“
Yet not for a single moment did I have any doubts about my own integrity and honour as a woman. I knew that my profession had been invented by men, and that men were in control of both our worlds, the one on earth, and the one in heaven. That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another.
”
”
Nawal El Saadawi (Woman at Point Zero)
“
The rich run a global system that allows them to accumulate capital and pay the lowest possible price for labour. The freedom that results applies only to them. The many simply have to work harder, in conditions that grow ever more insecure, to enrich the few. Democratic politics, which purports to enrich the many, is actually in the pocket of those bankers, media barons and other moguls who run and own everything.
”
”
Charles Moore
“
That men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife.
”
”
Nawal El Saadawi (Woman at Point Zero)
“
The purpose of clothing, as best he could tell, was to keep one unembarrassed and at the right temperature. If an outfit served that purpose for a respectable period—twenty years, say—and at the lowest price available, then it was successful.
”
”
Tom Rachman (The Rise & Fall of Great Powers)
“
Some womens are like SHOPRITE- LOWEST PRICES ALWAYS
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”
Zay-B unda-G
“
Salespeople who think that it’s all about price aren’t required: If it can be sold on the internet at the lowest price, you can take the huge cost of a sales team out of the equation.
”
”
Chris Murray (Selling with EASE: The Four Step Sales Cycle Found in Every Successful Business Transaction)
“
That girls should not marry for money we are all agreed. A lady who can sell herself for a title or an estate, for an income or a set of family diamonds, treats herself as a farmer treats his sheep and oxen — makes hardly more of herself, of her own inner self, in which are comprised a mind and soul, than the poor wretch of her own sex who earns her bread in the lowest stage of degradation. But a title, and an estate, and an income, are matters which will weigh in the balance with all Eve’s daughters — as they do with all Adam’s sons. Pride of place, and the power of living well in front of the world’s eye, are dear to us all; — are, doubtless, intended to be dear. Only in acknowledging so much, let us remember that there are prices at which these good things may be too costly.
”
”
Anthony Trollope (Complete Works of Anthony Trollope)
“
I am adrift. At 21, penniless in a world of plausible excuses, I am alone with my goals. These are difficult years, and if anything loving lay ahead I was already paying a large enough price. At my lowest in these years of signing on, I do not fit in anywhere with the family philosophy, and these days set the tempo of the times- even for the days when the sun re-enters the room. Travestied or not, you must just get through it.
”
”
Morrissey (Autobiography)
“
The value decade is upon us. If you can’t sell a top-quality product at the world’s lowest price, you’re going to be out of the game . . . the best way to hold your customers is to constantly figure out how to give them more for less.—Jack Welch, Chairman, General Electric
”
”
Philip Kotler (Kotler On Marketing: How To Create, Win, and Dominate Markets)
“
Come all ye conservatives and liberals
who want to conserve the good things and be free,
come away from the merchants of big answers,
whose hands are metalled with power;
from the union of anywhere and everywhere
by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price
and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price;
from the union of work and debt, work and despair;
from the wage-slavery of the helplessly well-employed.
From the union of self-gratification and self-annihilation,
secede into care for one another
and for the good gifts of Heaven and Earth.
”
”
Wendell Berry (The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry)
“
Why the conservatives, who controlled all three branches of the federal government, were still so enraged--at respectful skeptics of the Iraq War, at gay couples who wanted to get married, at bland Al Gore and cautious Hillary Clinton, at endangered species and their advocates, at taxes and gas prices that were among the lowest of any industrialized nation, at a mainstream media whose corporate owners were themselves conservatives, at the Mexicans who cut their grass and washed their dishes--was somewhat mysterious to Walter.
”
”
Jonathan Franzen (Freedom)
“
Wisdom, in short, whose lessons have been represented as so hard to learn by those who never were at her school, only teaches us to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life, a little farther than that life carries it. And this is, not to buy at too dear a price. Now, whoever takes this maxim abroad with him into the grand market of the world, and constantly applies it to honours, to riches, to pleasures, and to every other commodity which that market affords, is, I will venture to affirm, a wise man.
”
”
Henry Fielding (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling)
“
To the Disillusioned in Philosophy.—If you hitherto believed in the highest value of life and now find yourselves disillusioned, must you immediately get rid of life at the lowest possible price?
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits)
“
Everybody wants to a great bathroom, FairTradeWorks discover fresh bathroom makeover ideas and tips to renovate your bathroom at lowest prices.Now, Get Hassle Free Bathroom Renovation at FairTradeWorks.
”
”
shain cruz
“
I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value. I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one. I also knew that if I lost my job, all I would lose with it was the miserable salary, the contempt I could read every day in the eyes of the higher level executives when they looked at the lesser female officials, the humiliating pressure of male bodies on mine when I rode in the bus, and the long morning queue in front of a perpetually overflowing toilet.
”
”
Nawal El Saadawi (Woman at Point Zero)
“
It was supposed that the pearl buyers were individuals acting alone, bidding against one another for the pearls the fishermen brought in. And once it had been so. But this was a wasteful method, for often, in the excitement of bidding for a fine pearl, too great a price had been paid to the fisherman. This was extravagant and not to be countenanced. Now there was only one pearl buyer with many hands, and the men who sat in their offices and waited for Kino knew what price they would offer, how high they would bid, and what method each one would use. And although these men would not profit beyond their salaries, there was excitement among the pearl buyers, for there was excitement in the hunt, and if it be a man's function to break down a price, then he must take joy and satisfaction in breaking it as far down as possible. For every man in the world functions to the best of his ability, and no one does less than his best, no matter what he may think about it. Quite apart from any reward they might get, from any word of praise, from any promotion, a pearl buyer was a pearl buyer, and the best and happiest pearl buyer was he who bought for the lowest prices.
”
”
John Steinbeck (The Pearl)
“
The three of us exchanged glances but said nothing. After all, what was there to say? The truth was that hookers did take credit cards—or at least ours did! In fact, hookers were so much a part of the Stratton subculture that we classified them like publicly traded stocks: Blue Chips were considered the top-of-the-line hooker, zee crème de la crème. They were usually struggling young models or exceptionally beautiful college girls in desperate need of tuition or designer clothing, and for a few thousand dollars they would do almost anything imaginable, either to you or to each other. Next came the NASDAQs, who were one step down from the Blue Chips. They were priced between three and five hundred dollars and made you wear a condom unless you gave them a hefty tip, which I always did. Then came the Pink Sheet hookers, who were the lowest form of all, usually a streetwalker or the sort of low-class hooker who showed up in response to a desperate late-night phone call to a number in Screw magazine or the yellow pages. They usually cost a hundred dollars or less, and if you didn’t wear a condom, you’d get a penicillin shot the next day and then pray that your dick didn’t fall off. Anyway, the Blue Chips took credit cards, so what was wrong with writing them off on your taxes? After all, the IRS knew about this sort of stuff, didn’t they? In fact, back in the good old days, when getting blasted over lunch was considered normal corporate behavior, the IRS referred to these types of expenses as three-martini lunches! They even had an accounting term for it: It was called T and E, which stood for Travel and Entertainment. All I’d done was taken the small liberty of moving things to their logical conclusion, changing T and E to T and A: Tits and Ass!
”
”
Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street)
“
During our endless search for the newest trends for the lowest prices, we become complicit in the forced-labor industry. Chinese manufacturers often believe they have no choice but to secretly outsource to gulags, because they cannot meet the global consumer demand for budget prices and the latest trends. Studies have shown it is precisely brands’ demands for lower prices, faster production, and fulfillment of unanticipated orders that compel factories to illegally subcontract work to places like labor camps.
”
”
Amelia Pang (Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods)
“
A monopoly granted either to an individual or to a trading company, has the same effect as a secret in trade or manufactures. The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments, whether they consist in wages or profit, greatly above their natural rate. The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken, not upon every occasion indeed, but for any considerable time together. The
”
”
Adam Smith (THE WEALTH OF NATIONS (Illustrated))
“
where creativity doesn't drive a company's strategic vision, most often the lowest price will be the winning formula. Success, abundance, a rising standard of living-for individuals, companies, communities, nations-will depend on a capacity to create, invent, and innovate.
