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A squeegee is a sponge on a stick, and if there is a tangible item that’s more romantic, I don’t know what it is. Never go on a first date without one.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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It is much more profitable for salespeople to present the expensive item first, not only because to fail to do so will lose the influence of the contrast principle; to fail to do so will also cause the principle to work actively against them. Presenting an inexpensive product first and following it with an expensive one will cause the expensive item to seem even more costly as a result—hardly a desirable consequence for most sales organizations.
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Robert B. Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials))
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I could croak with no warning, and the only tragedy anyone would experience would be showing up on the last day of my estate sale simply to discover that all remaining items had copious amounts of dog hair on them.
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Laurie Notaro (It Looked Different on the Model: Epic Tales of Impending Shame and Infamy)
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He seemed to be an eternal on-sale item in the matrimonial market that everybody bypassed for the fancier merchandise.
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Diana Palmer (True Blue (Long, Tall Texans #41))
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I hope he approves of my carefully chosen Geekstuff.com outfit: the Ultimate Long-Safari-Skirt. Color: Puce. Sale price: $42.95. I've combined it with the Peter Pan Office Shirt, color: bright-white. Price $34.00. An item that has never been marked up or down for the past two years. A point I can't wait to bring up during my interview.
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Anne Eliot (Almost)
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I bought two items to get a third free, and then I returned the two. I should be Shopper of the Year
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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There is a bottle tree in Cross City, FL. Covered in locally bottled items. Seems Dixie County had a soda in the day. Ghosts keeping the ghosts away.
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Damon Thomas (Some Books Are Not For Sale (Rural Gloom))
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The odd thing is that only lonely people have a tendency to festoon their abodes with extravagant items.
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Yukio Mishima (Life for Sale)
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Now, during the tourist season, she first tries to speed the sale of an item that has been difficult to move by increasing its price substantially.
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Robert B. Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials))
“
We buy items that we only half like because they are on sale or a “good deal.” •We wear clothes that are so uncomfortable we need to take them off as soon as we get home. •We keep items that stopped fitting years ago just in case they fit again someday. •We wear shoes that we can hardly walk in and that leave our feet covered in blisters. •We force ourselves to wear pieces that we feel only so-so about because they were expensive and we don’t want to let that “investment” go to waste. •We wear worn-out, scruffy pieces around the house and hope nobody is going to stop by unannounced. •We wear clothes that ride up and tug in all the wrong places. •We wear outfits that don’t make us feel confident or inspired because we simply don’t have anything better in our wardrobe.
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Anuschka Rees (The Curated Closet: A Simple System for Discovering Your Personal Style and Building Your Dream Wardrobe)
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http://www.touchofireland.co/ have many shopping stores which contain all the things which are needed in daily purpose or uses .there are plenty of categories of products and items and we have made some changes in categories as per the current generation demand.
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irish dance soft shoes
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Ralph Lauren generates a huge portion of its sales from seconds and job lots sold at the many Polo factory stores around the country. There are so many of these stores (and the demand is so high) that many of the items sold aren’t seconds at all. They’re designed and produced for the factory stores. People tell themselves a story about finding a bargain, they build up the expectation by driving thirty miles out of their way (while on vacation, no less) and then are delighted to spend $40 for a $400 jacket that was never intended to be sold for $400 and probably cost $4 to make.
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Seth Godin (TODOS LOS ESPECIALISTAS EN MARKETING SON MENTIROSOS:: Los actuales vendedores de sueños)
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Scott noted that Walmart had similar techniques. It could measure whether a certain item, such as a globe for children, could lift the sale of another item, like a coloring book, if they were placed next to each other on a store display. Both companies had a deep interest in testing these combinations.
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Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
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be please with him) then said to ‘Abdur-Rahmaan (May Allah be please with him), “I take a strong oath from you that you will sell these items and then distribute the proceeds of that sale before nightfall.” Sunan Al-Baihaqi: 6/357. Muslims Compete for Calling Athaan Towards the end of the battle, a strange incident occurred
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Abdul Malik Mujahid (Golden Stories of Umar Ibn Al-Khatab)
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•I lost money in every way possible: I misplaced checks and sometimes found them when they were too old to take to the bank. If I did find them in time, I missed out on the interest they could’ve made in my savings account. I paid late fees on bills, even though I had money in the bank — I’d just forgotten to pay them or lost the bill in my piles. I bought new items because they were on sale with a rebate, but forgot to mail the rebate form. •I dealt with chronic health worries because I never scheduled doctor’s appointments. •I lived in constant fear of being “found out” by people who held me in high regard. I always felt others’ trust in me was misplaced. •I suffered from nonstop anxiety, waiting for the other shoe to drop. •I struggled to create a social life in our new home. I either felt I didn’t have time because I needed to catch up and calm some of the chaos, or I wasn’t organized enough to make plans in the first place. •I felt insecure in all my relationships, both personal and professional. •I had nowhere to retreat. My life was such a mess, I had no space to gather my thoughts or be by myself. Chaos lurked everywhere. •I rarely communicated with long-distance friends or family. •I wanted to write a book and publish articles in magazines, yet dedicated almost no time to my creative pursuits.
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Jaclyn Paul (Order from Chaos: The Everyday Grind of Staying Organized with Adult ADHD)
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The AM were wicked bright and us a bit sick however we scored our wake ups boosting some items at a sidewalk sale in the Harvard Squar where it were warm upping and the snow coming off onnings and then later Poor Tony ran across an old Patty citizen type of his old aquaintance from like the Cape and Poor Tony got over and pretended like he would give a blow job On The House and we got the citizen to get in his ride with us and crewed on him good and we got enough $ off the Patty type to get straightened out for true all day and crewed on him hard and C wanted we should elemonade the Patty’s map for keeps and everything like that and take his ride to this
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
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There were some amazing items for sale: stones on which the virtuous could stumble, mirrors that increased one's own sense of importance and spectacles that diminished other people's importance. Hanging on the wall were a few other prize objects: a dagger with a curved blade for stabbing people in the back and tape recorders that recorded only gossip and lies.
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Paulo Coelho (Stories for Parents, Children and Grandchildren - Volume 1)
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Becomingly dressed in a tan cotton suit, Nancy set off in her convertible for the shopping district. She drove down the boulevard, and upon reaching the more congested streets, made her way skillfully through heavy traffic, then pulled into a parking lot. “I think I’ll try Taylor’s Department Store first for a dress,” she decided. Taylor’s was one of River Heights’ finest stores. Nancy purchased several items for Hannah on the main floor, then went directly to the misses’ wearing apparel section on the second floor. Usually Nancy had no trouble finding a sales-clerk. But this particular morning seemed to be an especially busy one in the department, and an extra rush of customers had temporarily overwhelmed the sales force.
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Carolyn Keene (The Secret of The Old Clock (Nancy Drew Mystery, #1))
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Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina states that of the six hundred thousand food items for sale in the United States, 80 percent are laced with added sugar. Ninety percent of the food produced in the United States is sold to you by a total of ten conglomerates—Coca-Cola, ConAgra, Dole, General Mills, Hormel, Kraft, Nestle, Pepsico, Procter and Gamble, and Unilever.
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Robert H. Lustig (Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease)
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One way to do that is to sell something. You could sell lots of little stuff at a garage sale, sell a seldom-used item on the Internet, or sell a precious item through the classifieds. Get gazelle-intense and sell so much stuff that the kids are afraid they are next. Sell things that make your broke friends question your sanity. If your budget is stopped-up and your Debt Snowball won’t
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
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If you’re on a budget, check out thrift stores or garage sales. Look for signs of quality, like copper bottoms, cast iron, or stainless steel. Someone with limited money would do far better buying used than buying cheap stuff from Walmart. If you are determined to buy new, check out places like T.J.Maxx, the HomeGoods store, Ross—anywhere that’s likely to have top-quality items for low prices.
