This morning’s spin through the WSJ site turned up several good finds, including Jonah Lehrer’s piece on how nice guys actually do finish first…and then turn into jerks when they’re the bosses. The next thing I clicked on was a piece by Ray A. Smith about “smart clothes” that change color when the wearer sweats or helps her monitor vital signs and diet.

Lehrer quotes Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California:

When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.” Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

And Smith tells us that folks at North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles are working hard in the lab to develop sensor-laden fabric that tells the wearer when blood pressure or pulse rates are rising. He also shares the good news that a wicking, waterproof suit may be coming to a haberdashery near you, and even better, a Japanese company is pushing posture-enhancing underpants.

This last bit of news is especially gratifying, since the people who labor in the vineyards of unmentionables have not brought us any real innovative products since the days of edible undies. (Which, being very high in carbs, never had a chance.)

Now, what I want to see is clothing that keeps the nice guy from turning into a fool.

“Idiocy wicking” — yeah, that’s the ticket.

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You just know the first time some bright young banker proposed this in a meeting she was met with an appalled silence. Well, times change and even Big Banks do nice little things for customers every couple of years. This is one.

Reading this I was reminded of calling up a bankcard company some years ago and asking them to lower my credit limit. They had no mechanism, no paper form, no policy. But because it was a credit union and customer-service people were empowered to solve problems, the nice person on the phone figured out a way. It was a key part of getting myself out of some pretty deep debt. (I wrote about it in 1997, here, for the Seattle Times in “Debt Lite: Shedding ugly pounds of plastic.”)

I stopped myself from reading to the end of the NYT story or looking into it more deeply because I didn’t want to get to the part where the inevitable “service charges” get described.

The banking world is like one big fishing trip. We small customers are the fish and yes, now and then they do practice catch-and-release. They’re waiting for us to get big enough to make a decent meal. But, hey, enjoy the swim in the meantime.

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I saw a commercial this morning pushing their new Visa card that carries a terrific premium….one whole piece of luggage travels for free if you use the card to book a flight!

(I know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t one of those rich-people perks for frequent flyers. Anyone with a pulse and a willingness to charge stuff can get this card.)

More good news: I hear through my excellent network of sources that many other savvy businesses are following suit. Watch your email for new quick-approval charge and debit cards offers that include fabulous premiums.

Use those new cards for…

–a meal in your fave bistro… and get free toilet paper in the restroom! (Platinum cardholders get 2 free paper towels.)

–a trip to the emergency room…and get five squirts of hand-sanitizer!

–a trendy haircut…and they’ll rinse that shampoo out!

–your cellphone bill…and you can use the # key around the clock!

I haven’t confirmed it yet, but I’ve heard rumors that there’s a House/Senate Visa. You get a point for each dollar spent. When you get to 30,000 you can send email directly to your elected officials’ offices and ask tough questions. (One question per household. Some restrictions apply.)

Delta should be proud. Look what they’ve started.

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It is still like crossing a big country covered in forests of brightly colored plastic storage bins and coffee tables made of blond wood. Every item sold in the place has a name, presumably in Swedish, a language which seems a lot like English only with more consonants per word and a sound like a sneeze thrown in here and there.

There are people wandering around Portland’s IKEA who I’m pretty sure went in during the holidays of December 2008 and never left. They’ve existed entirely on Swedish meatballs and lingonberry juice since then. And they still don’t know how to put together an entertainment center.

In any event, all of this is just an excuse to post the photo I took today looking down on what had to be a half-acre of shopping carts. Even if every cart-pusher only buys a single 100-percent cotton pillowcase, IKEA will have a very good quarter.

Gathering of the Carts

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Some of you other book-lovers share my guilty fantasizing about getting a Kindle. Right?

Like you, I’m sold on the technology, which I could get either as the Kindle proper or as an iPhone ap. What could be cooler than deciding I want a book and being able to get it instantly?

I’m hesitating only because of Powell’s Books–the country’s best bookstore which has its huge mothership on the edge of downtown Portland, and is the destination for a significant chunk of my disposable income. Anything that could wound or shorten the life of this great company worries me.

Sooner or later, though, I’m going to give in. I’ll be just like my friends who so proudly declared “I don’t own a cellphone,” only to find themselves late for something important while stuck behind one of Portland’s raised bridges during its leisurely upppppp and downnnnnnn to let a ship pass under.

Technology has a way of twining itself around your legs like kudzu, no matter how determinedly you swing the scythe.

So, here’s my idea: Create a BookTithe option on each digital book purchase. It can work just like that Presidential election campaign question on the 1040 tax form. Do you want to contribute to your favorite independent bookstore? Check this box.

Now, true, this contribution is real, out-of-the-wallet dough, not the seemingly abstract money to the Presidential election fund.  And also true that the ten percent I send to Powell’s is not going to make up for the $10 or $25 I didn’t spend on a book there. But it’s better than nothing. And if I spend the usual $9.99 for the Kindle book (typically a lower price than a new actual book)  I can surely afford kicking in some of the savings to a bricks-and-mortar store of my choosing. Plus, it’s no threat to Amazon, B&N and the other giants of the electronic-book world.