”
”
Peter Georgescu (The Source of Success: Five Enduring Principles at the Heart of Real Leadership (Jossey-Bass Leadership Series Book 295))
“
They maintain he wrote The Art of War. Personally, I believe it was a woman. On the surface, The Art of War is a manual about tactics on the battlefield, but at its deepest level it describes how to win conflicts. Or to be more precise, the art of getting what you want at the lowest possible price. The winner of a war is not necessarily the victor. Many have won the crown, but lost so much of their army that they can only rule on their ostensibly defeated enemies’ terms. With regard to power, women don’t have the vanity men have. They don’t need to make power visible, they only want the power to give them the other things they want. Security. Food. Enjoyment. Revenge. Peace. They are rational, power-seeking planners, who think beyond the battle, beyond the victory celebrations. And because they have an inborn capacity to see weakness in their victims, they know instinctively when and how to strike. And when to stop. You can’t learn that, Spiuni.
”
”
Jo Nesbø (Nemesis (Harry Hole, #4))
“
To maximise output, every organisation will strive to obtain its necessary raw materials, labour and machinery at the lowest possible cost and combine them to turn out a product that it will then attempt to sell at the highest possible price... And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other commodities, a difference that conventional economics does not have a means of representing or giving weight to but that is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: that labour feels pain.
”
”
Alain de Botton
“
It is advisable to yield on price when bartering at the point of a bayonet.
”
”
David J. Mauro (The Altitude Journals: A Seven-Year Journey from the Lowest Point in My Life to the Highest Point on Earth)
“
One thing my father taught me,” he told her quietly, “is that everyone has their price. From the highest to the lowest, we will all bargain. It’s just a matter of finding what yours is.
”
”
Jayne Castel (Dawn of Wolves (Kingdom of Mercia #3))
“
Speculation does not determine prices; it has to accept the prices that are determined in the market. I ts efforts are directed to correctly estimating future price-situations, and to acting accordingly. The influence of speculation cannot alter the average level of prices over a given period; what it can do is to diminish the gap between the highest and the lowest prices.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
“
One can never call me a quitter
I take something right and see it
through till it’s wrong
Auctioning myself off to the lowest bidder
Going once, going twice
Gone
Sold to the man for the price of disdain
Some are sold for a song
I don’t rate a refrain
I guess it was all going just a little too well
If I wasn’t careful I’d be happy pretty soon
Heaven’s no place for one who thrives on hell,
One who prefers the bit to the silver spoon.
Then just when I’d almost resigned myself to winning
When it seemed my bright future would never dim
When my luck looked as though it was only beginning
I met him.
Sullen and scornful; a real Marlboro man
The type who pours out the beer and eats the can
A tall guy with a cultivated leer
One you can count on to diaprove or disappear
I knew right away that he was a find
Given this, he was the kindest man I’d ever met
Back came my sense of worthlessness
And my long lost pangs of regret
I was my old self again, lost and confused
Reunited with that old feeling
Of being misunderstood and misused.
Sold to the man for the price of disdain
All of this would be interesting
If it weren’t so mundane
”
”
Carrie Fisher (The Princess Diarist)
“
The “German problem” after 1970 became how to keep up with the Germans in terms of efficiency and productivity. One way, as above, was to serially devalue, but that was beginning to hurt. The other way was to tie your currency to the deutsche mark and thereby make your price and inflation rate the same as the Germans, which it turned out would also hurt, but in a different way.
The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world. In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives. So when you tie your currency to the deutsche mark, you are making a one-way bet that your industry can be as competitive as the Germans in terms of quality and price. That would be difficult enough if the deutsche mark hadn’t been undervalued for most of the postwar period and both German labor costs and inflation rates were lower than average, but unfortunately for everyone else, they were. That gave the German economy the advantage in producing less-than-great stuff too, thereby undercutting competitors in products lower down, as well as higher up the value-added chain. Add to this contemporary German wages, which have seen real declines over the 2000s, and you have an economy that is extremely hard to keep up with. On the other side of this one-way bet were the financial markets. They looked at less dynamic economies, such as the United Kingdom and Italy, that were tying themselves to the deutsche mark and saw a way to make money.
The only way to maintain a currency peg is to either defend it with foreign exchange reserves or deflate your wages and prices to accommodate it. To defend a peg you need lots of foreign currency so that when your currency loses value (as it will if you are trying to keep up with the Germans), you can sell your foreign currency reserves and buy back your own currency to maintain the desired rate. But if the markets can figure out how much foreign currency you have in reserve, they can bet against you, force a devaluation of your currency, and pocket the difference between the peg and the new market value in a short sale.
George Soros (and a lot of other hedge funds) famously did this to the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992, blowing the United Kingdom and Italy out of the system. Soros could do this because he knew that there was no way the United Kingdom or Italy could be as competitive as Germany without serious price deflation to increase cost competitiveness, and that there would be only so much deflation and unemployment these countries could take before they either ran out of foreign exchange reserves or lost the next election. Indeed, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism was sometimes referred to as the European “Eternal Recession Mechanism,” such was its deflationary impact. In short, attempts to maintain an anti-inflationary currency peg fail because they are not credible on the following point: you cannot run a gold standard (where the only way to adjust is through internal deflation) in a democracy.
”
”
Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
“
The common complaint, that luxury extends itself even to the lowest ranks of the people, and that the labouring poor will not now be contented with the same food, clothing, and lodging, which satisfied them in former times, may convince us that it is not the money price of labour only, but its real recompense, which has augmented. Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society?
”
”
Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations)
“
the best prices are not the highest prices, but the prices that encourage the largest volume of production and the largest volume of sales. The best wage rates for labor are not the highest wage rates, but the wage rates that permit full production, full employment and the largest sustained payrolls. The best profits, from the standpoint not only of industry but of labor, are not the lowest profits, but the profits that encourage most people to become employers or to provide more employment than before.
”
”
Henry Hazlitt (Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics)
“
The Third Reich made it its mission to use the authority of the state to coordinate efforts within industry to devise standardized and simplified versions of key consumer commodities. These would then be produced at the lowest possible price, enabling the German population to achieve an immediate breakthrough to a higher standard of living. The epithet which was generally attached to these products was Volk: the Volksempfaenger (radio), Volkswohnung (apartments), Volkswagen, Volkskuehlschrank (refrigerator), Volkstraktor (tractor).34 This list contains only those products that enjoyed the official backing of one or more agencies in the Third Reich. Private producers, however, had long appreciated that the term ‘Volk’ had good marketing potential, and they, too, joined the bandwagon. Amongst the various products they touted were Volks-gramophone (people’s gramophone), Volksmotorraeder (people’s motorbikes) and Volksnaehmaschinen (people’s sewing machines). In fact, by 1933 the use of the term ‘Volk’ had become so inflationary that the newly established German advertising council was forced to ban the unlicensed use of the term.
”
”
Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy)
“
Under bilateral competition, market-price is determined within a range whose upper limit is set by the valuations of the lowest bidder among the actual buyers and the highest offerer among the excluded would-be sellers, and whose lower limit is set by the valuations of the lowest offerer among the actual sellers and the highest bidder among the excluded would-be buyers.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
“
For her, being an American was loathing America, but loving America was something he could not let go of any more than he could let go of loving his father and his mother, any more than he could have let go of his decency. How could she "hate" this country when she had no conception of this country? How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the "rotten system" that had given her own family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her "capitalist" parents as though their wealth were the product of anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. The family that started out in a tannery, at one with, side by side with, the lowest of the low - now to her "capitalist dogs." There wasn't much difference and she knew it, between hating America and hating them. He loved the America she hated and blamed for everything that was imperfect in life and wanted violently to overturn, he loved the "bourgeois values" she hated and ridiculed and wanted to subvert, he loved the mother she hated and had all but murdered by doing what she did. Ignorant fucking bitch! The price they had paid! Why shouldn't he tear up this Rita Cohen letter? They were back! The sadistic mischief-makers with their bottomless talent for antagonism who had extorted from him the Audrey Hepburn scrapbook, the stuttering diary, and the ballet shoes, these delinquent young brutes calling themselves "revolutionaries" who had so viciously played with his hopes five years back had decided the time had again rolled around to laugh at Swede Levov.