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Kelly Williams Brown (Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps)
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To see what happens in the real world when an information cascade takes over, and the bidders have almost nothing but one another’s behavior to estimate an item’s value, look no further than Peter A. Lawrence’s developmental biology text The Making of a Fly, which in April 2011 was selling for $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) on Amazon’s third-party marketplace. How and why had this—admittedly respected—book reached a sale price of more than $23 million? It turns out that two of the sellers were setting their prices algorithmically as constant fractions of each other: one was always setting it to 0.99830 times the competitor’s price, while the competitor was automatically setting their own price to 1.27059 times the other’s. Neither seller apparently thought to set any limit on the resulting numbers, and eventually the process spiraled totally out of control.
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Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
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One way to do that is to sell something. You could sell lots of little stuff at a garage sale, sell a seldom-used item on the Internet, or sell a precious item through the classifieds. Get gazelle-intense and sell so much stuff that the kids are afraid they are next. Sell things that make your broke friends question your sanity. If your budget is stopped-up and your Debt Snowball won’t roll on its own, you are going to have to get radical.
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Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
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No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those things sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.
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Robert B. Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials))
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Stepan Arkadyevitch had not chosen his political opinions or his views; these political opinions and views had come to him of themselves, just as he did not choose the shapes of his hat and coat, but simply took those that were being worn. And for him, living in a certain society—owing to the need, ordinarily developed at years of discretion, for some degree of mental activity—to have views was just as indispensable as to have a hat. If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life. The liberal party said that in Russia everything is wrong, and certainly Stepan Arkadyevitch had many debts and was decidedly short of money. The liberal party said that marriage is an institution quite out of date, and that it needs reconstruction; and family life certainly afforded Stepan Arkadyevitch little gratification, and forced him into lying and hypocrisy, which was so repulsive to his nature. The liberal party said, or rather allowed it to be understood, that religion is only a curb to keep in check the barbarous classes of the people; and Stepan Arkadyevitch could not get through even a short service without his legs aching from standing up, and could never make out what was the object of all the terrible and high-flown language about another world when life might be so very amusing in this world. And with all this, Stepan Arkadyevitch, who liked a joke, was fond of puzzling a plain man by saying that if he prided himself on his origin, he ought not to stop at Rurik and disown the first founder of his family—the monkey. And so Liberalism had become a habit of Stepan Arkadyevitch's, and he liked his newspaper, as he did his cigar after dinner, for the slight fog it diffused in his brain. He read the leading article, in which it was maintained that it was quite senseless in our day to raise an outcry that radicalism was threatening to swallow up all conservative elements, and that the government ought to take measures to crush the revolutionary hydra; that, on the contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as it always did, a certain satisfaction. But today that satisfaction was embittered by Matrona Philimonovna's advice and the unsatisfactory state of the household. He read, too, that Count Beist was rumored to have left for Wiesbaden, and that one need have no more gray hair, and of the sale of a light carriage, and of a young person seeking a situation; but these items of information did not give him, as usual, a quiet, ironical gratification. Having finished the paper, a second cup of coffee and a roll and butter, he got up, shaking the crumbs of the roll off his waistcoat; and, squaring his broad chest, he smiled joyously: not because there was anything particularly agreeable in his mind—the joyous smile was evoked by a good digestion.
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Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
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Finding a situation that catches the key competitor or competitors with conflicting goals is at the heart of many company success stories. The slow Swiss reaction to the Timex watch provides an example. Timex sold its watches through drugstores, rather than through the traditional jewelry store outlets for watches, and emphasized very low cost, the need for no repair, and the fact that a watch was not a status item but a functional part of the wardrobe. The strong sales of the Timex watch eventually threatened the financial and growth goals of the Swiss, but it also raised an important dilemma for them were they to retaliate against it directly. The Swiss had a big stake in the jewelry store as a channel and a large investment in the Swiss image of the watch as a piece of fine precision jewelry. Aggressive retaliation against Timex would have helped legitimize the Timex concept, threatened the needed cooperation of jewelers in selling Swiss watches, and blurred the Swiss product image. Thus the Swiss retaliation to Timex never really came. There are many other examples of this principle at work. Volkswagen’s and American Motor’s early strategies of producing a stripped-down basic transportation vehicle with few style changes created a similar dilemma for the Big Three auto producers. They had a strategy built on trade-up and frequent model changes. Bic’s recent introduction of the disposable razor has put Gillette in a difficult position: if it reacts it may cut into the sales of another product in its broad line of razors, a dilemma Bic does not face.4 Finally, IBM has been reluctant to jump into minicomputers because the move will jeopardize its sales of larger mainframe computers.
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Michael E. Porter (Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors)
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The customer is also at the center of how we analyze and manage performance metrics. Our emphasis is on what we call controllable input metrics, rather than output metrics. Controllable input metrics (e.g., reducing internal costs so you can affordably lower product prices, adding new items for sale on the website, or reducing standard delivery time) measure the set of activities that, if done well, will yield the desired results, or output metrics (such as monthly revenue and stock price). We detail these metrics as well as how to discover and track them in chapter six.
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
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Once again, it's a beautiful day to be a pirate," Auburn Sally said to her crew. "Ladies, lower the sales!"
The twins looked up, expecting the sails above them to comedown and fill with the ocean air. Instead, Siren Sue peeked out of the crow's nest with a treasure chest full of scarves, jewelry, hooks, and weapons. The other pirates gathered below her with hands full of gold coins.
"You heard the captain - time to lower the sales!" Siren Sue announced. "For a limited time, everything is half off!" Scarves are two coins, earring are four coins, necklaces are six coins, and the rifles are eight coins! Get your accessories while the sales are low!"
Siren Sue sold off the items to the pirates below until there was nothing left in her chest. The women ogled their new purchases and showed them off to one another. It absolutely baffled Alex, and when she glanced at Conner, he looked just as confused as she did.
"I don't understand what's happening," he said. "I never wrote that."
"Did you mean to write lower the sails?" Like the normal sails on a ship?" Alex said.
"Oops," Conner said. "I must have spelled it wrong."
To his relief, once the sales were over, the pirates lowered the sails, too.
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Chris Colfer (An Author's Odyssey (The Land of Stories, #5))
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But was the Newton a failure? The timing of Newton’s entry into the handheld market was akin to the timing of the Apple II into the desktop market. It was a market-creating, disruptive product targeted at an undefinable set of users whose needs were unknown to either themselves or Apple. On that basis, Newton’s sales should have been a pleasant surprise to Apple’s executives: It outsold the Apple II in its first two years by a factor of more than three to one. But while selling 43,000 units was viewed as an IPO-qualifying triumph in the smaller Apple of 1979, selling 140,000 Newtons was viewed as a failure in the giant Apple of 1994.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Disruptive Innovation: The Christensen Collection (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, The Innovator's DNA, and Harvard Business Review ... Will You Measure Your Life?") (4 Items))
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I made the out of town trip once, walked a mile, and endured product placement rather than putting an item where it made sense. There were plastic smiles of overworked, underpaid employees who not only didn’t want to help you, they didn’t want to be there. Crowds, lots of crowds, because everything was always on sale. And after I’d wandered aimlessly for a couple of hours, running from one side of the store to the next caught in some perverse scavenger hunt, I stood in the line. Then there was the one open line in a row of fifty closed ones trying to check out a store full of tired suburbanites, their screaming kids, and clueless teenagers.
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Adrienne Wilder (In the Absence of Light (Morgan & Grant, #1))
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DECIDE HOW YOU CLEAN ONCE I loathe cleaning, and regardless of whether you share my hatred, deciding once can help the entire process feel manageable. Streamline Your Products When you buy a cleaner that’s on sale, a fancy microfiber cloth, or a magic mop you saw on Shark Tank, you’re making a fixed decision to use that item. If you use it and it adds value to your life, high five. If you don’t use it, it becomes clutter. Stuff is the enemy of clean, and the more stuff you have, the harder it is to clean your house. Ironically, when I’m discontented with my home, I buy things to make it prettier or cleaner, which only makes the problem worse by adding to the noise.
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Kendra Adachi (The Lazy Genius Way: Embrace What Matters, Ditch What Doesn't, and Get Stuff Done)
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Make a List (or lists)
• Make a list of all the things that you can look at and think: Why did we even bother to move that the last time? Now will be your last and best chance to give or throw away unwanted items until your next move (5-7 years on average). Give unwanted clothes, furniture, kitchen items, etc. to a charity that allows you to use your donation as a tax write-off. Yard sales are another option.
