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The Ernst & Young ITEM Club report, published on 20th July, continues the gloomy economic tone. They forecast that the coming recovery is going to be slow, and painful. It seems we all have several more years of "porridge" ahead of us. What has been playing on my mind is what the legacy of this period will be? I am wondering whether any of the traumas we are going through will result in lasting changes in behaviour?

Consumers are tightening their belts in lots of ways: shopping more scrupulously, cooking more at home, taking up knitting, growing their own vegetables, being more careful of their energy usage, vacationing closer to home ... etc., etc. ... you fill in the gaps. All good eco-friendly stuff, some would say. Speaking personally, I have put off replacing my car for another year, and I'm planning a low-cost holiday in Barcelona this year by renting a small apartment and flying with a budget airline (NOT Ryanair)!

Employers, too, seem to be approaching this recession a bit differently. Many appear to have more of an eye to the impact their actions will have on employee morale than they have in previous recessions. We are seeing innovative ways to reduce employee costs without laying off as many workers as they might have in previous recessions, for example, by offering career breaks on reduced pay, or asking staff to work reduced hours to preserve jobs.

Many of these recession-driven strategies could be seen as positive ways to live our ongoing work and home lives. But, as anyone trying to lose weight or give up smoking will tell you, it's not the initial effort that matters, but whether you can make adaptations to your lifestyle so that you sustain a change for good—what engineers call "permanent set."

Is it too much to hope that some of the better new habits we are forming as consumers and employers will survive the recession? Which recession-driven habits do you hope will stay with us for good, and which will you be glad to leave behind?

I remember growing up with Walter Cronkite. My family used to sit and listen attentively to what Mr Cronkite had to say. He was considered the voice of authority in our home. Of all the news reporters that have come and gone over the years, Walter Cronkite's voice is the one I can still hear in my head. I think about Cronkite's brand, and I realize that it was consistent throughout the years. He was known to be honest, straightforward, factual, fair, and credible. I recall him covering President Kennedy's death, Martin Luther King's death, the space shuttle mission, and many other events. You knew that when Cronkite delivered the news, you would get the truth in an unbiased way.

Walter Cronkite's brand was consistent through the years; that's why he became known as "the most trusted man" in America. Cronkite's brand created a loyal following of viewers who will always remember him and his grace under pressure.

And that's the way it is.

How's Your Day Going?

Flash.
CitiGroup to raise base pay of key execs by 50%.
And you?

I do not wish Barclays PLC president Robert Diamond harm. Nor do I wish BlackRock chairman Laurence Fink harm. Short of that, I surely do not wish them well.
I would love to be in a room with the duo, so I could have the pleasure of not shaking their hands. I would not spit on them—but I would be tempted. Sorely tempted.

Diamond and Fink graced page B1 of Saturday's Wall Street Journal. The story was of BlackRock's purchase of Barclays' money management operation. It was reported that the top 400 Barclays execs would divvy up $630 million—and Diamond would receive about $36.5 million.

What bugged me was not the $$$-signs per se.

What made me gag were the big, gaping grins on the two guys' faces. I think that is appalling-insensitive-stupefying-outrageous-disgusting-sickening in June 2009.

Would I love to find a check in the mail for $36.5 million? Damn right. Might it light up my face? Sure, but hopefully in the privacy of my entry hall at home. Not some big silly ass public grin—as thousands more are in the process of receiving pink slips in the same mail delivery.

One suspects that the pathetic saps actually think they deserved the bucks for "hard work" and personal brilliance. And maybe they even think the 20,000 a day who lose their jobs in the U.S. alone deserve their fates for not having kept their collective noses close enough to the grind stone.

But ...

But (not the first time I've used this phrase of late) ... have they no shame? If the photo was a must, couldn't they have shown a little sobriety of demeanor? I'm not asking for grim—just the tiniest inkling that they comprehend that not quite everyone experienced a $36.5 million payday on 12 June 2009.

Sorry bastards!

I do not wish them harm.
I do not wish them well.

I guess I can never be a Supreme Court justice.

I am befuddled by the Sotomayor brouhaha over the view of the world from the eyes of a female Latina.

Of course it's different.
Duh!

For one [big] thing, women, Latina and others, are more compassionate then men—and behave accordingly.
Duh!
And: Praise the Lord!

