From Fox News:

QUEENS, N.Y. —  In just a month since its official launch, a new Web site MadeInUSA has signed up more than 350,000 U.S.-based companies looking to encourage consumers to “be American and buy American.”Creators of the site hope to ensure that as many jobs as possible stay in the U.S. rather than be outsourced overseas.

For 50 years now, Mountain and Sackett, a tie manufacturer with a plant in Long Island City, N.Y., has made ties mostly by hand. Some 50 employees, some who have been with the company for decades, stitch meticulously for 40 hours a week. They get health care benefits too.

With a growing number of Americans opting to buy cheaper garments that are imported from outside the country — Mountain and Sackett has had to be creative in its approach to generating sales, all while trying to keep its workforce employed and the family atmosphere of the company in tact.

It takes an hour and a half to make a tie by hand at Mountain and Sacketts. Nick Sackett, the president of the company, says if he replaced some of the workforce with equipment, the ties could be made in a minute and a half. But many Americans value the hand-sewn product made right here in the U.S. So Sackett and his partner, John Mountain, logged onto MadeInUSA and registered their business for free, trying to get the word out.

MadeInUSA is based on the principle that “patriotic spending” keeps hard-earned dollars, made on American jobs, in America.

The Web site can help you find furniture, pet supplies, apparel and wine, to name a few, all at the click of a mouse.

Click here for more on MadeInUSA.com.

As recession-wary Americans adapt to a new frugality, Japan offers a peek at how thrift can take lasting hold of a consumer society, to disastrous effect.

The economic malaise that plagued Japan from the 1990s until the early 2000s brought stunted wages and depressed stock prices, turning free-spending consumers into misers and making them dead weight on Japan’s economy.

A case study of Japan’s economy may not be off-base, but well, just how far can you draw the parallel?

Complete article at the NYT>>

Found via Woot blog who found it via The Consumerist.

There’s plenty of debate out there about thrift and household debt and savings, and what the numbers all mean.

Another view from the web:

Even without tariffs as a cause, in 2008, copper fell from $4.00 a pound to $1.27 a pound in 5 months. This reflects the depression and trade interruption. This is not a price deflation due to Keynesian animal spirits. It is not so much due to a change in expectations as it is to a drop in demand. That drop in demand is not due to a sudden burst of thrift. We did not suddenly get plunged into depression because people stopped buying. The reverse is more nearly the case. The boom economy produced goods that people did not want to buy at prices that cover costs. The depression economy is the inevitable result, because businesses will not continue to produce goods that can’t be sold at prices high enough to cover costs.

Imagine that nearly everyone is put to work for a month by businesses that build high-priced houses induced by government stimulus. While that is happening, fewer people are employed baking bread. At the end of the month, people try to buy bread and find that there is not enough. Meanwhile, they do not want to buy the high-priced houses. There are too many of those. Home prices fall. Bread prices rise. (Consumer goods prices rose 0.3 percent in January.) The workers in homebuilding are laid off. Home prices decline. Lenders find their home loans going bad. The economy goes into an adjustment that is a recession in order to correct the imbalance. The economy needs more bread factories and bread makers. Left to its own devices, the adjustment will occur. The possibility of making profits by making bread will see to that. The losses in homebuilding will see to it that fewer homes are built.

But suppose that the government steps in with a stimulus bill and hires labor to pave roads. The adjustment toward bread making is delayed. At first overall production seems to improve, counting the money spent on roads. But eventually there is a surplus of paved roads and not enough bread. The bread makers try to hire labor. They compete with the road pavers. Wages rise. The economy sees price inflation. It still does not have the bread it wants.

There is much more to it, of course. But this is the idea. Deflation in prices is not a problem. It is part of the solution.

Wal-Mart was the only seller of Act II Caramel Popcorn around here, and they stopped carrying it a few months ago. The nice thing about Act II was that their box had 3 bags, whereas Orville’s has 2. Still, a good sale will make it worth it. And yes, Kroger is the only seller of Orville’s Caramel around here.

Both brands are by ConAgra foods, so I suspect there’s little difference. Orville’s probably use different popcorn, but the caramel wafer is the same.

I tried looking up caramel popcorn recipes, but most look too hard — i.e., take too long. I’m an instant gratifaction sort of girl when it comes to caramel. This one looks to be the easiest, but it doesn’t call for vanilla, corn or maple syrup, or baking soda like other recipes did. I’m loathe to try it because of that — just doesn’t sound as tasty.

(All the lights represent different units of time, so it’s possible to tell hour and minutes from the configuration. The only thing it doesn’t seem to do is indicate a.m. or p.m. — although I suppose it would be hard to get those mixed up unless you had a long nap in the middle of the day and didn’t know if the dimness meant it was 6 a.m. or 6 p.m.)

From Chao & Eero Jewel:
Quotation Earrings

Talk Pendant

Discovered via Geek Sugar