• Make a list (and/or get one online) of household hazardous materials. These are common items in your home that are not or might not be safe to transport: flammables like propane tanks (even empty ones), gasoline or kerosene, aerosols or compressed gases (hair spray, spray paint), cleaning fluids in plastic containers (bleach, ammonia) and pesticides (bug spray) and herbicides (weed killer) and caustics like lye or pool acid.
There is more likely to be damage caused by leakage of cleaning fluids-- like bleach--than there is by damage caused by a violent explosion or fire in your truck. The problem lies in the fact that any leaking fluid is going to drip its way to the floor and spread out--even in the short time span of your move and more so if you are going up and down hills. Aerosols can explode in the summer heat as can propane BBQ tanks. Gasoline from lawnmowers and pesticide vapors expand in the heat and can permeate everything in the truck. Plastic containers that have been opened can expand and contract with a change in temperature and altitude and crack.
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Jerry G. West (The Self-Mover's Bible: A Comprehensive Illustrated Guide to DIY Moving Written by Professional Furniture Mover Jerry G. West)
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Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company 1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top. 2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary. 3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare. 4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees. 5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts. 6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well. 7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize. 8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company. 9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.
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Tony Hsieh (Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose)
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How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn.
Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn.
To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.)
There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
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Mr. Clutter enjoyed the chore, and was excellent at it—no woman in Kansas baked a better loaf of salt-rising bread, and his celebrated coconut cookies were the first item to go at charity cake sales—but he was not a hearty eater; unlike his fellow-ranchers, he even preferred Spartan breakfasts. That morning an apple and a glass of milk were enough for him; because he touched neither coffee or tea, he was accustomed to begin the day on a cold stomach. The truth was he opposed all stimulants, however gentle. He did not smoke, and of course he did not drink; indeed, he had never tasted spirits, and was inclined to avoid people who had—a circumstance that did not shrink his social circle as much as might be supposed, for the center of that circle was supplied by the members of Garden City’s First Methodist Church, a congregation totaling seventeen hundred, most of whom were as abstemious as Mr. Clutter could desire.
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Truman Capote (In Cold Blood)
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With as yet no house of my own to keep, I had little that needed buying, but enjoyed myself in browsing among the newly replenished shelves, for the pure joy of seeing lots of things for sale again. It had been a long time of rationing, of doing without the simple things like soap and eggs, and even longer without the minor luxuries of life, like L’Heure Bleu cologne. My gaze lingered on a shop window filled with household goods—embroidered tea cloths and cozies, pitchers and glasses, a stack of quite homely pie tins, and a set of three vases. I had never owned a vase in my life. During the war years, I had, of course, lived in the nurses’ quarters, first at Pembroke Hospital, later at the field station in France. But even before that, we had lived nowhere long enough to justify the purchase of such an item. Had I had such a thing, I reflected, Uncle Lamb would have filled it with potsherds long before I could have got near it with a bunch of daisies.
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Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
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Tips for Mailings to Sell Professional Services Credibility is critical here. Descriptive items of fact (such as number of years in business, number of clients served, sample client lists, and so on) can all be of tremendous value. However, “believability” is even more important than “credibility.” The facts about your business, such as years in business, clients served, proprietary methods, and so on are important, but not nearly as persuasive as what clients have to say about their real-life experiences with you, benefits realized, and skepticism erased. Facts and credibility only support persuasion. Consider offering a free initial consultation or a free package of informative literature; this may break down barriers of skepticism and mistrust. Answer the question: why should the reader bother? Similarly, you should work at making the intangible benefits of your product tangible. This can be accomplished with before/after photographs, slice-of-life stories, case histories, or other examples. Demonstrate the value!
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Dan S. Kennedy (The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales.)
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OPTIONS FOR REDUCING While thrift stores such as Goodwill or the Salvation Army can be a convenient way to initially let go, many other outlets exist and are often more appropriate for usable items. Here are some examples: • Amazon.com • Antiques shops • Auction houses • Churches • Consignment shops (quality items) • Craigslist.org (large items, moving boxes, free items) • Crossroads Trading Co. (trendy clothes) • Diggerslist.com (home improvement) • Dress for Success (workplace attire) • Ebay.com (small items of value) • Flea markets • Food banks (food) • Freecycle.org (free items) • Friends • Garage and yard sales • Habitat for Humanity (building materials, furniture, and/or appliances) • Homeless and women’s shelters • Laundromats (magazines and laundry supplies) • Library (books, CDs and DVDs) • Local SPCA (towels and sheets) • Nurseries and preschools (blankets, toys) • Operation Christmas Child (new items in a shoe box) • Optometrists (eyeglasses) • Regifting • Rummage sales for a cause • Salvage yards (building materials) • Schools (art supplies, magazines, dishes to eliminate class party disposables) • Tool co-ops (tools) • Waiting rooms (magazines) • Your curb with a “Free” sign
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Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
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Any program about highlighting benevolence, protecting the innocent, or sacrificing time to help the underdog grew in popularity. Included in our list of reality viewing were shows about police or bounty hunters apprehending evil criminals. These too became some of the most-watched programs. To sum it all up, our entertainment is often centered on the good of humanity. Sales and Marketing 101 teaches us that a product must feel, look, sound, taste, or smell good in order to succeed in the marketplace. It must elevate the consumer’s senses or emotions to a better and happier state. We know that good items will sell. After all, who would want to purchase something bad? And only twisted people would desire to procure evil. We hear comments such as “he’s a good man” or “she’s a good woman,” and we normally accept this evaluation at face value. The vulnerable quickly let down their guard and embrace every statement or action from those proclaimed to be good as safe and trustworthy. But are these assessments always accurate? Could we ever fall into the delusional state of calling what’s right wrong or what’s wrong right? Doesn’t everybody know the difference? And we certainly could never fall into the deceived state of calling good evil or evil good. Correct?
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John Bevere (Good or God?: Why Good Without God Isn't Enough)
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Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.
-LUKE 12:15
One of our universal problems is the overcrowding of our homes. Whether we have an apartment or a six bedroom home, every closet, cupboard, refrigerator, and garage are all crammed with abundance. Some of us have so much that we go out and rent additional storage spaces for our possessions.
Bob and I are no different than you. We buy new clothes and cram them into our wardrobes. A new antique goes in the corner, a new quilt hangs over the bed, a new potted plant gathers sunlight by the window. On and on it goes. Pretty soon we feel as though we are closed in with no room to breathe. We continually struggle to keep a balance in our attitudes regarding possessions.
It is simpler to manage if you are single and
live alone-it's just you. Life becomes more complicated with a spouse and children. You soon get that "bunched in" feeling. This creates more stress, and you can lose your cool and blow relationships when your calm is broken.
We have made a rule in our home about abundance. Simply stated, it says, "One comes in and one goes out." After every purchase we give away or sell a like item. (We have an annual garage sale.) With a new blouse, out goes an older blouse; with a new table, out goes a table; and so on. Naturally if you're a newlywed this rule is not for you because you probably don't have an abundance of possessions.
There's another strategy that's very effective. We have informed our loved ones that we don't want any more gifts that take up space or that have to be dusted; we prefer receiving consumable items. Remember-your life is not based on your possessions. Share with others what you aren't using.
