If there is one upside to the economic downturn, it is the downfall of what was once assumed to be the resilient market for luxury pet goods. Dog and cat lovers are used to having ridiculous, often useless products foisted upon us. But in the last few years we have also had to endure a parade of come-ons for a keeping up with the Jones' dog approach to pet ownership. Happily, that may end.

In 2005, Paw Luxuries Magazine proudly launched as "the only magazine devoted to the world of high-end pet products and luxury pet services." Somehow before that us dog and cat people had to get along without "a stylish photographic essay, showcasing dazzling designs from the trendsetters of the pet world." And we'll have to find a way to get by without it; Paw Luxuries is gone. (Though The Pet Elite and Luxury Pet Living survive.)

No doubt, we're all spending more on our pets as they've become a bigger part of our families. When I was growing up, my dog Peanut was lucky to get an occasional rawhide stick. Now my dog Jolly has an assortment of meat-based treats -- like Dr. Becker's Bison bites (which are like a meat Pringle). He's also a senior with arthritis, so he has coats and even beds for all weather.

But what sellers of luxury pet goods fail to understand is, I'm willing to spend a lot of money on something I think will make Jolly comfortable or happy or even amused. I'm not interested in spending money to get a dog status symbol or fashion statement or piece of dog cuteness.

One of my favorite episodes of Columbo is called Double Exposure, where Columbo uses subliminal tricks to help nab a marketing genius who murders a client using subliminal advertising.

Subliminal advertising is considered a deceptive business practice by the Federal Trade Commission, but in a column in Parade, marketing guru Martin Lindstrom reports on five subliminal but legal tactics that marketers use to lure you in: If something feels heavy, you'll be more comfortable buying it. Certain kinds of music makes you more inclined to shop, and made-up traditions lend credibility to brands.

My favorite example of this is the world famous Samuel Adams brand of beer. I was having dinner with some friends a few weeks ago and two of them ordered Sam Adams beer. I asked them to guess when the company was founded. They guessed 1790 and 1820. The real answer: 1985! It's named after a famous founding father who sidelined in beer-making but has no other connection to him other than the name. But it's been a magnificently effective marketing tool.

One way to avoid falling victim to clever marketing tricks is to do as much shopping as possible where you can comparison shop easily and not be lured in by a store's scent or music. Of course this isn't such a good idea for clothing, but it might be the best way to buy electronics.

Who hasn't been curious about an "As-Seen-on-TV" product? No longer limited to late night infomercials, shortened versions of these ads pushing everything from weight loss to get-rich-quick schemes are now commonplace on prime time television.

Under the constant bombardment of these "miraculous" products, it's only a matter of time before one catches your fancy. Thankfully, the internet is full of personal accounts and reviews which can help you find out if these products work, "as-seen-on-TV."

Here are three easy ways to find out if an as-seen-on-TV product is worth it, all before the "20 minute" special offer to double your order expires.

• InfomercialRatings.com
• ASOTV.info
• Google

With the average baseball ticket costing $25.40, NBA ticket at $48.83, an NFL ticket at $72.20, and NHL seats at $48.72, it's no wonder sports fans have a difficult time making it through the turnstiles at stadiums and arenas across the country: Their wallets and purses are being picked.

Some teams such as the New York Yankees are giving fans a break at a few exhibition games, and the Golden State Warriors last month offered seats for $10 for one game. But those deals are just the beginning of good things to come in 2009, predicts The New Republic, not your typical sports publication. It calls 2009 the Year of the Sports Fan.

In September, we told you about a cool new comparison shopping tool for T-Mobile's Android G called ShopSavvy. The application lets users check the price of an item at local stores and online by simply taking a picture of the barcode. While consumers love the ability to instantly check the price of an item from anywhere, some stores aren't as fond of this technology. Since the launch of ShopSavvy at least one customer at Target has already been told that it is against store rules to price check an item.

In this particular case when the makers of ShopSavvy contacted the Target in question they were informed that there was no policy prohibiting customers from price checking an item. The manager blamed the mistake on an uninformed employee. I think the employee may have confused the shopper with an employee of a competing store who had come inside to record prices. This was something I ran into as an employee at Kmart years ago and that we did have a policy against.

If you're feeling a little sneezy, don't worry about the cost of antibiotics eating up your budget. Drug stores, Target, Costco, Wal-Mart and supermarkets are desperate for your loyal prescription business. Price wars have been driving down the cost of generics for months now, as these businesses that rely on foot traffic try to keep steady customers and not lose them to mail order companies.

Now comes Giant supermarkets, offering antibiotics for free! The chain will fill RXs of 36 generic antibiotics for no cost, including amoxicillin, penicillin and ciprofloxacin through March 21. Obviously the company is hoping that if it can lure you in for your ear infection or whatever you have, that you'll also pick up tissues, over-the-counter drugs and maybe some OJ while you're out. It's a good plan for people on a budget who would otherwise skip the drugs and tough it out, but it's also a good precedent for consumers who pay way too much for drugs overall, especially name-brand drugs.

