Living in San Francisco as I do, one runs into GAP employees all the time. I even had a roommate who worked at GAP long ago. In 2006, I got into an argument at a friend’s Christmas party with another guest who worked in the GAP’s global marketing department. It began innocently enough, he telling me he worked at GAP, me telling him that I was a former Wall Street retail anaylst. I tend to treat anyone I meet a source of information and so I did press him on more on GAP’s struggles. He was obiliging enough without giving away the store either but at one point and I don’t remember what exactly he said that led me to interject that GAP, Banana Republic and Old Navy are simply lost it if that’s the case. I went on a mini-tirade: you’re overstored, your same-store-sales are in rapid fire decline at Old Navy, tepid at best at GAP and probably slightly positive at Banana but you’ve got H&M taking women’s clothing away from you and if you don’t watch out Zara will take you both down. Your merchandising is just so frankly boring and bland that it’s blah. At that point it became a tit for tat. We’re doing this and this and I would counter H&M has done that already and Zara has opened a store a day this and their model works better because they are always testing. And then the kicker which caused him to just smile and walk away. I said your marketing obviously sucks (hey I was at party not on the job and had been drinking) because Zara does 0 advertising and their same store sales are growing and yours are in negative territory. You guys have lost it.

Today I am happy to report that indeed Zara, a Spanish chain based out La Coruña in northwestern Spain, has overtaken San Francisco-based GAP as the world’s largest clothier. Zara works because they have a tight relationship with suppliers and they test their lines throughout the world. Logistics and communication throughout the chain are the keys to their success. If something is hot and it starts to sell, they then order up. GAP makes an executive decision based on marketing research on fashion trends and then orders massively from its suppliers. If it doesn’t sell, GAP is stuck with massive inventory write-downs. There was a time in the early 1990s when GAP could do no wrong but beginning in 1997-1998 the chain just lost its way.

Other parts of the Zara formula is that their stores are the centre of their advertising. Sharp crisp displays and mid-tier price points. Zara also only does larger downtown stores and no suburban strip malls, that came to be the undoing of the GAP. Zara’s lines are more limited. In truth, Zara is the Banana Republic-killer. That’s what Zara has killed. H&M, the Swedish clothier, in turn has eaten into Old Navy and the mainstream GAP sales.

From the UK Guardian:

Spanish fashion chain Zara has ­expanded so rapidly in recent months that it has overtaken its main US rival Gap to become the world’s largest clothing retailer.

Beloved by proponents of fast-fashion, Zara has spread its reach across the globe at a time when Gap has suffered from plummeting consumer spending in the US.

Inditex, Zara’s parent company, recorded a 9% increase in sales to €2.218bn (£1.7bn) in the first quarter of its financial year. It also benefited from the strength of the euro to edge slightly ahead of Gap which saw its revenues fall by 10% and recorded sales of €2.169bn in the same period.

The difference may be tiny, but ­Inditex claims it is significant: for the first time the Spanish group has inched past its American rival.

The group, whose high street store Zara has led the charge, hopes to consolidate its lead over rivals later in the year as it continues to expand overseas in spite of the economic downturn.

It is three years since Inditex overtook H&M, to become the biggest clothing retailer in Europe. But the rapid growth is nothing new to a company which first started in 1963 in the bedroom of chairman Amancio ­Ortega’s home in Galicia, northwest Spain, making bathrobes.

The first Zara store was opened in 1975, in La Coruña in Galicia. The 1980s saw rapid expansion across Spain, followed by the opening in 1988 of the first Zara store outside Spain, in Porto, Portugal.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Christian Chavagneux and Ronen Palan’s Les Paradis Fiscaux is a great (and mercifully short) introduction to tax heavens, banking secrecy and the offshore financial world. And it’s in French. For my non-French readers, not to worry, hopefully, my review will give enough substantial information… or, y’all could learn French! However, I have preserved what I think are the best quotes in the original language so as to preserve their value.

