Attention TV Shoppers!

Attention TV Shoppers!

There’s a bazaar of goods for sale on the tube. Not all are bargains

Those 24-hour shopping shows are luring more than chronic TV browsers. Viewers are shelling out billions to buy a vast array of goods. The variety touted by the shows is immense: autographed baseballs, kitchen storage containers, exercise bikes, floating cordless phones, you name it. The quality ranges from phone gems to genuine diamonds, from trendy fashions to fine silk suits.

The two big players in the business, the Home Shopping Network (HSN) and QBC Network, each sell about $2 billion a year. Catalog I, the cable shopping channel developed by Time Warner and Spiegel, pitched more upscale goods from the likes of Williams-Sonoma, Neiman Marcus, and the Bombay Company.

There are a few bargains to be found on TV sales shows. An 18-karat gold bracelet, for example, was once sold on QVC for $278.00. An independent appraiser later valued it at at more than $600. But recent research by Consumer Reports found that a number of goods selling on QVC and HSN could be bought for less in local stores. And Arch-brand quilt selling for $147.72 on QVC, for example was going for $99 at a department store.

TV shopping and a little panda looking through a window. Photo by Elena

Clothing is though to buy from television. Getting those form-fitting jeans to fit your form is hard to do without trying them on. As a result, TV shoppers return an average 20% of items they buy, compared with only 3 percent for store shoppers. Jewelry is an easier buy. The networks will send callers sizing kits to help deter,ine ring sies and necklace lengths.

QVC and HSN use different styles to hawk their goods. Hosts at HSN sell in a high-pressure frenzy. They add to the pressure by putting deadlines on prices – “Buy now or cry later.” Hosts at QVC, which stands for quality, value, and convenience, use a softer sell.

All the TV shopping shows have mastered some form of celebrity sales, though. Celebrities entertain viewers as they pitch their wares, often taking on-air calls from the audience. Even the non-famous hosts are becoming mini-celebrities. At QVC hosts receive an average 500 letters every week. At HSN, the average is 1,000. Meanwhile, the stars are striking gold. Joan Rivers has raked peddling her line of jewelry on QVC. Vanna White has sold more than $25 million in pumps, clothes, and jewelry on the HSN, Ivana Trump’s initial appearance on HSN drew such huge clothing sales that the network ran out of Ivana fashions to sell.

(text published in 1994, in Dollars & Sense).

The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Red Coat

The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Red Coat

By Chaz Brenchley (excerpt)

Our unannounced visitor, the uninvited, the unknown: he was tall even by Martian standards, and the shortest of us would overtop an average Earthman. Mr Holland must have been tall in his own generation, six foot three or thereabouts; here he was no more than commonplace. In his strength, in his pride I thought he would have resented that. Perhaps he still did. Years of detention and disgrace might have diminished him in body and spirit both, but something must survive yet, unbroken, undismayed. He could never have made this journey else. Nor sat with us. Every tree holds a memory of the forest.

The stranger was in his middle years, an established man, confident in himself and his position. That he held authority in some kind was not, could not be in question. It was written in his assumptions, as clearly as in the way he stood, the way he waited; the way he had taken charge so effortlessly, making my own display seem feeble, sullen, nugatory.

Mr Holland apparently saw the same. He said, “I don’t believe we were introduced, sir. If I might venture a guess, I should say you have a look of the Guards about you.” Or perhaps he said the guards, and meant something entirely different.

“I don’t believe any of us have been introduced,” I said, as rudely as I knew how. “You are…?”

Even his smile was weighty with that same settled certainty. “Gregory Durand, late of the King’s Own’” with a little nod to Mr Holland: the one true regiment to any man pf Mars, Guards in all but name,”and currently of the Colonial Service.”

He didn’t offer a title, not even a department. I could hear the doubt in my own voice as I tried to pin him down. “The police?”

The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Red Coat. Photo by Elena

“On occasion,” he said. “Not tonight.”

