Tide: Now That's Cold

Tide (laundry detergent brand of Proctor & Gamble) has recently launched a detergent specifically designed for cold water usage. In other words, even white clothes that normally go in hot water can now be done in cold water.

The commercials cite the monetary savings from not heating water for every wash, a smart move in this economy. As Sustainable Life Media points out, this also has environmental benefits.

The major laundry brands have all developed cold water-specific detergents for developing countries where availability of hot water is spotty or non-existent. Could this be an example of innovation transference from emerging markets to the US?

Saving the Car Companies is a Giant Triple-Bottom Line Experiment

Despite car czar Steve Rattner’s protestations that saving GM and Chrysler is simply an investment decision, it seems to me that we are actually witnessing one of the largest triple-bottom line pushes ever made at major corporations. And not of their own volition.

Bottom Line 1: Financial. Obviously the goal is to get the GM and Chrysler back into stable fiscal shape if at all possible. The Obama administration doesn’t want to be in the car business, and would prefer to back out as quickly as possible, which means getting the companies back on their feet, financially.

Bottom Line 2: Environmental. The administration has made producing hybrid and more fuel-efficient cars a string attached to the investment

Bottom Line 3: Social. While there are no requirements, so my knowledge, to dictate social responsibility in the way that it is usually thought of (worker rights and pay, community investment, etc.), in a sense GM and Chrysler are both beholden to the American people, and have a responsibility to help get the economy back in shape, given their large economic footprint. Many workers would love to have the salaries and job protections that auto workers enjoy, so that’s not the issue, but more the larger social ramifications if the companies were to collapse. And because of the massive taxpayer investment, the companies need to do good, be good and act good, in order to show good return faith to the public.

Harley Davidson in a Skid

Reveries has some thoughts on the freefall that Harley Davidson currently finds itself in, battered by the recession

Harley’s slide certainly is tied to the recession, but there’s more to it than that. When times are bad, obviously it’s less likely that people will “shell out up to $20,000 or more for something that is basically a big toy.” It doesn’t help much that most of the Harley market consists of baby boomers who are watching their savings implode. But it also appears that Harley contributed to its own troubles in a chain reaction of mistakes.

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Harley is like Starbucks in that it created a strong customer experience, a sense of belonging, and then expanded that massively to a more mainstream audience. In the process, both lost their way. Starbucks let its experience get diluted at the edges, which impacted its core business. And the idea that by offering small luxuries it is recession proof has been sorely tested lately.

Both companies were on the vanguard of the experience economy, as Pine and Gilmore termed it in their book of the same name. They wrote, “The company that is perhaps most successful in embedding its goods into a total experience is Harley-Davidson. How many other company logos do you find tattoed on users’ bodies?” (p18).

Harley Davidson likes to pretend that they are of the people, for the people, a FUBU for boomers. But in reality they are in the high-end luxury escapism business. And when the bubble bursts, that’s a bad place to be.

Friedman: The Inflection is Near

In his column today, Thomas Friedman asks much the same question that I did a month ago: can we have an economy without the patterns of spending based off cheap labor and false credit, and which pillages the earth’s resources unthinkingly?

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese …

We can’t do this anymore.

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US Car-Makers: Let One of 'Em Fail

So says my frog colleague Marc Fenigstein in a provocative post.

As GM and Chrysler come back for more soup and our political system consideres not if but how we will refill their bowls (again), I am boiling with rage. Not the rage already expressed publicly by thousands and felt by millions that these companies are failures that produced the wrong products, poorly and inefficiently, and because they couldn’t sell them to us willfully are now snatching our wallets in a back alley. Nope, I feel that rage too, but this rage is that all three of them have the audacity to collude, to form an effective monopoly, to hold the American public hostage and our political system allows it because we don’t think of them as individual companies we think of them as the storied American Auto Industry. It’s an interesting take on pride in the American Auto Industry that we’re actually enabling them to continue to sully a 60 year tradition of the best automobiles in the world. It is time to shift our thinking. It is also time to let them fail.

He continues with the most humorous analogies I’ve seen of Mad Max and Thunderdome and this wonderful marked-up image of Jenga:

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