If, like me, you’ve been skeptical of Amazon’s steadfast refusal to disclose just how many Kindles it’s actually sold, you’re not alone:

It’s in Amazon’s best interest to keep Kindle sales details under wraps, said Michael Norris of Simba Information, a research firm that covers the media and publishing industries.

“They can keep this perception of being the market leader without releasing the details,” Norris said. “It’s interesting to sit through Amazon earnings calls and nobody pushes for Kindle details. It’s as if people are trained not to ask.”

In general, e-books net Amazon more profit versus physical books, Norris said. He points to an “amusing” July press release that said the company sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books.

“A lot of the Kindle bestsellers cost 25 cents — of course they’re going to sell better than hardcovers for $14,” Norris said.

“They’re comparing apples to Apple Jacks,” he added. “This kind of message management is beyond normal corporate public relations. And now I’ve gotten so used to it that I’m becoming suspicious of any stats they release.”

I’m sure Amazon has sold a good volume of Kindles by now. But I’m sure they’re not selling like hotcakes — it’s only after all the price cuts and heavy marketing that they started to move. If these truly were ever a hot item, Amazon would have been crowing long and loud about how fast they were flying off the digital shelves, just as any company with a similar best-selling tech device would. Their silence speaks volumes.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen evidence around me of how little penetration Kindles have had. It took a solid six months after the e-reader went on sale, before I saw one “in the wild” here in New York — and this is a prime territory for such a device. Meanwhile, I spied my first iPad being toted around within hours of its sales release. That’s a bit apples-to-oranges, in that there are several Apple Stores locally, and so there wouldn’t be the same lag in mail-order delivery. But still, I think it’s reflective enough of the reality that Amazon is trying to hide.

All told, the push for these dedicated e-readers feels like a race to the bottom. The now-standard notebook computers will morph into iPad-like designs, making other third-screen devices (other than phones) superfluous. Amazon and the other entrants in that space can cook the numbers all they like toward that end, but that won’t change the eventual outcome.

I don’t listen to enough radio to give much of a damn about the medium. But one trend has me puzzled: What’s with applying identity-like brandnames to individual stations?

Many radio station names are basically mnemonic devices for remembering the call letters — stations like KROQ in Los Angeles (“K-Rock”) or New York’s WHTZ (“W-Hits”) — and some even manage to turn the mnemonic into a brand, as did San Francisco’s KLLC, known as “Alice,” a name that goes beyond the call letters to effectively evoke its “chick rock” brand identity as well as referencing Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice (their in-studio webcam is called the “Looking Glass”) and the lyrics of “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane (“Go ask Alice…”).

A growing trend, I think, is that more and more radio stations are beginning to realize that there’s no law requiring them to be named after their call letters, so you get stations like San Francisco’s KSAN calling themselves “The Bone,” a name related more to their hard classic rock format and brand identity than their call letters (which, typically, just relate to the local area). When a station has an evocative name, it has more than just call letters or a handy way to remember the call letters — it has a brand. And since radio is now such a competitive big media business, brands are more important than ever. So The Bone’s listeners are called “Boneheads” and KFOG’s are called “Fogheads,” and all kinds of promotion is done playing-off the names.

The local New York examples that come to mind: The Breeze 107.1 (hardly unique, as I’m betting there are a few hundred easy listening stations across the land that use the same name); The Peak 107.1 (Adult Album Alternative format, whatever that’s supposed to be); and The Wolf 94.3 (upstate-oriented country music). The trend is probably more prevalent on non-music format stations, chiefly news and talk.

Music stations are so homogenized, with the same songs on virtual repeat for days/months/years, that some kind of station-based branding is the only way to build listener loyalty. What makes it unique is how it’s applied strictly on the local level — by necessity, but still. Television networks do the same thing, especially when they’re niche (Spike TV, Cooking Channel, etc.); but they have the additional advantage of exclusive content to distinguish themselves. With radio, outside of format restrictions, the same song can be heard on a range of stations.

