Items On Sale Quotes

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.

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.

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.

He seemed to be an eternal on-sale item in the matrimonial market that everybody bypassed for the fancier merchandise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The odd thing is that only lonely people have a tendency to festoon their abodes with extravagant items.

I bought two items to get a third free, and then I returned the two. I should be Shopper of the Year

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

•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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IN 1941, ITS BEST YEAR EVER, the partnership of Kavalier & Clay earned $59,832.27. Total revenues generated that year for Empire Comics, Inc.—from sales of all comic books featuring characters created either in whole or in part by Kavalier & Clay, sales of two hundred thousand copies apiece for each of two Whitman’s Big Little Books featuring the Escapist, sales of Keys of Freedom, of key rings, pocket flashlights, coin banks, board games, rubber figurines, windup toys, and diverse other items of Escapism, as well as the proceeds from the licensing of the Escapist’s dauntless puss to Chaffee Cereals for their Frosted Chaff-Os, and from the Escapist radio program that began broadcasting on NBC in April—though harder to calculate, came to something in the neighborhood of $12 to $15 million.

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.

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!

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

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?

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.

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.

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]

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

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.

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.

Collier understood and preached this swim-with-current-rather-than-against strategy. Do not arrive as an interruption or disruption, attempting to divert your reader's attention from the object it is focused on, fighting to interest him in something different from what he is already, at this moment, interested in. Instead, align yourself with the subjects already possessing his attention, the matters already garnering his interest, the self-talk conversation already occurring in his mind, and the conversations he is already having around the water-cooler at work or at the kitchen table at home with peers, friends, and family. About this, Collier wrote: “Study your reader first — your product second…. The reader of your letter wants certain things and the desire for them is, consciously or unconsciously, the dominant idea in his mind all the time. He is also engaged by the news or events or public conversations of the day. Put yourself in his place. If you were deep in discussion with a friend over some matter and a stranger came up and said: ‘Mister, I have a fine coat I want to sell you!’ — what would you do? The same thing happens when you approach a man by mail. He is in discussion with himself. If you just butt in, will you be welcome? How would you do it if approaching him and his friend in person? You'd listen and get the trend of the conversation. Then, when you chimed in, it would be with a remark on a related subject. Then you could gradually bring the talk around logically to the point you wanted to discuss. Study your reader. Know what interests him. Listen to the conversation he is already having with himself. Enter where he already is.” There are some obvious, perennially occurring attention dominators, such as seasons and holidays, and linking to these — regardless of whether your business naturally links or not — can be extremely helpful. You need not be a florist, jeweler, or restaurant to utilize Valentine's Day, for example. Beyond that, and deeper than that, every customer group has some shared item on their minds. Know it. Start your conversation with them with it. And be sure to take advantage of one of the great advantages of today's online media, including e-mail, blogs, and social media sites — being day to day, even hour by hour, timely. You can link a marketing message to world or local, financial, or cultural news of the moment — and you should.

There is a noticeable parallel between the ways that commercial fishermen and department stores generate a competitive fury among those they wish to hook. To attract and arouse the catch, fishermen scatter some loose bait called chum. For similar purposes, department stores holding a bargain sale toss out a few especially good deals on prominently advertised items called loss leaders. If the bait—of either form—has done its job, a large and eager crowd forms to snap it up. Soon, in the rush to score, the group becomes agitated, nearly blinded, by the adversarial nature of the situation. Human beings and fish alike lose perspective on what they want and begin striking at whatever is being contested.

Had Darwin waited a hundred and fifty years or so, he could have saved himself a great deal of trouble and seasickness in uncovering our primate ancestry by travelling from Down House to his (and my) local Sainsbury’s supermarket in Otford in Kent. There he could have learned from point-of-sale data that, over 30,000 items on the shelves, the single item most frequently purchased, as by all grocery shoppers in Britain, is . . . a banana.

The “line” generally refers to gross profit. Above that line on the income statement, typically, are sales and COGS or COS. Below the line are operating expenses, interest, and taxes. What’s the difference? Items listed above the line tend to vary more (in the short term) than many of those below the line, and so tend to get more managerial attention.

These were the men who made deals with desperate industrialists to provide transportation for the goods stalled in their warehouses—or, failing to obtain the percentage demanded, made deals to purchase the goods, when the factory closed, at the bankruptcy sale, at ten cents on the dollar, and to speed the goods away in freight cars suddenly available, away to markets where dealers of the same kind were ready for the kill. There were the men who hovered over factories, waiting for the last breath of a furnace, to pounce upon the equipment—and over desolate sidings, to pounce upon the freight cars of undelivered goods—these were a new biological species, the hit-and-run businessmen, who did not stay in any line of business longer than the span of one deal, who had no payrolls to meet, no overhead to carry, no real estate to own, no equipment to build, whose only asset and sole investment consisted of an item known as “friendship.” These were the men whom official speeches described as “the progressive businessmen of our dynamic age,” but whom people called “the pull peddlers”—the species included many breeds, those of “transportation pull,” and of “steel pull” and “oil pull” and “wage-raise pull” and “suspended sentence pull”—men who were dynamic, who kept darting all over the country while no one else could move, men who were active and mindless, active, not like animals, but like that which breeds, feeds and moves upon the stillness of a corpse.

