Holy Woot Batman and Greenspan's Underwear

I'm so giddy this morning I don't know where to start. Although it may be the sugar rush from the chocolate milk I'm downing this morning, but yet I digress.

So I have a number of topics to share today but I on the ride into work today I read 2 different news stories that I feel the need to share (whether you like it or not!).

The first is that my beloved WOOT.com has entered into the dark side of the Force making a deal with Yahoo to offer a secondary Woot deal of the Day exclusively through yahooShopping. For those of you who don't know WOOT (and judging by the lack of Rumba vacuums you own, there are a lot of you) it is a website created a few years back where they sell one item a day for a really good price until the item sells out. Sometimes it takes 5 min (ala: Bag O' Crap) and sometimes it can run the whole 24 hours until they repeat the process the next day with a new item. Here is the Wikipedia entry.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand as Woot founder, Jason Toon, put it a posting to the site's forum last night:

...this Yahoo! partnership gives us some room to experiment. We can push our product envelope, stretch our marketing muscles, and hook whole new demographic cohorts on the Woot narcotic. We can follow our mentally unstable muses without inflicting any pain on you guys (well, any more than usual, anyway). All the classic Woot identifying features – daily deals, bustling forums, obnoxious humor – will still be fully present and accounted for.

While it's a good opportunity for a site I love to visit, it always seems that these "small" partnerships usually become bigger with the smaller unique company folding into the
conforming, nondescript corporate conglomerate (strange to think of Yahoo in that way....never would have guessed it ten years ago...scary!) I'm going to take a wait and see attitude on this one but there better still be lots of Bag O' Crap or I'm bolting to a new site (possibly Girls Gone Wild, the retirement years.)

OK, On to the other big news of the day which involves former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan "Yes I'm married to Andrea Mitchell" Greenspan and his love of men's underwear. On yesterdays "The Bryant Park Project" on NPR, correspondent Robert Krulwich explained the Chairman's use of men's underwear to predict economic downturns and even recessions. The gist of it (you can read/hear the whole thing here) is that Greenspan thinks that the last thing that family's look to replace/buy new are men's underwear. He arguers, correctly, that there are plenty of other more important clothing items to buy such as kids clothes (they grow), women's clothes (styles change all the time), etc. The last think to look at is men's underwear. Greenspan points out that the sale of men's underwear (both briefs and boxers I think, but I need some clarification from the underwear industry about which is a better seller), stays relatively even except in bad times when it dips down. He says that "...if men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants...that is almost always a sort of foreshadow of 'here comes trouble.'"

Now are far be it from me to argue with a man who not only takes baths on a regular basis (long time Imus joke) but also can call out the president (note no caps for bush) but ....well...no wait actually he's right. I don't think I've ever been down on my luck to the point where I can't replace my underwear (and hopefully I'll never have to be) but there have been plenty of times where I didn't have a clean pair to wear and had to make the tough choice between going "commando" or just reversing out a "slightly" used pair. Humm....maybe he has something here. In fact when the Fed meets next month I want them to release not only numbers on the Core Interest Rate but also on Underwear Sales. (There's probably a better punchline but I'm wearing a clear pair today so I don't care.)