The big constraint in communicating these brands: They’re always accompanied by the station frequency. That’s another necessity, because the goal is to have people know where to tune in. But it’s an awkward pitch. To me, it sounds goofy: “Music festival sponsored by one-oh-two-point-five The Sound!”.

But again, radio is largely dead to me, so maybe I’m immune to this marketing angle. The charms of station-monikering escape me.

Along with bringing down the economy, we have another thing to thank the housing bubble for: Underwater mortgages that prevent people from moving to where new jobs are.

The labor migration rate is down sharply since the start of the economic downturn in 2007 and is just half the rate of a decade earlier, according to William H. Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer who has analyzed Internal Revenue Service and census data.

“Overall, interstate migration has reached its lowest point since World War II,” Frey said.

Being locked into a house was my biggest fear during the hard-sell portion of the residential boom, and this makes me glad that I never did take the plunge. If I had, I might not have left Florida for New York, and definitely would have been the worst for it professionally. Consider me one of the unscathed survivors of the late great Ownership Society.

Is it a sign of continuing lean times when your shoe-cobbling services take twice as long as normal?

Back in May, I took a pair of Allen Edmond shoes back to the store for repairs. They have this Recrafting service, where they ship the footwear back to their warehouse in Wisconsin for a redo of the sole, heel, etc. It’s a bit of a pain waiting weeks for the turnaround, but I’ve done it before, and have been more than satisfied with the results. It’s also one of the few ways in which I exercise frugality where fashion is concerned.

Normally, the turnaround time is about a month. Like I said, a pain, but bearable. This particular time, though, it took a solid two months. I found that to be a bit excessive. When I called to check up on them (and confirm that they hadn’t lost the shoes, or dogged it on shipping them out in the first place), one of the offhand excuses I was given was that the central warehouse was “backed up”.

That got me thinking: It makes sense that, so close to the major economic downturn that was/is the Great Recession, more people would extend the life of their dress shoes rather than chuck them for new pairs. So more shoes get shipped back to Allen Edmond’s mothership for Recrafting, for a third of the cost of new kicks. That creates a backlog, and it takes longer to get those worked-upon shoes back.

Regardless of the reason, I wasn’t happy to be waiting eight weeks to get my brown lace-ups back. I did finally get them today, and my inconvenience was assuaged a bit by the inclusion of a $35 giftcard — which I fully expect to use, as I was planning on getting a new pair of Allen Edmonds anyway (although probably not at the same midtown location, all things considered). I don’t know if this in-store discount apology offering validates or dashes my theory of greater economic forces at play; but I’m sticking with it.

I’m irrationally skeptical of mobile banking, but a new breed of check-scanning iPhone apps definitely could sway me:

Earlier this month, JPMorgan Chase updated its iPhone app to let customers electronically deposit checks. To make a deposit, customers photograph the front and back of the check with the phone’s built-in camera, then transmit the image to their account.

I’ve managed to minimize the paper-based payments amongst my accounts receivable, but I still have to run out and deposit the occasional check. Not that that’s a hassle, as practically every street corner around here has a full-service ATM that accepts paper checks for deposit.

In short, I probably don’t really need to snap photos on my iPhone to drop funds into my account. But the concept is so neat that, well, I just wanna. So this is all it takes to throw e-fiscal overcautiousness to the wind…

For companies wary of employee-stock packages that dilute overall corporate shares, phantom stocks — a promise to pay a cash bonus that is directly tied to the value of a company’s stock — are the new incentivization option.

Because it turns out that the worker ants aren’t particularly interested in equity anyway:

Research has also shown that employees who are rewarded with actual shares tend to sell it shortly after they take hold of them. Companies, as a result, have less of a need to pay employees with stock if their workers aren’t holding on to the shares.

Not surprising, in this post-crash volatile market, that they’d want cold hard cash instead of company paper that (sadly) could be worth pennies tomorrow. A win-win all around.

