Ever wonder what the real innovation is behind big-box stores like CostCo? Sure, they buy in bulk and pass the savings on to you, and they don’t have to “break bulk” – break up the bulk packaging. In many cases they don’t even break the pallet, just putting the whole thing right out on the floor. So this saves them labor and again passes the economy of quantity on to you.

I’d say there’s another somewhat more subtle mechanism at work here – transfer of rent. A pallet of four-packs of 1-gallon Ziploc bags allows CostCo to both warehouse and display (another innovation – they don’t have to have separate warehouse space) something like 640 four-packs or 2560 individual retail boxes — 256000 1-gallon bags — on about 16 square feet of floor space, or 16000 bags/sq ft. If you take home one of those four-packs, and you are will find those 400 bags taking up about half a square foot, or 800 bags/sq ft. And once you open the four-pack and put one box in the kitchen and leave the other three in the garage, you’ve increased the space usage to something like 500 bags/sq ft.

Now, what’s rent per square foot vs. that of CostCo? My rent is about $2.5/sq ft/month, so I’m paying about $2/month to store my supply of 400 Ziploc bags. If we’re charitable and guess that CostCo might be paying $1/sq ft/month, they are paying $16/month to store 256000 bags, or $0.025/month for the same box of 400 bags they sold me. Let’s say I paid $4 at Costco for four-pack of 400 bags that would have cost maybe $7 at Safeway, so I “saved” $3 at time of purchase — but I’m paying $2/month to store that savings! At the rate I use 1-gallon Ziploc bags, I will probably store that box for a year, for a total cost of $24 + $4 = $28.

This goes some way towards explaining why big-box stores have been so successful, but should also show that you’re not always saving what you think you are, and that it may well be less expensive to buy what you need, when you need it, instead of buying bulk and storing it yourself. I haven’t touched on the time factor (fewer trips to the store), which is often a benefit of buying bulk – but even so, next time you stop in at CostCo, think about who’s paying the rent.

I’ve been using FireFox for a few years, but in the last few months I’ve noticed it getting slower and slower. Opening a new tab often takes several seconds, navigating around and loading pages is also slow, and there are often sub-second hangups while typing in textareas and such. After re-visiting CyberNotes: Firefox Extensions cause Memory Leaks and Crashes, I have disabled Google Browser Sync again – that had caused problems in the past.

Of course, saying that “FireFox has still become too slow” is mostly a perception issue. Apps don’t get slower over time; usually it’s that we’re trying to do more with them – and that is exactly the case with FireFox (or whatever browser). Whereas it used to be just that, a browser, now it’s email, word processing, calendar, task list, maps, news, and whatever else – usually all open at once in multiple tabs, plus various add-ons and GreaseMonkey scripts. So on one hand it’s no surprise that the whole thing appears slower – although you’d think 3Gb of RAM would mitigate that to a large degree. Makes me wonder if FireFox can be configured to use more memory…

Via Reuters today: “The New York Times Co said on Monday it will end its paid TimesSelect Web service and make most of its Web site available for free in the hopes of attracting more readers and higher advertising revenue.” “The trademark orange “T’s” marking premium articles will begin disappearing Tuesday night…” – it’s about time. That TimesSelect thing was misguided from the start, and I told you so.