Racism?
The system of laws under which we [Americans, Brits, etc.] live was built by white guys, for white guys, and is, by and large, administered by white guys to this day.
Duh!

I have made out like a bandit since birth courtesy racism; that is, by being a white guy, better yet Anglo-Saxon white guy, in a world designed for and controlled by white guys—that is, a world designed especially for me me me me!!
Duh!

Do Gingrich and others [read: other white guys] really feel that they are free of bias?
Nobody could be that blind or un-self aware.
Right?
(Gingrich is an historian for God's sake.)

I have biases piled on top of biases piled on top of biases—only a small share of which I am even aware, but which directly and indirectly affect everything I do.
Duh!

(I always start my speeches with the same disclaimer: "Many who do what I do pretend that they are totally rational beings. Well, I'm not. Not even close. I carry a big bag of biases which color every word I utter—for example, I lived in Silicon Valley for 35 years; hence, everything I say inadvertently passes through an absurdly influential 'Silicon Valley-California' filter. Etc.")

Every human being—including our nine Justices—carry to work ships full of biases which get expressed in a zillion ways.
Duh!

This post is only peripherally about Judge Sotomayor.
It is, in the main, about the biases we all bring to work every day—and our awareness thereof; or lack thereof.

The implications are staggering!
(I.e., they determine every decision we make!)

(By the way, just to set the record straight, if I haven't in the last 15 years: I do definitely think the world would be a better place if women constituted the majority—significant majority?—of Prime Ministers and Presidents and Judges. Among other things, I suspect there would be less war, less violence in general, less environmental degradation and, "OMG," more com-pass-ion.)

Imaginary headline, June 2011:

"Sotomayor Brings Compassion to the Supremes"
Horrid thought, eh?

Alas, Detroit deserves virtually all the darts and arrows thrown its way. Nonetheless, I would point out that GM's May 2008-May2009 sales fell "only" 29%, while Toyota's (They-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong) "dipped" 41%. (Honda was down 42%—only Chrysler-dear-Chrysler-uhm-Fiat was worse, at minus 47%.) (And if you want to know just how bad things are, the numbers above were generally considered good news!!??)

Cisco replaces GM in DJIA!
Welcome to the 21st century!
GM, thanks for the memories! (And that is not not not a sarcastic remark!!)

Warning!
Strong Language Follows!

The New York Times (May 19) reports "Passengers' Advocates See Progress." Several topics are discussed, and the most contentious by far "is whether Congress will impose a time limit on keeping passengers on planes stuck on the tarmac." Four Canadian airlines have recently set a 90 minute limit in almost all cases. Needless to say, American carriers are fighting this tooth and nail.

Forget, please, for a moment, any diatribes about government nosing into private sector business—save 'em for another topic.

As to the strong language warning: As a veeeeeeery veeeeeery frequent flyer, I hereby declare that I don't give two shits about the airlines' problems in this regard. They bloody well asked for the regulation by their repeated disregard for customer concerns—read overflowing, clogged toilets for one.

To the airlines I say: Stuff it!!!

I am loath to admit that I watch Grey's Anatomy. It's fundamentally a soap opera. But the tragic Buffalo air disaster makes it an apt subject. The Buffalo fiasco is significantly tied to exhausted pilots (and several other wretched and avoidable things). One of the many Commandments violated was the co-pilot's sleeping in the ready lounge. Prep for a flight requires more than a catnap!

"Rested pilots" are a safety requisite.
Period.

After days of Buffalo Bombardment in the media (as a very very frequent flier, I welcome the attention), I watched, without horrid consequences in this fictional case, exhausted surgeons sacking out in their ready rooms prior to complex surgeries. Fictional as Grey's is, the problem is very very real—with brutal consequences.

But the real problem is that un-necessarily killing people in hospitals, by the hundreds of thousands in the U.S. alone, gets virtually no media attention, while the cause of one crash becomes a cause c�©l�¨bre that usually results in FAA revisions to Biblical Flying Rules, and often engineering changes in fleets of planes worldwide.

(In fact the entire hospital system mostly hides mistakes as a "cultural" trait—unlike Airline World, where reporting bad news is commonplace and requisite and "cultural," and causes no blame unless something unconscionable occurs. Hence, airlines and the industry have encyclopedic knowledge of "what went wrongs," and hospitals don't, except, as usual, the Veterans Administration, tops in virtually all things when it comes to error reporting and removal and patient safety.)

