Yet Another Thing I Wrote

For a regular client (I’m usually just editing posts over there rather than writing them). It’s part of a new feature we’re testing:

Stuff We Love is a collection of Wise Bread bloggers’ favorite products and services, the stuff we use and know and trust. These are the things we recommend to friends and family when they ask — and sometimes when they don’t.

This one’s about the Easy Walk Harness, and I really do love it. So does my dog Doughty. Here’s a snippet:

What’s Great About It

The Easy Walk looks like all those other dog harnesses you’ve seen that loop over the back, under the chest, and across the breastbone. With those, the leash attaches to a ring on the dog’s back, the whole setup sort of like a draft horse’s harness. In fact, while those harnesses prevent the dog from choking itself, they make pulling easier, while also encouraging the dog’s instinct to pull.

It Prevents Pulling

Instead, on the Easy Walk, the leash attaches to the harness with a ring on the breastbone strap. The dog is still secure in the harness and still protected from choking. However, attaching at the breastbone makes pulling more difficult because there’s much less to pull against. Plus, whenever the dog pulls, the effect is to turn the dog in toward the handler’s legs and feet, no place a dog wants to go.

Put those two effects together and suddenly you’re the neighborhood’s model dog-walker.

A Thing I Wrote: Market Clones

Hey it’s a post I wrote for another site. Read it, it’s fun.

A recent question posted to “AskMeFi” — the popular crowd sourced question and answer subsite of Metafilter.com — asked users to suggest products that were priced differently, depending on market and intended use. The example offered was food-grade mineral oil, which is costly when marketed and sold as butcher block oil, but inexpensive when marketed and sold as a laxative (as much as $1.74 per ounce versus as little as $.29 per ounce).

Same product, different market, different intended use, different price. The next time I buy a bottle of butcher block oil, I’ll visit RiteAid instead of Williams-Sonoma.

How many other bargains like this are out there?