Lessons Learned from the Netflix Price Hike

July 28th, 2011

Last week Netflix raised their rates, increasing the price of some plans by as much as sixty percent. Where before a plan with one DVD out at a time and unlimited streaming was $9.99 per month, the same service will now cost $15.98. Ouch. The outrage online was swift and furious. Customers were losing a great deal and weren’t shy about bashing Netflix on Facebook and blogs. As someone who uses Netflix heavily as a replacement for cable, I was among the outraged. (I’m still deciding what to do with my subscription: scale back, keep it as is, or cancel altogether.) Once I got over my shock I realized that Netflix’s action has reminded me of a few key financial/consumer lessons that apply to all kinds of goods and services.

A price increase might not break the budget, but it does have to be considered: No, an extra $6 per month isn’t going to break my budget. I can a

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Tags: Price, Price Hike

South Korea’s longest banking strike: Rebels without a cause

July 26th, 2011

What do we want? A gerontocracy

A SIGN on the ground floor of SC First Bank’s headquarters in Seoul reads “Here for good”. “Here for better or worse” might be more appropriate. The boss of Standard Chartered’s Korean subsidiary, Richard Hill, is locked in a battle with unionised workers over the introduction of performance-related pay. Over 2,500 of his 6,500 staff have been on strike since June 27th, making this the longest walkout in Korean banking history.

The idea of remunerating staff on their performance is hardly revolutionary, other parts of the South Korean economy included. But Korean bank staff are typically paid and promoted according to age and time served. The result

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Paying to Save Money

July 24th, 2011


A coworker of mine recently decided to get her finances in order.

She admitted her debt troubles and her concerns that they don’t have anything saved for the future, let alone emergencies. While I applaud her desire to fix things, I question the method and the seriousness of her effort.

I had to hide a chuckle when she showed up in the office after lunch the other day with two big bags. One was from Office Max and the other was from Barnes and Noble. She proceeded to show us all of her purchases: Quicken, a ledger, six books on personal finance, and a blank journal. S

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Economics focus: Cut or loose

July 13th, 2011

TO LISTEN to Barack Obama, there is no trade-off between supporting a weak economy and tackling America’s strained public finances. “We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing,” the president said on July 2nd. Big spending cuts are necessary, he added, to “give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs”. Perhaps. A successful outcome to talks between Congress and the White House over a multi-trillion-dollar package of budget cuts is clearly preferable to a chaotic debt default. Then again, public-sector job losses helped drive the unemployment rate up to 9.2% in June, which didn’t obviously do a lot for confidence.

Mr Ob

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Tags: Cut, Cut Loose

Europe’s policy options : Huge mess, untidy solutions

July 11th, 2011

IT MUST have been a satisfying letter to write. European finance ministers meeting in Brussels at the start of this week got a stern wigging from George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister. Insisting that his country had done its bit by pushing through painful reforms, he condemned the “indecisiveness and errors” of the European response to the crisis: “a cacophony of voices and views” had prevailed, “creating more panic than security”.

Mr Papandreou’s critique rings true but there is no denying the complexity of the threefold problem confronting European leaders, who are said to be planning an emergency summit in Brussels. First, they m

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