It made me think of a recent article in Wired Magazine about the invention of the price tag. Back in 1846 an Irish immigrant named Alexander Turney Stewart opened a store called Marble Dry Goods Palace in downtown New York City. It was a huge emporium that sold both luxury and everyday items. According to the article, Stewart’s store was the first in the United States to use a street-level plate glass window to display merchandise and more importantly it was the first store to label its merchandise with price tags.

Before Marble Dry Goods Palace, a customer and seller had to haggle over any common item. Often after a transaction at least one of the parties if not both felt taken advantage of. But when the fixed price tags were introduced (which other retailers quickly copied) salespeople stopped trying to squeeze the most out of every transaction and developed longterm relationships with customers.

In every deal at Graff-Pinkert I observe the dance of raw, old capitalism. What should we pay for a machine? What should we ask for it? Only God knows. I guess it’s the price where all parties can smile after the transaction knowing they can make money because of it.

Question: Do you prefer haggling for a car or other types of merchandise or do you prefer a fixed price?

Video from the TV show Pawn Stars on the art of haggling.

Full story from Wired can be found at http://www.wired.com/magazine/tag/auction/

-World Book and the Encyclopedia Britannica would become almost completely obsolete.

-Split finger fastballs are arm killers.

-Pickled beets in horseradish are delicious.

-The iPad would transform print publications and books.

-Fantasy football would change the way we look at the NFL. The games are becoming secondary to the stats for many people.

-Childhood obesity would become a bigger problem than gangs or drugs.

-We should have forgotten about the government stimulus package in 2008-09 and just written checks for $50,000 to every person over 16 in the United States.

-We should have passed a law that no foreclosure procedures would last more than six months.

-All unemployment benefits should end at 52 weeks. The country would be booming today if we had.

-We should have given $10,000 incentives per car to convert vehicles to natural gas. This would have ended our dependence on oil imports and put several hundred thousand people to work in natural gas conversion jobs.

-That it’s more fun to listen to audio books than to read old-fashioned books.

-That I would never get tired of buying and selling ugly, filthy, smelly used machinery.

-That the biggest plus to being in business with your son is that it re-energizes you by teaching and learning from him.

Question: What do you wish you had known 20 years ago that you know now?

1992 Encyclopedia Britannica Commercial (Is that Sarah Palin?)

In 2006 he got a call from a cousin in New Orleans where he had grown up. She was having trouble with Algebra and wondered if cousin Sal could tutor her long distance. Sal jumped at the chance to teach a little math and recorded a 10-minute video on the topic and posted it on YouTube. His cousin loved it and asked Sal for more help and Sal made more videos for YouTube. The lessons caught fire on the Internet channel and all of a sudden people from around the world were learning Algebra from Sal Khan in 10 to 20 minute lessons on the Web.

Sal quit his day job (his wife is a doctor) and started making more videos for the newly named Khan Academy. Everything was free—and the educational and philanthropic community was taking note of what was going on as Khan was piling up viewers from Green Bay to Calcutta (where his parents came from before ending up in Louisiana).

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation put up $2 million for seed money, which now helps fund him and a dozen associates. Khan has made a point to steer clear of the educational establishment, but amazingly to him, the progressive Los Altos, California, school system is partnering a hybrid approach which allows kids to use his videos as part of the math curriculum.

For tutors and home schoolers the Khan Academy is a godsend. The lessons are in digestible chucks, available anytime, and are free. Sal Khan is changing the world, one 10-minute video at a time. And that cousin from New Orleans just finished her freshman year at the elite Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

(Much of this information came from a Chris Kendrick article in the Palo Alto Weekly.)

Question: Do you have any experience with homeschooling?

It makes me chuckle as I think back to the classic scene in Blazing Saddles where GOV Mel Brooks cries, “We’ve gotta protect our phony baloney jobs!”

Check out the clip below.

A new golf ball is available that reduces slices by 70 percent because of a clever use of dimpling (see the New York Times video below). Many of the folks interviewed in the video said they wouldn’t use the ball because it wasn’t “fair.” Fair-schmair—I hate my slice. Of course, I’m the rare golfer who doesn’t keep score or bet, so maybe I don’t count (literally).

How do you feel about it? Would it kill the game for you or enhance the enjoyment? Is it really any different than using a fat Callaway driver or a graphite racquet in tennis? Should we embrace technology in sports or legislate against it? Should wide receivers in football be able to use sticky gloves? You make the analogy that fits?

Jackson says the mix he is selling is shifting gradually away from SUVs and minivans to cars. Toyota, Honda and Nissan say they will not be back to normal production until November, though the situation is worst in Japan.

Suppliers are busy but skittish about buying more equipment because of the earthquake/gasoline combination reducing production. The fear is that by the time the earthquake issues stabilize, $5 gas could be biting.