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Emilie Barnes
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Regret can improve decisions. To begin understanding regret’s ameliorative properties, imagine the following scenario. During the pandemic of 2020–21, you hastily purchased a guitar, but you never got around to playing it. Now it’s taking up space in your apartment—and you could use a little cash. So, you decide to sell it. As luck would have it, your neighbor Maria is in the market for a used guitar. She asks how much you want for your instrument. Suppose you bought the guitar for $500. (It’s acoustic.) No way you can charge Maria that much for a used item. It would be great to get $300, but that seems steep. So, you suggest $225 with the plan to settle for $200. When Maria hears your $225 price, she accepts instantly, then hands you your money. Are you feeling regret? Probably. Many people do, even more so in situations with stakes greater than the sale of a used guitar. When others accept our first offer without hesitation or pushback, we often kick ourselves for not asking for more.[2] However, acknowledging one’s regrets in such situations—inviting, rather than repelling, this aversive emotion—can improve our decisions in the future. For example, in 2002, Adam Galinsky, now at Columbia University, and three other social psychologists studied negotiators who’d had their first offer accepted. They asked these negotiators to rate how much better they could have done if only they’d made a higher offer. The more they regretted their decision, the more time they spent preparing for a subsequent negotiation.[3] A related study by Galinsky, University of California, Berkeley’s, Laura Kray, and Ohio University’s Keith Markman found that when people look back at previous negotiations and think about what they regretted not doing—for example, not extending a strong first offer—they made better decisions in later negotiations. What’s more, these regret-enhanced decisions spread the benefits widely. During their subsequent encounters, regretful negotiators expanded the size of the pie and secured themselves a larger slice. The very act of contemplating what they hadn’t done previously widened the possibilities of what they could do next and provided a script for future interactions.[4]
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Daniel H. Pink (The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward)
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Leonard H. Stringfield 1)Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody. The first formal research paper presented publicly on the subject of UFO crash/retrievals at the MUFON Symposium, Dayton, Ohio, July, 1978. Original edition, dated April, 1978, was published in MUFON Proceedings (1978). Address: MUFON, 103 Oldtowne Road, Seguin, Texas 78155. If available, price___________. 2)Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody,Status Report I. Revised edition, July, 1978, word processed copy, 34 pages. Available at author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 3)UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome, Status Report II. Published by MUFON. Flexible cover, typeset, illustrations, 37 pages. Available only at MUFON address: 103 Oldtowne Road, Seguin, Texas 78155. Price, USA___________. 4)UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence, Status Report III, June 1982; flexible cover, typeset, illustrations, 53 pages. Available from author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 5)The Fatal Encounter at Ft. Dix -- McGuire: A Case Study, Status Report IV, June, 1985. Paper presented at MUFON Symposium, St. Louis, Missouri, 1985. Xeroxed copy, 26 pages. Available at author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 6)UFO Crash/Retrievals: Is the Coverup Lid Lifting? Status Report V. Published in MUFON UFO Journal, January, 1989, with updated addendum. Xeroxed copy, 23 pages. Available at author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 7)Inside Saucer Post, 3-0 Blue. Book privately published, 1957. Review of author's early research and cooperative association with the Air Defense Command Filter Center, using code name, FOX TROT KILO 3-0 BLUE. Flexible cover, typeset, illustrations, 94 pages. Available from author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. 8)Situation Red: The UFO Siege. Hardcover book published by Doubleday & Co., 1977. Paperback edition published by Fawcett Crest Books, 1977. Also foreign publishers. Out of print, not available. 9)Orbit Newsletter, published monthly, 1954-1957, by author for international sale and distribution. Set of 36 issues. Some issues out of stock, duplicated by xerox. Available at author's address -- see below. Price of set, USA___________. 10)UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum, Status Report VI, July, 1991; flexible cover, book length, 81.000 words, 142 (8-1/2 X 11) pages, illustrated. Privately published. Available from author's address. See below. Price, USA___________. Prices include postage and handling. Mailings to Canada, add 500 for each item ordered. All foreign orders, payable U.S. funds, International money order or draft on U.S. Bank. Recommend Air Mail outside U.S. territories. Check on price. Leonard H. Stringfield 4412 Grove Avenue Cincinnati, Ohio 45227 USA Telephone: (513) 271-4248
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Leonard H. Stringfield (UFO Crash Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum - Status Report VI)
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Like,” he repeats with distaste. “How about I tell you what I don’t like? I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction about the Holocaust or any other major world tragedy to be distasteful—nonfiction only, please. I do not like genre mash-ups à la the literary detective novel or the literary fantasy. Literary should be literary, and genre should be genre, and crossbreeding rarely results in anything satisfying. I do not like children’s books, especially ones with orphans, and I prefer not to clutter my shelves with young adult. I do not like anything over four hundred pages or under one hundred fifty pages. I am repulsed by ghostwritten novels by reality television stars, celebrity picture books, sports memoirs, movie tie-in editions, novelty items, and—I imagine this goes without saying—vampires. I rarely stock debuts, chick lit, poetry, or translations. I would prefer not to stock series, but the demands of my pocketbook require me to. For your part, you needn’t tell me about the ‘next big series’ until it is ensconced on the New York Times Best Sellers list. Above all, Ms. Loman, I find slim literary memoirs about little old men whose little old wives have died from cancer to be absolutely intolerable. No matter how well written the sales rep claims they are. No matter how many copies you promise I’ll sell on Mother’s Day.” Amelia blushes, though she is angry more than embarrassed. She agrees with some of what A.J. has said, but his manner is unnecessarily insulting. Knightley Press doesn’t even sell half of that stuff anyway. She studies him. He is older than Amelia but not by much, not by more than ten years. He is too young to like so little. “What do you like?” she asks. “Everything else,” he says. “I will also admit to an occasional weakness for short-story collections. Customers never want to buy them though.” There is only one short-story collection on Amelia’s list, a debut. Amelia hasn’t read the whole thing, and time dictates that she probably won’t, but she liked the first story. An American sixth-grade class and an Indian sixth-grade class participate in an international pen pal program. The narrator is an Indian kid in the American class who keeps feeding comical misinformation about Indian culture to the Americans. She clears her throat, which is still terribly dry. “The Year Bombay Became Mumbai. I think it will have special int—” “No,” he says. “I haven’t even told you what it’s about yet.” “Just no.” “But why?” “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit that you’re only telling me about it because I’m partially Indian and you think this will be my special interest. Am I right?” Amelia imagines smashing the ancient computer over his head. “I’m telling you about this because you said you liked short stories! And it’s the only one on my list. And for the record”—here, she lies—“it’s completely wonderful from start to finish. Even if it is a debut. “And do you know what else? I love debuts. I love discovering something new. It’s part of the whole reason I do this job.” Amelia rises. Her head is pounding. Maybe she does drink too much? Her head is pounding and her heart is, too. “Do you want my opinion?” “Not particularly,” he says. “What are you, twenty-five?” “Mr. Fikry, this is a lovely store, but if you continue in this this this”—as a child, she stuttered and it occasionally returns when she is upset; she clears her throat—“this backward way of thinking, there won’t be an Island Books before too long.
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Gabrielle Zevin (The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry)
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To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
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Sure, I’d fake my own death. But only if I had the following items: duct tape, seven slinkies, a parachute, and a mannequin that looked like me.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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I am fun, friendly, and I know how to use the third comma in a list of three distinct items or things. In my book that makes me a better lover, because I wrote it. The book, I wrote the book, so of course I’d make myself a better lover.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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The most vexing managerial aspect of this problem of asymmetry, where the easiest path to growth and profit is up, and the most deadly attacks come from below, is that “good” management—working harder and smarter and being more visionary—doesn’t solve the problem. The resource allocation process involves thousands of decisions, some subtle and some explicit, made every day by hundreds of people, about how their time and the company’s money ought to be spent. Even when a senior manager decides to pursue a disruptive technology, the people in the organization are likely to ignore it or, at best, cooperate reluctantly if it doesn’t fit their model of what it takes to succeed as an organization and as individuals within an organization. Well-run companies are not populated by yes-people who have been taught to carry out mindlessly the directives of management. Rather, their employees have been trained to understand what is good for the company and what it takes to build a successful career within the company. Employees of great companies exercise initiative to serve customers and meet budgeted sales and profits. It is very difficult for a manager to motivate competent people to energetically and persistently pursue a course of action that they think makes no sense.
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Clayton M. Christensen (Disruptive Innovation: The Christensen Collection (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, The Innovator's DNA, and Harvard Business Review ... Will You Measure Your Life?") (4 Items))
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I GOT A PHONE CALL ONE DAY FROM A FRIEND WHO HAD RECENTLY opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought that, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it to her. The story involved a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving. She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area; no luck. She even told her sales staff to "push" the items hard, again without success. Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled an exasperated note to her head saleswoman, "Everything in this display case, price x %," hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been sold. She was shocked, though, to discover that, because the employee had read the "%" in her scrawled message as a "2," the entire allotment had sold out at twice the original price! That's
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Anonymous
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the great fortunes of our day have rarely been accumulated through the sale of the most meaningful items and services, such as poetry or relationship counselling.
