How Amazon privatizes public spaces for its own profit
February 14, 2024
This is a daily sight on 8th St. in the East Village of New York City, a spot historically chockablock with indie, brick-and-mortar shops. This is an Amazon truck and freelancers who have taken over the street (it’s a no standing zone) and sidewalk as their own. This is one way Amazon sells things for less: it turns public streets and sidewalks into its “warehouses” and “stores.” Imagine you’re a local business with a roof and rent. You can’t compete ...
Read More
We follow the travails of indie stores and the Internet in real life—and on the silver screen. The Times shares how the blockbuster film “You’ve Got Mail,” a story about an indie bookshop owner who finds love online, has fared over 25 years.
It’s a 40th anniversary for the company founded by Colin Riggs (left) and Ned Voelker’s parents, Abigail and Ed Voelker. Over the last four decades, the entire family has created a curated collection of handmade tableware and giftware for the nation’s independent store retailers.
................................
Congratulations on a milestone 40th year in business. Are you surprised Abigails has endured? Ned Voelker: We are surprised. It’s a tribute to Ed and Abbie ...
Read More
Small businesses are getting hacked via Facebook ads, shares Today’s The Wall St. Journal. The ads purport to offer Google’s AI engine Bard, but instead steal the business’s social media account access.
Glassworks just received a shipment of handmade glass from Blenko, based in West Virginia. The classic 384 water Bottle design was first introduced in 1938 and has been produced at their factory, by hand, almost non-stop since that very first year. The water bottle’s narrow shape with two pouring spouts and center indentation make for easy handling. Today, this piece of glassblowing history is commonly used as:
A glass pitcher - to serve drinks or enjoy a cool glass of ...
Read More
While this mother & baby are a North American subspecies of the brown bear, they are more commonly known as grizzly bears. As to the origin of their name, the bears can thank none other than Lewis & Clark whose journals mention a "grisley bear" no doubt referring to these majestic symbols of the wild whose grizzled appearance is caused by the long guard hairs on their backs and shoulders frequently having white tips. The fur of these bears is often dark brown but can vary from ...
Read More
Babcock Gifts celebrates its 50th birthday in 2024. The bridal registry and gift shop opened in 1972 as a partnership that included interior design. In 1974, with the exit of one partner, the store focused on antiques, gifts, and bridal registry. Over the next 42 years, there would be growth into two stores before downsizing to one. In 2016, ownership changed and the store moved one block down, where it continues to be a destination for bridal registry and gift-giving. With the constant doom and...
Read More
I got to thinking about the generational make-up of today's workforce when I realized all the folks I interviewed in the current issue are well-experienced, older workers with decades of expertise and know-how, who are still creating and innovating with alacrity. (Yours truly included.)
There was a time when you entered the labor force, worked until a certain age, and retired. Now, more and more people are working into their golden years, a trend that's expected to continue fueled by aging ...
Read More
Veselka, a famous Ukrainian restaurant on my block, shared this on their Instagram.
P.S. ~ I’m reading The Cold Start Problem, a book about network-based companies. It’s helping me understand how to help indie stores and brands connect online.
View Post
Settle into the Season! Fall has arrived! Turn your home into the most enchanted house on the block with our new magical and mesmerizing collections!
View Post
How pre-populating information saves clients time and speeds them along a process.
June 30, 2023
Each April, I scramble to send my tax information to my accountant so I can file my taxes before April 15. Since my friends confide that they do the same, there are likely millions of people like us racing to prepare our taxes. What if there was a way to avoid this painful rush—and even the cost of it? The WSJ shares that Japan, New Zealand, and much of Europe get such relief. The countries prepare tax returns for their citizens using existing data, and the citizen just needs to review it,...
Read More
How we can bring clients together to build a larger network.
February 4, 2023
Economist Bent Flyvbjerg encourages us to find our “Lego” in his new book “How Big Things Get Done.” Mr. Flyvbjerg, whose new book is reviewed by Ben Cohen in this week’s The Wall Street Journal, says that most large projects that are completed successfully use a modular approach. Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal:
“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big ...
Read More
In the early 2000s, the board game Cranium became a hit. The game combined elements of Scrabble and Pictionary with the goal of helping more people enjoy playing a game. Richard Tait, who created Cranium and sold it to Hasbro in 2008 for $77.5m, passed away in July. Like Mr. Tait, I had been a paperboy, but he went beyond what I ever offered: he came up with a new service that sold breakfast sandwiches along his newspaper route. He increased profits and made customers happier. ...
Read More
When I was a kid, my mom instilled in me a lesson to always get paid for my work. When I went to mow a lawn or do my newspaper route, she’d remind me, “Be sure you get paid.” As an adult, these flashbacks are vivid like a scene from Citizen Kane—just swap out the Rosebud sled with my newspaper delivery bike. Today, this lesson still resonates when running Bridge. When calling a store that hasn’t paid its Bridge bill, I’m confident in asking ...
Read More
An East Village Artist’s Death Prompts a Reflection on the State of Indie Retailers Today
…….
While thumbing through the Times, I noticed a smiling young woman’s picture in the obituaries. In the black and white photograph, she's standing on a fire escape with a historic building and a bridge in the distance. I was initially attracted to Ronni Solbert’s 1959 picture, yet I was even more drawn in by what I noticed next to her photo: a children&...
Read More
This past week, Amazon announced it was adding Grubhub delivery to its Prime subscription (Read the news about Amazon and Grubhub here). The goal of Amazon Prime (and other subscription services) is to make the subscription so pervasive that it's sticky. Don’t like Prime movies? Ok, but you love free Grubhub delivery. If you don’t need feature X and want to cancel, you realize you still need feature Y and keep paying for the subscription.
Excerpts:
- A report produced by groups seeking to block it pointed out that the number of Amazon facilities in New Jersey grew to 49 from one between 2013 and 2020, helping to nearly triple the number of warehouse workers in the state, to about 70,000.
- The Port Authority revealed the proposed lease with Amazon in August, the day its board voted to authorize the deal.
- Under the proposed deal, Amazon tentatively committed to investing $125 million in renovating two buildings ...
Read More
While walking down Broadway last weekend, I discovered this plaque regarding Gorham, a producer of fine metalware and flatware. The plaque shares that Gorham was located in this first-ever mixed-use building built in 1883. Notably, Gorham is still producing beautiful products today and is a member of Bridge's Product Syncing service. Ironically, the brand's modern-day showroom was just seven blocks away until very recently. (This building is at 19th St. and Broadway and the Lifetime Brands ...
Read More
In today’s Times, we learn that Amazon is raising and lowering the prices of items millions of times a day. We also learn that it has displayed different prices for the same item based on who you are. Imagine going in to a store and the paper towels are $3 for the person next to you but $4 for you.
I can attest to Amazon changing prices multiple times a day because Amazon crawls my retailers’ websites multiple times a day. It’s as if they have spies coming in our...
Read More
George Lois, the famous advertising maven, writes in Damn Good Advice that he doesn’t create an advertising campaign as much as he discovers one. He pulls it out of the air and captures it. He shares that Michelangelo said that a sculpture is imprisoned in a block of marble, and only a great sculpture can free it.
I view Bridge in a similar way. We’re not creating the software—we’re discovering it. Our methods for operating an online store were bound to...
Read More