”
”
Philip Roth (American Pastoral)
“
But I’m going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want. And really, if you think about it from your point of view as a customer, you want everything: a wide assortment of good quality merchandise; the lowest possible prices; guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy; friendly, knowledgeable service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience.
”
”
Sam Walton (Sam Walton: Made In America)
“
An attempt is sometimes made to demonstrate the desirability of measures directed against speculation by reference to the fact that there are times when there is nobody in opposition to the bears in the foreign-exchange market so that they alone are able to determine the rate of exchange. That, of course, is not correct. Yet it must be noticed that speculation has a peculiar effect in the case of a currency whose progressive depreciation is to be expected while it is impossible to foresee when the depreciation will stop, if at all. While, in general, speculation reduces the gap between the highest and lowest prices without altering the average price-level, here, where the movement will presumably continue in the same direction, this naturally can not be the case. The effect of speculation here is to permit the fluctuation, which would otherwise proceed more uniformly, to proceed by fits and starts with the interposition of pauses.
”
”
Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit (Liberty Fund Library of the Works of Ludwig von Mises))
“
Implicit in this was humanity. With it, the base of survival emerged - A magnificent ethic: The highest command is in terms of the species. The next is survival of group. The lowest of three is survival of self. All good and all evil, all morals, all progress, depend on this order of basic commands. To survive for the self at the price of the group is to jeopardize species. For a group to survive at the price of the species is manifest suicide. Here is the essence of good and of greed and a wellspring of justice for all of mankind.
”
”
Theodore Sturgeon (The Dreaming Jewels)
“
Implicit in this was humanity. With it, the base of survival emerged - A magnificent ethic: The highest command is in terms of the species. The next is survival of group. The lowest of three is survival of self. All good and all evil, all morals, all progress, depend on this order of basic commands. To survive for the self at the price of the group is to jeopardize species. For a group to survive at the price of the specifies is manifest suicide. Here is the essence of good and of greed and a wellspring of justice for all of mankind.
”
”
Theodore Sturgeon (The Dreaming Jewels)
“
This was his glory and his guilt-- that he let them teach him to feel guilty of his glory, to accept the part of a sacrificial animal and, in punishment for the sin of intelligence, to perish on the altars of the brutes. The tragic joke of human history is that on any of the altars men erected, it was always man whom they immolated and the animal whom they enshrined. It was always the animal's attributes, not man's, that humanity worshipped: the idol of instinct and the idol of force--the mystics and the kings-- the mystics, who longed for an irresponsible consciousness and ruled by means of the claim that their dark emotions were superior to reason, that knowledge cam in blind, causeless fits, blindly to be followed, not doubted-- the kings, who ruled by means of claws and muscles, with conquest as their method and looting as their aim, with a club or a gun as sole sanction of their power. The defenders of man's soul were concerned with his feelings, and the defenders of man's body were concerned with his stomach-- but both were united against his mind. Yet no one, not the lowest of humans, is ever able fully to renounce his brain. No one has ever believed in the irrational; what they do believe in is the unjust. Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess. When he preaches contradictions, he does so in the knowledge that someone will accept the burden of the impossible, someone will make it work for him at the price of his own suffering or life; destruction is the price of any contradiction. It is the victims who made injustice possible. It is the men of reason who made it possible for the rule of the brute to work. The despoiling of reason has been the motive of every anti-reason creed on earth. The despoiling ability has been the purpose of every creed that preached self-sacrifice.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
The age-old trick of transfer pricing
Taking advantage of the fact that they operate in countries with different tax rates, TNCs [transnational corporations] have their subsidiaries over-charge or under-charge each other – sometimes grossly – so that profits are highest in those subsidiaries operating in countries with the lowest corporate tax rates. In this way, their global post-tax profit is maximized.
A 2005 report by Christian Aid, the development charity, documents cases of under-priced exports like TV antennas from China at $0.40 apiece, rocket launchers from Bolivia at $40 and US bulldozers at $528 and over-priced imports such as German hacksaw blades at $5,485 each, Japanese tweezers at $4,896 and French wrenches at $1,089. The Starbucks and Google cases were different from those examples only in that they mainly involved ‘intangible assets’, such as brand licensing fees, patent royalties, interest charges on loans and in-house consultancy (e.g., coffee quality testing, store design), but the principle involved was the same.
When TNCs evade taxes through transfer pricing, they use but do not pay for the collective productive inputs financed by tax revenue, such as infrastructure, education and R&D. This means that the host economy is effectively subsidizing TNCs.
”
”
Ha-Joon Chang (Economics: The User's Guide)
“
The market is the first force that has led to the shriveling of citizenship. The classic case is the Wal-Mart effect. A town has a Main Street of small businesses and mom-and-pop shops. The shopkeepers and their customers have relationships that are not just about economic transactions but are set in a context of family, neighborhood, people, and place. Then Wal-Mart comes to town. It offers lower prices. It offers convenience. Because of its scale and might in the marketplace, it can compensate its workers stingily and drive out competition. The presence of Wal-Mart leads the townspeople to think of themselves primarily as consumers, and to shed other aspects of their identities, like being neighbors or parishioners or friends. As consumers first, they gravitate to the place with the lowest prices. Wal-Mart thrives. The small businesses struggle and lay off workers. They cut back on their sponsorship of tee ball, their support of the food bank. As the mom-and-pops give way to the big box, and commutes become necessary, lives become more frenetic and stressful. People see each other less often. The sense of mutual obligation that townsfolk once shared starts to evaporate. Microhabits of caring and sociability fall away. In this tableau of libertarian citizenship, market forces triumph and everyone gets better deals—yet everyone is now in many senses poorer.
”
”
Eric Liu (The Gardens of Democracy: A New American Story of Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government)
“
You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price. At the price I suggested, I calculated that we would lock in a 16 percent annual yield.
”
”
Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
“
Is there a difference in the amount donated—based on the "suggested donation" you list? Desmet (1999 ["Asking for Less to Obtain More." Journal of Marketing Research, 29(4), 430–440.]) found it depends on which suggestions you manipulate. Suppose you have the following "suggested donations":
•$15
•$30
•$50
•$75
•$100
Desmet's research suggests that changing the $30, $50, or $75 will have little effect, but raising the top or the bottom number will have significant results.
In his research, raising the top number led to overall larger donations. Strangely, raising the bottom number led to significantly lower response rates. Why would raising the $15 cause fewer people to donate? The dropoff came from previous donors who had contributed a small amount. Desmet cites an "aversion to the extremes," whereby donors do not want to contribute the smallest or the largest amount on the list.
So adding a $125 choice would increase the number of people who donate $100. But if the lowest number shown becomes $30, then people who donated $30 before would now be donating the lowest amount listed—which they don't want to do. Instead, some of them may choose not to donate.
”
”
Marlene Jensen (Setting Profitable Prices: A Step-By-Step Guide to Pricing Strategy Without Hiring a Consultant)
“
When Joe and I went to meet Goldman’s real estate team, though, we found they had a different view of the risks of this deal. Goldman wanted to bid as low as possible to avoid overpaying. For me, the biggest risk was not offering enough and missing out on a tremendous opportunity. I wanted to make sure we beat Bankers Trust’s expected bid. You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price.
”
”
Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
“
Well, forgive the fuck out of me for being shocked senseless when I realized he wasn’t dead. Why didn’t you tell me he was the beast, Ryodan? Why did we have to kill him? I know it’s not because he can’t control himself when he’s the beast. He controlled himself last night when he rescued me from the Book. He can change at will, can’t he? What happened in the Silvers? Does the place have some kind of effect on you, make you uncontrollable?”
I almost slapped myself in the forehead. Barrons had told me that the reason he tattooed himself with black and red protection runes was because using dark magic called a price due, unless you took measures to protect yourself against the backlash. Did using IYD require the blackest kind of magic to make it work? Would it grant his demand to magically transport him to me no matter where I was but devolve him into the darkest, most savage version of himself as the price?
“It was because of how he got there, wasn’t it?” I said. “The spell you two worked sent him to me like was it was supposed to, but the cost was that it turned him into the lowest common denominator of himself. An insane killing machine. Which he figured was all right, because if I was dying, I’d probably need a killing machine around. A champion to show up and decimate all my enemies. That was it, wasn’t it?”
