Certain Habits

If there was a cardinal rule of retail—and a rule making body to enforce it—“the customer is always right” would be a good candidate.

Of course that can mean a number of things. At minimum, though, it means stores should be friendly, easy to use, accessible, and stock what customers are interested in. Basic advice, right?

I’m not making this up. In South Korea, an enterprising entrepreneur has created a “Coffin Academy” where people write their epitaphs and spend ten minutes in a coffin as a self help exercise:

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Apparently there are websites out there that create a marketplace where communities of people can buy products. And amazingly, even a relatively small audience online can be quite profitable. Here’s Forbes, on the cutting edge as always:

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The history of weapons technology teaches that for advances in defensive capabilities beget advances in offensive capabilities, and vice versa. So more devastating bows and the first pistols led to the adoption of steel armored suits, which led to more powerful weapons which led to thicker armor, which … The same process repeated itself with the armored tank.

And it’s repeating itself today with a particularly insidious weapon employed by corporations everywhere: the automated phone tree.