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To: Ish who wrote (22398)	6/8/1999 4:00:00 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24894

So that's what killed my little junipers. Don't think they will make it but I need to spray them again. Stones came in. FINALLY. My guy will look over them this evening to see if they are any good. If he likes what he sees, he will get someone to come in Friday or Saturday to make paths and put in mulch. I desperately need the mulch. It's been cold but dry wind blows and there is very little rain. M.

To: Ish who wrote (22398)	6/9/1999 2:10:00 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24894

Zinga, Bill, we are cyber-jockeys. How 'bout that!!! Why We Buy, The Science of Shopping Excerpts from a review by Patricia T. O'Conner "The author, Paco Underhill, is a former urban geographer who has made it his business to lurk in supermarkets and bookshops and department stores to observe "shoppers in situ." His idea of a good time is to stalk the cereal aisle or the produce section and count the number of men (not very many) who check the price of an item before tossing it into the grocery cart. Teams of "trackers" from his consulting firm catch consumers in the act of looking, touching, sniffing, weighing, comparing, trying on, buying." (He must have visited Costco) "He reminds us just how much discomfort consumers have come to accept. In too many stores, products are hard to locate, badly labeled, difficult to examine and tedious to pay for….. Underhill describes a litany of commercial crimes: A drugstore in Minneapolis is still pushing suntan lotions in October….Then there's the lingerie department with no seating, so men wait for their wives and girlfriends by perching on a wide windowsill – right next to a Wonderbra display. Now, please. What woman is going to examine a bust-enhancing contraption in front of an audience of men? …..In fact, Underhill's observations about the sexes, if somewhat exaggerated, are the most interesting in the book……(Men are even buying their own underwear these days, he reports, though as a rule they still don't know their sizes. He describes one male shopper pausing before a display of briefs and surreptitiously pulling out his waistband to check.) Meanwhile, women, the truly "heroic shoppers," are buying more durable goods, electronics and household fix-it items than ever before, as smarter retailers are beginning to realize. Underhll suggests that the decline of the neighborhood hardware store and the rise of Home Depot have more to do with sex than with the price of wing nuts. Home Depot, he says, has demasculinized hardware and made it friendlier and less threatening, not only to women but to klutzy men." (Undehill is kewel. He even surfed the web) "There's always the Internet….But on-line shopping sites are inept and confusing, he says. Not every Web retailer is Amazon.com, "The Internet is never going to seriously challenge reality-based retailing," he writes. Can you smell a ripe peach on line? Can you accidentally discover a shoe that feels so good you impulsively take three pair?" What buyers miss on line are "the sensual, experiential aspects of shopping---the worldly pleasures that normal people love, but cyberjockeys scorn. That's why they're cyberjockeys." From The New York Times Book Review Summer Reading, June 6, 1999, p.10