The corporate world could always up the ante in this fiscal nebulousness: Instead of tying bonuses to actual stock prices, peg it to the company’s shadow revenue. Phantoms thrive in the shadow realms, after all.

Until recently, a “sugary beverage tax” of one-penny-per-ounce seemed destined to become law in New York State. But apparently, counter-lobbying by the American Beverage Association killed the proposed bill, and supposedly more persuasive advocacy by the industry turned the tide:

Next, this TV ad from New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes, a name calculated to make the blood boil. A mother unpacks groceries in the kitchen as her son mixes a powdered lemonade, one of the drinks that would be taxed. “Tell Albany to trim their budget fat and leave our groceries alone,” the mother says…

It is too early for a final tally of the money spent on advertising and lobbying by either side in New York. But by most accounts, the beverage industry has outspent the pro-tax side and has succeeded in painting the soda tax as a naked money grab cleverly disguised as a health policy.

I question how convincing the ABA’s advertising was, at least with the general public. I caught their commercials a few times; frankly, I wouldn’t have been aware of the tax if hadn’t. I found the ads — including the one referenced above — to be particularly grating and transparently self-serving. In fact, I came away from them more in favor of the tax, just because the industry opposition was so blunt. I think this is more a case of the state legislators getting swayed by their corporate constituents, prompting the burial of this bill. Democracy at work, right?

I guess that’s just me, though. I don’t froth at the mouth every time a new tax is proposed. Plus, I don’t consume all that many soft drinks. So that makes me the silent minority in this arena.

A recent spate of high-profile defective consumer product recalls is shining a light on the effectiveness of the public-safety procedure:

Government regulators, retailers, manufacturers and consumer experts are concerned that recall notices have become so frequent across a range of goods — foods, consumer products, cars — that the public is suffering from “recall fatigue.”

In many cases, people simply ignore urgent calls to destroy or return defective goods. One recent study found that 12 percent of Americans who knew they had recalled food at home ate it anyway…

The problem is twofold: Some people never learn that a product they own has been recalled, and others know they have a recalled product but don’t think anything bad will happen.

This seems to be setting up the institution of a data-drilled direct notification system for making sure people get the message on hazardous purchases. If you paid for groceries with a credit card, then your personal info is directly linked to those product details, and presumably you could be contacted directly, versus having to pay attention to government alerts. The next step is to embed safeguards directly into the product: Like a car that won’t run after the “recall” switch has been flipped on by the manufacturer, etc.

Naturally, this raises the usual privacy issues. Since this deals with public safety, it’d gain easier acceptance, even though the intrusiveness doesn’t really change. And ultimately, a percentage of people will still ignore or not get the message and get burned anyway; the point is to minimize that percentage.

Being a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I was raised to Just Say No to drugs.

But you can make an exception when it’s over-the-counter pharmaceuticals, right? I never was crystal-clear on that whole concept. If so, I’m sure the free samples that Help Remedies just sent me pass muster.

Yep, on the strength of last month’s post about Help’s unique packaging and marketing presentation, the company sent me some freebies. An email from their CEO, Richard Fine, extended the offer and subsequently hooked me up. I had a choice in what to receive; since I don’t have any chronic ailments that need relief, I opted for Help’s preventative measures:

- The help, I’ve cut myself package of 12 large and small bandages

- The help, I have an aching body package of 16 ibuprofen pills

Better safe than sorry, right? I feel compelled to injure myself, just so I can make use of this first-aid windfall. But I’ll keep my self-destructive impulses in check, and likewise keep this minor stash in reserve.

I do appreciate the outreach by Help. Indeed, the unconventional packets are fun to hold and behold, and they conveniently take up minimal space in the medicine cabinet. I have every confidence that their contents will fix me up, whenever I need to crack open their biodegradable shells.

