Anything Is Possible December 30, 1999February 13, 2017 This is my last column of the century, so I think I should write about something more important than vegetables. (“The beet,” Russell Turpin writes in response to last month’s column, “is also the most serious of vegetables. Don’t take my word for it. Borrow a copy of Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins, and read the first paragraph.” Adds Denise Sumner: “It’s the only book I’ve ever read in which a beet — or any vegetable, for that matter — is so….well, appreciated.”) Or frozen grapes. (“Another thing you can do with frozen bananas,” writes Anne Speck in response to someone who had put in a word for freezing banana slices, “is throw them in the blender with a spoonful of cocoa or carob powder and a splash of vanilla. Blend it up and you have something resembling a chocolate milkshake without the fat.”) But what? I could try to just give each of you a hundred dollars, as money is what a lot of you seem to be interested in. (Me, too.) But American Express has already beaten me to that punch. In order to get you to sample its free brokerage commissions, Amex will now give you $100 cash for opening a brokerage account (refer to Wall Street Journal “Promotion Code 100” and/or call 800-297-7006 if you have problems). It was once enough just to offer free commissions. Now Amex is paying you $100 to try free commissions. My hunch is that, if this works well, Amex may offer a free toaster as an enticement to take the free $100 to try the free commissions. Toasters have always been a draw for this sort of thing, because their little toast thermostats so quickly break (assuming you never clean them, which no Cooking Like a Guy™ guy ever does), leaving them little more than fire hazards. So everyone could use a new toaster, if not now, then soon, and offering them free would be a way to encourage people to take the free $100 to try the free commissions. There are huge profits to be made from a promotion like this, which must be one reason American Express stock has been soaring. I can’t compete with a powerhouse like American Express, so rather than give you $100 from my own pocket, I will just join you in running over to American Express for my free $100. So. No vegetables, no grapes, no free money. What then? The shirt off my back? No — although, thanks to alert reader Gary Krager I can steer you to an almost-free $40 men’s dress shirt. (Click here.) So, then — what? It seems to me that a few fond words about the Twentieth Century may be in order. Being a glass-half-full type, I see not the horrors of the Twentieth Century, like the World Wars and Apartheid and the failed communist experiment, but the fact that we survived them and may have learned something from them. Let’s hope. I see not the Depression, but the estimable institutions it caused us to create — principally the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve System, which have served us well. The amazing thing about this century of radio and TV and automobiles antibiotics and movies and computers (and Velcro and zippers) is that for the first time we realized that virtually anything is possible. Flight -– even to the moon. Instant wireless communication from any mouth to any ear on the planet. Bloodless surgery. Genetic engineering. Even immortality, Bill Gates has noted — and I’m quite sure he’s right — is by now “just a software problem.” (Unsure in just how many decades they will finish debugging the code, I am eating as healthily as I can.) We could certainly screw it up. But we now have it within our grasp to do almost anything. For thousands and thousands of years, since we lived in caves, this was merely the stuff of dreams. The other amazing thing about this century — if less miraculous, no less important — is the progress we’ve made in recognizing the fundamental validity of individual human rights. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that . . .”) It was only 79 years ago that women got the vote. By now, even most Republicans think it’s a good idea — even though the Bible says women should be subservient. Until just 35 years ago, African Americans were still officially second-class citizens in part of America. By now, happily, most of that is ancient history — even though the Bible says, “slaves, obey thy masters” (Colossians) “with fear and trembling” (Ephesians). And until just 8 years ago, when the Governor of Arkansas began running for President, the issue of fairness and equality for gays and lesbians had never been placed on the national agenda, debated in prime time. Today, much of mainstream America has come to know us as their friends and neighbors, sons and daughters, colleagues and employees. The Republican leadership has yet to get this one right, but they will. Anything is possible, and every constructive citizen deserves equal rights and respect. Not a bad century. This next one could be even better. With your help, it will be. And at least until these crazy e-commerce valuations collapse, a lot of stuff will be free. Happy New Year!