I want to fly with perky pilots.
And I want surgery provided via perky docs.
(In fact, to some significant extent, "perky" beats raw talent.)

First there was the picture of Bernie Madoff that looked a lot like Tom Peters and now there's a guy named Tom Petters (2 T's!) who is garnering the fraud headlines by trying to hustle non-existent DVD players. We here at tompeters.com just wanted to make sure there was no confusion between Petters and Peters. Our Tom is winging his way to Shanghai, where he'll be speaking over the weekend.

Several big companies are doing things for people who are laid off. In the current issue of BusinessWeek I read my Solid Gold favorite so far: Walgreens has 343 Take Care in-store clinics. If you are an existing patient and can show proof of unemployment and no insurance, Walgreens Take Care services are on the house from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays! (I believe that these visits usually cost around 50 bucks.) (Incidentally, I am a great fan of these clinics. In general.)

How sweet it is!
(At least for a few hours.)

Sitting in the lounge of a sea ferry crossing the Gulf of Finland from Tallinn to Helsinki. Big screen TV, Sky News. Watching a sickening, endless parade of missile-laden military vehicles in North Korea. Thousands of "volunteers" creating a sea of red in the background by "spontaneously" waving red pom-poms.

Why, Dear God, why?

What did the folks in Motown do to make the Big Guy sooooooo mad? Two of the "Big" Three come within an inch of bankruptcy before President Bush, with a little help from us taxpayers, became Detroit's one-man Salvation Army. Then, yesterday, the Detroit Lions became the first NFL team in his-to-ry to go 0-15 courtesy a loss that was waaaaaaaay beyond embarrassing.

Don't trust your eyes! No, I am not Bernard Madoff by night!

I'm no apologist for George W. Bush, let alone his sidekick, Mr. Cheney, but I think Secretary of State Rice had a damn good point when she recently said, "If you were in a position of authority on September 11, then every day since has been September 12."

Janet Napolitano, assuming confirmation, will have her hands full as our third chief of homeland security. That was made even more clear with the publication yesterday of the report of the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism. In short, the report virtually promised a major WMD attack on the U.S. homeland within the next five years, by 2013—and said that deaths in the hundreds of thousands could well be the tally.

If history is a teacher, DHS will work like hell to prevent the catastrophe—and beef up the capabilities of first responders. I'd hardly shortchange those two tasks, particularly the first, but I think that no-bullshit training and organizing of you and me and our neighbors in Civil Defense, not unlike World War II practices, should share top billing. If a WMD, nuclear or biological, kills hundreds of thousands, the entire nation will go nuts. (Rightly so.) So how do the man or woman on the street and our community prepare for it and deal with it? My father, too old for the draft in WWII, was a Civil Defense air warden leader within a well-organized schema—one of my favorite souvenirs from him was an elaborate guide showing the shapes of German bombers that might make it to our shores. (A few German subs did make shore not so far away.) He was a local big cheese in a highly developed and well-trained civilian network—needless to say, the British version of this was more elaborate by orders of magnitude, as the odds were high (very high!) of an invasion of their homeland.

Well, if the shit is going to hit the fan, and a sane person would conclude that the odds of a shit-covered fan are not all that low, you and I should be exceptionally well trained and exceptionally well organized to be part of the solution, a big part, rather than part of the problem. (Did you watch any of the short-lived TV series Jericho—not a pretty sight, and not necessarily all that far out.) My entire "training" since 9/11 has amounted to half listening to airport announcements telling me to look out for suspicious things. That is a pathetic request for my involvement. And I'll bet things don't change much—or at all.

My bottom line, and others have said this, is that I, and I suspect you, stand ready for my country to ask much of me in defending our homeland—if only President-elect Obama or DHS Secretary-designate Napolitano bother to ask.

So what are you and I going to do about it? (Anybody have Governor Napolitano's private cellphone #?)

As a southern boy, born 66 years ago the day after tomorrow in a very segregated Annapolis MD, I never imagined I'd see the day. As a Naval Officer in the Pentagon during the King riots, I never thought I'd see the day. Old America always has a new trick up her glorious sleeve ...