If that was meant reassuring, it fell short. By some distance. If we were casting about for our coats, half-inclined not to wait for those drinks, it was not because we were urgent to follow him into the conservatory. Rather, our eyes were on the door and the street beyond.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “be easy.” He was almost laughing at us. “Tonight I dress as you do,” overcoat and hat, “and share everything and nothing, one great secret and nothing personal or private, nothing prejudicial. I will not say “nothing perilous,” but the peril is mutual and assured. We stand or fall together, if at all. Will you come? For the Queen Empress if not for the Empire?”

The Empire had given us little enough reason to love it, which he knew. An appeal to the Widow, though, will always carry weight. There is something irresistible in that blend of sentimentality and strength beyond measure, endurance beyond imagination: we had cried for her, we would die for her. We were on our feet almost before we knew it. I took that so much for granted, it needed a moment for me to realise that Mr Holland was still struggling to rise. Unless he was simply slower to commit himself, he whose reasons – whose scars – were freshest on his body and raw yet on his soul.

Still, I reached out my hand to help him and he took it resolutely, quick of thought and quick to choose. Quick to go along. A lesson learned, perhaps. I was almost sad to see it, in a man who used to disregard protocol and convention so heedlessly; but it was sheer wisdom now to keep his head down and follow the crowd. Even where that crowd was disreputable and blind itself, leading none knew where.

Being led, I should say. Through a door beside the hearth, that was almost never open this time of year. Beyond lay the unshielded conservatory, like an open invitation to the night.

An invitation that Mr Holland balked at, and rightly. He said, “You gentlemen are dressed for this, but I have a room here, and had not expected to need my coat tonight.”

“You’ll freeze without it. Perhaps you should stay in the warm.” Perhaps we all should, but it was too late for that. Our company was following Durand like sheep, trusting where they should have been most wary. Tempted where they should have been most strong.

And yet, and yet. Dubious and resentful as I was, I too would give myself over to this man – for the mystery or for the adventure, something. For something to do that was different, original, unforeseen. I was weary of the same faces, the same drinks, the same conversations. We all were: which was why Mr Holland had been so welcome, one reason why.

This, though: I thought he of all men should keep out of this. I thought I should keep him out, if I could.

Here came Durand to prevent me: stepping through the door again, reaching for his elbow, light and persuasive and yielding nothing.

“Here’s the boy come handily now, just when we need him. I’ll take that, lad,” lifting the tray of refreshments as though he had been host all along. “You run up to Mr Holland’s room and fetch down his overcoat. And his hat too, we’ll need to keep that great head warm. Meanwhile, Mr Holland, we’ve a chair for you hard by the stove…”

Beyond the Random Walk

Beyond the Random Walk

It is difference of opinion that makes horse races (Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson).

Even a dart-throwing chimpanzee can select a portfolio that performs as well as one carefully selected by the experts. This, in essence, is the practical application of the theory of efficient markets. The theory holds that the market appears to adjust so quickly to information about individual stocks and the economy as a whole that no technique of selecting a portfolio – neither technical nor fundamental analysis can consistently outperform a strategy of simply buying and holding a diversified group of securities such as those that make up the popular market averages.

The broad acceptance of this thinking by financial economists and market practitioners became evident as the 1980s progressed. More and more, individual and institutional investors threw in the stock-picking towel and opted for indexing – that os, simply buying and holding one of the broad market indexes such as the Standard & Poor’s 500-Stock Index or perhaps the Wilshire 5,000 Index, an index that contains an additional 4,500 smaller companies. By 1990 literally hundreds of billions of dollars of endowment and pension-fund portfolios were invested in one or more of the market indexes.

But the 1980s also spawned some new doubters about market efficiency and renewed attacks to batter the theory down. With easy access to large-scale computers and with financial and stock price data of all sorts available both to practitioners and to academicians, the search was on to make one’s fortune and/or academic reputation by proving the efficient-market theory wrong. An academic battle of epic proportions was under way as a new generation of financial economists tried to make their reputation (and gain tenure at prestigious universities) by proving their elders wrong.