The sale of defensive items reached record heights; gun shop owners found people in line when they opened their stores; locksmiths were so busy putting in new locks and bars that they were working almost twenty-four hours a day; there was such a run on guard and attack dogs that animals from other states had to be brought in to fill the demand.

I can picture purchasing a product, such as a vehicle, a bicycle, or even grocery items, and seeing the emissions to produce the item and transport it to its location on its product tag, or by scanning its bar code. Items with top quartile emissions or high ESG performance for the category may have a different color-coded tag. The price tag will become a product tag and information about the item and the producer would be available in its online description,

The Down Markets opened out onto it from three sides; a more decrepit collection of useless items for sale Tehol had yet to see. And the people bought in a frenzy, day after blessed day. Our civilization thrives on stupidity. And it only took a sliver of cleverness to tap that idiot vein and drink deep of the riches. Comforting, if slightly depressing. The way of most grim truths.

...the reality is that most people (aka the public at large or wantrepreneurs with no skin in the game) see "Shark Tank" and think that all they need to be multi-millionaires overnight is to come up with a cool idea and pitch it to a group of fatcats. You can't have sales without business development and you can't have business development without sales. It's like digital marketing without SEO, eCommerce, branding, design, and content. It's popular and easy to see complex processes as simple one and done single items, but it's not the real world. When we break down goals into realistic point by point objectives needed to achieve that goal, then break down steps in a chain needed to attain each objective point, then figure out how we have to behave and who we have to become to put that chain into action, things get done quickly.

Carry individual items as opposed to whole lines. We wouldn’t try to carry a whole line of spices, or bag candy, or vitamins. Each SKU (a single size of a single flavor of a single item) had to justify itself, as opposed to riding piggyback into the stores just so we had a “complete” line. Depth of assortment now was of no interest. As soon as Fair Trade ended in 1978, we began to get rid of the hundred brands of Scotch, seventy brands of bourbon, and fifty brands of gin. And slowly (it was like pulling teeth) we dismantled the broad assortment of California boutique wines. No fixtures. By 1982, the store would have most of its merchandise displayed in stacks with very little shelving. This implied a lower SKU count: a high-SKU store needs lots of shelves. The average supermarket carries about 27,000 SKUs in 30,000 square feet of sales area, or roughly one SKU per square foot. Trader Joe’s, by 1988, carried one SKU per five square feet! Price-Costco, one of my heroes, carried about one SKU per twenty square feet. As much as possible I wanted products to be displayed in the same cartons in which they were shipped by the manufacturers. This was already a key element in our wine merchandising. Each SKU would stand on its own two feet as a profit center. We would earn a gross profit on each SKU that was justified by the cost of handling that item. There would be no “loss leaders.” Above all we would not carry any item unless we could be outstanding in terms of price (and make a profit at that price per #7) or uniqueness. By the end of 1977, we increased the size of the buying staff, adding one very key person, Doug Rauch, whom we hired out of the wholesale health food trade. Leroy, Frank Kono, Bob Berning, and Doug rolled out Five Year Plan ’77, which for purposes of this history I call Mac the Knife. Back in those days we had no idea how sharp that knife would become! We just wanted to survive deregulation. Everything now depended on buying. So here we go into the next chapter, Intensive Buying.

You can use standards of legitimacy both as a sword to persuade others, and as a shield to help you resist pressure to give in arbitrarily. (“I would like to give you a discount, but this price is firm. It is what General Motors paid for the same item last week; here is the bill of sale.”) Just as, by finding relevant precedent and principles a lawyer enhances his or her ability to persuade a judge, so a negotiator can enhance his or her negotiation power by finding precedents, principles, and other external criteria of fairness and by thinking of ways to present them forcefully and tellingly: “I am asking for no more and no less than you are paying others for comparable work.” “We will pay what the house is worth if we can afford it. We are offering what the similar house nearby sold for last month. Unless you can give us a good reason why your house is worth more, our

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.

So here’s the rule: list the six most important things you need to do and, by hook or by crook, get those six things completed each day. That doesn’t mean you don’t keep a side list of running items that need to be done.

