Best Of

Who knew that selling car care products and accessories could be so profitable? I used to keep up with the wash/wax/protectant debates you would find online where those who cared obsessively about such things would talk about "the best!" products to use for whatever purpose. I don't remember many Griot products being mentioned in those discussions; it was usually even more obscure stuff. I did get their catalog once and seem to recall being impressed by the price points they were asking. Stuff wasn't cheap, which I guess explains how the founder could afford to buy 6-figure cars for his collection.

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Back in the 80’s I saw a guy on a TV talk show who was introduced as a very successful entrepreneur. I didn’t recognize the name but that’s not important.

His claim to success was to see what was selling well in the market, that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. For men that was stuff for cars and for women it was stuff to clean the house along with some women’s clothing apparel. So, he went to established companies and had them package their products with a name he created but had them packaged in eye catching attractive displays. However, his biggest success was to charge a premium price for these products. His reasoning was if his products looked good on the shelves, customers would be willing to pay higher prices for them because they must be worth the higher price and it worked. Supposedly he made a lot of money doing this and retired in his mid 40’s and just enjoyed life with his family.

When asked why he didn’t continue with his money making schemes, his answer was he wasn’t a greedy person and he had more money than he or his family could spend in their lifetimes, so why not enjoy the fruits of his success.

His closing comment that ended his interview was that buyers had to be smart enough to know what they were willing to spend for products. In short, buyer beware and there is a sucker born every minute. For me, this was reinforcement that some things never change.

jmonroe

I have a laptop bought new in 2019 that came with Windows 10. When Windows 11 came along MS kept reminding me that it was eligible for an upgrade but I resisted for the longest time until a few months ago when I pulled the trigger. The upgrade worked reasonably well, with just one crash partway through. But it finally took and I've been using it since then. That machine only gets minimal use but even at that the changes it imposed left me cold - things like defaults for viewing pictures, how files get displayed when you want to see a directory, just basic stuff that used to be relatively easy - all seem worse. I'm sure there are workarounds but I just lose patience with it. It's the epitome of the old line "Everything is different, and nothing is better".

The main machine I use is an old Dell laptop from 2012. It has gotten increasingly slow and I get the feeling that it could pack it in at any time. I finally decided it was time and bought a new one from Dell, whose products always worked well before I retired and were about the same price as most other brands. It arrived yesterday. I have yet to take it out of the box. I just have the feeling that migrating all those files scattered over umpteen directories and external drives just will not be fun. I'm not looking forward to doing that nor in taming Windows 11 into something I can use. If I disappear for a while, you'll know what I'm trying to do.

I can see scapegoating Daimler, Cerebus, and the 2008/09 meltdown, but what are the excuses for Chrysler's first round of bailouts, at a time as I understand it, the other Big 2 didn't need bailouts.

Less of a bailout and more loan guarantees. Chrysler paid back the loans early.

Same thing by a different name. I'm sure there are a lot of failed businesses that could have used loans and loan guarantees prior to going out of business to keep them from going out of business.

People say the more recent bailouts were "paid back" but the truth is that statement is false if you understand basic math and accounting. Billions were lost/wasted/thrown away.

Opportunity cost.... not even factored in.