New York downtown, Battery and Hudson parks. Photo by Elena

And then, in the midst of it all, the stock market crashed with such ferocity that the thundering herd was buried under the debris for months to come. Early in October 1987, the most popular stock-market index in the United States, the Dow Jones average of 30 major industrial corporations, sold at approximately the 2,600. After October 19, a day in which this index fell by over 500 points in unprecedented trading volume, the market traded under the 1,800 level – a drop of approximately one-third within a single month. This is efficient? To many observers, such an event stretches the credibility of the efficient-market theory beyond the breaking point. Did the stock market really accurately reflect all relevant information about individual stocks and the economy when it sold at 2,600 early in October? Had fundamental information about the economic prospects of U.S. Corporations changed that much in the following two weeks to justify a drop in share valuations of almost one-third?

In the view of one influential financial economist, Robert Shiller, stock prices show far “too much variability” to be explained by an efficient-market theory of pricing, and one must look to the behavioral considerations and to crowd psychology to explain the actual process of price determination in the stock market. This view was obviously shared by thousands of investors who left the stock market in disgust. No amount of esoteric academic evidence could convince them that the market was an efficient and hospitable place in which to invest.

We present here an ivy-tower view of the debate and the new evidence uncovered during the 1980s. We will review all the recent research proclaiming the demise of the efficient-market theory. Our conclusion is that such obituaries are greatly exaggerated. We’ll also refer back to the underlying rational model of stock valuation and describe the “fundamental” events that could provide a rational explanation for the October 1987 crash. We will see that while the stock market may not be perfect in its assimilation of knowledge, it does seem to do a quite creditable job.

While we will present all research results in nontechnical terms, the reader should be warned that the material is a bit tougher than was described in previous articles. But don’t skip this chapter. Some of the statistical findings suggest useful investment strategies for individual investors.

Burton G. Malkiel. A Random Walk Down Wall Street, including a life-cycle guide to personal investing. First edition, 1973, by W.W. Norton and company, Inc.

Consolation

Consolation

By John Kessel (excerpt)

Esmeralda

The blast blew the door across the lobby into the plate-glass front wall, shattering it. But then I was out on the sidewalk. I set off through the downpour in the direction of the train station.

Before I had walked a hundred meters the drones swooped past me, rotors tearing the rain into mist, headed for Marovec’s office. People rushed out into the street. The citycar network froze, and only people on bikes and in private vehicles were able to move. I stepped off the curb into a puddle, soaking my shoe.

Teohad assured me that all public monitors had been taken care of and no video would be retrieved from five minutes before to five after the explosion. I walked away from Dunster Street, trying to keep my pace steady, acutely aware that everybody else was going in the other direction. Still, I crossed the bridge over the levees, caught a cab, and reached the station in good time.

I tried to sleep a little as the train made its way across Massachusetts, out of the rainstorm, through the Berkshires, into New York. It was hopeless. The sound of the blast rang in my ears. The broken glass and smoke, the rain. It was all over the net. Makovec was dead and they weren’t saying anything about Alter. Teo’s phony video had been released, claiming responsibility for the Refugee Liberation Front and warning of more widespread attacks if Ottawa turned its back on those fleeing Confederated Free America.

Consolation. Photo by Elena.

Outside the observation window a bleeding sunset poured over forests of russet and gold. After New England and New York became provinces, Canada had dropped a lot of money on the rail system. All these formerly hopeless decaying cities – from classical pretenders Troy, Rome, Utica to Mohawk-wannabe. Chittenango and Canajoharie – were coming back. If it weren’t for the flood of refugees from the Sunbelt, the American provinces might make some real headway against economic and environmental blight.

Night settled in and a gibbous moon rose. Lots of time to think.

I was born in Ogdensburg back when it was still part of the U.S. There’d been plenty of backwoods loons where I grew up, in the days when rural New York might as well have been Alabama. But the Anschluss with Canada and the huge influx of illegals had pushed even the local evangelicals into the anti-immigrant camp. Sunbelters. Ragged, uncontrollable, when they weren’t draining social services they were ranting about government stealing their freedom, defaming their God, taking away their guns.

