Isegoria

Jennifer Levitz notes that when stocks tank, some investors atampede to alpacas and turn to drink, “investing” in bottles of champagne, parking spaces in major cities, condos in Peru or Croatia, cypress farms in Costa Rica, odd farm animals like alpacas and emus, and bags of pre-1965 U.S dimes and quarters, which are 90% silver and in limited supply.

I found this bit slightly disingenuous:

Gold coins also are in great demand. Last week, the mint suspended sales of American Buffalo 24-karat gold coins because it can’t keep up with soaring sales. Last month, a record 14,000 bidders — 17% more than the previous high — turned out for a coin-and-currency auction in Long Beach, Calif., that generated $35 million in sales.

A real business does not suspend sales when it can’t keep up with demand. You’d think the Wall Street Journal would comment on that.

Entrepreneurs Scramble for Financing as banks cut them off:

Small businesses are turning to angel investors, suppliers and personal credit cards as the financial crisis spreads to Main Street and access to commercial bank loans becomes more restricted.

After being rejected last month at two commercial banks, Education 4 Kids Inc. owner J.M. Ivler is back to financing his 5-year-old online retailer with personal credit cards. “I can’t get the banks to give me a loan,” complains Mr. Ivler, whose Las Vegas company is profitable and produced $350,000 in sales last year.

Brian Moran, president of magazine publisher Moran Media Group LLC, decided to sell $125,000 in accounts receivables and incur a 3%, 30-day rate on outstanding balances to finance his Paramus, N.J. company after a bank credit line wasn’t renewed. The bank told him it was cutting back on small business lending to minimize risk.

I smell a business opportunity…

The Solution to Hunting’s Woes? Setting Sights on Women:

As the number of male hunters has declined, the sport has targeted women with everything from pink guns to gender-specific hunting courses. Now, they’re seeking out spokesmodels and pushing weapons tailored for women, such as lighter crossbows. Television shows starring women shooters include “American Huntress” and “Family Traditions with Haley Heath,” chronicling the hunting adventures of a young woman and her tag-along husband and children.

The campaign received a boost in recent weeks from the Republican Party’s vice presidential nomination of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Photographs have since emerged of the governor posing beside a caribou she’d shot, and supporters boasted that she knew how to field-dress a moose. Gov. Palin is an ideal role model, say some women hunters, because she defies the masculine image of the sport. “She’s a babe,” says Linda Burch, a bear-hunting Minnesota accounting executive who applies lipstick before posing for kill shots.

Gov. Palin also counters the stereotype of the woman hunter as poor, rural and uneducated. A 2003 survey of Texans who had attended a state hunting-and-outdoors training program for women found that 82% lived in cities, 79% had graduated from college and 39% had household incomes above $80,000 a year. They spent a mean of $3,250 a year on outdoor recreational pursuits, said the state wildlife agency, which conducted the survey.

The initial go-to strategy? Pink it and shrink it!

About five years ago, the outdoor-equipment industry began slapping pink paint on weapons, including handguns, and downsizing camouflage. “Initially their attitude was, ‘Pink it and shrink it’ and women will buy,” says Beth Ann Amico, an Oklahoma hunter and dog trainer who notes that pink defeats the purpose of camouflage. “We’re savvier than that.”

Now, arms makers are offering shorter gun stocks and barrels for women and crossbows requiring less upper-body strength. Apparel makers such as SHE Safari and Foxy Huntress LLC are marketing camouflage expressly to women. “The Foxy Huntress knows she’s dressed to kill in more ways than one,” says that three-year-old company’s Web site, touting “well-designed pieces cut with a female’s unique form and needs in mind.”

Ellen Gamerman calls the trendy green giveaway of the moment, the reusable shopping bag, An Inconvenient Bag, because it is a case study in how tricky it is to make products environmentally friendly:

“If you don’t reuse them, you’re actually worse off by taking one of them,” says Bob Lilienfeld, author of the Use Less Stuff Report, an online newsletter about waste prevention. And because many of the bags are made from heavier material, they’re also likely to sit longer in landfills than their thinner, disposable cousins, according to Ned Thomas, who heads the department of material science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Used as they were intended, the totes can be an environmental boon, vastly reducing the number of disposable bags that do wind up in landfills. If each bag is used multiple times — at least once a week — four or five reusable bags can replace 520 plastic bags a year, says Nick Sterling, research director at Natural Capitalism Solutions, a nonprofit focused on corporate sustainability issues.
[...]
Finding a truly green bag is challenging. Plastic totes may be more eco-friendly to manufacture than ones made from cotton or canvas, which can require large amounts of water and energy to produce and may contain harsh chemical dyes. Paper bags, meanwhile, require the destruction of millions of trees and are made in factories that contribute to air and water pollution.

Many of the cheap, reusable bags that retailers favor are produced in Chinese factories and made from nonwoven polypropylene, a form of plastic that requires about 28 times as much energy to produce as the plastic used in standard disposable bags and eight times as much as a paper sack, according to Mr. Sterling, of Natural Capitalism Solutions.
[...]
Getting people to actually use the bags is another matter. Maximizing their benefits requires changing deeply ingrained behavior, like getting used to taking 30-second showers to lower one’s energy and water use. At present, many of the bags go unused — remaining stashed instead in consumers’ closets or in the trunks of their cars. Earlier this year, KPIX in San Francisco polled 500 of its television viewers and found that more than half — 58% — said they almost never take reusable cloth shopping bags to the grocery store.

Phil Rozenski, director of environmental strategies at the plastic bag maker Hilex Poly Co., believes even fewer people remember to use them. Based on consumer surveys conducted by the company, he says roughly the same number of people reuse their bags as bring disposable bags back to the grocery store for recycling — a figure he puts at about 10% of consumers, according to industry data.
[...]
Mr. Shiv also says that according to surveys done by his graduate students, many shoppers say they are less likely to carry a retailer’s branded reusable bag into a competing store. “What these bags are doing is increasing loyalty to the store,” he says.

This anecdote says a lot:

Sarah De Belen, a 35-year-old mother of two from Hoboken, N.J., says she uses about 30 or 40 plastic bags at the grocery store every week. Late last year, she saw a woman at the supermarket with a popular canvas tote by London designer Anya Hindmarch and promptly purchased one online for about $45.

But Ms. De Belen says she soon realized she’d need 12 of them to accommodate an average grocery run. “It can hold, like, a head of lettuce,” she says. Besides, she adds, it’s too nice to load up with diapers or dripping chicken breasts.