Category Archives: consumption

Dealbreaker finds a $75 Amazon gift card which sold on eBay for $75.76. Interestingly, if you look at the auction history of the winning bidder, it’s pretty much all gift cards — this is someone who knows what they’re doing. … Continue reading →

Robert Hodgson has a paper out entitled "An Examination of Judge Reliability at a major U.S. Wine Competition". He had the ingenious idea of serving up three identical glasses of wine — poured from the same bottle — to groups … Continue reading →

It’s hard to keep up with Amazon. This morning, Tyler Cowen checked out the prices for an 8GB memory card: $24.45 but out of stock if you want Amazon’s frustration-free packaging, and $17.45 for the regular, frustrating version. Right now, … Continue reading →

The WSJ has quite the chart this morning, taken from MasterCard’s SpendingPulse data: These are huge numbers, especially the 35% drop in luxury sales: it wasn’t all that long ago that the luxury segment was supposed to be immune from … Continue reading →

Costco sells televisions. Here’s what its CFO had to say on the subject of recent sales, as reported by Jeff Matthews: Our television sales have been way up in November…. [W]e had unit sales up over 50% in the four … Continue reading →

Bloomberg headline, Dec 9: "Diamond May Fetch 9 Million Pounds at Christie’s, Defying Slump". Bloomberg headline, Dec 10: "Diamond Sells for Record $24.3 Million, Defying Slump". Consider the slump defied! But the best line comes from the buyer, Laurence Graff, … Continue reading →

Times have changed over the past ten years when it comes to attitudes to private jets. In October 1998, Nathan Myhrvold famously wrote a lavishly-illustrated paean to his Gulfstream V in Vanity Fair, and even appeared in a Gulfstream ad … Continue reading →

Today’s 8,000-word dose of schadenfreude is here, courtesy of Michael Shnayerson and Vanity Fair. All the bankers laid low by ill fortune you could ever want! Still, a look at the real-estate "bargains" shows how much further there is to … Continue reading →

Free Exchange reads LiveJournal: so we left around 11. About half an hour into the drive, we hit traffic. Thinking their must be an accident up ahead or something else going on, we pateintly waited, but the traffic never ended … Continue reading →

Reuters reports: The Sapphire Pool charges men $30 to $50 admission and is fenced off from the Rio pool, where the women keep their swimsuit tops on.

I just found Juliet Chung’s fascinating article on wine pricing at restaurants, which appeared in the WSJ on Friday. Here’s a couple of datapoints for you. A bottle of 2004 Opus One will cost you $195 at Houston’s in San … Continue reading →

The best bit of the "Lunch with the FT" column is looking at the bill: how much lunch costs in various restaurants. Unfortunately, it’s a graphic, which the clever chaps at FT.com seem to be incapable of reproducing. The article … Continue reading →

Momofuku Ko is the impossible-to-get-into restaurant in the East Village, where I suggested in April that the chef-owner David Chang might want to auction off reservations once or twice a week. Well, he kinda took my suggestion: for a one-off … Continue reading →

Keith Levenberg weighs in on the economics of wine with a very smart insight: If one aims to study “the welfare gains” to wine consumers, measured in those magic units of happiness that economists and philosophers call “utils,” then one … Continue reading →

Omer Gokcecus reports on the cost of Wine Spectator’s annual wine listing: The real price (in 1988 prices) for the basket of the entire Top 100 list was $4,313 in 1988; $3,132 in 1993; $2,533 in 1999; and $2,421 in … Continue reading →

Frank Bruni is right, I think: The same plate of pasta goes down a lot easier at $12 — it even tastes better at $12 — than it does at $16. Why does food behave in the opposite manner to … Continue reading →

Bloomberg has a big article up on the slightly sleazy world of inter-dealer brokers. It’s a world I know a little about, since I used to have an inter-dealer broker as my roommate. This chap was eminently qualified for the … Continue reading →

Back in November I held a Pinot contest which concluded that there was really no correlation between price and quality – or if there was, it was negative. Of course, there was nothing really scientific about a drunken night in … Continue reading →