Author: A.T.

In our continuing book-shopping saga, add to your favorites bestbookbuys.com, which searches — among several others — a Canadian outfit specializing in remaindered books, bookcloseouts.com. I was horrified to find the $24.95 hardcover of My Vast Fortune there for $4.79 (versus $16.10 at Amazon). Thanks to Barry Basden for pointing this out.

But in response to my notions that the Internet will make price competition acute — great for consumers, tough on vendor profits — Joshua Rasiel makes a different point:

“I predict this ‘price-bot’ craze will never happen, and if it does, it’ll self-destruct. Has everyone forgotten about value? Let’s look at regular commerce: If I go to K-mart instead of an upper-class store, 9 times out of ten, I can get the exact same album, shirt, or whatever, at a discount. Everyone knows that. Not everyone cares to get something the cheapest way they can, because they know that You Get What You Pay For. And that doesn’t always mean ‘expensive is good,’ but it does mean that if you care, quality is worth paying for.

“Take gasoline. Same exact product everywhere. Does the cheapo Fill ‘n’ Fly (real name; a chain in NJ) force Exxon under? of course not, because we all know that Exxon offers more in the way of service and reliability. they have more to lose if you end up with sugar in your tank, and aside from that, they’re cleaner, and they have slurpies.

“People pay for value. If an internet company wants to stay afloat and not slash prices to the bone, they ought to be remembering that.”

Well, I agree and disagree. It costs a fortune to build a chain of physical stores, to staff it and keep it clean, etc. And imagine the cost of hiring sales clerks who are all polite, knowledgeable and college-trained. And the cost of putting these stores in appealing neighborhoods. Yes, all this adds to the shopping experience. But the cost of doing the same on the Net is almost negligible. A few talented people can make it look and feel cheerful, polite and alert all the time — with no wait at the check out, no problem parking, no fear of the other patrons (or of being seen entering the store). At the back-end, FedEx delivery (or UPS or USPS) is the same whether you get it from the high priced site or the cheap one.

So, yes, sites will have to be reliable and meet certain standards to win and keep customers. But the barriers to this kind of entry are not terribly high. And the $150 bottle of pills, prescribed by your doctor, is really no better than the identical prescription filled for $97 on the Internet. Identical products have the same value regardless of what you paid for them. People will pay up for brand names and labels. But I doubt there will be much cachet in being able to show off an Amazon box versus the box of some competitor. Once the books come, I throw out the box.

“I got curious about an ad in the LA Times for an ‘investment opportunity.’ It guaranteed 11.9% annual yield for a three-year period. Which seemed interesting as it beats present bond returns. And one might not be able to guarantee that in the stock market either. 🙂 I called, and they said they’d send a prospectus. They said it was good for IRA’s or plain investment. They said it was like a CD, but NOT insured. They said in ten years of business, they had never failed to return an investor’s principle. I believe they said it was a corporate investment note. Now. Is this a good thing? Or a stupid thing to do. Do you know of this kind of thing? Is it legit or not, and how risky?” — Tom Whitaker

Could be vaguely safe or VERY risky. It depends on what stands behind the guarantee. No one borrows at 11.9% who could borrow at 7%, and strong corporations borrow at 7%, not 11.9%. So the banks or commercial paper market have turned them down (or they’re idiots, which is not a strong recommendation, either). I would steer clear unless you knew this deal inside out, and could explain convincingly why it ISN’T too good to be true.

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Thanks for clicking here, as many of you have, to go to PlanetRx and get three free products of your choice. (There’s $3.95 shipping.) As you know, if enough people click here, I might actually be one of four Grand Prize Winners who get 25,000 frequent flier miles. In the meantime, I’ve gotten a lot of free itchy-spray, toothpaste, and contact-lens solution. Thanks!