What’s Wrong with the Hunger Site? December 29, 1999January 28, 2017 As many of you have pointed out to me, there is an easy way to help starving children. It’s called The Hunger Site. Visit, click, and — at no cost to you — 2-1/2 cups of rice are provided for a hungry child. I first wrote about the hunger site this summer. I was a bit dismissive, in part because you had the sense you were ferrying a turkey dinner out to some poor kid, when in fact, as I discovered, you were contributing 3 cents to a UN hunger program. Three cents (now a nickel) is not a big deal. I also noted, back in July, that as well-intentioned as it seemed to be, if 10 million people clicked each day, the guy behind the site would pocket $25 million a year for his trouble. (These were not the numbers I used, but this is how the numbers worked out, based on his 14% commission.) So one could even construe it as a somewhat cynical way to make a fortune. Since then, the site has done a great job of providing full disclosure — and its founder, John Breen, of Indianapolis, has renounced the 14% commission. The site is now run for free. John says he even absorbs the cost of the server. What’s more, John is is so modest, his name and face appear nowhere on the site. As best I can tell, he’s not even doing this for the glory (at least not in this life). So what’s wrong with the Hunger Site? If anything, only this: At a nickel a day, after a full year of relentless clicking, you have given $18.25. (Well, you haven’t given anything, but the sponsors have, as a result of your clicking.) The upside: $18.25 has been contributed. Rice has been provided. And it’s made you feel good to help. The downside: perhaps not doing the math, you may actually feel that, having clicked, you’ve “done your bit.” (If you earn minimum wage or are nine years old, you have!). Hunger site devotees may feel, when asked to contribute to one good cause or another, including hunger causes, that, heck, they’ve been religious about helping the hungry every day all year — they’ve even turned other people on to this great site — and that’s enough. They “gave at the office,” as the line used to go. But c’mon. It’s a nickel. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go click. If it takes you 3 seconds, you are “earning” $60 an hour for the cause. If it takes you half a minute to pull up the site, glance at the ads, click, think about your good deed, and get back to what you were doing — $6 an hour. Either way, a nickel. “What is that nickel really worth?” John Breen muses. “If you live in an industrialized country, it is barely worth picking up off the ground. If you live in India and are watching your child die in front of you from hunger, that nickel — which buys two cups and a half of food at the Hunger Site — is worth everything in the world.” Beyond that, John seems, from our limited e-correspondence, to be such a bright, modest, thoroughly well-intentioned man that he may find ways to leverage the good will. Perhaps he will link to the several new sites, like helping.org, that make it easy to give lots more than a nickel. Helping.org, which recently received a rave from the Wall Street Journal‘s estimable Walt Mossberg, is a nonprofit set up by the AOL Foundation. It helps you donate money — or volunteer. Check it out. Or if clickles ever materialize, as I’ve long been hoping they will, perhaps The Hunger Site will make it easy to double-click — once for the sponsor’s nickel and once, say, to kick in your own 25 cents or half dollar. In the meantime, though, a nickel is still just a nickel, and your time must be worth something, so don’t spend too much of it thinking what a wonderful thing you’ve done by clicking on the Hunger Site.
Free Food from Priceline.com December 28, 1999February 13, 2017 Yesterday, I worried that it’s going to be tough for most Internet firms to make profits. And that one day, this could lead the stock market to tank, touching off a vicious cycle of gloom and depressed sales and lay-offs and bankruptcies, leading to even more gloom and even lower stock prices. (When it begins to hit bottom — when GREED begins to peek out amidst the rubble, but FEAR still clearly holds the upper hand — that would be a good time for a big tax cut. Not now, when the economy is booming.) I’m absolutely not predicting this will happen. But anyone who believes that it can’t is . . . young. So let’s take a moment to talk about priceline.com, a fabulously successful (though money-losing) company whose stock is actually down two-thirds from its $165 high this year. At $55 recently, the market still values Priceline at $8 billion. Is it a bargain? You probably know Priceline from the cheap airline tickets and hotel rooms it can get you. Back to them in a minute. First: free food. Jack Moubayed: “When I first heard about Priceline moving into the grocery scene, I thought ‘just another wannabe dot-com.’ However, last week, at the super market check out, I was handed a Priceline coupon, so I went home and logged onto their website (webhouse.priceline.com) and tried it out. I was so impressed with the savings that I e-mailed them congratulating them for this wonderful idea. Here’s how it works: 1. Buy your groceries as if you are buying anything online. 2. Pay for the groceries with your credit/debit card online. 