Found money” can do funny things to your head. Let’s say you go searching in a department store for a $100 item and unexpectedly find it on sale for $50. You buy it—and then take the $50 you just “saved” and spend it on things you would never have bought otherwise. When supermarket shoppers come across “instant coupons” in the store, they spend roughly 12% more on spontaneous purchases than other shoppers do—as if they feel compelled to reward themselves for saving money.

a majority of states still have a sales tax on period products because they are considered luxury items. Meanwhile, products such as Rogaine and Viagra are not.

The next step is to test this list objectively. Do that by asking yourself the following questions about each item on the list: • Is this Result measurable, tangible, and quantifiable? • Is it corporate—that is, can it be shared by more than one Buying Influence? • Is it business related—that is, does it positively affect one or more of this customer’s business processes? If you can’t answer yes to all these questions, what you’re looking at may be a “feature” or “benefit” rather than a true Result.

Still magic continued, the sort of practical magic that cured and healed and helped both with love desired and love gone wrong. Everyday people had their horoscopes written out and visited fortune-tellers on Miller Street, also known as Mud Avenue after downpours in the spring. There were magical items for sale in many of the markets, often hidden behind the counter or found in a back room or kept under cloths. Most residents did not trust doctors, who were often unschooled and lost more patients than they saved, using worthless remedies: saltpeter, tinctures of distilled powdered human bone used as a cure-all, a false remedy that was called skull moss, a plant grown from the remains of violent criminals who had been hanged which was inserted into a patient’s nostrils and was said to staunch bleeding and stop fainting and fatigue. Folk medicine was far less dangerous than the work of medical doctors. Practitioners of the Nameless Art were held in high regard when it came to their talents and their knowledge of curative tonics, seeds to induce sleep or cure insomnia, packets of dried lavender and rose hips for teas that would calm the nerves.

Never offer a prospect the choice between something and nothing. Always make it a choice between one of two items.

Back to top Chapter Eighteen - The Take Away Close With the take away close, even before the prospect says yes or no, you begin to suggest that the product may not be available. You might be out of stock. Sometimes people are not even aware that they want the item until you suggest that they may not be able to get it.

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.

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.

Tips for Purchasing Industrial Surplus Parts Industrial surplus equipment and parts are becoming increasingly popular as more companies turn to purchasing the components either for use or for refurbishment and resale. Industrial surplus parts are sold when an industrial manufacturer decides to get rid of these extra (or surplus) pieces, whether they are equipment or parts for putting together equipment, which can then be purchased by resellers or Industrial surplus buyers. For example: The most common type of parts sold for industrial surplus are electrical or electronics—because technology is increasing at a rapid past, it is not uncommon for the parts for electrical equipment to become obsolete when the latest model or latest technology is used. After the new model replaces the old, the parts and equipment are considered surplus. And also When we can buy surplus inventory from retailers or businesses is a great way to invest relatively little money and resell those inventory items for a significant profit. The following are some practical tips to keep in mind when purchasing industrial surplus parts. Tip: Research the surplus parts before purchasing Not all surplus parts are created equal, which is why you should never just purchase a surplus part because it seems like a good deal or because you have come across a new sale. It’s important to research the type of part, the manufacturer, whether it is used/non-used, and other relevant information. You want to be able to get more than what you paid for these surplus parts, if you are reselling, or to use the parts, if you are purchasing them for your own business; “jumping right in” could result in a waste of time, money and purchases. Tip: Never purchase certain parts without a warranty period Most surplus parts should have some kind of warranty or warranty period. This is especially true for electrical or electronic parts, which are more sensitive in nature. Do not purchase any electrical surplus parts if there is not a warranty period, as you will be risking your money. When possible, purchase other types of surplus parts only when there is an acceptable warranty period to help protect your purchase. Tip: Look for professional surplus retailers It might be tempting to look for an “underbelly” store that offers surplus parts at an extreme discount, but you should only do business with a professional retailer or manufacturer with a reputable reputation. When you choose little known surplus part resellers or sellers with poor reputations, you might be purchasing parts that are cobbled together or even stolen.

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.

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.