Ryodan had gone completely still. Not a muscle twitched. I wasn’t sure he was breathing.
“He knew what would happen if I pressed IYD, and he made plans with you to handle it.” That was Barrons, always thinking, always managing risks where I was concerned. “He tattooed me so he would sense his mark on me and not kill me. And you were supposed to track him—that’s why you both wear those cuffs, so you can find each other—and kill him so he’d come back as the man form of himself, and I’d never be any wiser. I’d get rescues and have no clue it was Barrons who’d done it or that he sometimes turns into a beast. But you screwed up. And that’s what he was mad at you about this morning on the phone. It was your failure to kill him that let the cat out of the bag.”
A tiny muscle twitched in his jaw. He was pissed. I was definitely right.
“He can always circumvent the price of black magic,” I marveled. “When you kill him, he comes back exactly the same as before, doesn’t he? He could tattoo his whole body with protection runes and, when he ran out of skin, kill himself so he could come back with a clean slate, to start all over.” That was why his tattoos weren’t always the same. “Talk about your ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card! And if you hadn’t botched the plan, I would never have known. It’s your fault I know, Ryodan. I think that means it’s not me you should kill, it’s yourself. Oh, gee, wait,” I said sarcastically, “that wouldn’t work, would it?
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Karen Marie Moning (Shadowfever (Fever, #5))
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There is no reason at all for thinking that the average intelligent investor, even with much devoted effort, can derive better results over the years from the purchase of growth stocks than the investment companies specializing in this area. Surely these organizations have more brains and better research facilities at their disposal than you do. Consequently we should advise against the usual type of growth-stock commitment for the enterprising investor.* This is one in which the excellent prospects are fully recognized in the market and already reflected in a current price-earnings ratio of, say, higher than 20. (For the defensive investor we suggested an upper limit of purchase price at 25 times average earnings of the past seven years. The two criteria would be about equivalent in most cases.)† The striking thing about growth stocks as a class is their tendency toward wide swings in market price. This is true of the largest and longest-established companies—such as General Electric and International Business Machines—and even more so of newer and smaller successful companies. They illustrate our thesis that the main characteristic of the stock market since 1949 has been the injection of a highly speculative element into the shares of companies which have scored the most brilliant successes, and which themselves would be entitled to a high investment rating. (Their credit standing is of the best, and they pay the lowest interest rates on their borrowings.) The investment caliber of such a company may not change over a long span of years, but the risk characteristics of its stock will depend on what happens to it in the stock market. The more enthusiastic the public grows about it, and the faster its advance as compared with the actual growth in its earnings, the riskier a proposition it becomes.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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What is certain is that the immutable classes, the nobility, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, the people, had loftier souls at that time. You can prove it: society has done nothing but deteriorate in the four centuries separating us from the Middle Ages.
"True, a baron then was usually a formidable brute. He was a drunken and lecherous bandit, a sanguinary and boisterous tyrant, but he was a child in mind and spirit. The Church bullied him, and to deliver the Holy Sepulchre he sacrificed his wealth, abandoned home, wife, and children, and accepted unconscionable fatigues, extraordinary sufferings, unheard-of dangers.
"By pious heroism he redeemed the baseness of his morals. The race has since become moderate. It has reduced, sometimes even done away with, its instincts of carnage and rape, but it has replaced them by the monomania of business, the passion for lucre. It has done worse. It has sunk to such a state of abjectness as to be attracted by the doings of the lowest of the low.
...cupidity was repressed by the confessor, and the tradesman, just like the labourer, was maintained by the corporations, which denounced overcharging and fraud, saw that decried merchandise was destroyed, and fixed a fair price and a high standard of excellence for commodities. Trades and professions were handed down from father to son. The corporations assured work and pay. People were not, as now, subject to the fluctuations of the market and the merciless capitalistic exploitation. Great fortunes did not exist and everybody had enough to live on. Sure of the future, unhurried, they created marvels of art, whose secret remains for ever lost.
"All the artisans who passed the three degrees of apprentice, journeyman, and master, developed subtlety and became veritable artists. They ennobled the simplest of iron work, the commonest faience, the most ordinary chests and coffers. Those corporations, putting themselves under the patronage of Saints—whose images, frequently besought, figured on their banners—preserved through the centuries the honest existence of the humble and notably raised the spiritual level of the people whom they protected.
...The bourgeoise has taken the place forfeited by a wastrel nobility which now subsists only to set ignoble fashions and whose sole contribution to our 'civilization' is the establishment of gluttonous dining clubs, so-called gymnastic societies, and pari-mutuel associations. Today the business man has but these aims, to exploit the working man, manufacture shoddy, lie about the quality of merchandise, and give short weight.
...There is one word in the mouths of all. Progress. Progress of whom? Progress of what? For this miserable century hasn't invented anything great.
"It has constructed nothing and destroyed everything...
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Joris-Karl Huysmans (Là-Bas (Down There))
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Daoist Ordination – Receiving a valid “Lu” 收录 Register
Since returning to the US, and living in Los Angeles, many (ie, truly many) people have come to visit my office and library, asking about Daoist "Lu" 录registers, and whether or not they can be purchased from self declared “Daoist Masters” in the United States. The Daoist Lu register and ordination ritual can only be transmitted in Chinese, after 10+ years of study with a master, learning how to chant Zhengyi or Quanzhen music and liturgy, including the Daoist drum, flute, stringed instruments, and mudra, mantra, and visualization of spirits, where they are stored in the body, how they are summoned forth, for which one must be able to use Tang dynasty pronunciation of classical Chinese texts, ie “Tang wen” 唐文, to be effective and truly transmitted. Daoist meditation and ritual 金录醮,黄录斋 must all be a part of one's daily practice before going to Mt Longhu Shan and passing the test, which qualifies a person for one of the 9 grades of ordination (九品) the lowest of which is 9, highest is 1; grades 6 and above are never taught at Longhu Shan, only recognized in a "test", and awarded an appropriate grade ie rank, or title.
Orthodox Longhu Shan Daoists may only pass on this knowledge to one offspring, and one chosen disciple, once in a lifetime, after which they must "pass on" (die) or be "wafted to heaven." Longmen Quanzhen Daoists, on the other hand, allow their knowledge to be transmitted and practiced, in classical Chinese, after living in a monastery and daily practice as a monk or nun.
“Dao for $$$” low ranking Daoists at Longhu Shan accept money from foreign (mostly USA) commercial groups, and award illegitimate "licenses" for a large fee. Many (ie truly many) who have suffered from the huge price, and wrongful giving of "documents" have asked me this question, and shown me the documents they received. In all such cases, it is best to observe the warning of Confucius, "respect demonic spirits but keep a distance" 敬鬼神而遠之. One can study from holy nuns at Qingcheng shan, and Wudangshan, but it is best to keep safely away from “for profit” people who ask fees for going to Longhu Shan and receiving poorly translated English documents.
It is a rule of Daoism, Laozi Ch 67, to respect all, with compassion, and never put oneself above others. The reason why so many Daoist and Buddhist masters do not come to the US is because of this commercial ie “for profit” instead of spiritual use, made from Daoist practices which must never be sold, or money taken for teaching / practicing, in which case true spiritual systems become ineffective. The ordination manual itself states the strict rule that the highly secret talisman, drawn with the tongue on the hard palate of the true Daoist, must never be drawn out in visible writing, or shown to anyone. Many of the phony Longhu Shan documents shown to me break this rule, and are therefore ineffective as well as law breaking. Respectfully submitted, 敬上 3-28-2015
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Michael Saso
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In the past decade, the historically consistent division in the United States between the share of total national income going to labor and that going to physical capital seems to have changed significantly. As the economists Susan Fleck, John Glaser, and Shawn Sprague noted in the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Monthly Labor Review in 2011, “Labor share averaged 64.3 percent from 1947 to 2000. Labor share has declined over the past decade, falling to its lowest point in the third quarter of 2010, 57.8 percent.” Recent moves to “re-shore” production from overseas, including Apple’s decision to produce its new Mac Pro computer in Texas, will do little to reverse this trend. For in order to be economically viable, these new domestic manufacturing facilities will need to be highly automated. Other countries are witnessing similar trends. The economists Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman have documented significant declines in labor’s share of GDP in 42 of the 59 countries they studied, including China, India, and Mexico. In describing their findings, Karabarbounis and Neiman are explicit that progress in digital technologies is an important driver of this phenomenon: “The decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital. The lower price of investment goods explains roughly half of the observed decline in the labor share.