Included with the samples was a thin little booklet that details Help’s business-operating philosophy. I really wish a version of it was online, because it’s a real hoot: Quirky brand messaging that’s reminiscent, in tone, of 19th Century snake-oil medicine sales pitches. Only in Help’s case, it’s utilized to debunk the modern variations of those pitches. Here’s a prime passage:

In the world of drugs and pharmacies there are stories about technologically complicated pills that, after entering your body and gliding aerodynamically down your throat, proceed to detonate and break into thousands of pieces. Those pieces then proceed to seek out the various bodily organs they must attend to, like thousands of tiny intelligent tadpoles (see figure 5-1).

In fact, pills are composed entirely of non-thinking matter, so nothing like this could possibly happen. Our pills are as technologically complicated as a piece of bread.

It’s product language that’s consistent, and adorns Help’s packaging, making for a memorable product. I don’t know if Help really will change the way OTC drugs are marketed toward consumers, but they’re giving it a good go. I still expect to see these little pill-packs spread beyond New York (Help’s home turf, right out of their Broadway HQ), and into the Targets of the world.

Have you blazed a wide swath of rotten credit? Rather than go through the unpleasantness of rebuilding your financial health, just have a kid or two and then leech off their virgin credit scores:

If a parent has a child’s social security number, they can do almost anything — no matter how young the child is — because a credit check does not reveal a person’s age, said Robert Siciliano, CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com…

Because of the availability of personal information to close family members, more than half of identity theft cases are typically committed by parents, he said.

“Parents who are compromising their child’s identity are generally doing it because of a need, like a single mom whose electric bill is too high and the lights get turned off, so the path of least resistance is putting it under the baby’s name,” said Siciliano. “But then a light bulb goes off in her head and she opens a mobile phone account, and the next thing you know she has a credit card under her kid’s name or gets a car loan,” he said.

Way to start Junior off in life, with a subpar credit score before s/he is out of diapers. If this isn’t child abuse, I don’t know what is.

Today I received my first-ever payment check from Yahoo! Publisher Network. It’s also my last-ever check from them, as Y! shuttered its answer to Google AdSense not long ago.

My grand total? Five dollars, eighty-five cents.

That’s four years after signing up to be a Network partner. But my tenure was short-lived: I swapped in the YPN ads for a brief test-run, immediately saw that they weren’t serving up anything of value, and promptly ended my experiment. I never did tinker with them again; AdSense pays well enough that, frankly, it’s not worth my time trying out blog-advertising alternatives.

I never bothered to close my YPN account. I would receive infrequent auto-messages over the years. From those, and casual news-tracking, I knew that Yahoo!’s foray into ad syndication was doing poorly. I figured it would end soon enough, and now it has.

And I’ve got a paper check to show for it. Hardly worth the cost of printing it and mailing it out, but there you go. I will indeed deposit it. My dreams of Internet millions obviously won’t involve the Sunnyvale company.

Yesterday, Ford Motor Company officially announced it was killing off its 72-year-old Mercury line.

Which means that everyone’s favorite Mercury Girl disappears along with the brand. Not that Jill Wagner particularly needs the car-commercial gig these days, as she’s moved on to other acting projects. Still, her stint as automotive spokeswoman was a notable mini-phenomenon.

Which makes me wonder if I shouldn’t take the hint, and shutter up this blog as well. Despite being five years old, my post that “revealed” Wagner as the “gotta put Mercury on your list” model still accounts for a healthy chunk of traffic to this site. Once the commercials stop, the visitors hereabouts will stop too. After that, really, what’s the point?

I suppose I’ll just have to craft some other throwaway post that will catch fire. Something non-vehicular, preferably. But definitely with female ogling — this is the Internet, after all.

I never knew that there’s a acronym name for frivolously-bullying lawsuits filed by deep-pocketed organizations against individuals:

Some first amendment lawyers see the case differently. They consider the lawsuit an example of the latest incarnation of a decades-old legal maneuver known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or Slapp.