My own opinions about illegals were not moderated by any ideological or religious sympathies. I didn’t need any more threadbare crackers with their rugged-individualist libertarian Jesus-spouting, militia-loving nonsense to fuck up the new Northeast the way they had fucked up the old U.S. We’re Canadians now, on sufferance, and eager to prove our devotion to our new government. Canada has too many of its own problems to care what happens to some fools who hadn’t the sense to get out of Florida before it sank.

The suffering that the Sunbelters fled wasn’t a patch on the environmental degradation they were responsible for. As far as I was concerned, their plight was chickens coming home to roost. Maybe I felt something for the Blacks and Hispanics and the women, but in a storm you have to pick a side and I’d picked mine a long time ago. Teo’s video would raise outrage against the immigrants and help ensure that Ottawa would not relax its border policies.

But my ears still rang from the blast.

The Children of Gal

The Children of Gal

By Allen M. Steele (excerpt)

In the days that followed, Sanjay did his best to put his mother’s banishment behind him. With less than three weeks – thirteen days – left in summer, there was much that needed to be done before the season changed: fish to be caught, dried, and preserved, seeds planted and spring crops tended, houses and boats repaired. He and his father put away Aara’s belongings – they couldn’t bring themselves to burn her clothes, a customary practice for the families of those sent to Purgatory – and accepted the sympathy of those kind enough to offer it, but it took time for them to get used to a house which now seemed empty; the absence of laughter and the vacant seat at the dinner table haunted them whenever they came home.

Sanjay didn’t feel very much like attending the Juli service at the Shrine, but Dayall insisted; if he didn’t make an appearance, the more inquisitive Disciples might wonder whether Aara’s son shared her blasphemous beliefs. Dayall was an observant Galian if not a particularly devout one, and the last thing they wanted to do was draw the attention of the Guardians. So Frione morning they joined the Disciples in the dome-roofed temple in the middle of town. Once they’d bowed in homage to the scared genesis plant that grew beside the Shrine, they went in to sit together on floor mats in the back of the room, doing their best to ignore the curious glances of those around them. Yet as R’beca stood before the altar, where the box-like frame of the Transformer stood with its inert block of Galmatter in the center, and droned on about how the souls of the Chosen Children were gathered by Gal from the vile netherworld of Erf and carried “twenty-two lights and a half through the darkness” to Eos, Sanjay found himself studying the Teacher resting within his creche behind the altar.

The Children of Gal. Photo by ElenaB.

Even as a child, Sanjay had often wondered why the Teacher didn’t resemble the Children or their descendants. Taller than an adult islander, his legs had knees that were curiously forward-jointed and hinds lacking the thin membranes that ran between the toes. His arms, folded across his chest, were shorter, while the fingers of his fores were long and didn’t have webbing. His neck was short as well, supporting a hairless head whose face was curiously featureless: eyes perpetually open and staring, a lipless mouth, a straight nose that lacked nostrils. And although the Teacher wore an ornate, brocaded robe dyed purple with roseberry, every youngster who’d ever sneaked up to the creche after services to peel beneath the hem knew that the Teacher lacked genitalia; there was only a smooth place between his legs.

These discrepancies were explained by the Word: the Teacher had been fashioned by Gal to resemble the demons who ruled Erf, and the Creator had made him the way to remind the Children of the place from which they’d come. This was why the Teacher was made of Galmatter instead of flesh and blood. According to history, everyone diligently learned and recited in school, the Teacher and the Disciples had fled the mainland for Providence just before the Great Storm, leaving behind the unfaithful who’d ignored Gal’s warning that their land would soon be consumed by wind and water.

The Teacher no longer moved or spoke, nor had he ever done so in recent memory. Yet his body didn’t decay, so he was preserved in the Shrine; along with the Transformer and the Galmatter block, they were holy relics, reminders of the Stormyarn. In his sermons, R’beca often prophesized the coming of the day when the Teacher would awaken and bring forth new revelations of the Word of Gal, but Sunjay secretly doubted this would ever occur. If he did, he hoped to be there when it happened, he’d like to see how someone could walk on all fours with limbs and extremities and misshapen as these.