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Alain de Botton (The News: A User's Manual (Vintage International))
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and looked up the phone number for Christie’s. When the number came up on her computer, she saw that their offices were at Rockefeller Center. Although by then it was nearly lunchtime, she called the number and asked for the jewelry department when they answered. The phone rang for a long time, and she was about to hang up, when a female voice finally picked up, and Jane asked to speak to someone about an appraisal to submit jewelry items for an upcoming sale, and they put her on hold, while she listened to an endless piece of music. It appeared that there was no one in the department, when a male voice said simply “Lawton” in a flat tone. Jane explained that she was calling from the surrogate’s court and needed an
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Danielle Steel (Property of a Noblewoman)
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In West's guide, rule-of-thumb guidance comes in two formats that most valuation experts recognize:  Percentage of annual sales: If a business had total sales of $ 100,000 last year and the multiple for that business was 40 percent of annual sales, the price based on that particular rule of thumb would be $ 40,000.  Multiple of earnings: An earnings multiplier makes the most sense to prospective buyers. It directly addresses the buyer's motive to make money: to achieve a return on investment. In many small companies, this multiple is commonly used against what is known as seller's discretionary earnings (SDE), which are earnings before accounting for the following items: • Income taxes • Nonrecurring income and expenses • Nonoperating income and expenses • Depreciating an amortization • Interest expense or income • Owner's total compensation for one owner/ operator after adjusting the total compensation of all owners to market value
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Lisa Holton (Business Valuation For Dummies)
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Like the circles of Dante’s Inferno, IKEA descends through several floors towards Hell itself (or the checkout, as people with no imagination insist on calling it). Unfortunately for the unwary traveller, you must venture through every floor no matter what item you wish to procure, whether you want to or not. For example, should you wish, like me, merely to purchase a wok and a couple of bookends to stop Greg’s huge hardback rugby books from falling over all the time, you must also look at every other sodding product IKEA has on sale. You must make your way along the circuitous and tortuous route that the sadistic Swedes have laid out between you and the exit. No one in human history has ever said the following: ‘I’ve just popped into IKEA and picked up some meatballs. You fancy a spag bol?’ One does not simply ‘pop’ into IKEA. One plans the visit like a military operation. Make no mistake: shopping there is not to be taken lightly. Not if you wish to retain both sanity and a healthy bank balance.
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Nick Spalding (Fat Chance)
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Here’s a proven sales meeting checklist of pre-meeting, during meeting, and post-meeting best practices and tips to follow and live by every day: Have clear meeting goals and expected outcomes documented and stated in email before and after meetings. Put agendas that are agreed to by your customers in meeting calendar invites. Meeting agendas should start with introductions and customers’ priorities/challenges review. Meeting agendas should close with discussion and time for questions. Research the company and recent announcements and know how their business is doing. Understand the context of their industry, too. Research the people attending your meeting and identify shared interests and shared executive connections. Connect with meeting attendees on LinkedIn before meeting. Some people believe this should be done after a meeting. My point of view is that it’s an important touch point when a prospect accepts your request to connect. Make the connection, and use your connection’s response and speed of response as a gauge of their awareness. If they connect fast, then it may mean they are excited to meet with you. If they don’t connect quickly, it could mean it’s not top of mind. Both are important to know. Don’t forget to personalize the message. Reconfirm agenda and meeting attendee participation. It’s good to do this the day before the meeting is scheduled to happen. Prepare a list of discovery and qualification questions to ask the prospect. The questions should preferably be open ended. Share the questions with your internal team to get alignment. It’s a requirement and best practice to brief executives attending the meeting with you beforehand. Share with your executives the context, current situation, and everything you learned during company, industry, and executive research. Your executives are busy. Help them help you. Be clear on what their role in the meeting is. Introduce meeting attendees at meeting outset, and let everyone have a voice. Go around and have people share their role and what they hope to get out of the meeting. Take thorough notes, capturing your customer’s words. Listen more and talk less. Watch the clock to begin and end meetings as promised. Leave time for questions and discussion at the end. Recap meeting outcomes and next steps before ending the call. Send meeting follow-up notes with clear action items the same day of the meeting using your customer’s words.
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Elay Cohen (Enablement Mastery: Grow Your Business Faster by Aligning Your People, Processes, and Priorities)
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To collaborate and involve your buyers as much as possible in e-relationship sales, focus on making your messages concise, include questions to involve Them, share specific examples, support information with documentation, reference and recap previous messages, and identify clear action items and timelines.
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Nancy Bleeke (Conversations That Sell: Collaborate with Buyers and Make Every Conversation Count)
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It has come to my attention lately,” he says, “that sales are up on suntan lotion and sunblock. Now who do you think are the customers for this item? I’ll tell you who. White people, that’s who. Not you or I, brother. No, it’s white people.” His voice deepens. “Now what do you think of a people who keep telling us they’re superior, and…” Without warning he pauses, his eyes squeeze shut, and he screams, “They can’t even make it in the fuckin’ sun!” Back to broadcast news. “You—” He points calmly at the heads of the fleeing crowd. “The white people. Don’t even belong. On the planet.
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Vivian Gornick (The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir)
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Originally developed as a cost-saving efficiency tool, once all product categories adopted UPCs and computing became powerful and cheap enough to handle the unimaginable quantity of data, the benefits of retail information dwarfed the anticipated cost benefits from efficiencies. Real-time knowledge of sales at the item level dramatically illustrated the truism of knowledge equating to power, especially when the data could be measured at the individual shopper level through loyalty cards.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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At the time of our visit, European manufacturers doubted the robustness of the Indian car market, as well as the merits of being a minority partner in a government-managed company. Their fears were not without basis. Though the Indian economy had grown 7.2 per cent in 1980-81, it was not seen as a very vibrant economy. The demand for cars had been stagnant for a decade. Cars were highly taxed and were considered a luxury item. The economy was still closed and highly controlled and the business environment for foreigners was not friendly. If the number of cars produced was small, royalties would not yield much income. The stringent localization conditions would mean that profits from the sale of imported components would be low. The world car market was going through a downswing at that time and European car makers were battling stiff competition from Japanese cars on their home turf. Getting into an unfamiliar, and what appeared to be an unattractive market, was hardly a priority.
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R.C. Bhargava (The Maruti Story)
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First, you can assume all the engineers are players. They obviously have technical knowledge they may throw on the table, otherwise why were they invited? The product-management person is also a player as she represents the sales folks in this meeting. Program managers in these meetings are pawns. They’ll make sure action items are recorded and that the meeting ends on time.If you’re sitting in a meeting where you’re unable to identify any players, get the hell out.
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Michael Lopp (Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager)
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Thus, the play is no longer to try to uncover needs, but to facilitate a conversation where the salesperson raises potential issues and their implications. This facilitation is a proactive means of accomplishing two things. On one hand, your bringing up important issues could absolutely jog the customer’s thinking and cause them to recognize key points that they might not have otherwise factored into their decisions. As well, raising important issues and implications is one of your greatest opportunities to gain credibility with potential buyers, as we will discuss in more depth when we get to the chapters on needs development. The key is preparation. When I train sales teams on-site, they leave with a list of action items that are important in terms of implementing the QBS methodology. The first action item on the list is always the same—to create a repository of decision issues and implications that could impact the customer. Notice I use the word “could,” because we’re not asking salespeople to be clairvoyant. You can’t know what’s important to a customer until you actually talk with them. But, you can absolutely make a list of potential issues and the implications of those issues, as a way to prepare yourself in advance for more productive conversations.
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Thomas Freese (Secrets of Question-Based Selling: How the Most Powerful Tool in Business Can Double Your Sales Results (Top Selling Books to Increase Profit, Money Books for Growth))
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The more material things that we possess, the less clear life becomes. Therefore, if you want clarity, have a garage sale.