The label has traditionally referred to meritless defamation suits filed by businesses or government officials against citizens who speak out against them. The plaintiffs are not necessarily expecting to succeed — most do not — but rather to intimidate critics who are inclined to back down when confronted with the prospect of a long, expensive court battle.

Basically, litigation by attrition. Fortunately, a lot of states have anti-Slapp laws on the books. So depending on where you live, you can yelp and tweet your rants with wild abandon, without worrying about being dragged into court.

Top Hat. Junk Shot. Top Kill.

I’m starting to suspect that British Petroleum* is purposely whiffing on these attempts to plug up its undersea Gulf of Mexico oil well leak, just so it can keep its code-name conjurers employed. What’s the next snappy failure-label, “Crude Hole”?

While browsing through a Duane Reade last week, I noticed this odd-looking rack of wares on an end-aisle. The hanging unit invites you over with a simple exhortation: “What’s Wrong?”. The individual packets provide the guiding-tandem answer: “Help I have a headache”, “Help I can’t sleep”, “Help I’ve cut myself”, etc.

At the time, I wasn’t suffering from any of the addressed ailments. So I moved on. But I kept a mental note on the display, with its unconventionally simple and colorful packaging.

It’s the product of Help Remedies, a quirky little startup in generic pharmaceuticals. It’s a New York-based operation, which explains their Duane Reade placement (although the look-and-feel of their output put me more in mind of something you’d find in Target, so don’t be surprised to find Help products there soon enough). There’s a distinct philosophy at play here:

[Design firm] ChappsMalina was approached by Help Remedies, a New York City-based startup with a big idea: to revolutionize over-the-counter medication. The resulting line consists of 6 products that are designed to guide you through the medication aisle with ease and comfort. From “help, I have a headache” to “help, I can’t sleep”, instead of yelling “FAST ACTING!” and “EXTRA STRENGTH”, the brand whispers in lower case empathy.

The product approach was simple; keep it clean and minimal with enough coding to clearly articulate my needs in a moment of crisis as directly as possible. Instead of lab coats, ChappsMalina chose to communicate content through the soft topography of the packaging material, that is reminiscent of a soft white pillow. To reinforce the Help Remedies message of responsibility, we designed the packaging using a highly innovative combination of paper pulp and co-molded corn-based plastic, making it completely compostable and a first of its kind.

They’re not kidding about that compostable claim; in fact, they’re tracking the mold- and worm-filled bio-breakdown of the material online (and via Twitter, of course).

Help certainly got my attention, which is the primary point. Then again, I didn’t buy anything. Even if I had been in the market for some ibuprofen or bandages that day, the offbeat presentation struck me as just a little too un-drugstore. If I’m hurting, I appreciate the empathy, but also want the straightforward relief. I don’t get that by wondering what’s up with the kooky sales pitch.

What’s the solution for all the extra housing inventory left over from the real estate market collapse? Simple: Build even more houses.

Land and labor costs have fallen significantly, so the newest homes are competitively priced. Some of the boom-era homes, meanwhile, are in developments that feel like ghost towns. And many Americans will always believe the latest model of something is their only option, an attitude builders are doing their utmost to reinforce.

In Phoenix, a billboard for Fulton Homes summed up the builders’ marketing approach. “Does your foreclosure have tenants?” it asks, next to a picture of a mammoth cockroach.

Brent Anderson, a marketing executive with another Southwest builder, Meritage Homes, said it bought 713 lots in stricken Arizona last year, and was on the verge of starting construction in a new Phoenix community called Lyon’s Gate.

“We’re building them because we’re selling them,” Mr. Anderson said. “Our customers wouldn’t care if there were 50 homes in an established neighborhood of 1980 or 1990 vintage, all foreclosed, empty and for sale at $10,000 less. They want new. And what are we going to do, let someone else build it?”

One of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, right? (Actually, it’s not, but let’s not get in the way of a good quip!)

