Word: oil
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...lift the heavy grocery bags, let alone do all the work the checkout clerk is being paid for. The same goes for pumping my own gas. Sometimes I yearn for the good old days, when an attendant would not only pump gas but clean the windshield and check the oil too. Companies are more interested in saving money by replacing employees with machines than in making things more efficient for consumers. Anything that makes life simpler and easier is fine, but I don't like the idea of doing the work of employees without being paid. Mary Lou Bryden, Wilmington...
...Even during The Great Depression, Americans managed to scrape together enough nickels to take in escapist fare like Marx Brothers comedies and monster flicks. Box office grosses rose during five of the last seven economic downturns in the U.S. - including the '70s oil crisis and the burst of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s. It's not just a ticket price bump that accounts for the extra dough, either - the total number of movies people see in a year tends to rise in recessionary periods...
...fine with Cassandra's new, cool Prius. Those curly fluorescent bulbs we have are great. And I do think we should replace our plants with cacti, only partly because they seem so much more badass than rosebushes. But I believe our messy oil age will be replaced by better technology, not by a planetary embrace of Luddism. Because really, what's easier--one smart dude figuring out how to run cars on sea monkeys, or convincing all of Asia to never try air-conditioning? Those people eat spicy food...
Worldwide credit crunch? Faltering stock markets? Oil at $110 a barrel? Mere trivialities for the $25 billion yacht industry. Annual sales over the past five years have grown 10% to 15% and show no signs of tanking, thanks to increasing numbers of wealthy buyers from developing countries. In the fiscal year ending September 2007, Sunseeker's sales jumped 18.5%, to $473 million. And other yachtmakers are enjoying similar returns. Italy's Ferretti, for example, saw its production value jump 21% last year, to $1.37 billion...
...Western Europe, where sales are softer. "An explosion in the client base" of high-net-worth individuals is generating sales, says Vincenzo Cannatelli, Ferretti's CEO. These aren't people who flinch at high fuel costs. "Many of our customers are making money from the price of oil," Cannatelli says, chuckling...