Market Power

Treat Your Young Customers Well

Glenn Reynolds:

Williams-Sonoma, on the other hand, managed to lose my business. After suffering a catastropic coffeemaker failure last night, I had tasked the Insta-Daughter to buy a new one. She was snubbed by the salespeople, who skipped her to wait on someone older who was behind her in line. So she went to Belk and got a better deal on the same thing, but tells me she’ll be personally insulted if I ever shop at Williams-Sonoma again. I’ve noticed a lot of stores that treat teenagers this way, and it strikes me as quite unwise.

I worked for Walgreens for eight years, - four years as a clerk in Sioux City, Ia. and four years as an assistant manager in Omaha, Ne..  I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I recall a meeting with, I think, the local district manager from Omaha.  The subject turned to kids in the store.  The DM asked us if we should be extra suspicious of kids hanging around the candy aisle or if we should not serve them as well as we would serve older customers.  He said we should treat our young customers with as much respect as we would treat our older customers because our younger customers were our future customers.  That's wise advice and it surprises me that "a lot of stores... treat teenagers this way."

Markets in Everything - Push Button Boobie Lift

Story here with video in Chinese.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I just want to wish all of my readers a Happy Thanksgiving. 

USA Today's Guide for Plane Spotting at Airports

Here.  Can you get closer than at St. Maarten?

And don't get too close.

FWIW, My family and I watched planes land at Omaha's airport from a road just beyond the NS runway and got shooed away this past summer.

I'll Have What He's Having: Curious Contract Provisions in the NCAA

My latest post is up at The Sports Economist.  I write about some contract provisions in recent coach contracts at Kansas and Kansas State that strike me as being odd.

Mizzou Football Statistic of the Day

Yesterday I tweeted about how much I like the Missouri defensive linemen and linebackers.  In the past two weeks, Mizzou has faced two of the best runners in the Big XII, both 1,000 yard rushers.  Yesterday Mizzou held Iowa State's Alexander Robinson to 56 yards on 14 carries, a 4 yard average per-carry (96.2 yards per game as of yesterday).  Last week they held Kansas State's Daniel Thomas to 79 yards on 23 carries, a 3.4 per-carry average (105.4 per game as of yesterday). 

The defensive backfield remains the soft spot, but I like the front 7.

"Saturday Night Live Parody of Obama and Jintao Press Conference"

Well done!

Update:  Link via Doc.

College Athletic Graduation Data

Here's an NCAA database on the athlete graduation rates released in 2009.  Here are links to past reports.  Both were linked to in this USA Today article on graduation rates.  USA continues to be an excellent source for raw data and links to other data.  If any of my readers have been involved in gathering this data, thanks!

Graduation Levels Up in College Athletics

USA Today is reporting that graduation levels are up in college athletics.

Nearly four of every five athletes — 79% — who entered Division I colleges and universities from 1999 to 2002 got their degrees within six years, according to an NCAA study released Wednesday. That's up a percentage point from a year earlier.

As it is with any random variable, there are highs and lows.

More than a quarter of the 320-plus men's hoops programs in Division I graduated fewer than 50% of the players who arrived from 1999 to 2002. That includes No. 3 Texas (47%), No. 5 Kentucky (31%) and 10 more of the 25 teams in this week's USA TODAY/ESPN Coaches' Poll.

Texas also lagged in football, where the unbeaten Longhorns are pointed toward the Bowl Championship Series title game. Their grad rate was 49% in the sport. Last year's BCS runner-up, Oklahoma, had a 45% rate.

One in six Division I baseball programs came in under 50%, including the winners of the last six national championships: LSU (48%), Fresno State (45%), Oregon State (44%), Texas (37%) and Cal State-Fullerton (29%).

Also among the NCAA findings:

• Schools doing the best job of graduating all their athletes were Notre Dame and Colgate (both 99%) and Navy (98%).

• Schools doing the worst job were Division I newcomer Utah Valley (28%), Chicago State (38%) and Florida A&M (41%).

Of course the NCAA has set new penalties for programs that don't graduate enough players.  It's unclear what efforts schools have put in place to drive the positive numbers reported in USA Today.  But I'm confident that information will come out in time.

What's Up With all the Football Posts? And a Couple of Mangino Cheap Shots

You've probably noticed that I've been writing more and more on college athletics in general and college football in particular.  There's an app a reason for that.  I have been reading up on the professional economic literature on college sports for a big project that I am working on.  Whenever I start a new project, I dive into the professional literature.  That's pretty standard in any field.  Because I am not as familiar with the literature on college sports as I am with other papers in sports economics, I have had to do a bit more diving.  I've also started writing on the subject.

I'll still be blogging on all the fun topics brought to you by the world of economics, but if you see me blogging sporadically and blogging a bit more on college football or college sports, it's not that I've given up on the rest of the science.  I've just immersed myself in one tiny little part of the vast Oceania Economica and am thinking about it a lot.  Thanks for bearing with me and, especially, for taking the time to read my blog.

By the way, Jason Whitlock's tweet about the need for a sturdy hotseat to hold Kansas' Mark Mangino and Notre Dame's Charlie Weis was pretty ripe.  My cheap shot tweet was that Kansas can't throw Mangino under a bus because he wouldn't fit.  They'd need at least a monster truck.