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Anonymous
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In some countries that I have visited, I saw that citizens are very rude and animalistic. They have no moral, no values, and no manners. They are always starring at others, judging with their eyes of ignorance and their very small conscience, they are impolite wherever you go, and their customer service is horrible. They never say sorry for anything and even offend you when you complain about their mistakes and lack of proper attitude. Besides, eating in some of these nations often reveals to be a huge disaster. Food is often rotten, and commonly comes with either hair, stones of even glass, as I have found many times. They waste money as I have never seen anywhere else and are simultaneously very abusive in prices. Their prices are high but their quality level is not even suitable for animals. They represent a waste on foreign investments. Their youngest generation is also a disaster; Extremely ignorant, without any respect or education, undeserving of any job or even trust. Nobody in his right mind should ever employ them, marry them or befriend them. Most are always trying to use their friendships to take advantage of others, especially if such people are outsiders. Their women are gold diggers and extremely promiscuous, especially towards men of other cultures, as if their pride was built on the number of sex partners they can have from the widest variety of nations from around the globe, especially if such men are wealthy. And yet, they can also show a high predisposition for racist behaviors and ignorance in what regards the planet they live in. They are, foremost, selfish, sadistic and parasitic. These countries and their people represent the lowest level of mankind. Whenever you witness what I just described, you are experiencing a country reaching its end. Move out of it while you can, for God will set on such people Divine justice as quickly as such citizens, by their immoral behavior, approach it. Many of such countries end with the loss of their sovereignty for political reasons, invasions by foreign armies, civil wars, violent revolutions, major economical collapses leading the citizens to poverty and starvation, and much more.
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Robin Sacredfire
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Out-of-town supermarkets usually have the lowest prices, while the highest prices are charged by motorway service stations.
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Rough Guides (The Rough Guide to England (Rough Guide to...))
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singing in the old-fashioned language of this good-hearted man, who sold us Hope at the lowest possible price,
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Alain Mabanckou (Black Moses)
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Kroger, one of the largest supermarket chains in the United States, use high–low pricing. For example, during the run-up to 2011 Thanksgiving, Kroger sold turkey cheaper than other retailers, at $0.98/pound. By providing the lowest price on the most compared product they got people to shop at their stores, and made their profit on potatoes, yams and other holiday items that were priced higher than at other retailers.
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Greg Thain (Store Wars: The Worldwide Battle for Mindspace and Shelfspace, Online and In-store)
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About us - Last Check, Australia's most reliable service for pre purchase and post purchase car inspection. Lowest Prices Guaranteed_Call 02 8626 3732.
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lastcheck.com.au
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What’s your specialty? Hmm, don’t have one? You might be becoming a commodity. If that’s the case, you’re in trouble. You’ll have to lower prices, because people won’t see any reason to pay more for you. You’ll have to spend more on marketing, because nobody will be buzzing about you or advocating for you. You’ll become watered down to mush, the lowest common denominator, struggling to get noticed in a world that quickly forgets me-too brands.
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Sally Hogshead (Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist)
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Best Budget Travel Destinations Ever
Are you looking for a cheap flight this year? Travel + Leisure received a list of the most affordable locations this year from one of the top travel search engines in the world, Kayak.
Kayak then considered the top 100 locations with the most affordable average flight prices, excluding outliers due to things like travel restrictions and security issues.
To save a lot of money, go against the grain.
Mexico
Unsurprisingly, Mexico is at the top of the list of the cheapest places to travel in 2022. The United States has long been seen as an accessible and affordable vacation destination; low-cost direct flights are common.
San José del Cabo (in Baja California Sur), Puerto Vallarta, and Cancun are the three destinations within Mexico with the least expensive flights, with January being the most economical month to visit each. Fortunately, January is a glorious month in each of these beachside locales, with warm, balmy weather and an abundance of vibrant hues, textures, and flavors to chase away the winter blues.
Looking for a city vacation rather than a beach vacation? Mexico City, which boasts a diverse collection of museums and a rich Aztec heritage, is another accessible option in the country. May is the cheapest month to travel there.
Chicago, Illinois
Who wants to go to Chicago in the winter? Once you learn about all the things to do in this Midwest winter wonderland and the savings you can get in January, you'll be convinced. At Maggie Daley Park, spend the afternoon ice skating before warming up with some deep-dish pizza.
Colombia
Colombia's fascinating history, vibrant culture, and mouthwatering cuisine make it a popular travel destination. It is also inexpensive compared to what many Americans are used to paying for items like a fresh arepa and a cup of Colombian coffee.
The cheapest month of the year to fly to Bogotá, the capital city, is February. The Bogota Botanical Garden, founded in 1955 and home to almost 20,000 plants, is meticulously maintained, and despite the region's chilly climate, strolling through it is not difficult. The entrance fee is just over $1 USD.
In January, travel to the port city of Cartagena on the country's Caribbean coast. The majority of visitors discover that exploring the charming streets on foot is sufficient to make their stay enjoyable.
Tennessee's Music City
There's a reason why bachelorette parties and reunions of all kinds are so popular in Music City: it's easy to have fun without spending a fortune. There is no fee to visit a mural, hot chicken costs only a few dollars, and Honky Tonk Highway is lined with free live music venues. The cheapest month to book is January.
New York City, New York
Even though New York City isn't known for being a cheap vacation destination, you'll find the best deals if you go in January. Even though the city never sleeps, the cold winter months are the best time for you to visit and take advantage of the lower demand for flights and hotel rooms. In addition, New York City offers a wide variety of free activities.
Canada
Not only does our neighbor Mexico provide excellent deals, but the majority of Americans can easily fly to Canada for an affordable getaway.
In Montréal, Quebec, you must try the steamé, which is the city's interpretation of a hot dog and is served steamed in a side-loading bun (which is also steamed). It's the perfect meal to eat in the middle of February when travel costs are at their lowest. Best of all, hot dogs are inexpensive and delicious as well as filling.
The most affordable month to visit Toronto, Ontario is February. Even though the weather may make you wary, the annual Toronto Light Festival, which is completely free, is held in February in the charming and historic Distillery District. Another excellent choice at this time is the $5 Bentway Skate Trail under the Gardiner Expressway overpass.
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Ovva
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One of the most serious concerns of the Thai government for the past forty years or so has been the presence within the national society of an economically powerful minority group whose way of life is alien, and in some respects incompatible, to the Thai way of life. How to assimilate this minority, or at least to reduce its influence nationally, is a question which has troubled a succession of Thai monarchs and prime ministers. To speak of the Chinese minority as constituting a problem is only to recognize this concern felt in varying degrees by all Thai political leaders. Yet, the Chinese living in Thailand are peaceful and self-disciplined, a thrifty and very industrious people who have made significant contributions to their adopted land—to what extent, then, can they be regarded as a ‘problem’? While the Chinese problem has many dimensions, at is first of all an economic problem, and it is precisely this aspect which looms largest for the Thai. As they see it, the Chinese, welcomed into the Kingdom years ago by a generous government, have since that time subtly undermined the livelihood of the Thai people themselves. They have driven the latter from various skilled crafts, monopolized new occupations, and through combination of commercial know-how and chicanery have gained a stranglehold over the trade and commerce of the entire Kingdom. The Thai see the Chinese as exploiting unmercifully their advantageous economic position: the Thai are obliged to pay high prices to the Chinese for the very necessities of life, and on the other hand are forced to accept the lowest price for the rice they grow. Through deliberate profiteering, according to standard Thai thinking, this minority has driven up living costs, hitting especially hard government employees on fixed salaries. It is also charged that profits made by the Chinese go out of the country in the form of remittances to China, which means a continuous and gigantic draining away of the Kingdom’s wealth. To protect their favored economic position, one hears, the Chinese have not hesitated to bribe officials, which in turn has undermined the efficiency and morale of the public service. Efforts to protect the economic interests of the Thai people through legislation have been only partially effective, again because of Chinese adeptness at evasion and dissimulation.
