commerce

"Economies are enormous groups of people engaged in a multitude of interdependent activities. What prevents decentralized decision making from degenerating into chaos? What coordinates the actions of the millions of people with their varying abilities and desires? What ensures that what needs to be done is in fact done? The answer, in a word, is prices. If an invisible hand guides market economies, as Adam Smith famously suggested, then the price system is the baton that the invisible hand uses to conduct the economic orchestra."

"After . . . drawing on independent research on donor expectations, . . . assistance from a variety of philanthropic experts, and numerous comments from donors and charities, the BBB Wise Giving Alliance issued the [following] BBB Standards for Charity Accountability. . . . These standards apply to publicly-soliciting organizations that are tax exempt under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and to other organizations conducting charitable solicitations. . . . The overarching principle of the BBB Standards for Charity Accountability is full disclosure to donors and potential donors at the time of solicitation and thereafter. . . . GOVERNANCE AND OVERSIGHT [Standards 1 - 5] The governing board has the ultimate oversight authority for any charitable organization. This section of the standard seeks to ensure that the volunteer board is active, independent and free of self-dealing. . . . MEASURING EFFECTIVENESS [Standards 6 - 7] The effectiveness of a charity in achieving its mission is of the utmost importance. . . . This is why a section of our standards require that charities set defined, measurable goals and objectives . . . and report on the organization’s progress. . . . FINANCES [Standards 8 - 14] While we believe that a charity’s finances only tell part of the story of how they are performing, they can identify organizations that may be demonstrating poor financial management and/or questionable accounting practices. . . . [T]hese standards . . . seek to ensure that the charity is financially transparent and spends its funds in accordance with its mission and donor expectations. . . . SOLICITATIONS AND INFORMATIONAL MATERIALS [Standards 15 - 20] A fundraising appeal is often the only contact a donor has with a charity and may be the sole impetus for giving. This section of the standards seeks to ensure that a charity’s representations to the public are accurate, complete and respectful."

"The 50 worst charities in America devote less than 4 percent of donations raised to direct cash aid. . . . Even as they plead for financial support, operators at many of the 50 worst charities have lied to donors about where their money goes, taken multiple salaries, secretly paid themselves consulting fees or arranged fundraising contracts with friends. . . . Some nonprofits are little more than fronts for fundraising companies . . . . To disguise the meager amount of money that reaches those in need, charities use accounting tricks and inflate the value of donated dollar-store cast-offs . . . ."

"[I]n all cases, for all commodities that serve to provide for the tangible or intangible needs of the consumer, it is in the consumer's best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and of trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price."

"This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and which no other system even promises to accomplish. It enables entrepreneurs, by watching the movement of comparatively few prices, as an engineer watches the hands of a few dials, to adjust their activities to those of their fellows. The important point here is that the price system will fulfill this function only if competition prevails, that is, if the individual producer has to adapt himself to price changes and cannot control them. The more complicated the whole, the more dependent we become on that division of knowledge between individuals whose separate efforts are coordinated by the impersonal mechanism for transmitting the relevant information known by us as the price system."

"The logic is simple: If you are going to be a net buyer of stocks in the future, either directly with your own money or indirectly (through your ownership of a company that is repurchasing shares), you are hurt when stocks rise. You benefit when stocks swoon. Emotions, however, too often complicate the matter: Most people, including those who will be net buyers in the future, take comfort in seeing stock prices advance. These shareholders resemble a commuter who rejoices after the price of gas increases, simply because his tank contains a day’s supply. Charlie and I don’t expect to win many of you over to our way of thinking – we’ve observed enough human behavior to know the futility of that – but we do want you to be aware of our personal calculus. And here a confession is in order: In my early days I, too, rejoiced when the market rose. Then I read Chapter Eight of Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, the chapter dealing with how investors should view fluctuations in stock prices. Immediately the scales fell from my eyes, and low prices became my friend. Picking up that book was one of the luckiest moments in my life."

"By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be. … A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business."

"Users can work with analysts and object designers to formulate and tune system requirements. People from business, analytical and object design disciplines can come together, learn from each other and generate meaningful descriptions of systems that are to be built. Each participant and each project has slightly different concerns and needs. Practical application of use cases can go a long way to improve our ability to deliver just what the customer ordered."

"The toughest thing about the power of trust is that it's very difficult to build and very easy to destroy. The essence of trust building is to emphasize the similarities between you and the customer."