(Of course, now the work begins.)

Here are some things I don't believe:

***People of great character are needed on Wall Street. Nice idea, and I'm all for it—more or less. Fact is, humans are greedy—you know, the survival thing explained by Darwin and his successors. Moreover, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations tells us in no uncertain terms that self-interest is the engine of the economy. Fact is, in ordinary times, self-interest is imperative, and more or less the more the merrier—i.e., greed. That's how innovations are commercialized—and why there are bubbles. Hence, this ends up being an argument for appropriate regulation and strong government intervention in general, rather than hoping that God-like individuals will save us, or at least our 401(k)s. (None of this is to suggest that I'm not in favor of beating the bloody tar out of some of these pricks, like the Lehman guy.)

***The world is flat. Sure, flatter than it was. But national sovereignty is alive and well—e.g., Russia invades Georgia. Central banks and finance ministers should work in concert, as they are and as they have been since at least Bretton Woods. Given the new flat-ish-ness, coordinated responses have to be made much more quickly, and dramatically, than before. But anyone who thinks that economic globalization will round off the forces of national sovereignty is flat out nuts in my opinion.

***We need a plan. Yes we do, but the market crisis will abate when the price of assets falls far enough that stocks are obviously significantly undervalued and worth buying. Mssrs. McCain and Obama are being criticized for failing to provide oceanic solutions in their get-together last night. Well, there aren't any panaceas, except to do more of what we're doing ever faster and ever more intensively—e.g., the Brits more or less nationalizing banks yesterday.

***Cut costs to the bone in individual enterprises. Yup, that's the self-interested answer—which I just touted. Problem is that cutting costs accelerates and deepens the recession when Susan and I delay a home construction project as we just did—in our case, it puts the hurt on the local contractor. (We've already extended a couple of projects purely to avoid such an outcome.) When the cycle of delayed or cancelled purchases accelerates, then, God help us. Or, rather, God help us, period—it's happening. The only major exception I can think of is companies with cash hordes who choose to make investments that will greatly disadvantage their competitors when the worst is past.

***Oh my God, even GE has problems. Worrisome indeed, and psychologically important, but for heavenâ??s sake, as we conjure up remedies, remember that all of our economies consist primarily of small companies with local markets ($$$$, employees, and in our case "American spirit"). Policy must be aimed at least as much or more at the world of the "millionaire next door" (or the biz with $200,000 revenue) as the big dudes.

***Governments never get anything right. True, governments over-regulate, then under-regulate, with blunderbusses, not scalpels. But there are times when "more government" is the solution, not the problem. This is clearly and unequivocally one of those times, like it or not—even congenital free traders like Paulson get it. (Greenspan seems to be the only one who doesn't get it—a little too much Ayn Rand as a lad.)

***Globalization is still inevitable. True, but with a timetable very different than imagined a couple of years ago. The reverberations from this crisis will probably be with us a decade from now.

***The worst is behind us. Nobody but nobody has a clue, but "the worst is yet to come" is the odds-on favorite. (We are really trying to find viable prices for stuff that in the "mark to market" sense are valueless—to the tune of trillions of bucks.)

There is no particular point to these musings. It's just my mind at work since I am totally unable to focus on my normal affairs given the economic situation and the election. I warned you not to "mark time"—but I am. I also warned you not to let depression get the best of you—well, it's sure got me by the &#^%*. (I'm not talking personal economic woes—though "life is good" would be a stretch. I'm talking about significantly debilitating disorientation.)

Maybe I'm the last to catch on, but usaelectionpolls.com is a marvelous site with an astounding array of polling info—more than anybody sane could want, but, then, I'm not sane when it comes to either elections or statistics.

(FYI, there is no partisan commentary—but there are very useful explanations of poll strengths and weaknesses and methodology.)

A good friend of mine, Steve Millard, a true modern telecoms-data movement pioneer, among many other things, keeps me on his intriguing mailing list. Last night (1230.07) I got what follows. As a kid who, in the early 50s, was subjected to "get under the desk" drills in the face of Soviet nucs, perhaps this has special resonance.

But I think the issue is broader than that—fact is, what follows kept me up most of last night (Sunday 1230). In a hyper-rank-conscious society (the Soviets), one incredibly thoughtful Red Army Colonel may have saved the world courtesy one and only one thing—common sense.

