I've decided to throw in the towel as a blogger and take a real job. From here forward, I'll be working half my time as an analyst and half as a journalist. I decided to take this route to minimize the amount of time I have to work while maximizing my pay check. As a journalist, I'll just take the headlines from the wires and the quotes from vendor press releases and toss in an analyst perspective or two and voila -- story done. As an analyst, I plan to adopt a British accent, quadruple my speaking fees, and increase my consulting day rate to a sum larger than the GDP of North Dakota (and insist on first class travel -- and pocket the difference between first and coach to pad my pay stub). Sorry guys. This blogging thing is just too much work for the money. I also don't like the idea that others can comment on what I have to say. I mean, why should we ever allow a community to have a perspective when talking heads are far more qualified to proffer up their opinions? Adios, y'all. Peace. Out.

- Jason Busch

As you can probably tell, this anti-dumping case has gotten me fired up. Whenever I see companies angling for artificial protection from competitors at the expense of everyone else in the market, it makes my blood boil. What's to stop any US company who can't compete with global competitors from filing anti-dumping complaints to a sympathetic, protectionist system inclined to side with the "fair-trade" perspective? It's bullshit, if you ask me. So on the advice of my doctor who wanted to get my blood pressure down, I thought that there might be a more comical way to look at the situation ...

If you're coming to this political cartoon without context, please check out these posts to learn more:

No Sleep for the Weary: USITC Will Hear Leggett & Platt Anti-Dumping Petition
No Sleep for the Weary: USITC Will Hear Leggett & Platt Anti-Dumping Petition (Part 2)
Leggett and Platt -- Increasing Prices While Filing Anti-Dumping Complaints
"Anti-Dumping" Should be Called "Save the Fat Cats" at Everyone Else's Expense ...

- Jason Busch

As I've said before, for those procurement organizations which are increasingly focused on global sourcing (and sourcing to serve production and demand in local markets), it's more than worth embracing your customs and trade team (which often have far too few dealings with sourcing groups). And that's because when it comes to global sourcing, the hidden costs of trade can come back to bite (or can be ameliorated through such artifices as trans-shipping and other clever devices which the customs and trade folks are likely to know about). Even though I tend to approach global sourcing from a procurement perspective, I still find articles like this one in World Trade Magazine on the history of shoe tariffs fascinating.

According to the story, high shoe tariffs (10 times the average rate) date back a century in the United States (which is incredibly ironic considering that it's impossible to profitably build a shoe manufacturer in the US now). The article notes that "the little-known shoe tax has its roots in the early history of American trade policy. A hundred years ago, tariffs raised most of the government's revenues. But after six decades of trade liberalization, the tariff system is now a small backwater in tax policy (there are no tariffs on toys, furniture, semiconductor chips, personal computers, or telephones)." Fortunately, there is a bill in front of Congress which might reduce the imported shoe tariff for those imports which are most impacted (e.g., Chinese and Vietnamese shoes). Still, stories like this are further proof of the arcane system of tariffs and import duties which your customs team is qualified to figure out the workarounds on.

- Jason Busch

Over on Software Safari, my colleague and fellow Enterprise Irregular Brian Sommer does not mince words when it comes to his concern over a potential shortage of TLAs. Seriously, what are industry analysts, marketing and IT people to do when there are simply no TLAs to choose from? Brian notes that "Industry pundits see the current supply of acronyms to be unrealistically constrained and warn that any further disruption in the availability of these necessities could roil the technology sector ... The lack of acronyms will be especially hard on software and hardware sales forces. They may find their already jammed PowerPoint slides will not accommodate full-length words. Sales people will have to either add additional slides to their decks or start giving their pitches in less technical ways." It's hard to imagine a world such as this. I mean, if the Spend Management world runs out of terms like SRM, SCM, and SPM what will we do? It might leave us to actually talk about what it is we do and implement in plain English. A scary notion, indeed.

- Jason Busch

Hello Spend Matters Readers,

My name is Jason "fact-based" Busch. I'm the Spend Management Group Director, Research Services VP, and office punching bag at Spend Matters Publishing, Inc. in Boston, MA (in fact, the Spend Fool is giving me ten lashes right now). One of the reasons that I am sending this to you today is because it is my firm's policy to spam as many potential customers as possible (trust us, we're a direct marketing firm and we know what we're doing). If you question our legitimacy here, here's a picture of the big boss to put you at ease. The other reason that I'm writing you today, of course, is that I'm working on a new research study about Spend Management. We'll put our heads together on the specific content once we figure out who might be willing to shell out the most to get a list of "leads" from those who download it.

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If you believe available labor capacity drives pricing, then your next King Fisher in New Delhi should be cheaper in the new year. According to Reuters, "Women will be allowed to work as bartenders in New Delhi, India's Supreme Court ruled, upholding a lower court's decision that an earlier ban was unconstitutional, local television reports said. The city authorities had wanted the ban reinstated, arguing that women needed to be protected from the bad behavior of drunken New Delhi men."