“My humble question to you is….. How the hell do I get out of debt?… I am in my early 30’s and have finally launched a decent sales career, and will be watching my income grow. I have doubled my salary in the last 2 consecutive years….however, the debt steel wall is killing me! I have clipped the cards and doubled-to-tripled payments. This may be a stupid question, but I’m a desperate person right now, is there any (legal) way to kill this disease at a quicker rate?” — Anne-Marie

Well, it’s conceivable that one of the credit cards might agree to a lower rate if you threaten to pay it off and cancel it. (Bluff.) And there’s the option of taking a home equity loan at a lower, tax-deductible rate, to pay off your cards — risky if you then start running up debts again.

I wish there were some kind of “Get Out of Debt Free” card I could deal you.

But it does sound as if you’re now on the right track. You’re not racking up new debt; you’re paying off your outstanding balances faster. To get out of debt faster still, you’d need to go back to living more as you were two years ago, on half your present income, using the additional savings for debt repayment. (Of course, the reason you got into so much debt is doubtless that, a couple of years ago, you were living ABOVE your means, so reverting to that lifestyle might not save as much as it otherwise might have.) The worry is that, in sales, you could have a couple of bad years. All the more reason to live frugally, pay off the debt, and build reserves. Good for you for recognizing the importance of this and taking the steps to solve the problem. Keep it up. You’ll get there.

For those who take their laptops to the pool, I’ve just turned on Chapter 13 of Fire & Ice. (You already have Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12.) It’s about the Quiz Show scandals of the late 1950’s. (What would they think when they found out wrestling was rigged, too?) But it’s also about the relationship between Charles Revson and his younger brother Martin.

Ouch.

For those who would rather go in the water, you may recall my quest for the Sony Swim-man — a Walkman you could wear swimming laps. Never found one. But now (no thanks to the Internet; with just a good old-fashioned quarter-page ad in the New York Times Sunday Magazine) I am the proud owner of three Swimmers Choice underwater radios. They won’t play tapes, but I can listen to FM radio lap after boring lap. I have three because you got a third one free if you bought two. I only needed one, but . . . well, you know.

They run $34.95 apiece. I knew the sound wouldn’t be as good as from that famous Bose “Wave Radio” you see advertised everyplace for $350. But I’d like to see how well the Bose Wave Radio would do in a real wave.

(Three hundred fifty dollars for a radio? I got mine cheap, from a writer who had gotten it directly from Bose to “review.” He had decided not to spring for the wholesale price to keep it, so — expecting Mahler himself to jumping out of the thing for that price, even wholesale — I bought it instead. And I must sheepishly report that, to my tin ear, my $12 Sony Dream Machine clock radio sounds very nearly as good.)

Anyway, this little yellow Swimmers Choice with its little black earplugs works really well, under the circumstances . . . when you’re on dry land. Under water, or even just stroking your way through it, you do hear occasional patches of sound, sometimes faint, sometimes blaring, but they are more or less drowned out by the sound of your swimming.

In case your pool is located in the shadow of a 50,000-watt radio antenna (or the FM equivalent thereof), and in case you swim very, very quietly, you may want to call 800-839-5002 to order your own. But I wouldn’t rush to buy three.

Robert Doucette: “Although I also admire Amazon.com, I have stopped buying from them in favor of a site called positively-you.com. I love the site for many reasons. It was run from the spare bedroom of a college professor in Iowa who started it because he loves books. They were profitable from the first day (their fixed costs are about $150/mo). And, best of all, you can donate 10% of your purchase price to any charity you want. Why would you buy books from anyone else?”

Well, perhaps because others charge less?

Barry Basden: “Go to http://www.bestbookbuys.com and look up a title. You may find a delivered price even cheaper than the booksamillion club price.”

The title I tried this on showed booksamillion.com as the cheapest of the bunch — $10.97 delivered (46% off the price of a paperback), vs. $14.35 at Amazon.

Ralphe Wiggins saved even more: “Bestbookbuys.com compares prices at about a dozen different sites. I recently bought a book that was priced at $107 at every site but Borders, where it was $69! Of the three technical books that I bought, there was a different best-price site for each.”

