Newsweek’s Daniel Gross explains the Consumer Price Index (here’s the official BLS site) in a very simple video. I could do without the goofy sound effects, but it’s a good, 2 minute explanation of how the government tracks inflation.
Per David Simon’s Berkeley talk, though, the video doesn’t go into why this matters. Perhaps they’ll cover that in the next installment of the Economics 101 series.
|
Blogroll
Friends
CT Politics Politics
Technology
West Hartford Blogs Hartford Blogs |
Active Posts
|
|
Track & Validate
|
I hadn’t heard this, but apparently FedEx acquired Kinkos This apparently was announced at the end of December 2003. Doesn’t seem to make much sense to me, but what do I know?
February 17th, 2004 at 3:33 pm
Well UPS bought Mailboxes, Etc., and renamed it “The UPS Store” so I suppose it’s a competitive response to keep FedEx a player in the retail market, which is supposedly quite profitable.
February 17th, 2004 at 7:22 pm
It makes sense to me in that Fedex will become a one-stop “office away from the office” for business travellers on the road, as well as small businesses. They offer video conference services, conference rooms, along with its suite of other products, so adding a streamlined shipping component to the whole deal, along with adding a strong retail presence, seems to make some sense to me…
February 17th, 2004 at 7:33 pm
I was reading some of the comments on FastCompany and looking at Kinko’s in general… The problem is whether Kinkos is doing well as a business and whether it makes any sense at all… MBE (the UPS Stores) already handled package delivery services for UPS… it was a natural fit. I’ve used them for shipping items (for example things I was selling for eBay auctions). They are in the core business that UPS was in. They also were making money with their mailbox business and packaging stuff.
Kinkos, on the other hand, I used to be a pretty frequent business traveler and a business user (though not in the same class as, say, an account sales exec or whatever) and have never had a need for Kinkos on the road… Also, one thing I read on fast company makes sense… too many people (read companies) have color copiers and laser printers around… a lot of the mundane copy business is being lost to those “smart document centers” many companies have.
I didn’t know about the video conferencing, and I have to admit I haven’t really looked into the business fundamentals of Kinkos… so take what I’m saying with a larger than normal grain of salt :).
At face value, it doesn’t make as much sense as the UPS/MBE acquisition… Kinkos doesn’t have anything to do with package delivery…