This post on the concept of extended warranties from late last year on the blog Economists Do It With Models includes this quote from the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein: …the extended warranty is a product that simply should not exist. If Humans realized that [...]

Following up on our last post on thrifting blogs, these items:

How I I Paid My Rent For 6 Months By Thrifting (Things I Found at the Thrift Store)

Let me first start by saying that having to make rent this way was in no way fun or recommended. Unless you’re retired or insanely dedicated to it. Paying my rent for 6 months via scraping by on reselling thrifted goods was a ton of work. I was able to utilize my in-depth knowledge of web-selling platforms to more easily liquidate most of the items. I was able to achieve this feat mainly by selling just a few items each month that made up most of my then $800 a month rent. On a soapbox-rant side note: let me say that when congress or some rogue old senator (who you know doesn’t even use the web) dabbles with the idea of taxing people’s income from selling items on sites like eBay and Etsy, it makes me seriously cringe. Some folks do this for a living and it’s grueling. An extremely slim percentage of the web sellers are making good coin from doing it. Like I said above, reselling items for a living is not what I’d call fun.

From Wikipedia: “Thrifting refers to the act of shopping at a thrift store, flea market, garage sale, or a shop of a charitable organization, usually with the intent of finding interesting items at a cheap price… Thrifting lures a variety of different audiences. Two most commonly come to mind: 1) People who have no economic [...]

As described in our last post, the retailer H&M is suffering a public relations nightmare stemming from a New York grad student’s noticing on the street hundreds of unsold garments that it destroyed. Twitter, Facebook, and the blogs are all ablaze in condemning H&M for not donating the clothes to charity. The H&M Facebook page [...]

You may have heard about the big to-do going on over H&M (as well as Wal-Mart) dumping unsold clothes instead of donating them to charity. A few days ago a City University of New York grad student noticed hundreds of the stores’ discarded garments and called the New York Times, which wrote up a story.

What happened next has become a familiar story in the annals of bad corporate p.r. H&M took too long to respond, and the Web went wild. A day later, H&M issued a statement. Wallet Pop…

From the Empty buildings for economic reasons photo pool: Click on an image to see it full size. More photos here.

Speaking of crime and the recession, we found this press release issued last year by the National Retail Federation. It deals with store return policies and “return fraud.”

Though retailers seem to be confronting return fraud, incidents continue to permeate most retail stores. According to the survey, most retailers (88.9%) have had stolen merchandise returned to stores within the past year. Retailers also report being victimized by returns of merchandise originally purchased with fraudulent or stolen tender (74.1%) and returns using counterfeit receipts (45.7%).

The release goes on to address something called “wardrobing.”

Welcome back everyone. You lived through Thanksgiving, and Black Friday. But just 3 1/2 more weeks till Christmas. Better get clicking, for today is: CYBER MONDAY! From Wikipedia: The term “Cyber Monday” is a neologism invented by Shop.org, part of the U.S. trade association National Retail Federation. It was first used within the ecommerce community [...]

If you’re starting your holiday shopping tomorrow and are looking for bargains, check these sites… BlackFriday.info BlackFriday.com BlackFriday.net Black Friday 2009 Gottadeal.com Google search: Black Friday ads Related post: Buy Nothing Day

As most consumers with an early eye on holiday shopping know, the day after Thanksgiving is also known as Black Friday.” On that day, savvy purchasers arise at 4 a.m., attire themselves in running shoes, flak jacket, and football helmet, and brave the vast hordes of salivating shoppers intent on scoring a dirt cheap price for their desired merchandise.

Yes, it’s easy to be snide. But in the midst of this brutal recession, with 10% unemployment, who can blame beleaguered Americans for seizing any opportunity they can to achieve some semblance of their former lifestyle while still meeting their dwindling budgets? Plus the economy needs that holidays’ jolt. Early scenes from the mall have not been encouraging.