Thom Forbes

CNBC has been running an hour-long special report on supermarkets -- the "$500 billion money machine" that only manages to eke out margins of about 2%, give or take.

Correspondent Tyler Mathisen and his producers do an excellent survey of the state of the "new town square where people want to come and spend time" -- at least that's the aspiration of behemoths such as the Giant Eagle outside Pittsburgh that has 65,000 products including 400 varieties of cheeses, 250 beer brands, rattlesnake meat and a full-time olive oil specialist among its 650 employees, two of whom perform a song-and-dance routine in the aisles.

My favorite segment is a look at a fisherman in Sitka, Alaska, who trolls for wild salmon with single lines and lures. Within 48 hours, his catch is displayed on the ice at a Whole Foods Market in Chicago at $14 a pound. So, you don't think a fish without bruises or net marks is worth $14 a pound?

Any devoted reader of MediaPost's cadre of newsletters will not be surprised by the segments on how supermarkets track their customers with everything from heat maps to Stop & Shop's handheld devices that buzz with deals when you pass by products you're prone to buy.

I read with great interest that the mattress folks have gone to the mattresses. Sealy and Simmons are at war over the fact that the former is introducing a new line of with its coils encased in fabric. "Pocketed coils," or "Marshall units," as they are known among bedding wonks, have been the latter's shtick since forever, which is to say 1924, giving it the famous bowling-ball-on-the-bed positioning. 

It may not be as bloody as a battle between warring Mafia families, or as ruthless as campus politics, but the snarky insults were flying back and forth in the New York Times yesterday.

#1 Sealy doesn't think giving its consumers another option is such a big deal, Stephanie Clifford reports. "To say it's not a major shift -- of course it is," Simmons CEO Gary Fazio fires back. "Do you not have faith in the brand promise you're making?"

"This, to me, feels like the competition is just aggressively going after this," Sealy CMO Jodi Allen tells Clifford. "Consumers could, really, to be honest, care less."

Brrrrrrrrr. If this isn't weather for the Hot Stove League, I don't know what is. Better make that the Pellet Stove League, as I read in the newspaper the other day that burning wood, as rooted in our cave-people past as the smell and comfort of a stack blazing logs may be, could be "the next eco-crime."

Speaking of our pasts, I was lured into a soft news piece on NewsRadio 88 late last week. A codger named Bill Kent was telling reporter Pete Haskell that when he was growing up as a fan of the New York Giants, Willie Mays was his hero and the Polo Grounds in Harlem is where he fell in love with him. Kent was thrilled that over the coming weekend, the 79-year-old "Say Hey Kid" would accompany rookie-of-the-year Buster Posey back to the site of the old ballpark, which is now PS 46, with the trophy that the San Francisco Giants received for winning the 2010 World Series.

"Isn't that a nice idea," I thought. The Giants were going out of their way to acknowledge the fans that they'd left behind when they followed the Brooklyn Dodgers west in 1957. Great PR.

It's getting hard to not like Walmart, or at least the way it has been throwing around its considerable weight to make the world a better place for the last three years or so. I never thought I'd write that.

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I frankly get the heebie-jeebies as soon as I spot a greeter in one of those ill-fitting vests. And 20 years ago, when I was writing for a magazine that covered the business of newspapering, the prevailing storyline was that Walmart was destroying Main Street and, in turn, sapping journalism of its lifeblood, retail advertising. It may still be, but that's the last millennium's news.

Yesterday's announcement about the five initiatives Walmart is undertaking to "make food healthier and healthier food more affordable" is extraordinary for the same reason that the company's partnership with the Environment Defense Funds on environmental issues has been. The EDL makes the case on its website when it states that no company has a greater potential to effect change.

I recently received two emails from friends containing links to tales of extraordinary customer service. Make no mistake, the individuals in both stories go beyond the normal call of duty with responses that could not be looked up in any employee manual. But the reason stories like these wend their viral way into so many mailboxes is because people believe this is the way things should be done. And, all too often, they're not.