Now if the thought of "drunken New Delhi" men scares you, I would suggest you might need to rethink your outsourcing strategy. Seriously, if women can bar tend bar and stay safe in Australia -- and as far as I know, they can -- then I'm sure they can hold their own in a country not exactly known for the same rowdy bar-room atmosphere as its continental neighbor to the South. But now that they can, legally, let's hope that competition in the labor markets drives the cost of that watery Indian lager down. After all, it's not worth the current prices they ask (I'll be honest, about the only thing which I don't find intense about India is the beer -- it just does not do it for me). Hat-tip: Amy Edwards

- Jason Busch

While most of us are worried about supply risk in the B2B supply chain (e.g., a supplier in Detroit going out of business or a supplier in India or China substituting cheaper materials), it also turns out that supply risk -- supply shortages, to be exact -- will also impact a good night's sleep -- literally. According to Reuters, we are about to face supply shortages of luxury goose down. The above-linked story notes that, "a good night's sleep on luxury Hungarian down pillows is likely to become a rarer experience as Hungary's poultry sector declines in the face of mounting problems ... But in recent years Hungary's poultry sector has been hit by repeated bird flu outbreaks, leading to the culling of 1 million birds, mostly water fowl, and a doubling of feed prices." The article suggests goose down duvets are one area where European-sourced products command a 2.5-3x premium over Chinese sourced and manufactured counterparts. Perhaps this suggests that to afford a good night of sleep, we all better pad our profit margins from sourcing cheaper parts and services globally for our businesses, in order to maximize our bonuses to avoid cheap Chinese down comforters from thwarting a good night sleep. Hat-tip: Amy Edwards.

- Jason Busch

This story in the New York Times about a recent controversy surrounding a Eurostar advertisement in Belgium nearly took the piss out of me. Apparently, "An advertisement in Belgium promoting the newly accelerated Euro-star trains recently caused a rare sense-of-humor failure in Britain ... The ad, a poster showing a shaven-headed English soccer hooligan urinating into a teacup, was discovered by British journalists who traveled to Brussels for the opening of the new high-speed train service from London via the English Channel ... The indignation eased when cooler heads consulted their travel guidebooks and realized that the pose of the 'skinhead' closely matched that of a Brussels landmark, the Manneken Pis statue."

Personally, I think the advertisement was a stroke of creative genius, but then again, my wife has to deal with my often twisted literary schoolboy humor around the house. But what's not so funny is how Eurostar is wasting money and receiving lesser service by working with three separate marketing agencies. According to the article, Eurostar works "in Brussels, with TBWA, part of the Omnicom Group; in London, with Fallon, owned by the Publicis Groupe; and in Paris with Leg, whose parent is Havas." Eurostar should have read the whitepaper that I referenced in this earlier post on how best to source marketing spend.

If it were my vote, from a creative standpoint in this case, I would have to go with Omnicom. In addition to their "pissing" stunt, I love how in order "to reinforce the idea that London is just around the corner" they took "over part of a Brussels bar called the Walvis, or Whale, turning it into an English pub. On one side, Belgian beer is served; on the other, English ale." Even though half of my family is from the UK and I love a good pint of bitter, I know what side I would frequent. What do you think? Does anyone else who reads this blog agree that Belgium brewers make the best beer in the world?

- Jason Busch

Although outsourcing is currently a global trend, there are some jobs that were not meant for getting off the payrolls -- at least in the North of Europe. And one of these jobs involves helping Santa and his reindeer make their yearly epic trek. According to a Reuters Dispatch, "A Finnish court ordered Santa Park in the north of the country to pay compensation to three of the underground amusement park's former elves for replacing them with temporary worker. The park -- which is located in the town of Rovaniemi on the Arctic Circle and boasts that it employs the world's only 'official' Santa Claus -- has been ordered to pay the employees 5,600 euros ($8,300) each in damages ... Santa Park director Wille Rajala said the lay-offs were necessary for the struggling business, which fired all its full-time elves the following year."

The irony of this is that in the United States, Santa and his elves are most likely working for free -- or minimum wage -- and are most certainly contractors. Alas, that's probably why they can afford to be so much more generous with parachuting in lower-taxed toys in this part of the world. Of course, the entire reason that Santa's U.S.-based henchman might have agreed in the first place to give up their collective bargaining rights might have been a result of lead-based paint rubbing off on them over the years or an accidental ingestion of an Aqua Dot. Hat-tip: Amy Edwards.

- Jason Busch

If we returned to our economics textbooks from college, we would quickly refresh our memories about how pricing impacts demand. But like all economists, bloggers like data that supports this type of broad-based claim (especially when it comes to economics and statistics, always ask for evidence before believing any claims). If you're the researching type and you're looking for a data set to confirm this finding, I have just the place. Consider how in a number of UK grocery stores, beer is now significantly cheaper than water. According to the above linked-article, "Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda now offer [private-label] lager at just 22p a can ... By contrast, bottles of own-brand mineral water cost between 56p and 92p a litre, depending on the store. Furthermore, a six-pack of 330ml cans of own brand cola costs between £1.11 and £1.29, or 56p to 65p a litre." Given the rising costs of many food commodities -- including hops -- I doubt that these retailers will be able to keep up this loss-leading gimmick for long. Still, my guess is that water consumption is dropping across the UK -- along with productivity. Hat-tip: Amy Edwards.

- Jason Busch