While visiting relatives for Thanksgiving, we talked a fair amount about, like, the economy. People are very attuned to the power of branding, blue-chip stock, et cetera. They're not so attuned to the power of conventional wisdom. Frustrating for me. I tried to argue that Wal-Mart's business model, which relies on expanding into untapped markets, will eventually arrive at a point of diminishing returns. This same kind of thing seems to be happening with McDonald's locations. Luckily for McDonald's, though, a franchise system insulates the parent company from this effect. The money-losing work of opening locations that don't prosper is passed onto the franchisees. Take an example like Subway--the individual locations close down pretty frequently, but the chain has been flourishing for years. Wal-Mart, though, has to shoulder individual locations' failures themselves, and opening a Wal-Mart is a whole lot more expensive than opening a Subway. Besides, there's always a point of diminishing returns. The first McDonald's in China is a lot more important, by which I mean 'profitable,' than the five hundredth one in California (note: I have no idea how many McD's there are in California--and, rereading, this whole post is rather incoherent.).

Here's a Wired article about Wal-Mart and video game censorship. Favorite tidbit: 'Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned' had the alternate title removed from the packaging for the Wal-Mart edition. It's 'Waif Me' all over again. Kurt Squire of MIT is quoted: "The biggest danger facing the games industry may be something like the comics code of the '50s, which seriously limited what content comics could deal with, resulting in the marginalization of the medium. Combined with a lack of experimentation in the games industry, that could cause long-term problems."

  ¶ 4:35 PM