My message, though, is not just a tribute to applied common sense. As the new year approaches, I'd urge you to use this story as a reminder of how precious and precarious life is. Last year I touted a wonderful book, The Manager's Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies, by Adecco exec Steve Harrison. I suggest using this Big Story of impending Nuclear Holocaust to remember small gestures. That is, take the time, with family and friends and colleagues and, indeed, strangers on the street, to smile or say thanks or somehow or other go the extra inch to introduce humanity into your moment-by-moment routines. Do this especially when you are harried and "don't have a second to waste." Between this amazing story about you and me and Colonel Stanislav Petrov and planetary nuclear incineration, and Dickens' Christmas Carol (I re-read it every Christmas), we should be humbled—and moved to give serious thought to the ways in which we transit the world on any given day, at any given moment.

[What follows is the beginning of an article re-printed from dailymail.co.uk. See the original here, and more by author Tony Rennell here.]

"September 26th, 1983: The Day the World Almost Died," by Tony Rennell

Stanislav Petrov, a lieutenant-colonel in the military intelligence section of the Soviet Union's secret service, reluctantly eased himself into the commander's seat in the underground early warning bunker south of Moscow.

It should have been his night off but another officer had gone sick and he had been summoned at the last minute.

Before him were screens showing photographs of underground missile silos in the Midwest prairies of America, relayed from spy satellites in the sky.

He and his men watched and listened on headphones for any sign of movement—anything unusual that might suggest the U.S. was launching a nuclear attack.

This was the height of the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. Both sides packed a formidable punch—hundreds of rockets and thousands of nuclear warheads capable of reducing the other to rubble.

It was a game of nerves, of bluff and counterbluff. Who would fire first? Would the other have the chance to retaliate?

The flying time of an inter-continental ballistic missile, from the U.S. to the USSR, and vice-versa, was around 12 minutes. If the Cold War were ever to go "hot," seconds could make the difference between life and death.

Everything would hinge on snap decisions. For now, though, as far as Petrov was concerned, more hinged on just getting through another boring night in which nothing ever happened.
Except then, suddenly, it did. A warning light flashed up, screaming red letters on a white background—"LAUNCH. LAUNCH." Deafening sirens wailed. The computer was telling him that the U.S. had just gone to war.

The blood drained from his face. He broke out in a cold sweat. But he kept his nerve. The computer had detected missiles being fired but the hazy screens were showing nothing untoward at all, no telltale flash of a missile roaring out of its silo into the sky. Could this be a computer glitch rather than Armageddon?

Instead of calling an alert that within minutes would have had Soviet missiles launched in a retaliatory strike, Petrov decided to wait.

The warning light flashed again—a second missile was, apparently, in the air. And then a third. Now the computer had stepped up the warning: "Missile attack imminent!"

But this did not make sense. The computer had supposedly detected three, no, now it was four, and then five rockets, but the numbers were still peculiarly small. It was a basic tenet of Cold War strategy that, if one side ever did make a preemptive strike, it would do so with a mass launch, an overwhelming force, not this dribble.

Petrov stuck to his common-sense reasoning. This had to be a mistake.

What if it wasn't? What if the holocaust the world had feared ever since the first nuclear bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, was actually happening before his very eyes—and he was doing nothing about it?

He would soon know. For the next ten minutes, Petrov sweated, counting down the missile time to Moscow. But there was no bright flash, no explosion 150 times greater than Hiroshima.

Instead, the sirens stopped blaring and the warning lights went off.

The alert on September 26th, 1983, had been a false one. Later, it was discovered that what the satellite's sensors had picked up and interpreted as missiles in flight was nothing more than high-altitude clouds.

Petrov's cool head had saved the world.

He got little thanks. He was relieved of his duties, sidelined, then quietly pensioned off. His experience that night was an extreme embarrassment to the Soviet Union.

Petrov may have prevented all out nuclear war, but at the cost of exposing the inadequacies of Moscow's much vaunted early warning shield.

Instead of feeling relieved, his masters in the Kremlin were more afraid than ever. They sank into a state of paranoia, fearful that in Washington, Ronald Reagan was planning a first-strike that would wipe them off the face of the earth.