Personally, I expect gas prices to go the other way. Jackson sees us ramping up to 16 million units. Let’s hope he’s right. Pickup trucks for business are still selling despite the continuing construction depression. Meanwhile, Buick sold 3 million units since 1999 in China.

Question: Are you driving less now?

If you define religious experience as a spiritual connection, no day is bigger for me than the signal of hope and rebirth which is Opening Day.

Passover and Easter have their spring rites, but not like the advent of a new baseball season for me.

Passover and Easter are beautiful family celebrations of freedom and rebirth, but the fresh slate of a new season, with the stories passing between generations of fans, excites me more than a kid getting a new train set. I remember when I used to talk about the Chicago Cubs with my grandfather, whose baseball lore carried back to Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, the aptly named Cubs slugger “Smiling” Stan Hack, and “Jolly Cholly” Grimm. His love of the game flowed to my Mother who would walk to the games on weekends as a kid, and used to take me to Wrigley on “Ladies Day.” Now I get to talk Cubs to my son, Noah, and educate my granddaughters who already identify as Cub fans, even though they’ve lived their whole lives in the Bay Area.

Could there be any more significant identification with the spirituality of baseball than the choice of songs my family sang to me for 45 minutes before I was wheeled into the operating room for heart bypass surgery? The last song I heard was a ringing rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and the only thing I remember from the operating room was the Cubs-Houston game on the radio.

If that isn’t a religious experience, I don’t know what is.

Question: What are your fondest baseball memories?

Sandy was nonplussed, like this was a common occurrence. He bandaged it tightly and then stuck a condom over the finger. I must admit, I didn’t even know what the rubbery thing was, naïve kid that I was. I played the game, but it was the end of my dunking career.

I thought of my limited dunking highlights when I read about Adam and Ryan Goldston, brothers and shoe entrepreneurs who played a little college hoops at Southern Cal., but at 5’ 11” were not exactly Blake Griffins. In 2009, just out of college they started Athletic Propulsion Labs, a shoe company with an idea—builds shoes with hops. They drew upon their father’s knowledge of the athletic footwear industry (he had worked for Reebok) and put tiny springs in their sneakers.

They got enough money together to make a small batch of shoes. They enjoyed good feedback from the playgrounds of L.A. and then had the chutzpah to send their shoes to the NBA, seeking an okay for players in the league to wear them.

Read full article here

According to him, there are short-term positives from winning that can overcome problems with chemistry, but over the long-term, there’s a reciprocal relationship between the two. It’s the great managers and coaches in business and sports who are able to motivate employees or team members to sacrifice their individual needs for the good of the team.

He said that on really high performance teams, every individual on that team holds himself accountable, not because they’re afraid they’ll be in trouble for failing but because they don’t want to let their teammates down.

I’m a huge Chicago Bulls fan, and I must say that I’m pretty psyched for this year’s team. Not only do they have one of the best records in the Eastern Conference, and a star point guard in Derrick Rose, this team gives me and millions of other basketball fans a warm fuzzy feeling when we watch them. The players play well together on the court, the stars jump off the bench to cheer when one of the reserves makes a great play, the players even go out together when they aren’t playing. Many Bulls coaches say they have never seen a group of players root for each other more and set aside egos and jealousy for the good of the team like this team does.

As unified and talented as this year’s Bulls team is, I have to wonder if they have what it takes to defeat a team like the Miami Heat, a team comprised of three elite yet individualistic stars, notorious for their enormous egos, Lebron James, Duane Wade, and to a lesser extent Chris Bosh.

Question: If you were starting a business, would rather have a team that got an “A” in chemistry and a “B” in talent, or a “B” in chemistry and an “A” in talent?

But he lost in the quarter finals in straight sets (6-4, 6-2, 6-3) to fellow Spaniard David Ferrer, seventh ranked in the world. It was a match that perhaps should not have been played because Rafa injured his hamstring in the very first game. He gutted it out for three sets and Ferrer played well (yes being an idiot tennis junkie I watched it at 4:00 in the morning on ESPN).

On the football front, Jay Cutler, the Chicago Bears quarterback, sustained a sprained knee in the first half of the NFC championship game against Green Bay last Sunday. He left the game after playing poorly on the gimpy leg. Cutler has taken a lot of heat for supposedly wimping out. According to some sources, he wasn’t even given the choice by the coaches to stay in the game. But for the sake of argument, lets pretend that it was Cutler’s choice whether or not to stay in.

The two cases are not exactly parallel but bring up the question of whether you do yourself or your team a disservice by playing hurt. Is it really the noble thing to do for Nadal or Cutler to play at 60 or 70%, when that would threaten their own future health and longevity?

Personally, I think in both of these cases the player would have done the right thing to accept injury—in Nadal’s case, conceding the match to his countryman rather than giving him a hollow victory, and in Cutler’s case, allowing an able bodied quarterback to get in the rhythm of the game before it was out of reach.

Question: Which athlete do you think made the right choice?