No matter how many bells and whistles they put on electronic readers, we still need real stores. Browsing, buying and selling old books is vital activity. How else can I find that treasure of a new, unknown author? No amount of clicking through lists is every going to have the soothing properties of wandering Powell’s aisles. I’d love to be able to buy a book in the middle of some insomniac night…but the ability to do so shouldn’t replace the bookstore.

It can’t be too hard to set this up. The person who built the Kindle must be looking for work by now, surely.

--Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett, TypeLikeTheWind.com

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Three examples are rolling around in my head, one big and well reported, the other two are smaller.

A New York Times story by Nick Bunkley reports that General Motors and Chrysler, after showing 2,000 auto dealers the door last year, are getting some up-close-and-personal attention from the feds. The automakers sent the dealers packing as part of a monster bankruptcy proceeding. But they didn’t reckon with the number of family-owned dealerships willing to call foul.

This isn’t just about money. As the son of one Utah auto-sales dynasty said:  “My mom and dad want their honor back as much as anything…It’s the ultimate showing of disloyalty, after all the years we’ve been loyal to them, to take our stores.”

This is a situation to watch. If the feds slap the automakers and forbid such sweeping “layoffs” and closures, it will dramatically affect bankruptcy reorganizations. Whether that benefits consumers remains to be seen.

The smaller, yet insidious, other examples: I’ve now heard from a few people about what I call the “work-now, pay-later” approach. It’s simple. You the employee put in two or three months at your new job…and THEN you get your first paycheck.

The first person who told me about this practice was a broker in a large Bay Area brokerage; an experienced and successful transplant from a Pacific Northwest firm. He waited three months for the first check…no small challenge when moving to spendy San Francisco. The next story that wafted my way came from a fellow freelancer, in this case an award-winning journalist of considerable stature. She’s writing for one of the biggest news sites on the planet…and the first paycheck came two months after she started.

And this:

An international cosmetic company, let’s call it Terrific Skin Co.,  places its employees at counters in upscale department stores. These workers are in an odd netherland: Not employed by Terrific Skin Co., its huge parent company, nor by the department store.

Instead, a third party, a “staffing agency,” employs them as temporary workers. They have contracts, but the terms all favor the employer. As a result, the Terrific Skin Co. salespeople are often let go without any reason or warning. They may not even be eligible for earned vacation time or anticipated benefits if the axe falls early in their tenure.

This business model is cropping up more often since the economy tanked. It allows operations like Terrific Skin Co. to staff their counters with top-drawer supervisors (licensed skin-care experts in this example) during holidays and sales, then send them packing when things slow down. This model is one that adapts easily to any number of employment scenarios, from department-store counters to basements full of software-code writers.

Worker bees getting delayed paychecks and staffing-agency casualties: Take a leaf from the book of the auto-dealership victims. Tweet, blog, out your employers; complain at city and state levels. Tell the rest of us so we stop buying whatever it is your cheesy bosses are selling.

(Second Update: Check out this blog item from NYTimes about low-wage workers getting routinely cheated.)

(Third update.)

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In the past the only way to know how these cards worked was to read and decode the disclosures that come with the bill. What a handy word, disclosure. It’s derived from Latin roots meaning “dense, impenetrable jargon in 4-point type.”

Since the last round of changes to credit-card regulations, however, we have greatly improved “transparency,” meaning less Byzantine code about “grace periods” and obscured interest rates.

We do indeed have clearer info at our fingertips. As proof, I offer this quote from my January Macy’s bill:

“As a result of the minimum INTEREST CHARGE of $2.00 being applied to your revolving account, the actual ANNUAL PERCENTAGE RATE charged on that account is 60.84%.”

(The capitalization is theirs. What better way to be transparent than to use uppercase letters, right?)

I don’t want to sound ungrateful. I do appreciate the clarity of that “60.84%” spelled out in type large enough to read. I appreciated it right through my nose with the half-cup of coffee I inhaled as I read the bill for the first time.

And I do appreciate Macy’s. If you’ve had a charge account at this mother-of-all-department-store-chains in the past, you know they bend over backwards to make it easy for you to buy things and feel smugly special. Coupons, cardholder sale days, even a “Star” club for those of us who really know how to shop. The Macy’s charge-account marketing people do everything but pick us up and drive us to the January white sale.

Now they have embarked on a breathtakingly clever strategy. It works this way:

(1) On Monday you charge $180 worth of stuff.

(2) On Wednesday you pay the bill in full online.

(3) Approximately two weeks later you get a bill that pretends you didn’t pay yet. The bill is for $180 and a $2 “interest charge.” (Remember, the payment was not late.)

(4) All of this is kosher because they spell out the interest rate associated with this out-of-nowhere interest charge.

When you dial them up to complain, the folks living on the other side of the world who answer such calls will assure you that the $2 will be credited back to you next month.