Tom Mathies: “As a guy interested in saving a buck and as a computer science professor, I like to follow how online shopping is evolving. I agree that competition makes it difficult for an online store to earn a profit.”

If it’s books you’re after, Tom suggests http://www.acses.com. But forget books. Try deal-finder.com, flamingoworld.com, and http://www.albany.net/~tiacat/Refunding/Offer.html. All three list deals and coupon codes on a variety of items, the modern-day electronic equivalent of 40 cents off on a can of coffee. Only you need never leave your chair, and you typically save $5 or more.

Thanks, Tom.

Debra Pappler: “I live overseas (Tokyo) and want to invest in some kind of environmentally friendly / sustainable future mutual fund, the kind you see ads for in UTNE Reader and the like. I’ve gotten the prospectuses from couple of places but I wasn’t happy with their fees. Do you have any recommendations? I hope that making money and being good to the environment aren’t mutually exclusive.”

My own feeling is that this is sort of like recycling in a community where the garbage is later just all thrown together. It makes you feel good, and you WANT to help … but recycling (in such a circumstance) really doesn’t.

That is, I’d invest for best results (which usually means finding an index fund or two with really low annual expenses); then give some of those results to worthy environmental causes.

That said, you could do worse than to check out http://www.citizensfunds.com/ . At least in recent years, socially responsible investing has been a good strategy for high performance, because the most forward-looking companies, socially, tend also to be forward-looking in other respects as well.

Viva la France. Happy birthday, Duncan.

Erich Riesenberg: “PriceSCAN.com is the best web price-comparison service I’ve seen. Very thorough. Hard to see how Amazon will ever be profitable, especially as broadband improves and checking prices becomes an automatic feature. Explorer and Netscape will probably have a BUY button, person will enter item name, list of cheapest site to buy it will come up automatically and person will just hit a CONFIRM button.”

[If it’s only books you’re after, you might try http://www.boolah.com. This must be run out of someone’s garage because the server is always busy. It searches for your book at Amazon but also shows the prices at Barnes & Noble and Borders, letting you link straight to your book there if one’s cheaper. The plus: It’s fast and convenient (or will be once they have it running right). Just an extra four seconds to save $1.40. (The book I checked was discounted 30% at all three booksellers, but from a list price of $24.95 at Amazon versus just $22.95 at Barnes & Noble.) The minus: It only checks the Big Three. You’ll generally save more at, for example, booksamillion.com.]

My own feeling, oft expressed, is that e-commerce is great for consumers and the economy but will be no bonanza to most investors. E-commerce makes price comparisons so easy, it heightens competition. Competition is tough on profits — and hence investors (should the day ever return when stock prices are related in some way to profits).

I think the ultimate winners will be the folks who control the Seinfeld reruns.

Right? Anything you watch — even your screen saver — will have little tabs across the top, and a little window to type in what you want: “A Case of Bud Light.” You’ll then click “add to my regular order” (so it gets aggregated with the rest of the stuff you’ve elected to have delivered Every Tuesday Between Six and Nine) or “NOW!” (so the Domino’s Pizza guy comes racing over with it).

Whatever you’re watching will be your shopping portal . . . and the chances are, Seinfeld reruns will be capturing a lot of eyeballs. In the New York Metropolitan area at 11pm there are two kinds of people: those watching Seinfeld on “the WB” and those racing home from dinner to do so.

Or the portal could be even more basic than that. The top inch of your computer screen might be controlled by the computer maker itself. (You’d put up with this because the computer, thus subsidized, would be irresistibly cheap.) There, at the top of the screen, no matter what you were doing or watching, you could click a BUY button and Dell or Compaq or IBM or whoever controlled that button would rake off its little piece of the action as it found you the item you wanted at the lowest price — a price so low the vendor could hardly make much from the transaction.

