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Natasha Singer:

OUR mobile carriers know our locations: where our phones travel during working hours and leisure time, where they reside overnight when we sleep. Verizon Wireless even sells demographic profiles of customer groups — including ZIP codes for where they “live, work, shop and more” — to marketers. But when I called my wireless providers, Verizon and T-Mobile, last week in search of data on my comings and goings, call-center agents told me that their companies didn’t share customers’ own location logs with them without a subpoena.
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Miguel Co

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Consolidated Edison monitors my household’s energy consumption and provides a chart of monthly utility use. But when I sought more granular information, so I could learn which of my recharging devices gobbles up the most electricity, I found that Con Ed doesn’t automatically provide customers with data about hourly or even daily use. Robert McGee, a spokesman for Con Ed, suggested that I might go down to the basement once an hour and check the meter myself.

Then there is my health club, which keeps track of my visits through swipes of my membership card. Yet when I recently asked for an online log of those visits, I was offered a one-time printout for the year — if I were willing to wait a half-hour.

Heading Out:

We have reached, I would suppose, a period of complacency in the perception of the coming of Peak Oil. We are in a period where, as recent posts have shown, the promises of bountiful supply are built on increasingly tenuous propositions. Unfortunately, the evolving story of the mess that we are heading into is at a point where the critical aspects of the problem rate minor paragraphs in articles that largely talk about something else. And the potential of the fossil fuels that lie within shale have commentators drooling over the benefits that will come from this abundant resource. Unfortunately, within this euphoria there are sufficient concerns that need airing, since overall, the situation has not changed that much since the Hirsch Report was published, just over eight years ago.

Jaison R. Abel and Richard Deitz:

Although the unemployment rate of workers with a college degree has remained well below average since the Great Recession, there is growing concern that college graduates are increasingly underemployed—that is, working in a job that does not require a college degree or the skills acquired through their chosen field of study. Our recent New York Fed staff report indicates that one important factor affecting the ability of workers to find jobs that match their skills is where they look for a job. In particular, we show that looking for a job in big cities, which have larger and thicker local labor markets (that is, bigger markets with many buyers and sellers), can give workers a better chance to find a job that fits their skills.

Theoretical research in urban economics suggests that the large and thick local labor markets found in big cities can increase the likelihood of job matching and improve the quality of these matches. These benefits arise because big cities have more job openings and offer a wider variety of job opportunities that can potentially fit the skills of different workers. In addition, a larger and thicker local labor market makes it easier and less costly for workers to search for jobs.

Andy Dunn:

In two decades of e-commerce in the US, we have produced only two standalone e-commerce companies of meaningful enterprise value: Amazon and eBay. One went public in 1997, the other in 1998. We haven’t had an IPO of an e-commerce company that has gotten to a two billion of market cap in fifteen years, let alone double digit billions.

Yet Marc Andreessen is predicting the death of traditional retail as e-commerce “eats the world.”

What gives?

The problem with e-commerce is that the joy of the consumer experience, extraordinary top-line growth, and market share theft are not yet met by strong business fundamentals for standalone e-commerce players.

If you’re selling other people’s brands, you are competing not via a local group of competitors but with everyone. In this type of market, you might imagine having one large national winner. You might imagine that winner is ruthless about scale and cost, and is run by a visionary leadership team who realize they can build a huge company by being extremely long-term focused. Such a company might not make real money for a long time, but when it does, though the margins will be thin, it will be incredibly powerful.