By The Campfire

May 9, 2008

May we live in interesting times, indeed.

While pundits debate recession fears, and global warming is treated like Obama addressing his ex-pastor, gas is headed for $7 a gallon. Don’t believe it will get that expensive? Drive and watch. It will happen.

What has happened already is just as amazing: Hewlett-Packard just launched the memristor, a smart memory chip as small as an atom that will change how we interact with all kinds of electronic and digital devises. And as importantly, how those devises will interact with us. The miniscule memristor allows functions like biological memory and recognition and things I don’t understand well enough to convey in a meaningful way. Dr. Richard Feynman smelled it coming in the 1950’s and Leon Chua predicted it specifically in 1971. Hewlett-Packard has patented it. That’s just the tip of the titanium oxide circuitry. “Open the podbay doors, Hal. Do you read me, Hal? Open the doors.”

Soon LCD and Plasma HDTV screens will be crushed by the astounding imagery of the O.L.E.D technology (organic light emitting diode – look it up). Sony is already launching the XEL-1 (using this technology) with a screen as thin as shirt backing cardboard. Your laptop will be as thin as your paycheck as the gas pump dings off a $140 tank-topper.

Starbucks is scrambling and looking back to the future with Howard Schultz in charge again and trying to reinvent the fresh-roasted giant in a world where no one can afford a $4-$5 latte anymore because they lost their house to a bad ARM, lost their savings to unscrupulous investment firms, and lost their ass buying gas.

I am no futurist, but I read a lot and just remember where you read this: Cheap is hot. Cheap is the new black. Cheap is going to be bigger than George Clooney. It’s already started.

Steve & Barry’s (a clothing retailer where nothing costs more than $10) is quietly slipping more than a billion a year into its cheap pockets. We’re talking celebrity labels that limbo under the prices of joints like Old Navy, Forever 21, and H&M. Steve & Barry’s cuts Wal-Mart prices in half. That should fit your post-economic apocalyptic budget like an $8.98 dress.

By the way, that $8.98 dress designed by Sarah Jessica Parker (of “Sex In The City” fame) is so hot people are standing 20-deep in cash register lines to get them. They’re also lining up to get $8.98 Amanda Bynes hoodies and $8.98 Stephen Marbury basketball shoes. See a pattern forming here? $8.98. Cheap is so hot it can cook a Mickey D’s value menu.

Some shop-til-you-drop-aholics have restrained their top-shelf buying binges and instead of a $300 blouse, they load up on a fist-full of $7 lip glosses to change their daily shade on the cheap.

Watch the highway and tell me how many Toyota Yaris, Ford Focus, and Hyundai cars do you see? Casual Friday is creeping into the other six days because ties and high heels aren’t as cheap as khakis and Mary Jane Crocs at Zappos.

Cheap is in. Cheap is ground zero for consumer habits. Unconventional is in. Thinking, not spending is in. Instead of paying a small fortune to take your family out to a ball game, you can Bluetooth USB-up the scoreboard of your favorite team (myliveboard.com) to your computer and get a cheaper thrill without the $44 seats, $15 parking, $12 hotdogs, and $8 beers.

The ancient routine of getting your degree, getting a job, starting on the ground floor and working your way up to no health care, no retirement, assured layoffs and random firings are old school toast. College students like 23 year-old Nick Massari are starting businesses with his classmates (Nanina’s pasta sauce) that are forking over million dollar sales in a year.

When everything you used to buy and do becomes unaffordable, what do you do? You reinvent; you change the paradigm (like Steve and Barry’s) to look where no one is looking but where everyone is going. You use the economic downturn, the health care crisis, the recession, housing disaster, global warming, job insecurity, gas through the roof of your wallet situations for what they are: Business opportunities.

What do you do when everyone is broke? You sell $8.98 celebrity designer apparel. You offer $1 coffee. You build a vehicle that runs on electricity or water or garbage or manure and burps exhaust fumes that smell like Axe. You don’t wait for the Hewlett-Packard biologically mimicking nano-chip; you use the nano-chips God gave you between your nano-ears and head for where the nano-future is going.

Next stop: Cheapville.

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