It’s amusing that marketing is largely driving this impulse for the latest model of new-construction dwelling, similar to automobile buying patterns. Too bad houses aren’t designed to be as disposable; and that existing properties stand to be mired in depressed valuations for decades to come, thanks to this over-building binge.

CBS added a prime-grade bit of corporate-speak to our lexicon yesterday:

The [schedule] changes, and the five new shows, are part of what Kelly Kahl, senior executive VP for CBS primetime, calls “aggressive stablity.”

“Every year the goal is to make the schedule stronger,” Kahl says. “To make the schedule stronger, you have to put new shows on the air. That usually means clearing out some space, some of the lower-hanging fruit. Most of the shows we canceled were either ones that had the biggest declines year to year or were simply the lowest-rated shows. It’s the network circle of life.”

“Aggressive stability”. Basically presented as a proactive strategy to stave off eventual decline, but really, it smacks of change just for the sake of change. With a dose of self-denial about it, to boot. Does this stuff actually make sense when it comes out of a suit’s mouth, or does it need to be repeated endlessly until any meaning is beside the point?

Here’s how Yahoo! is justifying its $90-some million acquisition of Associated Content:

Yahoo said the deal for Associated Content will provide “high quality, personally relevant content” for its 600 million online users… “Combining our world-class editorial team with Associated Content’s makes this a game-changer,” said Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s chief executive, in a statement. “Together, we’ll create more content around what we know our users care about.”

Did Bartz, or anyone at Y!, ever bother to read an entry or two out of Associated Content? No amount of editorial oversight can refine that quagmire of a content mill. Far from “high quality”, Yahoo! just bought the online-media equivalent of junk bonds.

Although I do understand the mechanics behind any such deal: The low-grade words on the pages matter less than the visitors that linger over them. AC must have particularly strong traffic metrics, and those eyeballs are what Y! wants, for ad-delivery purposes. It’s that audience-acquisition aspect that brings to mind the long-ago purchase of TV fansite Jump The Shark by TV Guide as a parallel — to wit, that quantity trumps quality when it comes to Web media properties. Especially on-the-cheap user-generated quantity.

Bottom line, look for Yahoo! to eventually absorb and bury Associated Content, after going through the obligatory efforts to monetize the brand. The millions of dollars spent will certainly benefit someone, but it won’t be Yahoo!.

The wildest day on Wall Street ever, which saw routinely $40 stocks plunge down to a penny a share, appears to have been caused by the slip of a trader’s fat finger:

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a “b” for billion instead of an “m” for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble, a component in the Dow…

Sources tell CNBC the erroneous trade may have been made at Citigroup. “We, along with the rest of the financial industry, are investigating to find the source of today’s market volatility,” Citigroup said in a statement. “At this point we have no evidence that Citi was involved in any erroneous transaction.”

Could be that there’s no math requirement for earning your Series 7 license. Nor a typing course. Both of which appear to be crucial in ensuring a smoothly-functioning economy.

It worked for the Greeks once before, so why not try the oldschool Trojan tactic on this present-day crisis?

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of [the EU's $145-billion bailout of Greece's economy].

I can’t imagine that modern European technocrats are any brighter than their ancient predecessors in Troy. So I wouldn’t bet against this new gift horse. Given the home country’s broke status, I doubt there’s anything ominous lurking inside anyway.

Recently, a nearby drinking establishment shut down abruptly. I took it as a sign that the Great Recession had indeed taken a toll, despite national indications that bars and taverns had been weathering the bad economy decently.

This week, what should open up in the same location? A bartending school.

In one way, it’s a sensible repurposing of the facilities, assuming all the bar fixtures are still in place (I can’t really tell, peering from the outside). What better setting in which to learn how to mix drinks and draw draft beers?

On the other hand: It seems silly to offer to produce job-seeking barkeeps, from the very site where a bar failed. The failure of which should indicate that there are already a surplus of bartenders running around. Doesn’t suggest a real need for schooling in the profession. What are the odds of a second consecutive shuttering?