That's the title of Terrence Malick's next movie, and here's the trailer.
Of course I will rush out to see this at the earliest possible date, but it is amusing how easy it would be, at this point, to make a spoof Malick trailer. I'm surprised no aspiring editor out there has recut some other movie's trailer into a Malick-style trailer, complete with the soaring, lyrical classical music score and whispered voice-over.
Sarah Baird writes of the visual dissonance of seeing new businesses moving into old fast food restaurant spaces in New Orleans.
Lately I’ve been seeking out these puzzles in architectural form throughout New Orleans, where I live, and where numerous new, often independent businesses are popping up inside the shells of old fast food chains. Each time I enter a car rental office, a new Chinese restaurant, or a pharmacy that used to be a fast food restaurant, I find myself unable to shake its familiar ambiance no matter how different the new business may be. Just like I struggled to say ‘yellow’ when a word was written in orange, I stand inside a Taco Bell-turned-Enterprise longing to order a crunch wrap supreme instead of negotiate the price of my economy sedan. It’s cognitive dissonance at its finest.
This deeply rooted attachment to the form and function of fast food chains is, of course, no accident. These companies were early adopters of architectural branding — the process of creating easily recognizable, distinctive buildings that reflect a brand’s “personality” and attract customers through a variety of spatial and lighting techniques. The brick and mortar stylings of drive-thru restaurants — from the golden arches on McDonald’s to the chuckwagon shape of the first Roy Roger’s — are seared not only into our personal memories, but the collective public consciousness.
Once a Taco Bell, now “the city's premiere Korean restaurant”
I experience similar momentary cognitive dissonance when I see a blog that has borrowed a more famous blog's well-known template, something especially common with Tumblr and Wordpress.
Jonah Peretti is doing some great things at Buzzed, but his sister Chelsea ended 2014 strong too with this brilliant standup special for Netflix. I saw her perform as an opener for Sarah Silverman a few times at the Largo in Los Angeles when I lived there. She was good then, but this act showcases her after some level ups.
I think all the talk of House of Cards being based on proprietary Netflix viewing habit data is vastly overblown, but I do wonder if all the standup Netflix has funded is based on empirical proof of the repeat viewability of standup comedy (not to mention its relative low cost versus a TV series.
When stores like Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, and Costco began their rapid expansion in the 1990s, supermarkets were thrown for a loop. The limited service, thinner assortments, and “everyday low pricing” of items in these “supercenters” — including foodstuffs — created enormous cost savings and increased credibility with consumers. What was a Safeway or a Stop & Shop to do in the face of such brutal competition?
A new paper from Stanford GSB looks at the strategic pricing decisions made by grocery firms during that period in response to the shock to their local market positions by the entry of Wal-Mart. The paper answers the age-old question in the supermarket industry: Is “everyday low pricing” (EDLP) better than promotional (PROMO) pricing that attempts to attract consumers through periodic sales on specific items? Investigators find that while EDLP has lower fixed costs, PROMO results in higher revenues — which is why it is the preferred marketing strategy of many stores.
The research is also the first to provide econometric evidence that repositioning firms’ marketing approaches can be quite costly. Switching from PROMO to EDLP is six times more expensive than migrating the other way around — which explains why supermarkets did not shift en masse to an “everyday low pricing” format as predicted when Wal-Mart entered the game.
From this article from Stanford's GSB. Ex-Apple exec Ron Johnson can attest to the switching costs of going from EDLP to PROMO pricing; it cost him his job at J. C. Penney.
I'm a Costco regular, but I'll buy groceries at Safeway or other grocery stores sometimes just because or geographic convenience and longer shopping hours. If you have proprietary products, that also allows you to sidestep, to some extent, the EDLP war of attrition.
For commodity products, however, the more retail moves online, the less tenable it is for stores to rely on the sheer convenience of physical store proximity to bypass the EDLP game. The paper above looked at the entry of Wal-Mart, but of course the modern day successor to Wal-Mart as an e-commerce gorilla is Amazon. If you are selling the same commodities as Amazon, it's a brutal game, especially as the eventual customer expectation will likely be same-day delivery AND every day low prices for most retail goods. In that scenario, the findings of the researchers above would not hold.