Top o’ the mornin’ to you, my friend. It’s Tuesday and this is Apex Money, the site (and email list) where Jim and J.D. collect the best money stories from around the web. Here’s what we have for you today…
Nobody knows what luxury is anymore. [Quartz] — “Luxury ain’t what it used to be. Blame the internet, the rise of on-demand services, and the shift in consumer values as younger generations become more important buyers of high-end goods — all are challenging traditional notions of what luxury is. The classic symbols —the Hermès Birkin bag, a couture dress by Dior, a watch by Rolex — aren’t in any danger of losing status. But around its edges, the concept of luxury is getting blurry, making it less clear where it begins and ends.”
This is what racism sounds like in the banking industry. [The New York Times] — “What makes their cases extraordinary is not that the two men say they faced discrimination. It is that they recorded their interactions with bank employees, preserving a record of what white executives otherwise might have dismissed as figments of the aggrieved parties’ imaginations.”
The surprising breadth of harbingers of failure. [Journal of Marketing Research] — “Previous research has shown that there exist ‘harbinger customers’ who systematically purchase new products that fail (and are discontinued by retailers). This article extends this result in two ways. First, the findings document the existence of ‘harbinger zip codes’. If households in these zip codes adopt a new product, this is a signal that the new product will fail. Second, a series of comparisons reveal that households in harbinger zip codes make other decisions that differ from other households.”
How Wes Anderson became an accidental icon of interior design. [Inside Hook] — “To say that Wes Anderson has a style would perhaps be an understatement…Anderson’s movies are immediately recognizable because of what’s in them: Steve Zissou’s red beanie and Margot Tenenbaum’s oversize fur coat, Suzy’s trusty binoculars in Moonrise Kingdom, the pale pink Mendl’s bakery boxes that match the exterior of the Grand Budapest Hotel.” [Trivia: Wes Anderson’s Rushmore is one of my favoritest movies of all time. Love it!]
That’s it for today. We’ll be back tomorrow with more from the world of personal finance. Got something we should share? Send it to us!