Thoughtlessly you go online and transfer another $2 to keep the account current. Only later it dawns on you that you’ve sent Macy’s a two-buck tip and asked them to keep it safe for a month, then give it back as a credit towards more stuff in their store.

I know: No one with a real job would dog this issue for a measly $2. And I won’t punish you by recreating the dialogue I had with the polite customer-service agent sitting 14 time-zones away. The bottom line is that refusing to pay the $2 is pretty much pissing into the wind. Feels good for a second, and then….not.

So, the choices are clear: Cancel your card and give up those discount coupons. Or resort to an Abbie Hoffman-like  gesture and pay the interest charge in some annoying way, such as sending a box of pennies or transferring an odd overpayment, like $2.02, via your online bill payer.  Or pay $1.98 today and .05 two days later. Yeah, way to mess with that computer’s mind!

It won’t diffuse the little wallet bomb, but you’ll feel better having lobbed one back over the fence.

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Along about September, my mailbox began to fill with those ever-smiling, smartly dressed families. These folks live in spacious, well-appointed homes and they have everything, absolutely everything: puppies on monogrammed dog beds, log-filled fireplaces, backyard ski hills, attractive multi-generational gatherings in which no one is groping anyone else’s spouse or dropping the good china.

Yet they aren’t snobbish, you can tell. These are people who are just grateful to be living in a time and place when every man, woman, and child is entitled to a full wardrobe of plush flannel sleepwear. It makes sense. No one sleeping in one of those polished oak sleigh-beds would be caught dead in a ratty blue t-shirt from the Kerry campaign.

These folks have drawstring sweatpants—with the original drawstrings—that are inevitably slimming. Their slippers match their robes. There are never any white splotches on the front of those terrycloth robes from errant toothpaste spittle.

A lot of the middle-aged women are confident enough to let their hair go gray, and you have to admire that. We could all learn something from these gals. Despite their lack of age-fighting salon time, not one of their chisel-featured men ever seems to have a much-younger partner hanging on his arm, or a passel of second-round kids who will be in junior high when he is 80.

The kids who do show up in these tableaux are dazzling. Not one needs cripplingly expensive orthodontia. It’s hard to know for sure, but it doesn’t seem likely that any of them have head lice.

The catalogs don’t stop coming, of course. But once the holiday season is over, things just aren’t the same. People spend less time at home. Puppies grow into dogs. Flannel sleepwear gives way to brushed pima cotton. It’s just a few weeks until the bathing-suit catalogs come out.

Now there’s a bunch of shallow phonies. Don’t even get me started.

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But my watch battery died and that night’s cake recipe called for chocolate chips…and Freddy’s is the place where one can find both necessities. In fact, this particular store is so big that it has a full-size jewelry store inside it.

There was a queue for the watch-repair man, a very tall fellow with a German accent, who was attracting the sort of attention usually reserved for a magician. He changed watch batteries, untangled gold chains, attached poodle-shaped charms to bracelets.

I was shocked to see that people were tipping him. This is not a big gratuity town; a parking valet outside the swanky Benson Hotel told me he can tell locals from visitors: locals are the ones who say, “Darn! I only have a five..catch you next time.”

When my turn came, I could see why the tips were flowing: the watch-fixer opened my battered Seiko, removed the battery, replaced it, put the thing together again. Elapsed time: 2 minutes. Cost: $10.

He didn’t sit down, but bent over a work bench behind a low glass wall, moving his elegant hands with the grace and speed of a surgeon or a pianist.

Each time he completed a task, he quoted the price, took the money and gave a slight, courtly bow.

It isn’t easy to appear dignified when hemmed in by half-price poinsettias and talking over a recording of Alvin & the Chipmunks singing “Jingle Bells,” but he managed.

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In “Should e-books be copy protected?” he mulls the rising storm around Kindles, Nooks, and the like. If you have a Kindle library of books, should you be able to switch to another e-book gadget and drag all your literary luggage along with you? And, what about passing that book to a buddy who then doesn’t have to pay for it?

I’m fine with moving an e-book from one e-reader to another. It’s like moving a book to a new shelf. Should I be able to pass it on to a friend without paying again? Well, yes. How is that different from lending a printed book to a buddy?

But what about the enterprising folks who pirate and sell the book online for a fraction of the “official” price? Those people we need to send to the electronic woodshed for sure. Of course, we all learned some lessons from the music-piracy mess. Controlling media sharing is pretty much a joke. It’s like catching a greased pig–possible, but laughably difficult.

Here’s what I’m waiting for: Some big macher in this debate to jump up and yell, “Hey! A lot of book-loving, round-the-clock readers are willing to pay for titles! Let’s ask some of them how they’d like to do it!” We rabid readers will rise to the occasion.

I imagine a future in which I make regular PayPal-like payments for increments of reading material — a kind of electronic punch card. Yes, the impoverished student next door will still download pirated stuff for free, but so what? She’s been standing in the aisles at Powell’s reading the stuff without buying it anyway.

Bookworms turn and unite! Pay for your pleasure!

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