Recently in Less Category

You are always hearing about how much stuff American's consume. You know, like American's eat an egg every day but a single egg can feed a whole village in China for a week. Crazy stuff like that.

Well I hear that stuff and after a while, I start to think about things I can consume less of. Do I really need it?

Then I heard about parabens. Some chemical that probably or definitely or maybe causes cancer and is in almost every shampoo you can buy.

Then I heard about the "No 'poo" movement. The no 'poo people are trying to use less plastic and they realized that you cant buy shampoo unless you get it in plastic. Ouch.

Listening to a radio show about these 'poo people, I learned that your hair naturally generates oil and it is not good for your hair to wash it every day. The no 'poo movement is about not using shampoo.

These thoughts coalesced in my brain... if you shampoo less you use less plastic, are exposed to less paraben, and your hair is happier. Hmmm. How un-American to use less commercial chemical products that promise to make your look beautiful. I was intrigued.

But I am 40 years old and I have washed my hair with shampoo every day of my life, sometimes more than once.

I thought of the hairiest person I know which turned out to be my two cats. They have never washed their hair EVER or used a paraben. They lick themselves for goodness sake and their hair is pretty darn awesome.

Then I asked the 2nd hairiest person and my wife looked at me like I was stupid. Wash my hair every day with shampoo? Are you trying to kill it?

Thus began my personal no 'poo experiment. One day I wash and condition my hair; the next day I just rinse it.

Suddenly I am using half the shampoo I used to use and my hair seems just about the same. A 32oz bottle of Aveda now lasts me about a year. My future is less shampoo.

The parabens?

Well I do believe that commercial chemicals are the cause of cancer and many of our other curious diseases and I try to use as little plastic as I possibly can. My wife got me some paraben-free shampoo when I found out my Rosemary-Mint Aveda has it in there. But it did not stick. The "natural" stuff was too much like food. Massaging a handful of corn-oil into my hair did not make me feel cleaner.

So I am living with the parabens but since I am trying to use less of everything, Im hoping for the best.

The other day I noticed that our new bar of Dial soap was defective. Instead being a nice rectangle, there was a large gouge out of the bottom. Weird.

Then I opened a second bar and it had the same gouge on the bottom. Same with the third bar. And finally it dawned on me.

Dial soap bars are smaller now. They look the same from the outside but you actually get less soap.

I have been reading about this for about a year. Companies are shrinking portions and in some cases raising prices as well. With the soap I finally observed this change personally.

Less is the new more.

We have a nice 50” plasma TV. To go with it, we have the absolute minimum digital TV package from Comcast.

This month our “intro” package expired and our bill went up to the normal price of $70. Seventy @#$% Dollars!! $70 (which includes $10 in "taxes") to see high quality commercials. I find such a price simply outrageous.

We have cable TV for only one reason: Watching sports – Basketball for me; the Tour de France for Angela.

We used to have cable for our Tivo so we could record first-run TV shows like Battlestar Galactica but earlier this year, I made the switch to Netflix. If I wait 6 months, I can watch the shows in good quality WITHOUT commercials for FREE. Angela started to watch more shows on her Mac as streaming content straight from the network websites.

The price was just the last straw. Earlier in the month I had another Comcast is the Devil experience.

All the major networks offer free over-the-air HD broadcasts with better quality than Comcast provides. The FCC requires Comcast to provide the same free digital channels on cable (called “clear QAM”) for people that get the basic analog cable. We used that service because Fox does not come in well at our current house. Last month, Comcast shut down the clear QAM channels and filed a lawsuit with the FCC to stop providing such “free” content. I thought my PC was broken because the channels stopped working and inappropriately got irate with Microsoft…

Hey Comcast, go fuck yourselves. You are a government-sanctioned monopoly but exhorting your customers is not a good long-term business model. We will find alternatives.

For now I will pay for your service during the sports season but only because I have to and I wont be happy about it. The rest of the year, you wont get my money. I may be a customer but I am not a happy one.

And I am not alone. More and more, people are leaving cable to save money and finding plenty of entertainment out there that is cheaper or free.

So fix your pricing or better yet fix your offering. Customers want ala cart offerings – pick individual channels for less money. If you don’t, you will be replaced by digital alternatives.

I was really excited to get digital cable for the first time this basketball season. Now I am equally excited to see cable turned off on Monday and have them pick up their gigantic cable box. Good riddance.

The future means less CATV.

This week, I was reading an article about the new Sony PSP Go of all things and it struck me that we are moving into a world with less retail.

The original PSP used discs for movies and games called UMD. (Probably stands for ultra-mini-disc and they were about as popular as the original Sony mini discs.) UMDs were never a big hit so the new PSP Go removes the disc drive altogether.

The article pointed out that retailers actually make their money on the accessories like movies and games and not on the original systems. Using a common business cliche, there are no profits on the razors; the money is in razor blades.

By removing the disc drive media, you remove the retailers incentive to carry your system. If there are no blades to sell, why carry your razors?

This article was about the Sony PSP but it is a theme across a lot of products that use media. Retailers make money on the discs but customers just want the content. If content delivery changes, it undermines the business model of the retailers.

And that is exactly what is happening. Media is all going digital and digital is moving to direct downloads via the Internet.

(As a side note, Apple doesn’t worry about this because they have their own retail stores. Direct download media is fine with them and better for the customer.)

Then I was read an article about Redbox – those kiosks in the grocery store that rent movie DVD’s for $1. Over 10M rentals last year. They are doing well because of their location convenience and super low price but movie studios are angry because they feel easy rentals cuts down on DVD sales.

I cannot remember the last time I went to a video store. A week ago, we were visiting friends out of town. How about a movie? We used their laptop to log into Netflix and 5 minutes later we were all watching a movie stream to their TV with Silverlight. Instant gratification and great quality. Why would you ever waste time on a video store?

Where products are media, the stores are going away and being replaced by digital downloads. Music. Movies. Games. Do record stores even exist today? The retail experience for these products is greatly diminished from 20 years ago.

Digital media is the most dramatic example, but other physical goods are also being sold online more and more cutting out traditional retail. The consumer electronics space has contracted leaving BestBuy as one of the only survivors. The pie shrank and most of the retailers starved to death. Book stores?

The one thing physical retailers are best at is returns but returns is not a business you want to be in. More and more people will check prices at retail, inspect the product and then buy it from their online supplier like Amazon.

More and more, retailers will shrink and go out of business. Maybe the new system is more economically efficient over all but it sure is different.

Boy oh boy has the world changed in my lifetime.

When I started this blog, one of my main themes was the great housing bubble.

A lot of people denied there was a bubble until catastrophe last year. Now we are in a long period of readjusting prices to incomes and returning to realistic, sustainable prices.

In other words, the housing bubble is so last year. But I have a new theme.

The new theme is less. After decades of more, more, MORE! I predict that the USA will now move into a similar period of less, less, less.

Less what? Just about everything.

There is less fresh water, for instance. The rivers are lower, the aquifers are lower, and places like California are now openly saying that if they dont desalinate the ocean water they wont survive.

Less is the new more and a central theme in our lives is going to be adjusting to living with less.