3. Print out the shopping list provided by Priceline 4. Go to the nearest participating supermarket (D’Agostino, The Food Emporium, Foodtown, Grand Union, Gristede’s, King Kullen, Pathmark (only in Westchester), ShopRite, Stop & Shop, Super Foodmart, Waldbaum’s) and fill your shopping cart with the items on your Priceline shopping list. 5. Go to check out, swipe your Priceline card (not your credit/debit card), and you’re done! You already paid for the items online. “I would like to mention here that I paid $27.24 online for my Priceline items and at the supermarket checkout, the receipt read $71.45. [The receipt read $71.45, but Jack never gave the supermarket a penny. His payment of $27.24 had been made, to Priceline, on-line.] That’s $44.21 savings on every supermarket trip.” Wait. If Millionaire Mike’s experience is any guide, it’s even better than that. (Mike is not his real name, but he is a millionaire.) “It is unbelievable,” Mike told me, back from the store for the third time this day. “You go in with your list — which you don’t actually have to have, but you bring it to remind you — and you put the things you picked in your cart. You can also put in some other things you want to buy that you hadn’t thought of . . . and if the store doesn’t have exactly what you wanted, or the size you wanted, you can put in a different size or brand.” “Oh,” I chirped. “So the cash register is smart enough to add the extra stuff to your order and charge you for it separately?” “NO!” said Millionaire Mike, giddy. “It rings up whatever you bought, and you walk out with a receipt and the stuff you picked off the shelves. But you don’t pay the supermarket anything.” “Oh,” I said. “So the extra stuff and the changes are added to what Priceline already charged your credit card?” “NO!” said Millionaire Mike. “You only pay what you paid on line. Don’t you see? No one at the store checks what you walk out with against the list of what you paid for!” “Oh,” I said. “You mean you just stole a lot of extra stuff.” Millionaire Mike paused (basically an honest guy). “Yes,” he said. “And no one even checks! It is unbelievable!” And so it is. Even if Millionaire Mike is wrong, and he somehow finds the extra purchases on his Visa card after all, the prices are, according to Jack (who stole nothing), unbelievable. For now. But this is a dot.com model that seems loopiest of all. The airline and hotel stuff I understand. If an airplane seat is empty, the revenue it could have generated is lost forever. If it’s filled, it costs the airline an extra $10 in fuel and peanuts. Anything beyond that is profit. Much the same with hotel rooms (substitute soap and shampoo for peanuts). So priceline.com’s model can work there: If you would not otherwise have flown, and it sells you the $500 ticket for $180, everybody wins. The airline makes $170 it would not have made otherwise, which it can split with priceline.com; the economy is more efficient because fewer seats go empty. Likewise with the dot-com models that cut out the middleman. One day, books will be delivered straight from the publisher (and in some cases, straight from the author) to your computer. That saves paper, printing, binding, shipping, warehousing, retailing, and your trip to the store. So there’s another model where there’s room to cut prices and everybody wins. The economy is more efficient because it costs far, far less to get a book from the author’s brain to your eyeballs. But groceries? I will eagerly buy groceries on-line for the convenience of it, if they’re delivered. I’m happy to pay for that. But where would the economic savings come from? Nothing about the process Jack and Millionaire Mike describe is more efficient. The products cost the same to make and package and ship and warehouse and stock and check out. So is Heinz suddenly going to accept half-price for its ketchup? Maybe for a week, but permanently? Is Safeway going to start losing billions of dollars by destroying their relatively modest margins? I can see how, long-term, conceivably, 5% or 10% could be squeezed out of profit margins and marketing budgets to somehow pass on that much saving — maybe. (Actually, I can’t see it, but let’s assume it.) But will Millionaire Mike take the time to go on-line and shop this way, then go to the market and do a treasure hunt, all to save 10%? It certainly makes sense to take your free money while it’s being offered. But how long can this last? How will Priceline make huge profits from Jack’s $27.24 purchase in order to justify its still-huge stock price? Surely Priceline will have to pay the store something for Jack’s ketchup, and the store will have to pay Heinz something. When you cut the bill from $71.45 to $27.24, how does that leave room for Heinz, Safeway, and Priceline all to make money? Which brings us back to the larger question, of Internet profits and stock prices, not just Priceline’s. Microsoft is a hugely profitable company because, for all practical purposes, it has a monopoly. Everybody runs Windows. Nobody even knows or much cares what it costs. But how is Amazon going to make huge profits? You can buy what it sells anywhere. Price competition is fierce. Yes, it does a great job. And yes, it may even make a profit one day. But huge profits? Tell me again why it’s currently worth more than twice as much as Federal Express? And the same for the hundreds of dot.coms that plan to make a fortune selling advertising. Everyone plans to make a fortune selling advertising. The competition to sell advertising is likely to get fiercer and fiercer. Can the prices stay high? Can everybody win? I sure hope so. Tomorrow: Free Food of a Different Kind
