Are you selling online?

Holiday retail sales figures reported by MasterCard indicate online shopping growing significantly faster than brick and mortar.  From Direct Marketing News:

December 2010 e-commerce sales increased 17.6% compared to the previous December, representing one of the strongest growth rates seen last year, said Mike Berry, director of industry research at MasterCard SpendingPulse.

Online shopping surged late in the holiday shopping season, with strong sales across categories, according to the organization. A few retail sectors showed slight weaknesses, mostly due to discounts. Electronics, where sales volume increased 1.2%, saw strong unit sales offset by falling prices for big-ticket items such as TVs and laptops.

Meanwhile, apparel sales were up 10.9% and luxury sales increased 8.5% compared to the previous December, according to SpendingPulse. Yet even in those sectors, online sales increased faster than offline. Online electronics sales rose 14% despite price deflation, while Web-based apparel sales were up 28.8%, year-over-year.

Many Finger Lakes retailers still don't have any web presence at all, let alone a growing e-commerce revenue stream. There will never be a better time to get your business online.  We can help.

Cuomo's inaugural address

Andy and the usual suspects

For those of you who forgot to tune in, two quick observations regarding in Andy's speech this afternoon:

The only mention of Upstate in the official transcipt, although we recall do hearing him say something like "high taxes have destroyed Upstate's economy":

Young people all across upstate New York who are leaving because they believe there is no economic future left.

We'd ask our kids if they agreed, but they've already left.

Also, how can the new Governor of the State of New York address our financial crisis without ever speaking the word "union?"

Photo of the day

Cornell's Professor Jacobson hass the photo of the day.

IGY explained

If you weren't keeping up to date with My Weekly Reader back in 1958, you may have been puzzled by Donald Fagen's 1982 hit "I.G.Y. (What a Beautiful World)".  Fagen's first post-Steely Dan solo album, "The Nightfly",  also featured a song about a party in a fallout shelter.  You shouldn't be surprised to learn that "The Nightfly" is still played frequently here at South of 5 and 20.

Greg Sullivan relates 1982's "I.G.Y." to a look back at 2010 New Year's predictions.   He hits the shot from NBA territory:

The IGY was the International Geophysical Year, a kind of nebulous, let's all be scientific together exercise from 1957 to 1958. It hoped that if we assembled all the guys who operated slide rules (then) like we text-message with our thumbs (now), it would function as an “apolitical, non-nationalistic, scientifically oriented entity,” and make a great leap forward in our understanding of the earth and its atmosphere.

Oh well. We’ve gone off the graphite and glitter rails over the earth and its atmosphere since then, but I sleep better knowing that after eighteen months of the scientific and diplomatic version of a college dorm room bull session, the governments of Argentina, Australia Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the USSR, Great Britain and the United States of America solemnly declared they wouldn't put nuclear weapons in Antarctica. Along those lines, I’ve also promised my wife not to get a job giving bikini waxes at the Playboy mansion.

Of course Donald Fagen didn’t mention that before the 90 minutes of undersea rail time, there’d be an additional 90 minutes of groping by a TSA employee holding the same credentials as a sanitation worker and wearing the same rubber gloves they used to frisk a leper ten minutes before. Likewise, Fagen must be forgiven for incorrectly envisioning the ascendance of a kind of robot to make all the big decisions for us. After all, Al Gore only lost the election by a few votes.

You should read Greg's entire post at at Right Network.  

Greg's experiences while supporting his family in rural Maine will sound familiar to anyone living in this area, so go visit his personal blog:  Sippican Cottage. 

$295 million in property tax relief...

Large scale sunflower farming in North Dakota

 ... for taxpayers in North Dakota, that is, thanks to shale energy development.  In a report entitled "go north, young man", the Washington Examiner tells us:

North Dakota’s oil boom has already increased the sparsely settled state’s population by 5 percent, and the director of the state’s Mineral Resources Department predicts that 2,000 new wells (there are now 166 active ones) will be drilled in 2011. Half will be located in a 70-mile radius around Williston, which had to add 1,200 new housing units this year to keep up with demand.

But the state is also looking to the future.

In November, 63 percent of North Dakota voters wisely approved a measure that funnels 30 percent of all oil tax revenues, now at $613 million annually, into a Legacy Fund which cannot be touched until July 1, 2017, at which time it is expected to be about $2 billion and generate $60 million in interest annually for the state's general fund. 

But only interest earned by the fund can be spent by the state. An emergency provision to allocate up to 15 percent of the principle per biennium requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the legislature to ensure that revenues will outlast the oil.

Even as Finger Lakes households open their staggering January tax bills, our self-anointed elites are working overtime to ensure nobody in Central New York ever benefits from any type of boom, energy or otherwise.

Rosie the Riveter, RIP

Geraldine Hoff Doyle, a World War II factory worker whose bandana-wearing image in a wire-service photo is said to have been the model for the woman depicted in the 1942 "We Can Do It!" poster, has died. She was 86. The iconic wartime poster became an enduring symbol of women's power from the Rosie the Riveter era

James Lileks posts the story at Right Network.  Don't miss the portrait of Geraldine at age 17.

Happy New Year!