The book’s central thesis is that the development of offshore financial centers since the 1960s is an integral part of the dynamics of contemporary globalization, both in the financial and productive sectors. Tax heavens are now a pillar without which contemporary economic globalization could not function.

And surprisingly, they have not been studied to the extent that they should have been. For orthodox economic literature, tax heavens are a product of overtaxation in industrialized countries or a simple manifestation of informal economies. Both views are faulty according to Chavagneux and Palan.
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My $99 USD a year dot mac e-mail and world wide web services remain at best intermittent. At times, I can log on, at other times no such luck. Even when I am able to log on, I can’t send emails and even reading them can take minutes to open if the server doesn’t go down which it usually does after 10-15 minutes. Having been a life-long Apple customer, this is not the Apple to which I am accustomed. I have rarely had problems with my dot mac service, now it is a daily travail. So yes, I am pissed.

Computer World takes up my cause with its article MobileMe users seethe over four-day e-mail outage :

Apple Inc.’s MobileMe online service continued to tick off customers today as users blasted the service for outages that have kept them from accessing e-mail for several days.

“I could not receive any e-mail (sending seemed to work OK though) on my MobileMe Mail account between Friday morning CDT and midday on Monday,” reported one of the calmer users, identified only as M&C, on an Apple support forum today. “I still can’t believe Apple [hasn't] posted explanatory information about this on the MobileMe site.”

The support site does include a notice from Apple. “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. We apologize for any inconvenience,” the notice under the “System Status” section reads. The message has been unchanged since Saturday, according to users.

That notice has been taken to heart by customers unable to access their .Mac or MobileMe services: Some subscribers have taken to calling themselves “1%ers.”

“I’m a 1%er (which is bull),” said Joemac1960 on another support thread. “I think a lot of folks who are in the same boat as I am (no e-mail for 3-1/2 days) don’t come to this forum anymore because they know that until the server is fixed its just ’standby to standby.’ ”

Other users were irate, or worse. “This is ******* ridiculous!! 5 days without mail, and I’m even on the shorter side of the delay from others,” said a user tagged as Smellslikecinnamon on another forum. “Is anyone out there ******* awake!! Can’t you at least reach those of us with alternate e-mail addresses outside of Apple, just so we know what the **** is going on?!?!?!”

Apple has had problems migrating subscribers from its original online service, .Mac, to the new MobileMe while cranking up the latter to accommodate existing users and new customers who signed up to take advantage of the iPhone’s new “push” syncing capabilities.

The day before the July 11 iPhone 3G launch, .Mac customers complained about a longer-than-expected outage as Apple shifted to MobileMe. The process was to take just a few hours but stretched through most of a day.

Last week, others blasted Apple for touting all of MobileMe’s synchronization as “push,” or nearly instant, when it wasn’t immediate to and from Macs and PCs on the one hand, and the iPhone and MobileMe servers on the other. Apple issued an apology to users and credited them with an additional 30 days of service for their troubles.

The e-mail problem has some MobileMe customers stressed out and suspicious. “Like most of us, I haven’t had access to my e-mail since Thursday around 1 p.m. and have waited for long periods of time without success to chat with Apple support,” said Joe Holley in a message posted Sunday to the service’s support forum. “It is obvious that they do not have a solution and can’t provide an ETA and that the problem is much larger than the 1% of users they claim. I, like most of us, are feeling that Apple is being less than honest about the % of affected users and scope of the problem.”

Others pointed out that MobileMe is a cornerstone of the iPhone’s push to compete head to head with business-oriented smart phones like Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, but that the reality doesn’t match Apple’s promises. “You know, when BlackBerry goes down that stuff hits the news, the world stops and they fix it lickity split,” said “Vanaman” on the same thread. “This is ridiculous and offensive to those who rely on Apple for a serious service — ‘Enterprise for the rest of us.’ Yeah, right.”