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Craig D. Lounsbrough
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Those retailers are simply fated to live in the inflexible world of racks and aisles, where products must obey the uncompromising physics of atoms, not bits. One of those unfortunate rules of corporeal matter is that it cannot transcend time and space. Obviously, a physical item can be in only one place at any given time. For instance, a can of tuna cannot exist simultaneously in multiple categories, even though the interests and browsing paths of each shopper might suggest many: “fish,” “canned food,” “sandwich makings,” “low-fat,” “on sale,” “best-selling,” “back-to-school,” “under $2,” and so on. A physical store cannot be reconfigured on the fly to cater to each customer based on his or her particular interests.
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Chris Anderson (The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More)
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So Charlie decided to take back what rightfully belonged to her. She was no longer as naive as she had once been. She learned everything she could about banking and finance and figured out how to establish a secure Swiss bank account. After that, through Barracuda, she hacked into Lightning’s corporate bank accounts, siphoned out a considerable amount of money, and deposited it in her own account. And then, because she couldn’t help herself, she enacted a little more vengeance on Lightning. On the company’s homepage, she altered the slogan to “Committing Evil for 120 years” and animated their lightning logo so that it struck a kennel and set several cartoon dogs on fire. She also removed all the software products for sale on their website, replacing them with particularly horrible items like elephant tusks, rhino horns, and giant panda skins. Finally, she wiped out all of Lightning’s access codes.
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Stuart Gibbs (Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation (Charlie Thorne, #1))
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Food License Consultant
A food license consultant is one type of bridge that can help you to issue your food license. There are many companies available that can help you to grow your business. They can guide your whole process and explain the fee structure and government fee and some legal documents.
If you are looking for the best food license consultants in your city then you can visit our website. Here you can get many verified professionals.
Here are some details about the food license which are listed below.
What is Food License?
What is Food License Registration?
What are the types of FSSAI Licenses?
What are the documents needed for Food License Registration?
What is a food License (FSSAI License)?
FSSAI stands for Food Safety Standards Authority of India, which is a statutory body established under the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Government of India. It has been established under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, which is related to food safety and regulation in India. A food license is responsible for protecting and promoting public health through regulation and supervision of food safety.
Food License Registration
A food license is required for every person who wants to start a food business, who can involve in any kind of business like manufacturing, processing, distribution, or sale of food products, etc.
A food license consists of 14 digit license number, which can print on all the food packages item. It gives all information regarding the assembling and owner’s permit.
The motive of registration is to make the food business operators more responsible that can maintain the quality of food products.
Types Of FSSAI License
There are different types of food licenses that can depend on the scale of business, and on the turnover provided by the business owner. The government issue different type of license based on the food business operator activity. The types if food licenses are as below:
1) FSSAI Basic Registration: The FSSAI basic license registration for those who have a small-scale business. If their turnover is less than 12 lakh then apply for basic registration.
2) FSSAI State License: The FSSAI State License registration for those who have medium-scale businesses. If their turnover is more than 12 Lakh or up to 20 crores.
3) FSSAI Central License: The FSSAI Central License registration for those who have large-scale businesses. If their turnover is more than 20 crores then it can apply for Central License.
Document required for Food License Registration
The food license registration document required for the proprietorship Concern or a single person
1) Rental Agreement
2) Pan Card
3) Two Photos
4) ID Proof
The food license registration document required for the Partnership Firm
1) Pan Card of Partnership Firm
2) All partner’s Id and Address Proof
3) Two Photos of Each Partner
4) Rental Agreement
The food license registration document required for Private Limited Company
1) Pan Card of Private Limited Company.
2) Incorporation Certificate of Private Limited Company.
3) All Director’s Id and Address Proof
4) Two Photos of Each Director.
5) Rental Agreement.
Best FSSAI License Consultant in India
We are a team of FSSAI Registration centers, helping business owners in the registration, and certification procedures all over India.
If you have further queries or doubts, then please visit our website.
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Dhaval
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The customer is also at the center of how we analyze and manage performance metrics. Our emphasis is on what we call controllable input metrics, rather than output metrics. Controllable input metrics (e.g., reducing internal costs so you can affordably lower product prices, adding new items for sale on the website, or reducing standard delivery time) measure the set of activities that, if done well, will yield the desired results, or output metrics (such as monthly revenue and stock price).
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Colin Bryar (Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon)
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I took a piece of paper and wrote down the things that defined a perfect life for me. I then stuck that paper on my cell wall with toothpaste. Over the next seven years, I focused on that list every day. I committed emotionally to achieving the items on it. And I began taking actions daily that were consistent with the things I knew I wanted.
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Weldon Long (The Power of Consistency: Prosperity Mindset Training for Sales and Business Professionals)
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According to Ivar, he and Dr Glowacki reached a final agreement on July 2, 1925, just days before the new participating preferred shares were to be sold. Ivar’s assistant, Karin Bökman, said she witnessed the signatures to the secret deal; she certified the translation of the original contract, as did a Polish notary. Dr Glowacki signed on behalf of the “Treasury of the Polish State,” and Ivar signed on behalf of International Match Corporation.32 Ivar apparently didn’t need to use the stamp he had prepared with a facsimile of Dr Glowacki’s signature. Like the B Shares, this contract was a marvel of financial innovation. First, the agreement provided for the creation of a new Dutch company called N.V. Maatschappij Garanta, or Garanta for short. Garanta would be incorporated in Amsterdam, and its shares would be owned by Polish citizens nominated by Dr Glowacki. Garanta would take over the entire match industry in Poland, from production to sale. Garanta also would assume “certain exchange losses which have been sustained by International Match Corporation in connection with financial transactions in Poland. This item is to be carried as an asset on the books of Garanta.”33 Apparently, Ivar had continued gambling on foreign exchange rates during 1925. This time, though, he had used International Match’s money, and this time he had lost. The secret agreement shifted those losses from International Match to Garanta. Durant and Berning were unaware of these losses, or their transfer.
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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But this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.
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Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
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These looming, multicolored cubes are packed with items donated with the best of intentions. But the best of intentions, alone, can’t sell clothes, and more than half the apparel that arrives at Goodwill is unsold.
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Adam Minter (Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale)
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By this time, Ivar and Berning had developed a much cozier relationship. Ivar had given up on getting Berning’s first name right, but at least he addressed letters with an honorific now, as in “My dear Mr Berning.”27 Berning had gotten over the scrubbed trip to Japan, and instead was focused on an upcoming trip to Europe with his wife, at Ivar’s expense. He wrote that “Mrs Berning and I are looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to our visit to Sweden.”28 A.D. Berning’s responses to detailed inquiries from Durant ranged from murky to non-responsive. What, Durant wanted to know, did International Match’s income statement entry of $4,318,827.84 for “income from other sources” represent? Berning cryptically answered that the “other sources” entry “represents all the income of the corporation other than from sales. It includes dividends and interest received on investments, interest received on advances, accounts receivable, etc., profit on exchange and other miscellaneous items.”29 Whatever that meant, it could not have inspired much confidence.
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Frank Partnoy (The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century)
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Teaching the Dharma to people who are skilled in dry intellectual speculations and cling to mere words of sophistry will result in slandering the Dharma. By slandering the Dharma the slanderer will accumulate evil karma, and you yourself, by being angry, will also gather misdeeds. Thus both teacher and recipient will gather evil karma through the Dharma. There is no need for that.
Do not make the profound instructions into a sales item but practice with perseverance in remote places and mingle your mind with the Dharma.
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Padmasambhava (Dakini Teachings: A Collection of Padmasambhava's Advice to the Dakini Yeshe Tsogyal)
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Often in our life we have made a prayer list of items we feel we need. We learned years ago that before venturing out to buy an item at full price, we should give God the opportunity to provide the item at a great sale price, used for still less, or sometimes even for free. We have seen God answer our prayers over and over again. We document these in our family's 'I Spy' book-- a simple spiral notebook that chronicles the faith stories of how God blessed us with material possessions that we needed and prayed for.
