 one-time-only meal prepared by a guest chef at a high-end restaurant to a makeshift art gallery in an alley. Some pop-ups mix big corporations with independent operations — like the SFMade pop-up of locally made goods currently ensconced in the Banana Republic flagship store in San Francisco.

Cultural institutions of all types have also adopted the concept: this week, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art announced that while its building is closed for expansion sometime in the next few years, it will host pop-up exhibits.

Even the pop-up’s temporary nature is open to interpretation. One high-profile project, Proxy, a two-block land parcel in Hayes Valley being developed as a pop-up by Envelope Architecture and Design, a local firm, plans to operate until 2015.

“It’s gotten hard to know what people are even talking about when they say ‘pop-up,’ ” said Daniel Patterson, the chef and restaurateur whose Coi in San Francisco and Plum in Oakland have recently played host to riffs on the genre.
For business owners, an uncertain economy has driven the form. Pop-ups frequently function as trial balloons for brick-and-mortar businesses, testing concepts with less financial risk.

Michael Mauschbaugh, an aspiring chef, “had a very clear vision” of the food he wanted to make but found the process for opening a traditional restaurant arduous. In March, he responded to an ad on Craigslist that offered the use of a tiny kitchen in the Sugarlump coffee shop. Soon enough, Sous Beurre Kitchen was popping up six nights a week, offering sweetbreads and mussels alongside Sugarlump’s lattes and scones.

Though Mr. Mauschbaugh’s bistro is a regular fixture at Sugarlump, he calls it a pop-up because it operates in someone else’s space, offering a completely different dining experience.

Pop-up “is kind of an umbrella term,” Mr. Mauschbaugh said. “It captures the weirdness of eating rustic French cuisine next to some punk with headphones surfing the Net.”

The large number of entrepreneurs who are looking for permitted locations for their businesses has created a kind of trickle-down pop-up economy — another reason for their persistent popularity.

A few blocks from Sugarlump is La Victoria, a 62-year-old Mexican bakery owned by Jaime Maldonado. For years, Mr. Maldonado has exchanged kitchen and dining space to pop-ups for a cut of their gross income, a strategy that helped save his business in 2008.

“The Mission has changed so much, I’d say 50 percent of the people who live here have no idea about my bakery,” Mr. Maldonado said. “Pop-ups bring me that young, skinny jeans-wearing crowd that would otherwise walk right by.”

Scott Cameron created a company in Oakland exclusively to provide venues for pop-ups. He opened Guest Chef in October, which rents out a fully equipped restaurant space for two-week stints.

Pop-ups are perfectly in sync with the current social and economic concerns, said Lizzie Wallack, project architect for Proxy, which will introduce its rotating cast of eight retail shops this spring.

“It’s the nature of our culture,” she said, “We’re interested in the immediate and the next thing.”

But pop-ups can’t rely only on novelty value, said Henry Mason, of Trendwatching.com, a Web site and research company that first used the term in a 2004 report. Toys “R” Us, for instance, cut down from last year’s record-setting 600 holiday pop-ups.

“Given the amazing success of the pop-up phenomenon, certainly the element of surprise and excitement is somewhat diminished,” Mr. Mason said, “So the challenge for any aspiring pop-up is now that ‘temporary’ on its own is not enough. What else can you offer people?”

For Sunde White, proprietor of Pie Fridays, the answer is baked into the product. She rolls a bright red hand-painted food cart out on weekend evenings.

“People love to bring their out-of-town parents to ‘that adorable little secret pie cart’ and get their picture taken with me for Facebook,” Ms. White said. “But that’s just the hook. If my pie wasn’t good, people wouldn’t keep coming back.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us...%20news&st=cse

[astonas]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

Thanks for posting this, Don. It's great to see a creative slant on doing business in a rough economy. Having a possible future payoff is way better than holding a dead strip mall with nothing but empty storefronts, and the small entrepreneurs might just find something good! Sometimes it just takes desperation to create new opportunities. This is sort of thing reminds me that while the current circumstances are indeed dire, the entrepeneurial spirit of the country remains strong. When freed (one way or another) from the current situation, people can eventually thrive again.

[don]

Re: Postcards on the Edge

the entrepreneurial spirit of the country remains strong

Never say die. My people