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 was talking my my friend Adam the other day about Wink, and he mentioned the “Wink Answers” feature. This is a typically ingenious Web 2.0 functionality mashup of search + wiki + tagging. Apparently, Wink is a tag-enhanced search engine — but once you search, you’re offered “Wink Answers” in addition to tag- and Google-powered search results. Wink Answers are simply wiki entries keyed to search strings. Given that a string like “mov video converter” is much more specific than any of the single words contained therein, this could be more useful than, say, the Wikipedia entry for video formats. Neat idea. Apparently, someone else has already taken this to its logical endpoint and mashed wiki + URL to create “Shadows” — clearly insane, but not surprising.

In any case, there isn’t yet a _Wink Answer_ for “mov video converter”. Given the results of my search yesterday, I now have the answer. The question is, why would I stuff it into Wink? I can blog it right here, Google (and a thousand other spiders) will crawl it, and the next time you search for “mov video converter” on Wink (or Google, or anywhere else), my post will show up, if it’s a good one. The only reason I’d shove my Answer into Wink is if I don’t have some other way to hang it out where spiders can see it — and if I’m on the net searching for info about “mov video converter”, then I almost certainly do.

The same problem/solution applies to reviews, which I’d guess are the broadest and deepest user-generated content out there. So why do so many people take so much time to write detailed reviews and post them in single, walled off databases like Amazon, Yelp, sfsurvey.com, etc.? It all comes down to the value exchange. You provide the content, the site provides the UI, and specialized economy of scale. The amount of personal content/data/facts that you’re willing to embed/give to a site is related to the utility that the site provides to you, personally, with regard to that information. But, more importantly, it’s directly proportional to the extent that particular site can act as a proxy for your desired audience.

As broad search UI’s become more powerful, the need for specialized UI’s to act as proxies to specialized audiences is reduced. If I can search for “reviews San Francisco chowhound azie” — and I can — and get an aggregate thread of web-wide posts and information, including stuff that doesnt happen to be posted on Chowhound’s board, why would I want to wade through this? I don’t.

I think I finally understand why “blogging” _might_ be such a big deal.

Check back shortly for “wink answer mov video converter“.

I was struck by a couple of things reading Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalization. First of all, his overwhelming optimism about globalization, and how all will be well as long as governments take ‘appropriate measures’to ensure against “occaisonal downsides.” More importantly, he neglects entirely to address the criticism brought by John Gray in False Dawn: that even if you don’t necessarily end up with a “race to the bottom” brought on by global competition between established countries with a heavy burden of overhead (e.g. social and environmental programs) on one hand, and newer economies without such constraints on production on the other, that, like many other economic transformations, globalization essentially works to eliminate the conditions which favor its initial spread. As globalization spreads greater wealth and common social, environmental, labor, and political norms throughout the world, it gradually smooths over the differences between economies that draw multinational companies into increasingly remote corners of the globe in the first place. As these differences gradually evaporate, the relative advantage of producing a given product in an other place — more distant, versus locally, closer to where it is consumed — diminishes, and thus also does the incentive to globalize.

Perhaps more than anything else the real fear of the "anti-globalizers" is that once globalization has run its course, we’ll be left with a world that is, on average, somewhat richer, but also far less diverse, with even the most local communities subject to the whims of the global market. I suspect that Bhagwati would argue in counterpoint that the degree to which such communities suffer from their involvement in the global market is necessarily less than the degree to which they benefit from it, and that it is exactly this benefit, in terms of prosperity, that enables those who so choose to continue to differentiate themselves from others in the world, and to do so in an economically sustainable fashion, given the reality of the modern economic system. The thing is, as Gray notes, we cannot know in advance if this will be always, or even usually true — and what we do know, as we watch many of the more subtle differences between cultures slowly erode — is that the move towards globalization is an irrevocable one, and so if we discover as time goes on that somehow the picture isn’t as rosy as the one Bhagwati paints, at that point it will be too late. In fact, it already is — a point for which Bhagwati’s argument would have been much stronger if acknowledged.