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Karen Ehman (A Life That Says Welcome: Simple Ways to Open Your Heart & Home to Others)
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strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,’ Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. ‘And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.’”[
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Foster Provost (Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know about Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking)
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■ Poor labor efficiency due to lack of job costing ■ Sales team focus on revenue rather than margin (discounting quotes, making concessions, and so on) ■ A lack of emphasis on service sales (rather than product sales), which were generally more profitable ■ Excessive punch list items requiring follow-up work without the ability to invoice ■ Errors in order entry: finish, fabric, pricing, and so on ■ Installation damage and concealed damage on receipt of product ■ Excessive nonbillable overtime ■ High average collection days ■ Small-tool loss and damage
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Brad Hams (Ownership Thinking: How to End Entitlement and Create a Culture of Accountability, Purpose, and Profit Ture of Accountability, Purpose, and Profit)
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I’ve seen on a reality show. Page after page of newspaper clippings of local events, sales, coupons, scrawled reminders cheerfully ignored, I’m sure…a litany of the collected leavings of a disturbed mind. I open the jewelry box, sort through the jumbled stuff, and find the one item I can remember her wearing when I was a child – a silver charm bracelet. I try it on my good wrist and it’s a fit. I have no use for the rest of the junk – cheap earrings and costume jewelry. There’s absolutely no hope that her wedding ring is in the box. Ralph would have pocketed that immediately since it was the only thing of value she would have passed on to me. I’m still a little freaked out over the whole Ralph-with-gun thing, and his threat is ringing in my ears as I consider the sad collection of trash that represents everything my mom accomplished and accumulated in almost forty years on the planet. I’ve always believed that we shouldn’t get too attached to our material possessions, but this is plain pitiful.
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R.E. Blake (More Than Anything (Less Than Nothing, #2))
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The opposite of value is a commodity item with little or no perceived value — which means people are not seeking it out and when they do, it’s merely one of the many choices (so very likely the cheapest offering will get the sale).
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David Brier
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We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,’ Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. ‘And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.’”[
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Foster Provost (Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know about Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking)
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few seasonal items that tend to go on sale only once or twice a year. For
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Ruth Soukup (Living Well, Spending Less: 12 Secrets of the Good Life)
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All other things being equal, the more familiar an item is, the more attractive it is. People prefer faces they’ve seen ten times to equally attractive faces they’ve seen only five times.
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Josh Turner (Connect: The Secret LinkedIn Playbook To Generate Leads, Build Relationships, And Dramatically Increase Your Sales)
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I keep my heart in my hope chest. Other items in there are clothes, towels, silverware, and all the love I have to offer my future wife. I must specify that my love is hand wash only.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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When you are the designated buyer, ask for more money than the item costs, so when you spend less people will be happy about you spending their money. Be careful with money—and with love. Don’t overspend with either.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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I once went to a Russian restaurant called “Stalin’s Café.” All the items on the menu looked tempting, but after careful deliberation, I decided to order the cook to be sent to the gulag for what I took to be insubordination.
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Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
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1. Focus on the short trip. For supermarkets around the world (the same principle applies to all classes of trade), half of all shopping trips result in the purchase of five or fewer items, with one being the most common. These short trips typically account for one-third of store sales. The new strategy is to increase the size of each of those baskets by one or two items. Quick trippers spend money very fast, and getting them to buy one or two more items is far easier than motivating stock-up shoppers to buy ten or twenty more items. This focus, focus, focus on the quick trip could deliver an easy 30 percent sales lift (and a lot more when the synergies with other types of trips become apparent).
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Herb Sorensen (Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing)
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The most important promotion is place, not price. In a typical store, probably 2 percent of the total items in the store at any one time are being promoted on end-of-aisle displays or other secondary promotional displays. This 2 percent of items may constitute a full 30 percent of all the sales in the store. However, half the shoppers purchasing an item from one of these promotional displays are unaware that it is at a reduced price. Of the half who are aware, half of those really didn’t care about the price. Good retailers are locked in a mindset that price considerations dominate shopping.
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Herb Sorensen (Inside the Mind of the Shopper: The Science of Retailing)
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the directors of the Tesco food-marketing business in South Korea set a goal to increase market share substantially and needed to find a creative way to do so. They looked at their customers and realized that their lives are so busy that it is actually quite stressful to find time to go to the store. So they decided to bring their store to the shoppers. They completely reframed the shopping experience by taking photos of the food aisles and putting up full-sized images in the subway stations. People can literally shop while they wait for the train, using their smartphones to buy items via photos of the QR codes and paying by credit card. The items are then delivered to them when they get home. This new approach to shopping boosted Tesco’s sales significantly.5
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Tina Seelig (inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity)
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The problem you face is “We need to sell more widgets.” Your team might come up with a list of the following ways to increase widget sales: • Changing the way we sell our widgets to retail outlets. • Improving the way we market our widgets to consumers. • Reducing the unit cost of our widgets. If this list looks rather generic, that’s fine; we will talk about moving down a level of detail in the next section. What matters is that the list is MECE. Suppose you add another item, say, “Reengineering our widget production process.” How does that fit with the three issues you already have? This is certainly an important issue, but it isn’t a fourth point alongside the others. It falls under “Reducing the unit cost,” along with other subissues such as “Leveraging our distribution system” and “Improving our inventory management.” Why? Because all these are ways to reduce the unit cost of widgets. Putting any (or all) of them with the other three issues on the list would cause an overlap. The items in the list would no longer be mutually exclusive. Overlap represents muddled thinking by the writer and leads to confusion for the reader.
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Ethan M. Rasiel (The McKinsey Way)
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The bottom tier customers buy sleeping bags, canteens, flashlights and one or two -man tents. They'll buy life vests and inflatable rafts. They'll usually wait until there is a sale or promotion to get what they are looking for. The middle tier will buy all of the above, but a higher end tent and sleeping bag, and will also buy cook stoves, fishing gear, coolers, and aluminum boats with oars. They will also look for discounts and use their loyalty points to purchase maybe one or more high-end items. The top tier will buy all of the above, but everything top of the line, and they'll buy the boat with the motor, and the fish finder. They'll completely outfit themselves for their camping excursion no matter the cost. For them it's all about the best quality goods, no matter the price.
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Ellis Howell (Sales and Marketing 80/20: What Everyone Ought To Know About Increasing Effectivity In Business)
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In discussing one of the issues the FTC staff wanted to sue over, the report said the company illegally took content from rival websites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. to improve its own websites. It cited one instance when Google copied Amazon’s sales rankings to rank its own items. It also copied Amazon’s reviews and ratings, the report found. Spokesmen for TripAdvisor and Amazon declined to comment.
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Anonymous
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Promote best sellers. Many e-commerce sites will have a list of best sellers. Promote those best sellers to all of your new visitors. This will help decrease the time it takes someone to actually purchase items. People want to be told exactly what to purchase. Displaying your best sellers across your website is a great way to do that.
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Alex Harris (Boost E-commerce Sales and Make More Money: Three Hundred Tips to Increase Conversion Rates and Generate Leads)
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A sale link on your navigation bar. Having a sale category will allow people know where to find the sale items quicker to save more money.
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Alex Harris (Boost E-commerce Sales and Make More Money: Three Hundred Tips to Increase Conversion Rates and Generate Leads)
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TERMS AND CONDITIONS Sketches and Comps Fee quoted includes ____ preliminary concepts / sketches; additional concepts / sketches are $ _______ each. Final Artwork Fee quoted includes one set of final mechanical artwork. Changes to final artwork will be provided at an additional cost based on the extent and complexity of the changes, at $ ___ per hour or a mutually agreed upon fee, TBD. Rights Upon full payment of all fees and costs, the following rights to the use of the designs and/or artwork transfer to Client, as noted: Credit Unless otherwise agreed, Designer shall be accorded a credit line on all published, printed material, to read as follows: Overtime Fees quoted are based upon work performed during the course of regular working hours (based on a ____ hour week). Overtime, rush, holiday, and weekend work necessitated by Client’s directive is billed in addition to the fees quoted at $ ____ per hour or a mutually agreed upon fee, TBD. Change Orders Work change orders will be issued for additional work and changes requested after approvals or commencement of work. WCO’s include a description of the change/addition requested, estimated additional costs, and changes to work schedules/project completion. Client’s signature is required on WCO’s to proceed with changes/additions. Billable Items In addition to the fees and costs estimated herein, costs incurred for outside services (TBD), messengers, and courier services are billable (at cost __; with a markup of __ percent). Wherever applicable, state and local sales taxes will be included in Billable Items. Travel expenses are billed additionally, at cost.