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Richard J. Coughlin (Double Identity: The Chinese in Modern Thailand)
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There is also a long tradition in developing countries of governments using price and tax policies to benefit the urban sector at the cost of the rural. Many countries in Africa in the 1970s created what they called agricultural marketing boards. This was a cruel joke, since many of the boards were intended to prevent the marketing of produce so the board could buy it at the lowest prices, thereby stabilizing prices for city dwellers. Other countries, like India and China, banned exports of farm products to keep prices where urban consumers wanted them. A by-product of these policies was to make agriculture unprofitable, encouraging people to leave their farms.
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Abhijit V. Banerjee (Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems)
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Sarah Skoterro, in Albuquerque, a veteran of thirty years as a drug counselor, remembered the meth years ago was a party drug. Then, she said, “around 2009, 2010, there was a real shift—a new kind of product. I would do assessments with people struggling for five years with meth who would say ‘This kind of meth is a very different thing.’ ” Skoterro watched people with families, houses, and good-paying jobs quickly lose everything. “They’re out of their house, lost their relationship, their job, they’re walking around at three in the morning, at a bus stop, blisters on their feet. They are a completely different person.” As I talked with people across the country, it occurred to me that P2P meth that created delusional, paranoid, erratic people living on the street must have some effect on police shootings. Police shootings were all over the news by then and a focus of national attention. Albuquerque police, it turns out, had studied meth’s connection to officer-involved fatal shootings, in which blood samples of the deceased could be taken. For years, the city’s meth supply was locally made, in houses, in small quantities. When P2P meth began to arrive in 2009, those meth houses faded. Since 2011, Mexican crystal meth has owned the market with quantities that drove the price from $14,000 per pound down to $2,200 at its lowest. City emergency rooms and the police Crisis Intervention Team, which handles mental illness calls, have been inundated ever since with people with symptoms of schizophrenia, often meth-induced, said Lt. Matt Dietzel, a CIT supervisor. “Meth is so much more common now,” Dietzel told me. “We’re seeing the worst outcomes more often.” In
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Sam Quinones (The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth)
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The company even drew unlikely customers. From rural Arkansas, operating just five comically cheap-looking stores—a rounding error compared with the largest retailers—Sam Walton made his way to an IBM conference for retailers. While he shied away from investing anything in any emotional aspect of retailing, delivering the lowest prices meant mastering logistics and information. To one speaker at the conference, Abe Marks, modern retailing meant knowing exactly “how much merchandise is in the store? What’s selling and what’s not? What is to be ordered, marked down or replaced? . . . The more you turn your inventory, the less capital is required.” Altering his first impression, Marks found that Walton’s simpleton comportment masked his genius as a retailer, eventually calling him the “best utilizer of information that there’s ever been.” A little over two decades later, Sam Walton would become the richest man in America; he would attribute his competitive advantage to his investment in computing systems in his early days. The small-town merchant who expected that knowing his customers’ names or sponsoring the local Little League team would give him some enduring advantage simply didn’t understand the sport. American consumers, technocrats at heart, rewarded efficiency as reflected by the prices on the shelves, not the quaint sentiments of a friendly proprietor. To gain this efficiency, information systems were seen as vital.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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It comes out better if one persuades rather than compels. Let me suggest to the reader that the assumptions be examined—both about the making of profit and about undertaking to compel service by law. Is all that we want from profit-making business the lowest price we can exact? In my own efforts to help business to become more serving I feel that I am contending with a popular view that price is all.
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Robert K. Greenleaf (Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness)
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Purina’s exposure to the hog business was not limited at all. The volatile markets exposed that fact. In 1998, the US hog market experienced a shock comparable to the stock market crash of 1929—a market convulsion that obliterated all the rules everyone thought applied to the business. The root of the problem could be traced to the very industrialization that created Purina Mills’ feed business in the first place. Now that hogs were raised on factory farms, the supply of animals was enormous and inflexible. Farmers were raising herds of tens or even hundreds of thousands of pigs. When prices started to fall, these industrial farms couldn’t adapt quickly. They had mortgage payments to meet on the big pig houses, and they needed to keep production high. Factory farms were a machine that wasn’t easily turned off. The flow of pigs continued into the slaughterhouses, and prices fell even further. Then everything spun out of control. Hog prices plummeted, sucking the entire business into the ground almost instantly. The price of hogs fell from about 53 cents per pound to 10 cents per pound in a matter of months. When adjusted for inflation, this was the lowest price for pigs in US history. It cost far more to raise a pig than the animal was worth. Purina Mills should have been insulated against this crisis. It only sold feed, not the hogs themselves. But with its decision in 1997 to start buying baby hogs, Purina had exposed itself to the risk of falling pork prices. Dean Watson began to discover just how large that exposure was. As one farm economist put it at the time, the rational number of hogs to own in 1998 was zero. Purina discovered this fact quickly. It bought baby hogs, and turned around to sell them to the farmers. But there were no buyers. The farmers refused to take them. “The people who we were supposed to be selling the pigs to were basically saying: ‘Sue me.’ The people we had bought the pigs from were saying: ‘You’re not getting out of my contract or I am suing you,’ ” Watson said. “All of this ownership risk that I was assured didn’t exist started to just come out of the woodwork.
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Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
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Woolworth’s and similar chains such as S. S. Kresge Company and W. T. Grant focused on offering the absolutely lowest price even if it meant things would need replacing a lot sooner than they once did. This pushed hard against the American tradition of frugality, where price was only one consideration. Historically, Americans sought durable long-lasting goods that they could pass among themselves and down to their children. Shoes were reheeled, socks darned, and hems let out to fit generations of brothers and sisters. Discounters gave the common man and woman the opportunity to eschew the cobbler and the darning needle, to break in a brand-new pair of shoes or socks when their toes poked through the old ones. Discounters made ordinary folks feel rich by putting a wide selection of goods within easy reach of all but the most meager budgets. Someone had to pay, of course, but that someone need not be the customer.
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Ellen Ruppel Shell (Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture)
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Almost overnight discounters reversed the venerable retailing practice of offering customers precisely what they wanted. Rather, discounters offered customers what was available at the lowest possible price and positioned these goods in such a way—both physically and psychologically—as to convince customers they were getting the very best deal. The focus switched from the object to the deal: If the deal was good, the object under consideration became less critical to the transaction. Nearly half a century earlier, Frank W. Woolworth had set the stage for this parlor trick when he scoured the globe for almost anything cheap: hair ribbons, buttons, and poorly made wood-backed thermometers. Fifty years later the country had changed dramatically.
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Ellen Ruppel Shell (Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture)
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Sworbreck was dealing with the baker first. He was a chubby man, which made him look guilty of eating well, and he was sweating profusely, which made him look guilty of being warm, both of them capital crimes in this lean winter of the Great Change.
“I been a baker twenty years,” he was saying. “My father was a baker.”
“Hoarders!” someone screamed.
“Take ’em to the Tower!”
“Take ’em all!”
The Styrian woman clutched her face with her hands as if she wanted to crush it between them. “Mercy!” she blubbed. “Mercy!”
The court was not without it. Judge was the voice of the mob. She was their bitter rage, their envy and their greed, but she was also their sentimental forgiveness. When the mood turned for some well-spoken old man, some innocent-looking young woman, first Judge’s chin would crinkle, then her lower lip would tremble, then her black eyes would well with tears. Sometimes she would vault from behind the High Table, kiss the accused, clasp their head to her rusted breastplate. Then they would be embraced by weeping guards, applauded on their way out of the hall while songs were sung and slogans chanted, free Citizens and Citizenesses, enemies no more!
Perhaps Judge liked seeing the hope in the eyes of the accused, so she could see it crushed. Perhaps she truly believed she was doing the good work and rejoiced in those righteously acquitted as much as those rightfully convicted. Perhaps—surely the most terrible possibility of all—she was doing the good work, and somehow he could not see it.
The baker was trying to defend himself, but how to prove false what was self-evidently absurd? “I charged the lowest prices I could and still stay in business! But flour’s gone up so high—”
“And so we come to you!” roared Sworbreck at the miller. He was bony and severe, with a habit of peering up shiftily from under his brows that did him no favours.
“There was a poor harvest!” he barked out. “Now the cold weather’s frozen the canals, snarled up the roads. It’s hard to get goods into the city.”