Tax-Buying? December 27, 1999January 28, 2017 I told you about my few shares of ICGE. They came out this summer at $12 and ran up to $169.50, where I sold half. Fourteen times your money in four months, even these days, is acceptable. That was December 7. By the 9th, it had inched up another 40% — a respectable two-day gain — so I sold the rest at $238.25 and wrote a few sentences about how nuts all this is. By last week, it had climbed a further 60%, to $424. (It had also split 2-for-1 — for each dime we had two nickels — which meant the stock was now quoted at 212.) At this point, ICGE was valued by the market at more than General Motors. I took a deep, deep breath and shorted a tiny bit — DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME! I don’t know anything (obviously). If I did, I wouldn’t have sold at $169.50. I would have waited a couple of weeks and sold at $424. But it seems to me that while much of the excitement stems from the dazzle of the Internet, which is very real (ICGE owns stakes in 35 Internet companies), some of the extraordinary gains recently in stocks like this one and dozens of others may have come in part from: Short-covering — short-sellers who just couldn’t stand the pain any longer, or who, because of margin requirements, had no choice. Tax-considerations — short-sellers buying to take a year-end tax loss . . . combined with shareholders itching to take profits, but not selling — determined to wait a few weeks until January 3, to push the tax bill out 12 months. The combination of desperate buyers and stubborn non-sellers can drive a price up. Or maybe these factors had nothing to do with ICGE’s jump from $169 to $414. For all I know, ICGE may double next year. Or next week. If it does, I’ll be fine. I shorted just a tiny bit. Even if it goes up tenfold, I’ll be able to eat. But a tenfold gain would give it a higher market-cap than IBM and Exxon/Mobil combined. Can this year-old company be that astonishing? I don’t mean to pooh-pooh ICGE’s ownership stakes in 35 e-commerce companies. But I have ownership stakes in half a dozen myself — should my market cap be $5 billion? I won’t more than mention that the 35 e-commerce companies ICGE owns stakes in mostly lose money. Investors are way too far-sighted to care about that. The assumption is that one day, somehow, the profits will not just flow, they will gush. They will cascade. My one worry about this is that e-commerce makes price-comparisons so easy. That’s great for shoppers, but rotten for shopkeepers. Even virtual ones. You don’t have to drive around comparing prices. You don’t even have to call around. Indeed, you don’t even click around. Automated shopping robots will find the best prices for you. Suddenly, it’s a snap to save $2, which you would never have bothered to do if it meant leaving one store and walking to another, unsure whether the item would be cheaper (or even in stock). And getting the best price no longer requires haggling. Or disappointing an eager sales clerk with whom you’ve established eye contact. Before, there were lots of reasons to pay more for a microwave. Now there are none. This is fine for the microwave makers; not so fine, perhaps, for the people who sell them. And won’t microwave ovens soon be free anyway? You’ll click to have one delivered, in return for agreeing to see banner messages in the digital display (“Food ready. Try a little A-1 Sauce!”) and a permanent banner above the door (“Things go better with Coke!”). People will pay you to use one of their microwaves. Pay you to make their portal your portal. Not just give you free PC’s — a highly profitable business model, if you ask me — but pay you to use their PC. (I had planned to give you a free pair of sneakers for reading this column today, compliments of WebMD — click here. My own size 9-1/2’s should be arriving any day now. But supplies have apparently run out. Sorry.) You think Starbucks is profitable now? With those $3.89 decaf eggnog lattes? (Quite good, by the way.) That’s no way to make real money. The way to make real money is to give the coffee away, as a way to draw even more traffic, and put banner ads on the cups. Banner ads for FREE PCs and FREE PORTALS and FREE SNEAKERS, the providers of which can all afford to spend a fortune advertising on Starbucks cups because there’s such huge profit, ultimately, in giving things away free or selling them for just pennies above cost. Take that huge profit and multiply it by 50 (in the case of General Electric, up 60% this year) or 77 (in the case of Microsoft, up 70%) or 1600 (in the case of Yahoo, up 400%), and you have today’s stock price. (At least Microsoft has a monopoly, and GE is one of only two or three brands you can names that sells light bulbs. But Yahoo at 1600 times earnings? What happens when Pokemon opens a portal?) One of my friends is worried. He thinks this is a bubble, and that the higher it goes, the more horrific the unwinding will be. After all, unwindings can feed on themselves. Falling stock prices can make everyone feel poor. That hurts business. That hurts employment. That hurts business more. That hurts stock prices more . . . and around and around it goes. Hopefully not. But it is absolutely possible, so don’t have all your money in high-flying stocks. And don’t be in the market on margin. Tomorrow: Free Food
