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The Simple Dollar Morning Roundup: Mental Blitz Edition 2comments

October 3, 2007 @ 7:30 am - Written by Trent
Categories: Morning Roundup
Bookmarks: del.icio.us, reddit

It feels like the last several days have been a fog - I’ve reached a point where a day or two of mental unwinding would be very good for my psyche.

The Smell of Money: How Marketers Use Scent To Encourage Spending I mentioned before how Williams-Sonoma uses this trick to encourage people to buy food-related items. (@ get rich slowly)

Is Ticket Scalping Fair? It certainly is. However, as the internet gets more pervasive, I think teams will start auction bidding their tickets, basically taking scalpers out of the loop. (@ consumerism commentary)

The Simple Dollar Retro: The Furniture Dilemma You just moved into a much bigger house. You have not nearly enough furniture to fill the rooms. What do you do?

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Thanks for re-posting the furniture link. I don’t know if it’s a response to my email about frugal furnishing (but I’ll just assume it is and say thanks!)

DJ @ 1:47 pm October 3rd, 2007 (comment #1)

So if you think scalping is fair, then I assume you are OK with price gouging on gasoline, like for example when there is news of a hurricane or impending war with iraq or something? If not, please explain how these two things are different.

Both involve opportunists artificially constricting supply to manipulate pricing in their favor for their own short-term gain. (And I suppose both involve idiots who would pay the inflated price, enabling the scalping/gouging in the first place)

What if I bought up all the heating oil in the US just before winter and scalped that at a price too high for you to afford to heat your home? would you still think its fair then?

Actually, why doesn’t anybody actually do this? We should form an investment group to scalp heating oil. We would make so much money. We probably don’t even have to get all of it, just even if we could buy up all the oil in a certain geographic area. Sure, some old people would freeze to death, but hey, its still fair, right?

icup @ 2:45 pm October 3rd, 2007 (comment #2)

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The Simple Dollar Morning Roundup: Mental Blitz Edition 2comments