MobileMe was touted as “Exchange for the rest of us” by Apple executives, including CEO Steve Jobs, when it was unveiled in June. The reference was to the new synchronization features it will offer iPhone users who don’t grab mail or update calendars and contacts lists through their companies’ Microsoft Exchange e-mail servers.

The service also provides new Web-based e-mail, contact and scheduling applications, as well as 20GB of storage space, double .Mac’s allowance, for an annual fee of $99.

Apple did not reply to a call for comment on the MobileMe e-mail outage and the service’s continued problems.

All my contacts are gone. Yes, I have a back up but I now have to import them off an older computer and I am not sure how many will have been lost when all is said and done. And as is often the case with Apple, tech support is web-based. And this case, it’s been non-existent. This One Percenter has throw $50,000 at Apple over my lifetime so yes I am still pissed at Apple.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via Context Crawler, thanks to a new article in the American Sociological Review, we should revisit the zombie meme of Opt-Out, the already-debunked idea that women are leaving the workforce to return to homemaking responsibilities. It is a meme that won’t die (hence, the zombie part) because it seems to validate the social conservative and “family values” crowd that women REALLY belong at home with their children and if everyone understood and abide by that, the entire society would be better off.

The correlated belief is that the family is the base institutional structure of society, which has not been true in several centuries, as Stephanie Coontz has aptly demonstrated. But then, social conservatives and “family values experts” are never really bothered by facts and truth. After all, they still maintain that abstinence-only program and virginity pledges work, despite the evidence.

But back to the Opt-Out myth.

According to sociologist Christine Percheski, the author of the ASR article, debunks the myth:

“Despite anecdotal reports of successful working women returning to the home to assume child care responsibilities, less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 leave the workforce for a year or more during their prime childbearing years, according to the study,

Percheski’s research shows that the number of women with young children who work full-time year-round has increased steadily, growing from a rate of 5.6 percent of women born 1926 to 1935 (referred to as the “Baby Boom Parents” by Percheski), to 38.1 percent of women from Generation X (born 1966 to 1975). More professional Generation X mothers of young children were working full-time year-round than their counterparts in any previous generation.

Percheski finds that among mothers of older children (those age 6 to 18), full-time employment is the norm for professional women of Generation X.”

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My posts, my views.

Via the BBC,

“Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns.”

The report in question was drafted by the coalition Rights and Resources Initiative focused on global forest policy. They advocate sustainable management of forestry as well as respects for the people living in and from the forests in their rights not to be forcibly displaced by logging companies who deprive them of their livelihood. As stated in the BBC,

““Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab,” said RRI’s Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.

“It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone.”

Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.

But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests.”

Well, for logging companies and well as the biofuel and ranging sector, there is no problem: let’s just tap into these tropical forests. But this would make climate change worse since deforestation already accounts for 20% of carbon emissions. But the need for both fuel and food has triggered land speculation and whatever the global financial markets want, they usually get. It is a very unequal battle between Big Money and the rights of indigenous people to land.

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Oh, did they screw up. I finally got my e-mail back after 36 hours. Beyond the immense hassle of having been cut off from the world for that time and now the sheer dread of trying to catch up on hundreds of emails, this new MobileMe suite is anything but sweet. All, and I mean all, of my contacts are gone. Since I primarily use Dot Mac as a web-based application off a half dozen computers and not as a mail client application off one computer, having all my web-based contacts now gone is a tad upsetting. Never in my 22 year association with Apple have I been so befuddled and frankly so furious. One can say they pulled a Microsoft.