A Christmas Poem December 23, 1999February 18, 2023 Stop! Don’t buy wrapping paper! I use the Wall Street Journal — makes a nice grey background for a red/green magic marker sentiment (“Arnie and Sue, this is for you!”), spares the environment, saves money. I used to save New Yorker covers throughout the year and then tape them together for the same purpose, but the Journal is a lot less work. And with each gift should come a poem. Preferably in the form of a riddle. “Come rain or come shine, You’re my kinda fella, So I went out and got you This brand new um—— !” How hard is that? If you’re wondering where I got such an astonishing talent, it’s simple: my Mom. OK, so neither one of us may ever threaten Rita Dove (U.S. poet laureate), let alone Maya Angelou (“good morning!”). But consider what my Mom came up with, some years ago, when asked to write a poem for Christmas: My Christmas message is quite short: Give to others your support. Count your blessings, help the needy . . . It makes you happy, yes indeedy! Self-involvement makes you sad; Espouse a cause and you’ll be glad. Extend some roots and find a goal And peace and joy will fill your soul. It is rhymes like “yes indeedy” that have kept my Mom from rising into the first poetic tier. The Pulitzer committee was this close to recognizing her gift until they stumbled over “yes indeedy.” But for anyone sad around the holidays — an easy thing to be — it’s not a bad poem to tape to the bathroom mirror. Yes indeedy. Happy holidays!
Tax-Deductible Vacations December 22, 1999January 28, 2017 Muriel Horacek: “Glad you finally put in a plug for Earthwatch. Here’s another suggestion: I pay for my Earthwatch trips (have done 23 and will be going to Israel and Peru on my next two) with appreciated stock, thus avoiding capital gains. And I also pay for my teenage grandchildren to go on Earthwatch expeditions (one did scuba diving on a coral reef study and turtle tracking on St. Croix; another did grizzly bear research in Montana). How else to give a grandchild a tax-deductible, worthwhile gift!”
Food for Thought December 21, 1999February 13, 2017 So here is Honest Tea included among “100 of the most notable beverage brands of the past 100 years,” according to Beverage World. Others include Coca-Cola, Perrier, Snapple, Evian, Bud Light, 7-Up, Jack Daniel’s, Gatorade, Starbucks and Absolut. How come Welch’s made it and V-8 didn’t? Yoo-hoo but not Dom Perignon? Jolt Cola but not Colt 45? So, OK, it’s a little capricious. But it’s nice, after 17 months in business, to be named a brand of the century. Alicia Rasley: “About 12 years ago my husband and I bought universal life insurance policies, thinking the cash value would fund our children’s college tuition. (Well, that’s what the insurance agent told us!) I think we paid $7000 for $150K in coverage. (Single premium.) The cash value was supposed to increase rapidly, based on the interest rate then — you know 10-12%. Anyway, the latest statement shows the cash value is now around $7400. At least we’re back up around what we put in! And we have had life insurance all that time. But, as you might imagine, we’ve found other ways to save for college. This is a live-and-learn experience, and it’s no big loss financially. But I’m glad we never depended on it for college cash.” The same term life insurance coverage might have cost $250 a year, and $7,000 invested in the Dow Jones 12 years ago would be worth — what? — maybe $40,000 today. One of the randomly-rotating “quotes of the day,” at left, is from ex-Harvard Treasurer Paul Cabot: “I don’t understand a goddam thing about insurance, except that I don’t want to have any.” To which Steven Gilbert adds: “At a Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting several years ago, a shareholder asked Warren Buffett whether the firm had key man insurance on his life. Buffett replied, ‘We sell insurance, we don’t buy insurance.'” J. Raymond: “[With respect to Cooking Like a Guy™], fresh blueberries freeze well too. As a more acquired taste, you can peel a banana, cut it into relatively thin slices (similar in size to what you would probably use if you were putting them on your morning cereal) and stack these in a plastic container in the freezer. The stacking takes a bit of trial and error only because the banana slice surfaces tend to freeze to each other so you should “offset” them as much as possible to make them easier to remove (a fork works!) from the container after they freeze. It sounds a bit odd but if you’re a fan of Ben and Jerry’s ‘Chunky Monkey’ you might like this too. The blueberries are easier.” Don’t miss Anna and the King. I didn’t expect to like it, but it’s wonderful. About love and justice — just like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, come to think of it. (But I invite the Thai scholars in the crowd to let me know just how egregiously it departed from historical fact.)