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else."

"There is one thing we are quite passionate about — and that is serving the customers who have trusted us."

"I'm constantly amazed that owners and managers of all businesses don't train their people to call the person who pays by credit card by name. It definitely makes the customer feel good and will be a factor in bringing them back to your place of business."

"Think about it: if you were running a multi-million dollar company, and your database of customer information was stolen, would you want to tell your clients? No. Most [US] companies did not until the laws required them to. It's in the best interest of organisations - when they're attacked and information is stolen - to tell nobody."

"Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement."

"Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy."

"When you stop talking, you've lost your customer. When you turn your back, you've lost her."

"The golden rule for every business man is this: 'Put yourself in your customer's place.'"

"As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product."

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

"Somewhere in the past. organizations were quite simple, and 'doing business' consisted of buying raw material from suppliers, converting into products, and selling it to customers... For the most part owner-entrepreneurs founded such simple business and worked along with members of their families. The family-dominated business still accounts for a large portion of the business start today."

"Our DNA is as a consumer company - for that individual customer who's voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That's who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it's not up to par, it's our fault, plain and simply."

"Delighted customers are the only advertisement everyone believes."

"Your product is a starting point. A loyal customer is the goal."

"A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all."

"Organizations are defined from the inside out: they are described by who reports to whom, by departments and processes and matrices and perks. A business, on the other hand, is defined from the outside in by markets, suppliers, customers, and competitors."

"The right measure is not how many customers you've got, but how closely you hold them."

"If customers leave without a purchase, you have not failed. But if customers leave without a smile, you have."

"Pan Am takes good care of you. Marks & Spencer loves you. Securicor cares. I.B.M. says the customer is king. At Amstrad, we only want your money!"

"Customers can be asked about a product's evolution, but not its revolution."

"Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn't the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard."

"My dad's father was of Scots-Irish descent and a man of many hats. He was adopted by a neighboring family at the age of six after his single father decided to move on without him. As a young teenager, he ran away from the only real family he knew and set out to start a life for himself. I loved hearing his stories, some sounded like tall tales. Grandpa, a snake-oil salesman of sorts, rode the rails all over the country, selling anything and everything to earn a buck."

"That kind of politics has to stop. That kind of quackery has to stop. We don't need anymore faith healers and snake oil salesmen. We need some doctors to take the bullets out."

"Well, he is on the recovery board, right? I guess two things. Caterpillar has also opposed the "buy American" provisions in the stimulus package. Recently a spokesman for Caterpillar said that they were like snake oil. And I know that the final package is still being finalized. But I'm wondering, that, and the fact that Caterpillar -- probably one of the companies that most supports the Colombia free trade agreement, and says that the stalling of that on Capitol Hill -- and I believe the President also has expressed concerns about that free trade agreement -- that that stalling is basically sending a message to businesses in Colombia, please buy Canadian products, not American. Does Caterpillar's support for the Colombian free trade agreement and opposition to the "Buy American" provisions, under the same idea of what's good for their workers and good business, would that have any effect on the President's thinking?"

"Snake oil analyzed shows that it is a bit more about enhydris chinensis, the Chinese water snake. Apparently, it is a rich source of Eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), an omega-3 fatty acid, which the human body converts into natural pain killers, such as series 3 Prostaglandins."

"This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: “I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.” Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle — the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity — that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man’s political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking — of a snake-oil salesman’s mysticism; one gets the public figure’s relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home."

"In the Middle Ages people took potions for their ailments. In the 19th century they took snake oil. Citizens of today’s shiny, technological age are too modern for that. They take antioxidants and extract of cactus instead."

"Clark Stanley reached into a sack, plucked out a snake, slit it open and plunged it into boiling water. When the fat rose to the top, he skimmed it off and used it on the spot to create 'Stanley's Snake Oil,' a liniment that was immediately snapped up by the throng that had gathered to watch the spectacle. Little wonder. After all, Stanley had proclaimed that the liniment would cure rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lumbago, sore throat, frostbite and even toothache."

"The shamans are forever yacking about their snake-oil "miracles." I prefer the Real McCoy — a pregnant woman."

