Wal-Mart Cutting Brands, Opening Itself Up to IP LawEt suit?

Try this article on for size. It's called "DUMPED: Brand Names Fight to Stay in Stores". The basic gist of it is that Wal-Mart is cutting back on the amount of brands that are sold in their stores. Not only that, but they are cutting back in favor of their store brands. The logic they are citing is that the economy is bad and it is more cost effective to stock fewer brands because what customers there are will be bargain hunting, not feature shopping. Thats reasonable and true...but not what they are doing. Hefty, a well known brand, was dropped from the store in favor of the wal-mart brand bags. They were welcomed back when they agreed to manufacture the Wal-Mart brand bags for a new lower cost. That was not an isolated case. It appears that many products have gotten themselves back into the store by doing something for Wal-Mart. Clearly this is not quite what it seems, unless you think it seems Wal-Mart is looking for a new and interesting way to twist suppliers arms and save money. Wal-Mart is huge and they feel no one will stand in their way because they haven't before. I propose that this might bite them in the ass.

I think there will be a huge IP backlash from this. Most of the brands that are being given the boot are commodity brands. Commodity brands have the hardest time differentiating themselves from other brands due to the common nature of the products they make. They will have patented and trademarked anything and everything they can that makes them stand out. Wal-Mart makes it's own versions of many of the successful commodity products that have differentiated themselves with minute details. The commodity brands are going to lose A LOT of money while Wal-Mart sells their products and they get no money because they are not even on the shelves.

The way these store brand generics usually work is that the company who makes the original product doesn't make a fuss when the big stores (CVS, Target, Wal-Mart) copy their products because they do not want the stores to take their brands off the shelves. This is a scare tactic, but it works, and brands don't complain. Now Wal-Mart is removing the brand names from the shelves and keeping the Wal-Mart brand products, leaving the brand names with no incentive not to sue for IP infringement. This isn't just one brand, but a lot of brands. I'm sure there's some form of Captain Planet type of team that could combine powers to be bigger than Wal-Mart in a courtroom. This could get interesting.

Pajama Jeans? Really?

First off, let me say that I am wearing my favorite pajama pants as I write this. That said...I believe these might be a little too much. Meet the Pajama Jean which may or may not be a lot of women's new favorite thing. The basic idea is that these are a hybrid between jeans and pajama pants. They look like the stylish jeans you love (do they?) and feel like the pajama pants you wish you never had to take off.

I have to hand it to the creators of these. They saw an white space in the market. One look at peopleofwalmart.com and many of the students we know (freshman class at 8am anyone?) shows that women are in fact wearing their pajama pants out of the house, happily denying fashion trends for the sake of comfort. Looking at these pajama jeans creates a sort of head smacking "why didn't I think of that" moment, which is a sure sign of success. Of course people who already wear their pajama pants out side of the house would be super excited about these. There's also a market for people who want to be comfortable at home but don't like dressing down to do it. There are hundreds more reasons to wear these. So complete Kudos to the probably soon to be rich creators.

I understand people might want the pajamajean, but I'm still not too happy they exist. They kinda show a new height of laziness for America. We might officially be too lazy to get dressed. Not really, but this is scarily close. I guess when it comes down to it, while personal style is super important, I think the way a person presents themselves is very important. Wearing these might bridge the gap between "I was too busy to dress up today" and "I don't want to dress nicely".

These remind me of the snuggie in many ways. The main similarity to me is that both...just...aren't...necessary. They are things that people might want, but provide no actual benefit other than fitting 1 need that people could very easily not have addressed.

That said, while posting I started thinking how nice these might be on my next international flight...

I'm still scared of them.

Poach Pod: Eggstrodinairy?

I love poached eggs. I could find ways to eat them with every meal...if I could cook them. I've ruined a lot perfectly good eggs in my time trying to poach them. What's more, poaching more than one egg at once is even further beyond my skill.

Enter the Poach Pod. With this, one can supposedly cook perfect poached eggs any time. This classy invention falls under the category of gift. At about 10 dollars for the set, I have passed it up in the past (ironically, probably wasting more than 10 dollars worth of eggs in the process). Be that as it may, my mom thought it was cool, so she surprised me with a set of them.

Theoretically, with these two silicone cups I can poach eggs with ease and leave all of my egg failures in the past.

Initial Thoughts


I like how these things look. They're modern and fun looking. They're dishwasher safe, and I can apparently bake with them if i so choose. Since I've been wanting them for a while, I guess they've done their job in selling themselves.

The instructions seem easy enough. Pretty much boil water an add the cups with eggs in them. I can do that, right?

Poaching

The cooking process starts off simple enough. I put some water on the stove to boil and get the prep work done. The directions tell me to oil the poachers, so I spray a liberal amount of PAM on each cup.

Getting the eggs in the cups was trickier than I thought it would be, but I think it's only because of my personal egg habit. I normally break the eggshell on the side of my frying pan. In this situation, I was pretty far away from my pot of water, and couldn't do that. I also didn't want to get any egg in the water by messing up the crack. I tried whacking the eggs with a knife to break them like I've seen people do. As you can see, I had one success and one failure. The yoke on the left was DOA due to some jagged edges made by my failure to use the knife properly. I figured it would cook anyhow and left it.

Also, the cups are not very stable when putting the eggs in. I did the first one too fast and almost spilled egg all over my counter.

In any case, they were ready to be cooked.




Into the water the eggs went. They looked like lily pads! I put the lid on and cooked them for 4 minutes as specified by the directions. On removing the lid...something had gone wrong. The cups had water in them and there was egg all around the pan, quite like my other failed attempts at poaching. The egg with the intact yolk had submerged itself. It looked like an exceptional poached egg though. The other egg didn't look good at all.

I had fun trying to tip the cups in the pot to get all the water out, while not spilling the egg. Anyhow...

The broken yolk egg was still super runny on the inside for some reason, so I cooked it for a little while longer. The picture above is the "after cooking the hell out of it" picture. It still looked gross. Apparently I still waste an egg with these. I'm pretty sure if I used them again, I wouldn't have a fail egg. I generally don't break yolks.

Result: 1 Perfectly Poached Egg!
Well I'm getting hungry all over again looking at this picture. The egg was perfectly cooked. I would have liked two...but these things happen.

Critiques

1. Shape of the cups: The cups are unstable when putting the eggs in and the three handles make it hard to pick up without tipping. Also, I can't figure out what the holes are for in the cup. Maybe one can tie to top together?
   
2. Type of Pot: I think next time I'll use a deeper pot or a convex lid. The lid may have pushed them down. It's also possible that I was doing too hard of a boil, and that's why it happened.
3. Taste: The egg tastes a little like the silicone cup.
   
4. Cracked yolk=fail?

All in all, if I hadn't messed up the egg and perhaps used the wrong pot, I would have had 2 passable poached eggs. Purists will say I cheated and the shape of the egg isn't correct (it's supposed to look like an organic shape, not a jello mold). I think the biggest benefit is that it is super easy to poach more than one egg at a time.

Final Review
Nifty, but not strictly necessary. Great if a lot of eggs need to be poached at once.