“Ah, so the government is to blame?” Sworbreck spread his arms towards the benches behind the dock, where the Representatives gravely shook their heads at such a slander. “And since the government consists of those chosen by the people…” Sworbreck leaned back, raised his arms to the balconies. “The people are to blame?
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Joe Abercrombie (The Wisdom of Crowds (The Age of Madness, #3))
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Nick’s mother bowed her head. “Oh, heavenly Father, thank you for the food you have brought to this table at the lowest prices available anywhere. Let it sustain us as we go forth and make more heavenly purchases in your name.
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Shannon Ryan (Panic No More)
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One can always sell something by offering the lowest price. But this does not create loyalty to your brand. Never did and never will. It only creates “loyalty” to that price point. As soon as your guest or visitor is offered a better price, he or she will jump ship, leaving you like a scorned lover in the middle of the night.
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David Brier (The Lucky Brand)
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The Great Bubble ended on March 10, 2000 (though we didn’t realize that fact until some months later). On that day, the NASDAQ (recently 1,731) hit its all-time high of 5,132. That same day, Berkshire shares traded at $40,800, their lowest price since mid-1997.
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Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway Letters to Shareholders, 2023)
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This is the way the power industry began in the days of Muncie, Indiana. Each town had one power plant, and there were no power lines between cities or towns. Moreover, technological developments are forcing a new look at this sort of design, nowadays referred to as microgrids. However, with current technologies and costs, microgrids are not yet cheaper than power from the large-scale grid. In other words, if you want an electric power supply that is extremely reliable—that is, very rarely has blackouts—at the lowest possible price, you need a fleet of large generators and a grid interconnecting them.
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Peter Fox-Penner (Smart Power Anniversary Edition: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities)
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Maddie had seen commercials for Match Made Easy on TV. They seemed like a decent business and legit. She hoped. She prayed they weren't out of her price range. Not that it mattered - time was running out. She'd pay anything to prove to her family she wasn't cursed. Plus, Ryan would be there, most likely with that cheating blonde of his. She bet anything they'd both love to see her at her lowest point: jobless and dateless. Well, no one was going to feel sorry for her. Not her cousin and certainly not the best man, either. She'd show them all. And since she couldn't find a wedding date to her sister's wedding on her own, it looked as if she'd be forced to do the next best thing. Hire one.
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Jennifer Shirk (Wedding Date for Hire (Anyone But You, #2))
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Brand growth and dominance is created by having the highest brand value, not the lowest price tag.
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David Brier (The Lucky Brand)
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Tough times brought on by the Gulf War were testing such assumptions, forcing us to consider our response. We needed to come up with new ideas, do more with less, make short-term gains through greater efficiency, and prepare for long-term gains. That meant cutting every dollar possible in overhead and procedures while maintaining or boosting spending in three vital competitive areas. Number one was product quality. World leadership demanded that we maintain world-class quality, and recession is generally a period when material and labor prices are lowest and room occupancies are down. So we renovated and refurbished at such normally busy properties as the Inn on the Park in London and The Pierre in New York at a time when revenue would be little affected and customers least inconvenienced. That meant we were spending when others were retrenching. We had followed that strategy in 1981-82, and the rebound from that recession had given us nine years of steady growth. I thought the odds were in our favor to score the same way again. The second area was marketing. It’s tempting during recession to cut back on consumer advertising. At the start of each of the last three recessions, the growth of spending on such advertising had slowed by an average of 27 percent. But consumer studies of those recessions had showed that companies that didn’t cut their ads had, in the recovery, captured the most market share. So we didn’t cut our ad budget. In fact, we raised it modestly to gain brand recognition, which continued advertising sustains. As studies show, it’s much easier to sustain momentum than restart it. Third, we eased the workload and reduced costs by simplifying reporting methods. We set up a new system that allowed each hotel to recalculate its forecast, with minimal input, to year’s end, then send it in electronically along with a brief monthly commentary.
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Isadore Sharp (Four Seasons: The Story of a Business Philosophy)
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Supplier Consolidation Once the purchasing process has been streamlined, as was described in the preceding sections, the next step is to pursue cost reduction activities. A significant cost reduction technique is to reduce the number of suppliers with which a company does business. By concentrating its orders with a smaller number of suppliers, it can use higher purchasing volume to negotiate price reductions, rebates, and discounts. This concept is addressed in more detail in Chapters 8 and 9. The following subtopics address various supplier consolidation issues at a general level. Bottom 10 Percent Besides concentrating order volume, another reason to consolidate suppliers is to eliminate the worst-performing ones. These are the suppliers that deliver the wrong items late and with low quality. Even if these suppliers offer what appear to be rock-bottom prices, the total cost of doing business with them is much higher, because the company is endlessly dealing with receiving inspections, product returns, and the processing of credits. Consequently, having a separate program to identify and eliminate a company’s lowest-rated suppliers can also reduce costs.
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Steven M. Bragg (Cost Reduction Analysis: Tools and Strategies (Wiley Corporate F&A Book 7))
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The Price Promise. When you suspect you won't be the low bidder on a proposal, say this: "Pat, just so you understand, we're never the low bidder. In putting this proposal together for you,
I'm assuming you're looking for the highest value and not the lowest price. Am I right on that, or will you be forced to choose the least expensive supplier regardless of quality?
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Samuel D. Deep (Close The Deal: Smart Moves For Selling: 120 Checklists To Help You Close The Very Best Deal)
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1871.—My property had been sold to Shereef's friends at merely nominal prices. Syed bin Majid, a good man, proposed that they should be returned, and the ivory be taken from Shereef; but they would not restore stolen property, though they knew it to be stolen. Christians would have acted differently, even those of the lowest classes. I felt in my destitution as if I were the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves; but I could not hope for Priest, Levite, or good Samaritan to come by on either side, but one morning Syed bin Majid said to me, "Now this is the first time we have been alone together; I have no goods, but I have ivory; let me, I pray you, sell some ivory, and give the goods to you." This was encouraging; but
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David Livingstone (The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death: 1869-1873)
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The one that’s really new is the lowest-priced, too!” In the more rarefied sectors of Madison Avenue, a resort to rhymed slogans is usually regarded as an indication of artistic depravity induced by commercial necessity. From
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John Brooks (Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street)
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The stock market has four trading points, namely: “O” or opening price, “C” or closing price, “H” or highest price for the day, and “L” or lowest price for the day. You'll see all of these points while you're looking at a chart.
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Zachary D. West (Stocks: Investing and Trading Stocks in the Market - A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Stock Trading and Making Money in the Market)
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Range – You can determine this information by subtracting the lowest price from the highest price.
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Zachary D. West (Stocks: Investing and Trading Stocks in the Market - A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Stock Trading and Making Money in the Market)
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The Turtle Trading Approach You can easily find a lot of online articles regarding this approach. Here, you will look at the “lows” and “highs” of the past twenty days to determine the market signals. Remember the following principles when using the turtle trading approach: Buy more shares if the stock's current price is above the highest point of the past twenty days. Sell your shares of the company if the current price is lower than the lowest point of the past twenty days.
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Zachary D. West (Stocks: Investing and Trading Stocks in the Market - A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Stock Trading and Making Money in the Market)
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The Williams %R Indicator You should use this tool to identify oversold and/or overbought stocks in the market. Here, you need to compare the stock's closing price with the high-low price range of a certain time period. The formula of “%R” is simple: subtract the closing price of the stock from the lowest price of the past “N” number of days, and divide the value by the highest price minus the lowest price of the past “N” number of days. With this computation, you can determine the possible closing price of the stock for the next few days.
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Zachary D. West (Stocks: Investing and Trading Stocks in the Market - A Beginner's Guide to the Basics of Stock Trading and Making Money in the Market)
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Oh, and another change from your system: our prisons are now privately owned and operated.” “Really?” West asked, frowning. “I thought governments in my time experimented with privatizing prisons and it didn’t work very well.” “That’s because those prisons weren’t really ‘private.’ They were still paid for by government tax dollars and operated as government-enforced monopolies. They didn’t have to compete to provide the best service at the best price. Of course they were almost as inefficiently-run as ones operated directly by government. “Now criminals can choose the prison they wish to live in, and must pay the costs themselves. This means that prisons compete to provide the best care at the lowest prices. They cannot abuse prisoners without being sued and going out of business, and they cannot overcharge or no one will choose their services.