Yup. Nope. December 20, 1999January 28, 2017 Last week we had a kind of dense column on variable universal life insurance, largely written by my friend Less Antman and another, also largely by him, that read like a thriller, on Qualified State Tuition Plans. In each case, I provided a one- or two-word “executive summary” for those of you who might have been running late for work. “Your executive summaries,” writes Less, “have inspired me to stop wasting my time with time-consuming posts. So instead of spending weeks writing 10 more such pieces, I thought I’d fit them into a single list of 10 executive summaries. That way, you can spend the other 9 days sharing with the readers your balanced and unprejudiced political views.” Less is a libertarian (see June 5, 1998, “The Trouble with Libertarians”). Instead of contributing to the Democratic National Committee, he has contributed this nifty holiday package of One-Word Hyperlinked Executive Summaries: The best tax shelter in America today . . . Executive summary: Buy-And-Hold. The surest way to outperform 80% of all stock market investors over the long term . . . Executive summary: Index. The surest way to outperform the indexes over the long-term . . . Executive summary: Miscalculate. Where to start if you have at least $3,000 to invest . . . Executive summary: Vanguard. Where to start if you have only $25 to invest . . . Executive summary: TIAA-CREF. The surest way to guarantee you don’t outlive your retirement savings . . . Executive summary: Smoke. The cause that deserves a contribution from you every year . . . Executive summary: Roth. The people who benefit most from variable annuities . . . Executive summary: Salesmen. The quickest way to reduce your tax bill . . . Executive summary: Daytrade. Executive summary: Thanks, Less.
It’s Andy Day! December 17, 1999December 29, 2016 You read faster than I do. You need less sleep. You call that fair? As long-time readers know, to try to catch up I occasionally declare an Andy Day. This is one of those days. Something tells me you will be able to fill the void just fine. If not, click Archives, at left, and be my guest. But I warn you: as weak as these columns are in real-time, they weaken with age.
Vitamins, Herbs and Grapes December 16, 1999February 13, 2017 VITAMINS.COM Joe: “My order, almost a month ago, from Vitamins.com also has not come, even after two calls to customer support. You get what you pay for (or in this case, you don’t get what you don’t pay for).” Brian Miller: “Count me in for another who has not yet received my order from Vitamins.com.” Sharon: “I ordered from them because of the $25 come-on. Over a month later I have received only a $6 bottle of vitamin E. They are attempting to resolve the unfilled order (a case of Atkins diet bars) but interestingly enough it cannot be handled by email or at the site but only by phone with about a 20 minute wait. The company was not prepared for the volume and hasn’t a clue about service. Planet RX is the best in my experience so far.” HERBS Dana Nibby: “Did you know taking ginkgo biloba and aspirin together could cause hemorrhagic stroke? Click here for details from healthcentral.com. I’d do a quick word search on any herb you’re taking, or considering taking, at healthcentral.” GRAPES Nick Corman: “I love frozen grapes. Cookies are another thing that always seem to go from being “good/very good” to “excellent/divine” after being frozen. Apple juice too, although many people over age 14 don’t really seem to like apple juice in any state for some reason. A little apple juice popsicle stick, though, is a delight. (Mmmm…now I’m all hungry for grapes and cookies and homemade apple juice Popsicles.)”