The Power of Retail

While the general market for books is declining, books for children have seen increases in the recent past. Specialized children’s books and gifts are a great sector to be in and retailers that are enjoying a wave of popularity, thanks to products like the My Adventure Book range which are personalized stories with the child’s name, age and details about friends incorporated into the book. Some of the more popular titles include Disney’s Cars, Princess and Pirates etc. Besides books, there are lot of other products like rulers, pencils, labels, lunch boxes etc that can all be personalized.

My upstairs neighbor had a baby sometime back is has the usual complaints that go along with such a time, lack of sleep, lack of personal time, lack of going out time and so on. If it isn’t the dark circles under eyes, it’s the sheer lack of time to do anything by or for oneself at all. Forget about reading a magazine or updating one’s Facebook page or any such thing. It’s all about the baby, after all! It’s a completely life changing experience and everyone goes through it, but as much as she is enjoying it, she is also kind of enjoying complaining about it. And so life goes on!

So much work has been going on here, plumbing work, tile work and so forth. The landlord has been very helpful and has organized a team of people to sort out our recent leakage. It was the wierdest thing..no one could figure out what the hell was happening, but it was a really pain for me, I had endless backaches from the clean up. In the process we changed the tiles in the bath and put in new ones instead of having a bathtub, which was never used as a bathtub. And since it was such a huge one, the space feels so much bigger now. It looks much, much nicer.

Coupon sites are a huge trend in the retail industry these days. No one wants to pay regular prices and why not, consumers all know of the huge margins that most retailers have and want to make their money stretch as far as possible. RetailMeNot is one of the newer entrants to the coupon scene and has been around only for 6 months, but has over 1 million visitors every month who have contributed 35,000 coupons that can be used online. I was surprised to see so many target coupon code options for discounts ranging from 10% off to $5 off a $50 order at their site. A really cool feature of the site is a firefox extension that can be downloaded, so that it reminds you to enter a coupon code whenever you are buying something online. If you want alerts in your email, you can sign up with the Hot coupons newsletter, which can be selected for a single retailer or for all of them combined.

We’ve been considering moving to a new place for a while, but really didn’t get too serious about it since we like where we live, despite the few recurring problems. Every so often the rents go down or new flats come on the market and we get tempted to go take a look and see if something really appeals to us, but really are not moved enough to make the move. From what all we have seen, one thing is for sure, where ever we go we would need to get one of these flat panel mount since the rooms, especially the bedrooms are quite tiny. The flat TV’s would be a really help in freeing up floor space, and all one would need is some kind of shelf to store DVDs etc. But where would the DVD player go? I think some of the new TV’s have them built in as well, and that would be really, really nice for us!