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Beth Cody (Looking Backward: 2162-2012 A View from a Future Libertarian Republic)
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The problem with keeping up with the Germans is that German industrial exports have the lowest price elasticities in the world.46 In plain English, Germany makes really great stuff that everyone wants and will pay more for in comparison to all the alternatives.
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Mark Blyth (Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea)
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In the search for a new superintendent, the Massachusetts Association of School Committees gave the lowest price for a search service. The $12,000 price tag includes resume screening, focus group discussions and interviews to help the district sort through applicants. Another $8,000 could be used for ads that district policy dictates should be run in the Boston Globe and The Sun.
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Anonymous
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Data on how such buyers affect the listed market are difficult to corral. But an InvestigateWest analysis of roughly 12,000 buyers who paid cash for listed homes in Multnomah County between 2006 and 2014 found more than 850 individuals or their corporate doppelgangers buying between two and nine homes. Those buyers were joined by the 26 institutional investors that captured hundreds more. Translation? Among the approximately 12,000 purchases, there were at least 2,750 flips, remodels, redevelopments and new rental acquisitions in place of new homeowners at the lowest price point of the market. Owing to the lack of transparency in real estate holdings — many homes were acquired by opaquely named corporations, and some buyers use several at a time — and to the tendency of equity groups to place houses in the names of their investors rather than of the investment company, that number is likely much higher.
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Anonymous
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Consumer prices in August rose just 0.3 per cent from the year before as lower energy and food costs took their toll. The dip comes after inflation had already slowed from 0.5 per cent in June to 0.4 per cent in July, putting it at less than a quarter of the ECB’s official inflation target of 2 per cent. Individual countries were even harder hit. In Italy, inflation reached its lowest level since 1959 as consumer prices slumped 0.2 per cent in August, triggering calls for the eurozone central bank to signal to markets when it meets next week that it is ready to act.
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Anonymous
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2) Asking For The Order Doesn’t Motivate People To Buy. What motivates people to buy is when they get that you “get” them—that you understand their world, and have shown how your product/service will impact their company in ways important to them. In most cases, the salesperson that wins the deal isn’t the one with the best product or lowest price, but the one who best articulates the customer’s point of view.
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Peter Bowerman (The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less)
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The explosion of energy prices—thanks to a bubble that Western banks and perhaps some foreign SWFs had a big hand in creating—led to Americans everywhere feeling increased financial strain. Tax revenue went down in virtually every state in the country. In fact, the correlation between the rising prices from the commodities bubble and declining tax revenues is remarkable. According to the Rockefeller Institute, which tracks state revenue collection, the rate of growth for state taxes hit its lowest point in five years in the first quarter of 2008, which is when oil began its surge from around $75 to $149 a barrel.
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Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
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The eugenics roots of minimum wage laws. Excerpt from *Principles of Economics*(1911) by Frank Taussig:
"We have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.... What are the possibilities of employing at the prescribed wages all the healthy able-bodied who apply? The persons affected by such legislation would be those in the lowest economic and social group. The wages at which they can find employment depend on the prices at which their product will sell in the market; or in the technical language of modern economics, on the marginal utility of their services. All those whose additional product would so depress prices that the minimum could no longer be paid by employers would have to go without employment. It might be practicable to prevent employers from paying any one less than the minimum; though the power of law must be very strong indeed, and very rigidly exercised, in order to prevent the making of bargains which are welcome to both bargainers.
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Frank William Taussig
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Logistics is in fact a key aspect of military planning, and Cook is responsible for Apple’s operational excellence. For example, when Apple knew it would move away from disk drives in its iPods and MacBook Air notebooks, it invested in billion-dollar forward purchases of flash memory. Cook’s supply-chain organization executed this masterstroke, which accomplished the trifecta of securing Apple’s supply, locking in the lowest price, and hobbling the competition’s access to components. Such back-of-the-shop excellence at a company known for its creative flair is a rare example of what researchers Charles O’Reilly of Stanford and Michael Tushman, a professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School, refer to as “ambidexterity as a dynamic capability.” In other words, it reflects the ability of a top-performing company to be simultaneously efficient and innovative.
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Adam Lashinsky (Inside Apple)
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If your client can’t beat the competitor in its area of strength, one strategic option is to refocus your client’s business on a competitor’s weakness. If the competitor sells at the lowest prices, has the lowest cost structure, and is realistically unbeatable at the low-price game, you could position your client as the high-priced, highest-quality provider instead.
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Victor Cheng (Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting)
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Those that use only fundamental variables refer only to a company's business performance, not the relationship between that performance and its share price. Studies have sorted stocks using returns on equity or on total capital invested, growth in earnings per share, growth in assets—as opposed to sales growth—and various measures of profit margins. Companies with high marks on these variables are successful firms whose shares are inherently attractive to investors. However, consistent with the studies we discussed above, it is often the firms that ranked lowest on these measures—low returns on capital or narrow profit margins—that have tended to generate the highest future market returns.
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Bruce C. Greenwald (Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond (Wiley Finance Book 396))
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You need a good process for qualifying prospects before they get to you so you’re not stuck doing demos with people who will pay you $30 a month or are the wrong fit for your product. Dialing in your positioning, website, and marketing is one way to make sure you’re attracting the right prospects and weeding out those who aren’t a good match. Using a qualifying form to schedule a demo is also good. Have them put in the company’s name, the company’s size, their best work email, and other information you need to know. Weeding through those prospects can be time-consuming—especially if you have a dual funnel with low-priced and enterprise-level tiers. Here’s a hack: At Drip, anytime someone clicked “Book a Demo,” they got a pop-up that asked for their name and value metric (i.e., how many subscribers they had). If they put in a low number, they were redirected to a page with a video demo, a 10-minute screencast of me walking through the product. If they put in a high number, they were directed to our scheduling link to book a time for a more extensive conversation. As Drip grew, the cutoff number for in-person demos grew, too. At first, we were doing demos for people in our lowest tiers because it was early and we wanted to learn about our market by talking to anyone we could. Bit by bit, we ratcheted up the number on the form based on how many salespeople had the bandwidth to run demos.
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Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
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Going in a group is always enjoyable; it could be executives on a business trip, a family on a holiday, or a group of friends on an expedition. The very first thing to be considered while planning for such a trip is the airfare. The question is: “Is group booking in flights cost-efficient within India?” The answer is yes, but there is much more to it than merely getting the lowest price for a large group. Thus, cooperating with a professional travel agency like Seturtrip can help organize a great trip and get a good discount for a large number of people.
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Arpit Gupta
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Dan Ariely, George Loewenstein and Drazen Prelec did a study in which students were presented with a random product and asked whether they would buy it for a price equal to the last two digits of their own Social Security number.6 Although subjects were reminded that their Social Security number is essentially random, those with high numbers were willing to pay more for the products. Much more, in fact. Students with low Social Security numbers were willing to pay an average of $16.09 for a cordless keyboard. Those with the highest Social Security numbers, however, were willing to pay $55.64 on average—more than three times as much! They repeated this experiment with wireless mice, wine, books and chocolate. In most of the trials, those with the lowest Social Security numbers were only willing to pay one-third as much as those with the highest numbers. It’s amazing what a little anchoring can do.
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Dan Ariely (Hacking Human Nature for Good: A Practical Guide to Changing Human Behavior)
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Rokulink Technology Pvt Ltd
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In other words, the reasons Chinese suppliers subcontract to forced laborers lead straight to global consumers: to us and the way we buy. In our ceaseless search for the cheapest and the most current design, technology, flavor, or appliance, we reward the companies that offer the lowest prices and sell the latest trends. The most profitable retailers in every industry are the ones that meet these demands.
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Amelia Pang (Made in China: A Prisoner, an SOS Letter, and the Hidden Cost of America's Cheap Goods)
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Studies show that belief in self-reliance is very closely linked with a low degree of comfort with intimacy and closeness. Although avoidant individuals were found to have a great deal of confidence about not needing anyone else, their belief came with a price tag: They scored lowest on every measure of closeness in personal relationships.
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Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)