Consumer Traveler blogger Christopher Elliott tells the heart-rending story of an email be received from one of his readers whose 3-year-old step-grandson had been murdered by her step-daughter's live-in boyfriend in Denver. The woman's husband was in Los Angeles on business. She worked with Southwest Airlines to arrange what looked like a seamless transfer for him from L.A. through Tucson to Denver but the plans went awry when long lines at LAX caused her husband to miss his initial flight. He'd explain his plight to anyone he thought might move things along, but they all seemed oblivious. But when he finally arrived in Tucson, he discovered that the plane that was supposed to have taken off at 11:50 was still waiting for him at the gate at 12:02.

When people talk about the Sixties from a pop-cultural perspective, they generally point to such influences as the Beatles/Rolling Stones (which, for some reason, has become a rivalry akin to the Yankees/Red Sox), Twiggy and Andy Warhol. Or, in certain decidedly diametric quarters, explorers such as John Glenn or Timothy Leary.

Personally, I was partial to Fred and Barney. It has been many years since I watch an episode of "The Flintstones" but I was reminded of the primetime animated show for kids last night by a jaw-dropping spot contained in "We'll Be Right Back ... 60 Years of Television Commercials," a new online exhibition curated by the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

In it, Wilma and Betty, the ever-devoted, wiser and more resourceful wives, are nonetheless bearing the burden of the workload, as they always do. As Fred and Barney banter at a stone fence about how hard their better halves toil, Wilma trims the lawn with an alligator lawnmower and Betty beats a rug with the ardor that only a repressed house frau can summon.

Quick, and no Googling or Binging before you answer, please. When you see "Live Positively" or "livepositively.com," what comes to mind?

I'm betting your answers are similar to those of some of my colleagues. Most thought it must be an activist group, probably having something to do with HIV, AIDS or another illness. One suggested it was an evangelical organization or Tony Robbins-like self-help enterprise; another said she had a vague sense that she'd heard of it, but no specific recollection of its nature. No one got it right.

It's Coca-Cola's "do-good" site.

Here's how I found out about it: A friend of mine who is in publishing takes a lot of care in selecting a books he thinks will be particularly appropriate for his friends every December. For me, he chose The Master Switch by Tim Wu -- a fascinating and cautionary look at how new information technologies get centralized over time. He has purposefully wrapped his gifts in recycled newspaper for several years now. Less deliberate, I suspect, was the wrapping around my present -- a full-page ad from the New York Times of Dec. 18 extolling the choices that Coca-Cola provides.

I woke up Sunday morning at the ungodly hour that I do when I'm writing this column with an unlikely vision in my head. I was attaching a pearl necklace around a woman's neck. She was beaming. "What's the headline here?" I asked. "The Smile of Acquisition," I told myself before wisely rolling over. But I've been mulling the state of the luxury market ever since.

I will leave it to the academics to explain why people buy things they don't really need, and to the shrinks to tell me why I chose such an anachronistic symbol as a string of pearls to represent this tendency, and will instead concentrate on some commentator's thoughts about where this market is heading. It does, after all, account for a disproportionate amount of sales.

Last October, Bain & Co. proclaimed an end to the "global crisis in luxury goods sales," which it said was the first year-long decline it had seen during the nine years it has released its "Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study."

In its coverage of the National Retail Federation's annual conference this morning, Stores reports that sales of premium brands did much better over the holiday season that did those of mass-market goods.

Tempus not only fugits, it also has the tendency to reverse the fortunes of high-flying products with supersonic speed. Take the Concorde, for instance, which that old nemesis of breakthrough ideas, ROI, eventually did.

Nelson D. Schwartz reports that BOA has a dedicated team of 15 to 20 people drawn from various departments, and led by its chief risk officer, examining documents for compromising information. It's also trying to figure out where the purported information might have come from, reportedly with no success.

The other story, on the front page, reveals that "diplomats are a big part of the sales force" for the two companies that compete for the lion's share of the worldwide airliner business, Boeing and Airbus. Eric Lipton, Nicola Clark and Andrew W. Lehren write that the "politicking and cajoling at the highest levels" includes "letters from presidents, state visits as bargaining chips and a number of leaders making big purchases based, at least in part, on how much the companies will dress up private planes."

Boeing hasn't responded yet, as far as I can tell, and perhaps that's because every $1 billion in commercial jet sales results in 11,000 jobs in the U.S. The court of public opinion is likely to weigh in its favor on this one. But that doesn't mean that it hasn't been engaging in a lot of strategery at the highest levels.