If these kind of plans make generics more popular, all the better for the rest of us. I just recently filled a prescription for my daughter for a name-brand antacid that cost me $56. I figured, this is what the doctor wanted her to have, so I'll just have to stomach the cost. But when we went back to the doctor for a follow-up visit and she wanted us to continue the medication, I piped up and asked for a generic alternative. Turns out there was one and it only cost us $10. Next time, I'll ask for a generic from the start!

As France's champagne producers have endlessly reminded us, to be a true champagne, a sparkling wine must originate in the Champagne region of France. Unfortunately, "real" champagne doesn't come cheap, and the inflated dollar has driven the price up even further. On the bright side, even if you don't want to spend a small fortune on carbonated wine from France, there are numerous other options for welcoming the New Year. With that in mind, here are a few suggestions for the perfect drink for beginning a fun and thrifty 2009!

Prosecco: A dry, carbonated Italian wine, Prosecco combines the fizz of champagne with the fresher flavors of summer. With its clear overtones of melon, lemon, almonds, and honey, it offers a bright, sunny taste that contrasts nicely with falling temperatures. Best of all, it is not nearly as well known as champagne, which translates into a lot more holiday cheer for a lot less money.

Lambic: Although officially a beer, lambics use natural yeasts to produce a clean, slightly tart flavor that is far more reminiscent of wine. While basic lambics have a rich, exciting taste, the ones flavored with fruits are far more intense and festive. Regardless of whether you choose raspberry, peach, blackcurrent or cherry, it is sort of like a slightly more sophisticated Kier Royale. Best of all, at under $10 per bottle, it is a delicious and reasonably priced tipple!

How much time do we spend actually using the stuff we own? That kitchen knife -- 5 minutes a day? Those dress shoes -- two hours a week? The lawnmower -- a couple of hours a week, seven months of the year. The treadmill- never? The new trend to rent or share, rather than buy, products (see Hertz Connect, for example) is a good way for consumers to trim expenses. Unfortunately, it can be a disaster for retailers.

According to the New York Times, one industry reeling at the moment is publishing, in large part due to our newly developed practice of reselling books we have finished. Stores such as Half-price Books have abetted this, but the 500-lb gorilla of this industry is Amazon.com. Now, publishers have a much shorter window of opportunity in which to sell new books before they begin to show up in quantity on used book shelves and internet sites.

Take, for example, the paperback version of Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, which came out in late September with a cover price of $14. Already used copies are available on Amazon beginning at $5.65. Even with $3.99 shipping, the reader will save over $4. Del Rey, the publisher, won't see a nickel of this resale, and neither will Chabon.

So what? you may say. So this- publishers and book stores have to make enough money to justify the expense of producing and retailing a book, and with sales already weakened by the retail bust and competing entertainments, many are hanging on by their fingernails already. If the large publishing houses go under, avid readers will have to contend with the anarchy of self-published or small press offerings, and the difficult task of finding the a kernel of wheat in a mound of chaff will be made even harder.

This is another impetus for publishers to embrace the Kindle and like devices, where books can be sold in captive formats that include a barrier to redistribution, much as DVDs are sold today. I hate the thought that book stores might follow blacksmith and TV repair shops into oblivion, but everybody's got to eat, and paper just isn't all that tasty.

Bad ideas are as common in the internet world as Brittany Spears photographs, so to stand out in this company an idea has to be truly execrable. Swoopo.com rises (or sinks) to that level.

At first blush, the site resembles the typical auction site, where customers vie to snatch up bargains by competitive bidding. The difference with Swoopo, however, is that all items are put up by Swoopo, not individuals as on Ebay, and the bidder pays $.75 for each bid. Think about that for a moment.

Let's pretend that we are intent on bidding on the Samsung LN37A550 37" LCD HDTV currently on auction as I write this. While the site lists the retail value at $1,199.99, Amazon sells the set for $879.99. Suppose a dozen people start bidding. Of that dozen, at least a few are going to be caught up in the auction frenzy, as the price climbs slowly, but still tantalizingly cheap. By the time the set sells, one bidder might walk away with a bargain, but the other eleven will have nothing in return for the money they spent to bid.

The insidious part of the Swoopo model is that items could routinely sell for well beneath their market price, the difference funded by the money collected per bid. In essence, all the losers are helping to cover the cost of the winner's prize.

The only way Swoopo can hope to retain bidders is to provide bargains, and since in every auction all but one of the participant will end up out of pocket with nothing in return for the money they spent on bids, I can't imagine people hanging around long.

Thanks, Techdirt

Also read: Ebay changes turning off customers

Many a time I have stood over my kitchen sink, trying to peel little oval stickers off a pear or a sweet red pepper, silently cursing whoever it was that invented the produce identifiers.

Well, now I feel just horribly, because Tom Mathison, founder of Stemilt Growers and the first man to use produce stickers on a commercial scale, died December 26 at his home on Stemilt Hill, in Washington. In addition to instigating the widespread use of little stickers -- which were actually a really smart marketing strategy as well as being useful to grocers -- he believed in paying his growers a sustainable price for their fruit, and he began experimenting with organic growing systems long before anyone else was considering them. Other growers call him an "icon" with "caring" and "passion," telling the story of the year he only made $89 in profit (before growing his 35-acre farm to an operation that shipped more than 20 million boxes of apples, pears and cherries each year) and say that he was looking after the cherry crops to the very end.