OK, I’ll admit to being out of my depth here. A lot of smart people have spent a lot more time thinking this through than me. But tell me again why AMZN, which I love and admire, but which has never made a dime of profit, and owns very little that Barnes & Noble does not, is worth twelve times as much? Why it is worth three times as much as The New York Times Company? Why it is worth substantially more than Federal Express and United Airlines combined?

A lot of you may already have gotten this from a friend, but if not — or if you haven’t acted on it yet — click here to go to PlanetRx and get three free products of your choice. (Well, there’s $3.95 shipping.) When you do, I’m supposed to get frequent flier miles. And if enough people click here, I might actually be one of four Grand Prize Winners who get 25,000 miles — enough for a coach ticket anywhere in the US. Even Kansas.

Like an idiot, I told you about this free stuff (and some other free stuff) in my July 1 column, before I knew about this. If you clicked over to PlanetRx from that column, sure, you got your free stuff, but I got nothing.

But now, if you click here, it’s Topeka here I come.

(The rules say I’m not supposed to post this on a bulletin board, or some public forum. But this is my web site, and you guys are old friends by now, so I hardly think this is cheating. If it is, I’m sure they’ll disallow me, but you’ll still get your free stuff.)

Some of you were wondering how I would get paid for this daily column? Do I sell subliminal banner ads you just can’t see? Am I secretly sponsored by the Used Car Dealers of America? By the Anti-Tobacco Lobby? No . . . I was just waiting for a deal like this to come along.

Anyway, click here, get your free stuff, and if I win, I’ll send you a postcard.

To those of you who get this column Q-paged automatically each day, my apologies — I posted yesterday’s too late to make it, so you got a repeat of the day before. Soon Q-Page will be smart enough to send you columns only once they have changed. But for now, here it is again.

To those of you who did read yesterday’s column, here it is again — but with “the answers” appended.

(To those of you who have no idea what Q-Page is, but would like to get this page e-mailed to you automatically each morning, just scroll to the bottom of this page and click the Q-Page button. With AOL, unfortunately, it comes as an attachment. Maybe the forthcoming AOL 5.0 this fall will fix that. But for those with other Internet Service Providers, it seems to work quite well.)

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Have you been to hungersite.com? Every time you visit and click, one of its sponsors buys a hungry person a meal (limit: one click per day). I’ve clicked a few times, and it got me to wondering . . . how do we know they gave away 20,865 meals on July 7? Did the folks from USA Today and Yahoo! who’ve plugged this site checked to be sure? My guess is that, no, they didn’t check, but that, yes, the meals are being distributed, albeit not literally one-by-one on the days listed. I.e., the meal may cost a nickel (we are not talking about steak and potatoes in France — potato, I might note, does have an “e” when it’s plural — but, rather, one and a half cups of rice or something similar in a poor country). Presumably, the sponsor pays hungersite.com on some regular basis, and hungersite.com passes on all or a good chunk of the sponsorship money to groups like the UN’s World Food Program to be used to provide food to the hungry.

I have a call in to the UN World Food Program — listed as the current beneficiary of our largesse — to make sure they have heard of the hungersite.com, and to get an idea of what sort of dollars are involved.

In the meantime, one does wonder who, exactly, the hunger site is. Are there no names or faces out of modesty and altruism — definitely possible — or because full disclosure might tarnish the nice tone of this?

In the Frequently Asked Questions section, you will see no question like, “Who Are You?” or “Who Started This?” Rather: “The Hunger Site was founded as an independent Internet site to help alleviate hunger in the world. It enables people to learn about hunger and to make free donations of food to the hungry. It is not owned by any company or affiliated with any group or organization.”

Fair enough. But that could mean a bright young guy or gal is doing this and taking in a penny or two of his or her own for every click. To which I would say, basically: more power to him or her . . . but disclosure would be nice. (Imagine getting 10 million people a day to click this, and getting a penny from each — $100,000 a day.)

