The plan, the first major move by Apple executive Ron Johnson since he became Penney’s CEO in November, is different from Wal-Mart’s iconic everyday low pricing. Unlike Wal-Mart, Penney’s goal isn’t to undercut competitors, but rather to offer customers more predictable pricing.

“Pricing is actually a pretty simple and straightforward thing,” Johnson told the Associated Press during an interview ahead of the announcement at the company’s Plano, Tex. headquarters. “Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product.”

These quotes from the story are rather interesting:

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Penney is to sell shoppers on its new pricing. For years, Penney, like many other stores, has propped up price. The intent: to make it look like shoppers are getting great discounts when items go on sale.

The increased discounting has been a vicious cycle that only feeds into shoppers’ insatiable appetite for bigger and better discounts. In fact, whereas it took 38 percent off to get shoppers to buy 10 years ago, it now takes discounts of 60 percent, Johnson says.

Kohl’s is perhaps the worst at carrying out this pricing strategy. Kohl’s shoppers think that an item marked $45 (that is worth $20) and on sale for $25 is a great deal. So many items at Kohl’s are not priced appropriately until the items are marked 60% off – household items, kitchen items, shoes, bedding items, etc. The average shopper has been trained to see sales, not the real value of the products they buy. The cheap-and-easy credit era helped to fuel that ignorance because the abuse of credit has been justified by folks who believe that there is an upside to all the debt: they are buying value because goods appear to be listed at bargain prices. In reality, they are overpaying for products and getting sucked into buying things they didn’t plan on buying, and the end result is more stuff, more debt, and a skewed perception of value.

So here is one of my favorite blasts from the past. This article is from the Washington Post from late 2007: “Bernanke: There’s No Housing Bubble to Go Bust.” A quote:

U.S. house prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years, noted Bernanke, currently chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, in testimony to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee. But these increases, he said, “largely reflect strong economic fundamentals,” such as strong growth in jobs, incomes and the number of new households.

Isn’t that fun?

Article to be published by this weekend.

In jest, the same newspaper also has fun with this story: “Half of Americans hit the shops as US stocks record worst week since the Great Depression.”

US stocks closed down today, ending the worst Thanksgiving week since the Great Depression.

The Dow and S&P posted their worst equivalent week, in percentage terms since 1932.

Debt-subsidized Americans are imitating Greece as the Mall of America had a record day, and Bloomberg reported that “Black Friday sales increased 6.6 percent to the largest amount ever as U.S. consumers shrugged off 9 percent unemployment and went shopping.” Meanwhile, I get a kick out of all of the deep thinking that produced Black Friday Boom stories that began with “consumer confidence rose …. as shoppers spent billions…” In the meantime, I understand that the US Government has not yet released the recession/depression/unemployment memo. Oh, that coal in the stocking.

Also, countless acts of self-sufficiency on the part of many folks is actually a hobby, or leisure. Mises and Rothbard criticized Romanticism and Primitivism because the tribalists denounced specialization and the division of labor. Jose Ortega y Gasset termed these primitives, “those who have remained in the motionless, frozen twilight, which never progresses towards midday.” Modern, self-sufficient folks who value life skills and independence from the potential fallout of politically controlled systems are not primitives who endorse the prowess of caste and status. A person possessing the spirit of independence in terms of the tasks and lifestyle that he enjoys is not living the life of the noble savage, nor is he living a life that is nasty, brutish, and short. In fact, he is living the life of luxury because his chosen skills are a crucial part of his wealth and spiritual well-being.

There has been no valid option for the US Government for years now.  The debts and obligations are too great to be serviced.  Therefore, there are only two options…

Face reality and default on its debt and reduce the size of the Federal Government by at least 90%…

Or continue to be in a state of denial and head back to the all-you-can-eat buffet…

Ben Bernanke will let you know the choice he will make on your behalf on Tuesday.  If he announces QE3 then it will be death via a massive coronary: dollar hyperinflation.

But, as Alan Greenspan noted just the other day, U.S. Treasury bonds are a safe investment because there is “zero chance of U.S. default” … and that’s because … we can “always print money.”

We know these indexes are often linked with economic outlooks and trotted out as meaningful indicators, in spite of the fact each individual perception of “confidence” could be entirely based on something not having anything to do with the economy (someone’s grandmother invested her trust in his homebuilding business, or, several thousand homebuilders read that the Fed was going to send out helicopters, etc.). But this hardly matters because the headlines (“Confidence Rose”) do make a deep impression upon those who are a part of the sound bite society.