"The powers of the placebo are so strong that it may be morally wrong to call homeopathy a lie because the moment you say it then a placebo falls to pieces and loses its power. I am a great believer in double-blind random testing, which is the basis of all drug testing. People still insist on things like holistic healing and things that have no real basis in evidence because they want it to be true—it’s as simple as that. If you’re dying of cancer or very, very ill, then you’ll cling to a straw. I feel pretty dark thoughts about the kind of people who throw straws at drowning, dying men and women, and I’m sure most of us would agree it’s a pretty lousy thing to do. Some of these people perhaps believe in the snake oil they sell or allow themselves to believe in it. That’s why James Randi is so good, because he knows what magicians know: if you do a card trick on someone, they will report that it was unbelievable, they describe the effect the magician wanted, and they miss out all the steps in between that seemed irrelevant because the magician made them irrelevant, so they didn’t notice them. People will swear that a clairvoyant mentioned the name of their aunt from nowhere, and they will be astonished if you then play a recording that shows that thirty-two names were said before the aunt’s name, none of which had any effect on them. That’s because they wanted to hear their aunt’s name; they wanted the trick to work, so they forgot all the failures in the same way as people forget all their dreams that have no relevance to their lives, but they mark when they dream of someone they haven’t met for ages that they see the next day. I would be astounded if everyone had coincidences like that—yet people say that is somehow closed-minded of me!"

"Richard Kunin visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to buy such snake oil and analyze it. According to his 1989 analysis published in the Western Journal of Medicine, Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies. Salmon, one of the most popular food sources of omega-3s, contains a maximum of 18 percent EPA, lower than that of snake oil."

"In 1917, the U.S. government actually tested one of the bogus potions sold by Clark Stanley, the “Rattlesnake King,” and called Stanley's Snake Oil. it contained no EPA at all and consisted mostly of mineral oil and red pepper (with a tiny bit of beef fat, camphor, and turpentine thrown in), apparently similar to ingredients found in modern day capcaicin cream that is alleged to provide temporary arthritis relief. Interestingly, genuine snake oil is still sold in traditional Chinese pharmacy stores. A sample brought in San Francisco's Chinatown in 1989 was found to contain 75% of carrier material, such as camphor, and 25% of oil from Chinese water snakes, and 20% of that oil, in turn, was EPA."

"Mr. Speaker, there is an old trick to hawking snake oil. First raise the fear. Then sell to it. That is exactly what the big- union, Washington-based labor bosses are trying to do with their latest advertising campaign of fear and blatant disinformation."

"Look, we're both snake oil salesman to a certain extent, but we do label the show as snake oil here. Isn't there a problem selling snake oil as vitamin tonic?"

"It seems almost incredible, whatever their origin, that remedies of so offensive a character as many of those above given can still retain a place even in the rudest traditional pharmacopoeia, but there seems to be in the uneducated human mind a sort of reverence for or faith in that which is in itself disagreeable or repulsive. This idea apparently rules in- stead of rational judgment in the selection of many popular household remedies in the shape of oils of most loathsome deriva- tion, such as " skunk-oil," " angle-worm oil " (made by slowly rendering earth-worms in the sun), " snake-oil " of various kinds, etc. George Borrow, in that rare idyl of vagabondage, " Lavengro," tells of various encounters with an old herbalist who always car- ried on his back a stout leathern bag, into which he gathered not simples but vipers, whose oil he extracted for medicinal purposes. The faith of this wandering English mediciner and his numerous customers of half a century ago in the viper-oil is quite equaled to-day by that of American frontiersmen in the peculiar virtues of rattlesnake-oil. It is just possible that subtle remedial powers do exist in some of these oils, but it is not easy to ascertain why lard or olive-oil might not take the place of these disgusting un-guents."

"Numerous supplement products have emerged in the market in the last ten years. They range from vitamins and minerals to herbals and hormones. This boom has created an uncertain situation as to the quality and safety of dietary supplements. According to Bruce Silverglade from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, 'the challenge for most consumers is to determine which supplements are beneficial and which are nothing more than 21st-century snake oil--or even dangerous.' That is why this legislation includes authorization of funds for physician and consumer education programs regarding adverse reactions."

"[Jack White] is the showman—the brassy frontman and the snake-oil trader."

"An intellectual hatred is the worst, So let her think opinions are accursed. Have I not seen the loveliest woman born Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn, Because of her opinionated mind Barter that horn and every good By quiet natures understood For an old bellows full of angry wind?"

"when we see a woman bartering her beauty for gold, we look upon such a one as no other than a common prostitute; but she who rewards the passion of some worthy youth with it, gains at the same time our approbation and esteem."