Bizzy’s AM Coffee Biz-Econ-Life Links (073106)

Free Links:

• The following, which was incorporated into an e-mail to me from a Mac direct-mail dealer, has to be a sign of the apocalypse (you can see a similar ad at the dealer’s home page)–

  

• This isn’t a sign of the apocalypse, it’s a sign of sanity –

  Hard rockers Metallica, who long refused to make available individual songs from its albums for sale online, has begun doing so on the iTunes Music Store.

  ….. Fans may buy tracks a la carte for 99 cents or purchase the albums, starting at $9.90.

  ….. The group, which in the early part of the decade led the charge against the original Napster online file-sharing service, has previously made its albums available for purchase online through retailers and its own website.

  I’m still waiting for the Beatles’ music to become available, as was “promised” several months ago (3rd item at link).

• Would it be too much to hope that Nevada Senator Harry Reid’s recent victimization by an identity thief could get legislators off their rear-ends and pass meaningful identity-theft protection legislation, including the right to free no-questions-asked credit freezes?

• Direct mail credit card offers reached an alltime high last year of 6.06 billion pieces last year, CardTrak reports. The response rate, which has been plummeting for years, was a dismal 0.3%. So why does the barrage continue? If you want to reduce the number “pre-approved” offers for credit you receive, you can call 1-88-5OPTOUT. When you do that, all three credit bureaus will be notified that you do not want information from your credit file released to credit card and other solicitors, such as home-equity lenders and insurance companies, who usually look at the information to decide who to mail out offers to. You won’t get offers from those firms any more, but you will still get offers from firms who use other criteria, such as zip codes, to target their offerings without getting credit information.

• Plenty of folks have weighed in on the misguided “living wage” law passed last week in the City of Chicago that targets only “big-box” retailers (”S.O.B.ers” NixGuy and Porkopolis, to name just two), particularly Wal-Mart. But I can’t leave it until commenting on the opening paragraph of the New York Times story Porkopolis linked to:

  After months of fevered lobbying and bitter debate, the Chicago City Council passed a groundbreaking ordinance yesterday requiring “big box” stores, like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, to pay a minimum wage of $10 an hour by 2010, along with at least $3 an hour worth of benefits.

  The ordinance is “groundbreaking,” all right. Wal-Mart has already indicated that there will indeed be a whole lot of groundbreaking from now on — at new store sites in suburban Chicagoland, but certainly not in the city. Other Bix Boxsters like Home Depot and Lowe’s will probably do the same.