Priceline Stories, Please? June 3, 1999January 29, 2017 My mention of priceline.com last month evoked a woeful tale. To be sure, one modest snafu hardly invalidates a brilliant business model. But as we lurch into the brave new world of cybercommerce, we look to each other for guidance. Does this stuff really work? How well? Thanks, therefore, to Graig Ponthier, for the story that follows. (Countervailing anecdotes welcome!) Graig writes: “I thought I was being very ‘Tobias’ when I decided to get on priceline.com and see what kind of bargain I could get on hotel accommodations for a recent trip. For me, it was only worth spending $40 a night since I could have driven back home instead of staying the night. After shooting for the moon (3, 4, 5 stars), I finally found that my $40.00 got me a suite at a 2-star hotel (with kitchenette, separate living area, etc.) I was pretty excited because of how easy was this. I didn’t even have to call the hotel, just show up and the room would be waiting. “Well at check-in, I discovered that the room reserved in my named was at a special discounted rate of $65 (which was not a suite and was not a double occupancy as Priceline stated it would be). I explained to them about my $40.00 room and discovered that none of the front desk employees have even heard of Priceline.com. They asked if I had something I could show them that shows this rate. I thought for sure that I was a victim of a Priceline scam, since they already had my credit card number. “Well, all I had was my bag and my laptop. So, I went up to my $65 room, booted up my laptop, dialed up the server, loaded up my emails to find my confirmation. In pure embarrassment, I brought my laptop down to the lobby, placed it on the front desk as all the other patrons watched and waited. Anyway, they finally did honor the rate but the whole check-in process was a nightmare. Oh well, I guess I still saved some money on the rate. Unfortunately, they got it back at the hotel bar.”
Short-Sales, Fermat, Flying Cars June 2, 1999January 29, 2017 HE’S NO TAX EXPERT . . . “I’m no tax expert,” writes Darren, “but I thought shorting stock did not allow you to declare capital losses. Am I confused by the fact that you have to pay ordinary income tax when making a capital gain as a result of shorting?” Yes, you are confused. Any gains or losses you realize when you close out a short sale (by “covering your short”) are reported as short-term capital gains or losses. You could have held this short position for 30 years, but when you cover it (by buying back and returning to their rightful owner the shares that you borrowed and sold short), your profit is treated as a short-term gain or loss. Speaking of short sales, some of you know I have for years been high on Amazon.com as a company but short its stock. The Internet will be great long-term for consumers, but possibly not for investors. Did you see this week’s Barron’s cover story? AMAZON.BOMB, as it was titled? The same day it came out, I found myself with a Titan of Industry who — not knowing of my interest in Amazon, or of the Barron’s cover story — offered me a wager. “I’ll bet you,” he said, “that Amazon never turns a profit.” Should he prove to be right, market historians will surely look back in amusement at the $36 billion market cap the stock sported last month, or even the $19 billion or so it commanded at the time of the Barron’s story. HE’S NO FERMAT . . . “I was all set to write the Secret of Wealth, which had just come to me in a flash … but then I got so distracted waiting for the elevator, and so bemused once I eventually got IN the elevator, the Secret snuck back off into the ethos, like a dream you know you had but can’t remember.” Or so I told you last week — evoking this (from Doug): “That happened to me once. Of course, I couldn’t admit it as easily as you did. You should say something like ‘The Secret is too big to fit in the margins of this notebook’ and then die dramatically before anyone can ask you about it.” — Pierre de Fermat WANT TO BUY A FLYING CAR? “Amazingly,” writes Bob Price, “this isn’t another ‘beat the market in a few minutes’ email from me. Since you ignored all of THOSE, I got the hint. Check out www.moller.com/faq. Neat stuff.” Chances are you won’t be buying, or flying, one of these cars any time soon. But — like the dream of beating the market with a few minutes’ work each week — the dream of leaping over traffic on the way to the beach never dies.
Q-Page June 1, 1999February 12, 2017 But first a joke. “Do you know what DNA stands for?” asks Steve Mohanan? Scroll down . . . “National Dyslexic Association” Sorry. And now, if you keep scrolling down, you will eventually come to the Q-page button near the bottom of this page. (See it?) I tell you this for three reasons: First, you might want to use it to get this column delivered to you on a schedule of your choosing. I wouldn’t, because I use AOL, and right now with AOL Q-page has to send the page as “an attachment.” That’s a pain. Plus, why would I want to have my own column delivered to me? But you might, and you might not use AOL. Second, you might want to put the Q-page button on your web page, if you have one, or your company’s web page, so your visitors are sure to see it. Why make them request it “manually” each time? Why risk their forgetting to come visit? To “Q-page” your page, just click the little line just below the Q-page button and follow the instructions from there. Third, some of you have been following the development of this small company, in which I hold an interest. This is the latest development. (Also: we’ve moved to our own dedicated server.) What I find most remarkable is that until we reached abroad and hired a 22-year-old Bangla Deshi on a contract basis — Nayeem is his name, and, no, we have naturally never met him — all of the programming for this enterprise was done by my brilliant young friend Marc and his canny canine Looe down on South Beach. (You can see Looe on the Quickbrowse website. We do not ourselves know what Nayeem looks like, but he writes clean code. And at 22, everybody looks good.) The world has come a long way since the Seventies when a friend of mine, more into Daily Variety than Foreign Affairs, asked of “The Concert for Bagla Desh” — a record you may recall that featured a little girl on the sleeve, designed to raise money for that flood-ravaged, impoverished nation — “What’s with this Bangla?” Yes, she was an appealing little girl, he allowed. But how was it that an entire record album had been produced on her behalf? Who was this little girl? What was the angle? Nayeem had not even been born by then; Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had just about the only two personal computers in the world; and a phone call to Bangla Desh cost . . . well were there any phones in Bangla Desh? And now Nayeem is writing code that will enable Quickbrowse and its sisters, Q-search, Q-people and Q-page, to assist millions of people around the globe to use the Internet a little more effectively. Or so Looe seems to be dreaming, as he snoozes at Marc’s feet. Looe has been working like a dog. Tomorrow: Short-Sale Tax Treatment, and More