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Eva Doman Bruck (Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers)
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All purchases made on client’s behalf will be billed to client. In all cases, such prices will reflect a markup of ___%. Charges for sales tax, insurance, storage, and shipping and handling are additional to the price of each purchase. In the event client purchases materials, services, or any items other than those specified by the designer, the designer is not liable for the cost, quality, workmanship, condition, or appearance of such items. Schedule of Payment Hourly Rate: Regular billing periods (bimonthly, monthly) based on hours consumed or periodic approval points. Fee Billing: ___ percent upon project commencement, ___ percent following completion of concept development, ___ percent upon completion of design development, ___ percent upon completion of production, ___ percent upon completion of implementation. Invoices are payable upon receipt. Termination Policy Client and Designer may terminate project based upon mutually agreeable terms to be determined in writing, either prior to signing of this proposal or within the final Client-Designer Contract. Term of Proposal The information contained in this proposal is valid for 30 days. Proposals approved and signed by the Client are binding upon the Designer and Client beginning on the date of Client’s signature. If the information in this Proposal meets with Client’s approval, Client’s signature below authorizes Designer to begin work. Kindly return a signed copy of this Proposal/Agreement to Designer’s office. Designer Signature _____________ Print Designer Name _____________ Date _____________ Client Signature _____________ Print Client Name _____________ Date _____________
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Eva Doman Bruck (Business and Legal Forms for Graphic Designers)
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EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion.
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Anonymous
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Proving that styluses never go out of fashion, sales of vinyl record albums rocketed to 9.2m in America last year, the most since 1993. Although that represented only around 4% of total albums sold, the growth of vinyl is in sharp contrast to the decline in music downloaded through various online stores, as more people switch to music-streaming services. Vinyl has increased in popularity partly as a collector’s item. Fans can keep their LPs in mint condition by listening to the music on free downloads that come with the album package.
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Anonymous
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As the producer states gradually forced the major oil companies to share with them more of the profits from oil, increasing quantities of sterling and dollars flowed to the Middle East. To maintain the balance of payments and the viability of the international financial system, Britain and the United States needed a mechanism for these currency flows to be returned. [...]
The purchase of most goods, whether consumable materials like food and clothing or more durable items such as cars or industrial machinery, sooner or later reaches a limit where, in practical terms, no more of the commodity can be used and further acquisition is impossible to justify. Given the enormous size of oil revenues, and the relatively small populations and widespread poverty of many of the countries beginning to accumulate them, ordinary goods could not be purchased at a rate that would go far to balance the flow of dollars (and many could be bought from third countries, like Germany and Japan – purchases that would not improve the dollar problem). Weapons, on the other hand, could be purchased to be stored up rather than used, and came with their own forms of justification. Under the appropriate doctrines of security, ever-larger acquisitions could be rationalised on the grounds that they would make the need to use them less likely. Certain weapons, such as US fighter aircraft, were becoming so technically complex by the 1960s that a single item might cost over $10 million, offering a particularly compact vehicle for recycling dollars. Arms, therefore, could be purchased in quantities unlimited by any practical need or capacity to consume. As petrodollars flowed increasingly to the Middle East, the sale of expensive weaponry provided a unique apparatus for recycling those dollars – one that could expand without any normal commercial constraint.
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Timothy Mitchell (Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil)
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In short, when it comes to market logic, the more turnover or sales, the better - and that is that - regardless if the item sold is credit, rocks, “hope” or flapjacks. Any pollution, instances of waste or other such detriments are, again, “external”. There is no consideration for the technical role of actual production processes, strategies for efficient distribution, design applications or the like. Such factors are assumed to culminate metaphysically in the best interest of the people and the habitat simply because that is what the “invisible hand”294 of the market implies.
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TZM Lecture Team (The Zeitgeist Movement Defined: Realizing a New Train of Thought)
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I'm a frightful example of what happens to those who step out of line...When people talk about spongers, they forget the contribution we make to the upholding of the status quo. I am a walking, staggering cattle prod, frightening the Reeboked animals into manageable herds, so that the ordered life of Western society may continue undisrupted. I am, if you will, a sort of policeman. As a responsible citizen I spend my meagre Giro benefit on high-duty items like cigarettes and spirits so most of the money the government allows me is ploughed straight back into its coffers. The remainder I spread like a thin fertilizer over the parched hard pressed land of small businesses - corner shops, pizza parlours and low-grade supermarkets. Even, God help them, those 'worse off than myself' get a look in since what few clothes I own are provided by jumble sales and charity shops. Furthermore, when I die, I shall leave no burgeoning bank account. Whatever may pass through the hands of a waster remains permanently in circulation since he has neither the means nor the pre-disposition to save - in effect, a congenital waster is as lean, fit and economically viable as the most stringently run software corporation.
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Ian Pattison
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Benefits of Going Green
The benefits of going green are sometimes not similar to obvious right away. For some people, because of this that going green can be so difficult. They have to see immediate or near immediate results of their green efforts. Unfortunately, some benefits take a while and dedication. Now and dedication can be a good thing about going green in itself. When we become more commited to an environmentally friendly lifestyle we study that lifestyle, the aspects of the life-style that is effective on our behalf and then we study new tips that make the lifestyle much better to create. Other merits of going green can be found especially zones of green lifestyles.
Benefits of Going Green at Home
Going green at your home is among the few places that green lifestyle benefits are shown quickly or in the next short space of time. The first home benefit that many individuals who go green see, is a drop in utility bills and spending. As people commence to make subtle and full blown changes in the volume of energy they use and the manner they make use of it, the utility bills will drop. This benefit shows itself within the first three billing cycles no matter the effective changes. Spending also reduces. The spending pattern of green lifestyles shows a spending reduction because of switching from disposable items to reusable items, pricey chemical items for DIY natural options and swapping out appliances for higher energy levels effiencent models. Simply not only are the advantages observed in healthier lifestyle options, but on top of that they are seen in healthier financial options.
Benefits to Going Green at Work
Going green at work is problematic to implement and hard to see immediate results from. However, the avantages of going green in the workplace might be incredibly financially beneficial regarding the business. A clear benefit for businesses going green that is the alleviates clutter and increased organization. By utilizing green techniques in your business such as cloud storage, going paperless and energy usage techniques a business will save many dollars each month. This is a clear benefit, but the additional advantage is increased business. Consumers, businesses and sales professionals love aligning themselves with green businesses. It shows an ecological awareness and connection and it has verified that the green business cares about the approach to life of their total clients. The green business logo and concept means the advantage of a higher customer base and increased sales.
Advantages and benefits of Going Green within the Community
Community advantages and benefits of going green are the explanation as to why many individuals begin contribution in the green movement. Community efforts do take time and effort to develop. Recycling centers, landscaping endeavors and urban gardening projects take community efforts and dedication. These projects can build wonderful benefits regarding the community. Initially the advantages will show in areas similar to a decrease in waste, increased organic gardening options and recycling endeavors to diminish waste in landfills. Eventually the avantages of going green locally can present a residential district bonding, closer knit communities and environmental benefits which will reach to reduced air pollution. There can also be an increase in local food production and local companies booming which helps the regional economy. There are numerous other benefits of going green. These benefits might be comprehensive and might change the thought of how communities, states and personal lifestyles are changed.
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Green Living
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faster. As I was closing this book, Walmart announced that to upgrade its ability to compete in e-commerce with Amazon—which still does eight times Walmart’s sales online—it was buying Jet, a year-old Internet retail startup. The Economist reported on August 13, 2016, that Jet’s appeal to Walmart was its “real-time pricing algorithm, which tempts customers with lower prices if they add more items to their basket. The algorithm also identifies which of Jet’s vendors is closest to the consumer, helping to minimize shipping costs and allowing them to offer discounts. Walmart plans to integrate the software with its own.” It turns out that “under a second” was just too damned slow.
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)