The year was 1983 and—as a history documentary in a primetime slot on Channel 4 [UK] next weekend vividly shows—the next six weeks would be the most dangerous the world has ever experienced. ...

[Read the remainder of the article at dailymail.co.uk.]

Saturday. 8PM. The History Channel. The True Story of Charlie Wilson. (A couple of reviewers say the same thing: Charlie Wilson's unvarnished story is so good-amazing-bizarre that you don't need Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts to spice it up; this is the killer version.)

The Atlantic this month (12.07) is loaded with my favorite sort of analyses; namely, those that reveal counter-intuitive truths (or decent speculations, at any rate). Consider:

*SLUMS ARE GOOD. Today's burgeoning slums are the product of people pouring into the cities from the countryside—in pursuit of jobs. (In 2008, cities' population will surpass countryside population.) While eyesores and cause of appropriate concern, said cities are in fact the source of jobs, and overall poverty reduction is significantly attributable to the migration—burgeoning slums notwithstanding. The assertion is that no nation has grown wealthy since the start of the Industrial Revolution until the country-city migration was in full flower. ("Bright Lights, Big Cities," Matthew Quirk)

*HOME OWNERSHIP IS BAD. There are indeed enormous benefits to home ownership. But the big drawback, especially in times of economic revolution, is that home ownership measurably slows migration from where the jobs were to where the jobs are. ("Housebound," Clive Crook)

*WE HAVE TOO MANY DOCTORS. The supply of doctors to an area is significantly determined by the wealth and insurance coverage of the population. Hence there are more docs per capita in well-off areas—where, in fact, medical problems are less intense per capita. This also leads in particular to an excess of specialists—lots of docs prescribe lots of tests and make lots of referrals. As to the "bottom line," healthcare, per several sound measures, is no better in places with lotsa per capita docs than in places that are doc-deprived. It gets more interesting: The more specialists, the worse the outcomes. (More or less.) Specialists trip over one another, give conflicting advice, and are notoriously bad at cross-communication. More on specialists: The glamour and pay accorded to specialists comes at the price of less and less well-paid primary care docs—it is the vanishing primary care docs who are primarily responsible for good healthcare outcomes. Dr Elliott Fisher, Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School: "If we sent 30 percent of the doctors in this country to Africa, we might raise the level of health on both continents." ("Overdose," Shannon Brownlee)

*Less AID, more aid. "Scents & Sensibility," by Sarah Chayes, is the saga of helping Afghans successfully build a soap and body-oil business. It's also the umpteenth repeat of the story of how such "on the ground," practical, human-scale efforts are slowed or halted by the ham-handedness of USAID. [Web-only slideshow]

*THE LATE-BIRD STARTS THE CREATIVE ENTERPRISE. From "How You Sleep Is Who You Are" [not available online]: "Early risers prefer to gather knowledge from concrete information. They reach conclusions through logic and analysis. Night-owls are more imaginative and open to unconventional ideas, preferring the unknown and favoring intuitive leaps on their way to reaching conclusions." Morning people are more self-controlled, more formal, respect authority, and obsess on making a good impression. The late bunch are more independent and have less respect for authority. (Research source cited by the Atlantic: "Morning and Evening Types: Exploring Their Personality Styles," by Juan Francisco Diaz-Morales.) (TP note: Sounds like we need a night-owl CEO matched by an early-bird CFO.)

One of my favorite business books from the last few years was Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. It showed how, in a marketplace characterized by small customer-interest niches and unfettered by the constraints of limited retail space, products can succeed without being "hits." One example: Wal*Mart carries only the top 750 CDs, but consumers can find millions of other titles through online music sellers.

Over the past few days there was news that Britney Spears' new CD was #1 on Billboard's charts. That, itself, is a scary piece of news. But here's what caught my attention: Billboard later changed their list, putting the new album by The Eagles on top.

Why is that scary? The Eagles record is only available at Wal*Mart, and Billboard had to change their rules to include sales in limited retail distribution. Britney had sold about 300,000 copies, but The Eagles had sold 711,000 copies at Wal*Mart/Sam's Club in six days.

Personally, I can't wait to hear the new Eagles CD. And, I'm not one of those anti-Wal*Mart types, by any means. But it does catch my attention when American buying behavior can be so concentrated in one place. I'll admit it. I want to be part of the fragmented, interesting marketplace The Long Tail, describes.