Some of my contacts are likely gone forever, most are likley spread across various computers and laptops but they were all there on the web-based application because given my travel I could access them wherever whenever to quote my compatriot Shakira. The worst part about Dot Mac is that there is not one person to whom you can talk and get these issues resolved. Everything is web-based. So I now have to send an email and it being Saturday means the earliest I might get a response is Tuesday. To make matters even more bizarre, my appledotmac/login is gone replaced by this redirect which tells me nothing about where to find my login information. I had to do a google search to find the log in and go from there. And then this new system is painfully slow. Opening an email takes minutes, minutes that I don’t have. And then about every five minutes, I get this lovely notice:

Mail Error
Mail is unable to communicate with the MobileMe servers. Check your network connection and reload Mail.

And it doesn’t end there. My iDisk is empty. The icon is still on my desktop but what was in it is gone. Yeah, Apple has some explaining to do.

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Having been a loyal Apple user for over 20 years now, I am thrilled that Apple’s new products have brought financial success to the company. For a while in the mid and late 1990s, many of us were worried about Apple’s survival. Today Apple launched its 3G iPhone. It sold out in Europe in minutes. I will assume that sales are brisk in the Americas as well. The store in San Francisco had people camped out. Kudos to Steve Jobs.

Now for a bone to pick. In conjunction with the new launch of this iPhone, Apple was to launched a suite of services called Mobile Me for its Dot Mac customers like myself. Unfortunately instead, I have been left without email service for 27 hours.

MobileMe web applications not yet available.

The MobileMe transition is underway but is taking longer than expected. While core services such as desktop mail, iDisk and sync are available, the new MobileMe web applications are not yet online. Thank you for your patience as we complete the upgrade.

Die MobileMe Web-Anwendungen noch nicht verfügbar.
Der Übergang zu MobileMe ist im Gange aber dauert länger als erwartet. Während die Hauptfunktionen wie Mail auf dem Desktop, iDisk und die Daten-Synchronisierung völlig funktionsfähig sind, sind die neuen MobileMe Web-Anwendungen noch nicht einsatzbereit. Wir bedauern die Unannehmlichkeiten. Wir arbeiten daran, um MobileMe baldmöglichst zugänglich zu machen.

Les applications web MobileMe ne sont pas encore disponibles.
La transition MobileMe est en cours de réalisation mais elle prend plus longtemps qu’anticipé. Pendant que les services principaux comme Mail dans une application de bureau, iDisk, ainsi que la synchronisation fonctionnent normalement, les nouvelles applications web MobileMe ne sont pas encore en ligne. Veuillez nous excuser pour tout dérangement que cela pourrait vous occasionner. Nous nous efforçons de mettre en service MobileMe dès que possible.

MobileMeのWebアプリケーションはまだご利用いただけません。
現在、MobileMeへの移行作業が行われていますが、当初の予定より作業完了が遅れています。デスクトップのメール、iDisk、シンクなどのサービスはご利用いただけますが、新しいMobileMeのWebアプリケーションのリリースにはもうしばらくお待ちください。ご迷惑をおかけして大変申し訳ありません。

No, my desk top mail services are not available. Please restore them.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Watch this first amazing video. It is 16-minute long but worth every second (and see this BBC background page):

The Bhopal Chemical Disaster: Twenty Years Without Justice

Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster. On December 3, 1984, an accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas.

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Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.

Via Le Monde, everybody hates tax havens but they do not exist at the margins of the global financial system. If anything, they are an integral part of it and every year, billions of dollars land there. They are an integral part of the infrastructure of international finances.

What circulates through tax havens? Clean and dirty money (proceeds from illegal activities that end up there for purposes of money-laundering), tax-evasion money. Tax havens were allowed to prosper by all the economic powers, but now, they are worried because they have realized that these havens make funding terrorism easier and more discreet. In the past months, we also discovered that these place facilitate tax fraud on a grand scale, as the case of Liechtenstein where more than a thousand Western people deposited their funds. So, it is not really a surprise that this topic has come up at the G8 meeting.
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What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo

Today marks the start of the new FISA (Federal Information and Surveillance Act) regime. Your government can spy on you without cause and without a warrant. Tim Ferriss interviews Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers fame, on his thoughts on FISA.

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