I'll take a different view of those little stickers and think about Mathison next time I peel one off over my kitchen sink.

In the best of times, it's easy to imagine that commodities and currencies are stable, unchanging things. After all, if gold was worth $400 an ounce yesterday, there is no reason to imagine that it will be worth a great deal more or less tomorrow. Similarly, if the dollar was able to buy a certain amount of goods or services last week, then one can be forgiven for imagining that it will be able to buy a comparable amount of goods or services next month. In good times, prices don't fluctuate all that much, and we can make long term plans, secure in the belief that the economy or the markets won't leave us holding the bag.

Unfortunately, the past few months have been a long, painful lesson in the pitfalls of currencies and commodities. When the value of gas skyrocketed and the value of the dollar plummeted, prices that had long been stable began to bounce up and down. Stocks that were once worth a fortune were suddenly devalued, while gold that was once worth a reasonable amount was suddenly worth a whole lot more. In the midst of this crisis, some necessities began to look like luxuries and thrift once again became a virtue.

I gave blood this weekend. But this wasn't a noble act. I was just trying to open some toy packaging.

Now that Christmas is over, I can't help but think that maybe I should have just stuck with buying books and clothes for my daughters, who are 4 and 7 and, naturally, asked Santa for just about every toy imaginable. I tried to oblige and bought what I could, but now I'm rather glad I didn't buy more. There are already toys that I can tell are going to be part of the backdrop of their bedrooms, like untouched props on a movie set: they help create an environment but little else and of all their gifts, their favorite seems to be a computer game that their grandparents bought them.

Anyway, I'd just like to vent and offer some unsolicited advice to toy manufacturers out there. If toy companies actually took some of this advice, I honestly think they'd have a better year in 2009 than they apparently did in 2008, where toy sales were expected to fall by five percent.

In America, we call people who are paid to talk up a product "street teams" and marketers avidly pursue "trendsetters" to tout their products. Movie studios regularly offer free screenings to housewives and hairdressers, other companies give out hundreds of free t-shirts and ball caps, or offer free samples. It's just part of our regular commerce.

But in Japan, apparently, this practice is not so transparent, and McDonald's has found itself caught in a public relations pickle, with some special sauce.

Trying to drive up hype for the debut of a new Double Quarter Pounder with cheese at a branch devoted just to the Quarter Pounder in Midosuji-Suomachi in Osaka, the PR company in charge of the event is charged with paying 1,000 people an hourly wage of 1000 yen to stand in line, and also paid for their purchases. About 15,000 people visited the store on that day, but only about 2,000 people are reported to have stood in line for any length of time, so roughly half of the hype was bought. One blog says that the key trendsetters -- the ones who camped over night, trying to drive up interest -- were actually on the payroll.

This time of the year makes me think of one of the many cycles in our individual lives that we perpetuate ourselves, namely buying new stuff, storing old stuff then chucking out old stuff to make room for the new old stuff because we just bought or were given a lot more new stuff.

The beginning of the New Year is a great time to contemplate what we should sell, give away, recycle or, failing any of the former, toss onto the scrap heap. For the things we really need to keep, storage can be a costly problem, but it doesn't need to be.

One of the simplest ideas is under bed storage. The dollar store version is a 42" x 18" x 6" vinyl storage bag with a zippered top and pull handles. It isn't impervious to nicks or tears, but it will keep the dust off of your sweaters if all it's doing is sitting under a bed 24-7. At a buck a piece, you could buy several of these fold-able containers for the same price as one hard plastic under bed storage unit, which costs $9.97 for a 32 1/8" x 19 1/8" x 7" size with wheels that I found at Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart also stocks a three piece vinyl and fabric storage set for about $10 that includes an under bed bag that's 42 x 8 x 18" big and two sweater bags 15 1/2" x 13 1/2" x 3" each.

When one hears the term "mystery meat," it's hard not to think of Spam. After all, although the ingredients -- pork shoulder, ham, water, sugar, salt, sodium nitrite, and potato starch -- are clearly marked on every package, there still remains a question about its origins. Maybe it's the mysterious can, with its old-fashioned illustrations and rounded corners, or maybe its just the fact that the meat doesn't really look like anything that occurs in nature; regardless, Spam carries with it a tinge of strangeness, a touch of enigma.

One of the greatest mysteries in this most mysterious of meats lies in the question of who actually eats it. While Whole Foods seems notably lacking Spam, most grocery stores stock huge piles of the stuff. What's more, Spam cans always seem fresh, undented, and almost pristine, which would suggest that it doesn't spend much time in the store. Recent news reports back this observation up.

While Spam is popular across the United States, it is almost legendary in Hawaii, where every man, woman, and child consumes, on average, six cans a year. While most pundits claim that the canned snack gained popularity during World War II, when U.S. soldiers gave it to natives, Christopher Moore cites a more entertaining explanation. In Island of the Sequined Love-Nun, he claims that Spam actually is code for "Shaped Protein Approximating Man," and that it was used to wean cannibals off of long pork.