Anyway, I hope to learn a bit more about this. In the meantime, I may set Quickbrowse to include http://www.hungersite.com in my daily fare, so I can quickly and efficiently click. Then again, how many seconds is a nickel even worth? (If your time is worth $20 an hour: 9 seconds.)

If I find out anything interesting, I’ll let you know.

So here’s what I’ve learned since posting this yesterday. The meals go for 3 cents each (at a nickel, I guessed high), which of course does not begin to cover the actual cost of getting a meal to the people involved, but may pay for the rice or grain itself. Sponsors pay 3.5 cents a click. Each day you click, you rack up three cents for the cause and half a cent for John Breen, in Bloomington, Indiana, who started and runs hungersite.com. (And who doubtless has some expenses to pay out of that half cent.) His intentions, I suspect, based on his e-mail to me, are good.

In the short time the site has been up, it claims about 300,000 clicks, which at 3 cents each would work out to $9,000 for the UN World Food Program. And indeed, when I reached that outfit, I was told that $7,000 had thus far been received, and that they had been told another check was in the mail. The UNWFP seemed a bit perplexed by all this, and stressed to me it had no connection with hungersite.com, other than to have received three checks.

So far, also, one assumes John Breen is 300,000 haepennies ahead of the game, before expenses and any payment for his time and talent — about $1,500.

True, if a million children a day clicked, that would be $5,000 a day for John Breen (and $30,000 a day to help fight hunger). And if 10 million a day . . . well, but something tells me they won’t. And that if they did, John might well shave his cut of the action still further.

In addition to the 3 cents, the site does help raise awareness of world hunger. And it links to organizations to which people may wish to donate actual money.

In short, hungersite.com is a clever and, I like to think, well-intentioned idea, nicely executed; but — if your time is worth anything at all — unlikely to revoke the maxim that there is no free lunch.

Have you been to hungersite.com? Every time you visit and click, one of its sponsors buys a hungry person a meal (limit: one click per day). I’ve clicked a few times, and it got me to wondering . . . how do we know they gave away 20,865 meals on July 7? Did the folks from USA Today and Yahoo! who’ve plugged this site checked to be sure? My guess is that, no, they didn’t check, but that, yes, the meals are being distributed, albeit not literally one-by-one on the days listed. I.e., the meal may cost a nickel (we are not talking about steak and potatoes in France — potato, I might note, does have an “e” when it’s plural — but, rather, one and a half cups of rice in Mauritania) . . . and the sponsor may pay hungersite.com monthly. Hungersite.com may then pass on all or a good chunk of the sponsorship money to groups like the UN’s World Food Program to be used to provide food to the hungry.

I have a call in to the UN World Food Program — listed as the current beneficiary of our largesse — to make sure they have heard of the hungersite.com, and to get an idea of what sort of dollars are involved.

In the meantime, one does wonder who, exactly, the hunger site is. Are there no names or faces out of modesty — definitely possible — or because full disclosure might tarnish the altruistic tone?

In the Frequently Asked Questions section, you will see no question like, “Who Are You?” or “Who Started This?” Rather: “The Hunger Site was founded as an independent Internet site to help alleviate hunger in the world. It enables people to learn about hunger and to make free donations of food to the hungry. It is not owned by any company or affiliated with any group or organization.”

Fair enough. But that could mean a bright young guy or gal is doing this and taking in a penny or two of his or her own for every click. To which I would say, basically: more power to him . . . but disclosure would be nice. (Imagine getting 1 million people a day to click, and a penny from each — $10,000 a day.)

Anyway, I hope to learn a bit more about this. In the meantime, I may set Quickbrowse to include http://www.hungersite.com in my daily fare, so I can quickly and efficiently click. Then again, how many seconds is a nickel even worth? (If your time is worth $20 an hour: 9 seconds.)

If I find out anything interesting, I’ll let you know.