Eideard

Who says teenagers don’t listen to their parents?

Public health researchers recently published an intriguing report about the indoor tanning habits of college students, based on a survey of more than 200 female students at East Tennessee State University…

The researchers, Mary Kate Baker, a doctoral student, along with Joel James Hillhouse and Xuefeng Liu, wanted to find out two basic pieces of information. First, how old were the students when they had started indoor tanning? And second, who did they go with on their first visit to a tanning parlor?

Often, it turns out, it was their mothers.

Indoor tanning, it seems, has become in many families a mother-daughter bonding ritual, like shopping or going to the hairdresser…

What was interesting is that for the girls who were introduced to tanning by their mothers, the habit really took hold. College students whose mothers introduced them to indoor tanning were almost five times as likely as the others to be heavy tanners once they were in college. The heavy tanners used indoor tanning at least twice a month or more.

The ones who went with their mothers first also started around age 14, on average, two years earlier than the others, who started around age 16.

Skin doctors are worried about the link between indoor tanning and skin cancer. The World Health Organization has labeled indoor tanning a Class 1 carcinogen, the same class as tobacco. And some research suggests that indoor tanning may even be addictive.

Alas, information – in this instance – doesn’t stand up well against a culture that presumes white people darkening their skin makes them more attractive.

Starbucks’ coffee drinks have become synonymous with the high costs consumers are cutting back on these days, but at least the Wi-Fi connections in its stores will no longer require a credit card.

Starting July 1, Starbucks will let anyone connect to its WiFi network for free. This fall, the company will add a content network called Starbucks Digital Network, in partnership with Yahoo and other sites, which will include local content you won’t be able to read anywhere else. Both offerings will be free.

“Free Wi-Fi is in my mind just the price of admission — we want to create … new sources of content that you can only get at Starbucks,” chairman and president and CEO Howard Schulz told the Wired Business Conference. “This is a thing that doesn’t exist in any other consumer marketplace in America.”

Starbucks hopes to make money from these initiatives indirectly, by “enhancing the experience” and making the content “so compelling that it drives incremental traffic,” said Schulz…

McDonalds has free Wi-Fi too, of course, as does just about every other coffee place in the country other than Starbucks. Schulz admitted that both of those stratas have been competing with Starbucks on coffee as well as internet service, with McDonalds stealing bargain-oriented customers and boutique independent coffee shops in urban areas grabbing some of its loyal epicures…

The network will include free online access to the Wall Street Journal, with a percentage of subscription revenue generated when coffee drinkers decide they want to access those articles elsewhere, too.

Good for a frugal geek like me. There are two Starbucks coffee shops within the broad pairing of shopping centers where we shop for most everything but groceries. I access AT&T nothing.

Meantime, I surf and suck down caffeine.

Behold, a new YouTube star rises. There’s nothing terribly new about seeing a teenage girl use YouTube to discuss the world of beauty and fashion. But Blair Fowler, a sixteen-year-old girl whose name seems directly drawn from the pages of Sweet Valley High, has been written up twice this week for her use of video to not only share her favorite fashions, but monetize her YouTube fame with promotional deals.

Fowler was first cited as an example of the teen girl phenomenon of putting your “hauls” (ie — purchases from shopping trips) online, and in fact she is a great point person to consider in the examination of this trend, given her intense yet approachable commentary on what she acquired.

She is reputed to be making over $100K a year already – selling into a demographic wholly composed of 13 to 17-year-old girls. That’s the amount directly dealing with her YouTube videos.

My wife just commented, “Now, we know why we’re climbing out of the recession!”

A clothing store on Robertson Boulevard is causing a stir with a new window display — a nativity scene with very sexual undertones.

Madison clothing store, located at W. 3rd Street and Robertson Boulevard, has put up a nativity scene featuring a scantily-clad Virgin Mary sprawled on the ground with a glittery, golden baby Jesus in her lap…

Some people have complained about the display, calling it risqué.

A group that works across the street from the store said sex, their religion and shopping in a single tableau is too much for them to handle.

Said one woman, “The way they have presented Mary in a very provocative position with a baby in her crotch, and that baby is supposed to be Jesus… No.”

If my understanding of the history of clothing in the Middle East is accurate, it’s not especially likely that too many folks were wearing underwear back then, anyway. Right?

In “We Are What We Consume: The Influence of Food Consumption on Consumer Impulsivity,” Arul Mishra and Himanshu Mishra show how the types of food consumed during Thanksgiving can influence impulsive choices; for instance whether consumers buy on sales the next day or not.

“Most of us don’t connect what we eat to our subsequent choices,” Arul Mishra said. “However, our research shows that types of food, such as turkey, make people behave less impulsively. Such people are less likely to buy products available at a discount and will find it easier to restrain their impulsive urges and choices.”

In other words, if you’re looking to spend less this holiday season, eat a good Thanksgiving meal…

The combination of tryptophan-rich foods like turkey and carbohydrates like mashed potatoes increases levels of serotonin, a chemical produced in the brain that affects many functions in the central nervous system, including mood, appetite, sleep and some cognition.

Serotonin levels have also been shown to correlate with impulsive behaviors. The researchers conclude people who have increased levels of serotonin, such as someone who recently ate a large turkey dinner, are less prone to impulsive purchases. Most meats (e.g., turkey, chicken) and tofu have the amino-acid tryptophan that synthesizes serotonin.