The new GST: A halfway house In spite of all the favourable features of the GST, it introduces the anomaly of having an origin-based tax on interstate trade he proposed GST would be a single levy. 1141 words From a roadblock during the UPA regime, the incessant efforts of the BJP government have finally paved way for the introduction of the goods and services tax (GST). This would, no doubt, be a major reform in the existing indirect tax system of the country. With a view to introducing the GST, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley has introduced the Constitution (122nd Amendment) Bill 2014 in Parliament. The new tax would be implemented from April 1, 2016. Both the government and the taxpayers will have enough time to understand the implications of the new tax and its administrative nuances. Unlike the 119th Amendment Bill, which lapsed with the dissolution of the previous Lok Sabha, the new Bill will hopefully see the light of the day as it takes into account the objections of the state governments regarding buoyancy of the tax and the autonomy of the states. It proposes setting up of the GST Council, which will be a joint forum of the Centre and the states. This council would function under the chairmanship of the Union finance minister with all the state finance ministers as its members. It will make recommendations to the Union and the states on the taxes, cesses and surcharges levied by the Union, the states and the local bodies, which may be subsumed in the GST; the rates including floor rates with bands of goods and services tax; any special rate or rates for a specified period to raise additional resources during any natural calamity or disaster etc. However, all the recommendations will have to be supported by not less than three-fourth of the weighted votes—the Centre having one-third votes and the states having two-third votes. Thus, no change can be implemented without the consent of both the Centre and the states. The proposed GST would be a single levy. It would aim at creating an integrated national market for goods and services by replacing the plethora of indirect taxes levied by the Centre and the states. While central taxes to be subsumed include central excise duty (CenVAT), additional excise duties, service tax, additional customs duty (CVD) and special additional duty of customs (SAD), the state taxes that fall in this category include VAT/sales tax, entertainment tax, octroi, entry tax, purchase tax and luxury tax. Therefore, all taxes on goods and services, except alcoholic liquor for human consumption, will be brought under the purview of the GST. Irrespective of whether we currently levy GST on these items or not, it is important to bring these items under the Constitution Amendment Bill because the exclusion of these items from the GST does not provide any flexibility to levy GST on these items in the future. Any change in the future would then require another Constitutional Amendment. From a futuristic approach, it is prudent not to confine the scope of the tax under the bindings of the Constitution. The Constitution should demarcate the broad areas of taxing powers as has been the case with sales tax and Union excise duty in the past. Currently, the rationale of exclusion of these commodities from the purview of the GST is solely based on revenue considerations. No other considerations of tax policy or tax administration have gone into excluding petroleum products from the purview of the GST. However, the long-term perspective of a rational tax policy for the GST shows that, at present, these taxes constitute more than half of the retail prices of motor fuel. In a scenario where motor fuel prices are deregulated, the taxation policy would have to be flexible and linked to the global crude oil prices to ensure that prices are held stable and less pressure exerted on the economy during the increasing price trends. The trend of taxation of motor fuel all over the world suggests that these items

ake an hour or so at a discount card shop or dollar store and load up on all kinds of greeting cards-birthday, anniversary, friends, and pets. Store them in a convenient place and use them as special occasions arise. You'll save a lot of time by having them when you need them. ave a "gift shelf" in your home. Load it up with boxes of stationery, stuffed toys, small items-whatever is useful and on sale so when occasions arise, you'll be ready. When grandchildren drop by, let them pick a little gift off your shelf he Bible says, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Ephesians 5:21). The Bible also says we're to live in harmony and love. Here are a few thoughts to contemplate. • A good marriage is not a gift; it's an achievement by God's grace. • Marriage is not for children; it takes guts and maturity. • Marriage is tested daily by the ability to compromise. • Being a family means giving, and-more importantly-forgiving. • It's time for parents to take charge of their families and redeem them for the Lord.

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.

Retailers are driving sales to new heights by moderating choice angst, offering a more limited selection of items. But there is a related angst issue in most stores: “Where is the …?” We refer to this as navigational angst. And there is no question that navigation can create significant frustration, whether it is navigating the shelf visually or finding one’s way around the store. There are at least five ways to reduce navigational angst, as follows: • Design the store and lay out the merchandise in a logical and intuitive way. • Provide signage or other navigational aids to assist the shopper. • Reduce the size of the store to reduce the need for navigation. • Remove visual barriers so shoppers can see the whole store.

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).

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.

How Is It Packaged? Packaging refers to what products and services are sold together. For example, years ago McDonald’s noticed that many customers ordered french fries and a soft drink with their hamburgers, so the restaurant shifted from selling hamburgers to selling “meal deals”—bundles of a hamburger or other sandwich, french fries, and a soft drink. The rest of the fast-food industry shifted dramatically in this direction too because other restaurants discovered that selling meal deals instead of separate items increased sales by 30 percent.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 _____________

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.

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

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.

Color-coded maps were widely distributed to employees at headquarters in Seattle. Travel to green states like Michigan was okay, but orange states like California required special clearance so that the legal department could track the cumulative number of days Amazon employees spent there. Travel to red states, like Texas, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, required employees to complete an intensive seventeen-item questionnaire about the trip that was designed to determine whether they would make the company vulnerable to sales-tax collection efforts (number 16: “Will you be holding a raffle?”). Amazon lawyers then either nixed the trip altogether or obtained a private letter ruling from that state spelling out its specific treatment of that particular situation.

use an item for its intended purpose. For example, do not just use a tablecloth for a table, make it a slip cover for your ottoman. It can save you lots of money and time when you purchase

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

few seasonal items that tend to go on sale only once or twice a year. For

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.

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.’”[

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).