Archives For Outdoors

Things to watch in 2012

February 13, 2012 — 1 Comment

I caught up on some reading last weekend, which included JWT.com’s 100 things to watch in 2012.  I pulled out a few for consumer product companies.

Smaller SKU’s

  • What to watch: companies are rolling out with smaller packages to reach lower price points for price-sensitive consumers.
  • What this means for consumer product companies:  increased costs due to proliferating SKU’s and possibly, smaller more frequent shipments, raising shipping costs.

Rising Food Prices

  • What to watch: food prices will continue to rise, outpacing inflation due to wacky weather worldwide.
  • What this means for consumer product companies:  more costs not just in actual raw materials, but possibly more personnel time to find and maintain several reliable suppliers.

Unwrapping the Process

  • What to watch: companies are making their manufacturing operations more visible, making it easier for consumers to see how the products they purchase are made.
  • What this means for consumer product companies: increased marketing costs to open the curtain

In summary, more costs that companies will have to absorb, unless they can pass those costs along to consumers, which is difficult to do, or cut costs elsewhere, which is also difficult to do.

Here are additional 2012 predictions I recently posted.

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Activity Summary for Week of August 22 2011

August 29, 2011 — Leave a comment

Last Week’s Posts and Activity

Links and Selected Social Stream Activity

CPG/Retail

Outdoor

Publishing

  •  My answer on @Quora to: How much should I pay for a content editor for my 60,000 word novel I…http://qr.ae/7KJiu

Other

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Funnel Cloud Image from Home

June 21, 2010

Sunday afternoon I was sitting on the back deck looking east and spotted a funnel cloud coming down from a storm that was gathering east to us. It was a ways off and a ways up. I snapped it with my cell phone, so image is not the best. We see funnel clouds about once a year and I was lucky to have grabbed a picture of it as this particular one fizzled after only a few minutes.

From 2010_Misc
In Outdoors ,
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Summer Outdoor Activities

September 3, 2009

This past summer was not quite all about working on the new house and property.  I did take some time in outdoor activities.

Biathlon

Since the property did come with a little shooting range on it complete with timbers as a backstop, no doubt I take advantage of that little gem.  I try to get out once per week and usually take my .22 biathlon rifle and do some running and shooting.  Some targets below I scanned for safe-keeping.


From 2009_Misc


From 2009_Misc


From 2009_Misc

Rock Climbing


From 2009_Misc

I’ve owned a pair of rock climbing shows for 20 years. They have never gotten much use. I don’t own other safety equipment, so my rock climbing has always been staying very close to the ground and going horizontal versus vertical (called Bouldering). I really enjoy it and I now do it at least once per week on our big rock chimney. Maybe after I get our main barn repaired, I can build a climbing wall on it.


From 2009_Misc

Local Area

We have not checked out our local area too much for hiking and biking activities. I am slowly building a map of stuff I find via online research. In the future, we’ll start to do more of these activities.



View Local_Points_to_Checkout in a larger map

Weather

I am a weather nut and love Wunderground for all the weather data and maps it puts at our fingertips. We’ve had a very active summer thunderstorm and monsoon season, so its been pretty wild watching storms come rolling through. The house was hit by lightening twice (minor damage the first strike, but after that, we installed lightening rods), we were hit with 1 inch hail in one storm and I saw a tornado funnel cloud. It did not touch down, but was my first tornado experience. I took two images of local area thunderstorm activity from Wunderground. The little black squares represent lightening strikes. The second image shows a storm that was bearing down on our house and the purple triangle represented a tornado signature. The storm veered north and ended up missing us and also weakened.


From 2009_Misc


From 2009_Misc
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