Har! Any excuse will do – like being too sleepy to get up the next morning and stand in line at Best Buy.

Only breadsticks can save us, now!

Like many food-obsessed people, I collect things. In my case, I collect mostly useless things. For example, I have a drawer full of plastic chopsticks from my local Vietnamese takeaway that I am convinced will come in handy should I decide to make noodles for 40 surprise dinner guests or if I plan to fashion a representation of The Gherkin on a rainy Sunday afternoon when Bolton Wanderers v West Bromwich is the only football on the box.

I have a library of takeaway menus stretching back at least 18 years and most of which, I am sure, refer to places that have rightly long since closed. I also have a dusty pile of well over 2,000 business cards from restaurants all over the world, which I pick up as a matter of habit and almost never look at again.

However, my favourite collection of all is a rapidly growing list of overheard middle-class foodie lamentations – railings against the general unfairness of life and how it can come between a person and the eating happiness they deserve.

The catalogue was already quite a lengthy one and is growing all the time and the current incumbent at the top of the pile is my brother-in-law, Matt. He is a good northern lad and a long time supporter of Sheffield Wednesday who would definitely mark himself down as being credible on a street level, even if said street was a leafy avenue with nice detached houses. However, during a family holiday in Devon, while scouring the aisles of a sparsely stocked budget supermarket with my nephew and niece in tow he was heard to wail to my sister:

“The children are getting upset. Quick, where are the grissini?”

Fracking hilarious article if you’re a foodie. And I am. I hear remarks like these every Saturday morning on our weekly grocery shopping run.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

Two hours before the doors were set to open Friday morning, a Miami-area Wal-Mart parking lot was full of cars — and possibility. But in a Christmas shopping season in which many Americans were unwilling to spend, even a packed lot doesn’t always translate into holiday cheer for stores.

As stores offered rock-bottom prices and extended return policies, shoppers returned to the malls the day after Christmas. But many were on the hunt for big bargains on specific items or hoping to return unwanted gifts — not looking to splurge.

A common refrain among shoppers Friday, appeared to be searching for a deal unlike any they had seen so far this year.

That kind of focus by shoppers could spell deep trouble for the nation’s stores, which are facing the worst holiday shopping season in decades.

According to preliminary data from SpendingPulse, which tracks purchases paid for by credit card, checks or cash, retail sales fell between 5.5 percent and 8 percent during the holiday season compared with last year. Excluding auto and gas sales, they fell 2 percent to 4 percent, according to SpendingPulse.

More people did appear to shop online, particularly in the last two weeks of the season, when storms hit. Online sales dipped just 2.3 percent. The notable exception being Amazon.com.

Our household shops mostly online for years. If geeks don’t know how to do it, who does?

Just as many Web retailers feared, online shoppers are being unusually frugal this holiday season.

During the first 23 days of November, consumers spent $8.19 billion online, a 4 percent drop from the same period last year. That marks the first annual decline since e-commerce took off.

“We thought that things would solidify in November,” said Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore, who said gut-wrenching declines in the stock market and the auto industry crisis “spooked people who might have been thinking the worst was behind us…”

“We have our fingers crossed that the stock market will not go through another 2,000-point meltdown and that the decline in gas prices will build up some cumulative buying power,” Mr. Fulgoni said. “However, if there is any more significant bad news just over the horizon, all bets are off.”

What shopping? I’m doing none.

I’ve been online for 25 years. Banking, shopping, all moved online as they became available – and secure. Still ain’t wasting money on getting a new HDTV 6 inches wider than the one we already own.

I once lived in rural France for half a year, in a region of southern Burgundy known to epicures for its fine cattle and wine. It was also known for being the French boondocks – we got the feeling from Parisian friends that they thought we were living somewhere vaguely akin to a suburb of Binghamton, New York…

My husband and I weren’t particularly green at the time, which was seven years ago. Nor was anyone else in that rural part of France, as far as we could tell. What they were was frugal. “Everyone has porcupines in their pockets,” a neighbor there once told me – in other words, it really hurt to reach for their wallets. That mattered when it came to plastic bags, because you had to pay for them at the store.

The store, E.Leclerc, was a sprawling emporium that sold household goods along with groceries – think Wal-Mart or Tesco, only with an entire aisle devoted to 23 varieties of yogurt. The store bags were plastic, but a thickish plastic, with sturdy handles. We always intended to put the empty ones back in the car for the next trip, but every once in a while, they were left behind in the pantry, and then we’d find ourselves in a bind.

The bags were maybe 30 cents each, but it wasn’t just the financial hit that made us waste all that time turning around to go home. It was shame.

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These are the sort of jets he pilots

A male Japanese air force major caught naked while shopping for women’s underwear has been suspended from his duties for 10 days.

The man, on his way home from a late-night farewell party for a colleague in early September, stripped off his clothes behind a convenience store before going in and buying panties and pantyhose.

“He had just his wallet and his shoes on him,” said the spokeswoman from the Matsushima air base in Miyagi, northern Japan.

“He thought it would be funny if he went into the store stark naked, that it would surprise people.”

It would surprise me.

Maybe it wouldn’t surprise me if I ran a shop next to an RAF base. But, in Japan – sheesh!