So the other day, we patiently tried to explain it all to our beloved Max, who just sat with his huge hairy head solemnly nestled in his hands for the longest time. Suddenly, it was as if the metaphorical light bulb exploded behind his eyes, and he stood up with what passes for a grin on his face, waving his arms excitedly, wreaking havoc in our kitchen area and scattering anyone nearby to all corners of the room in a frenetic attempt to avoid the barrage of kitchen utensils. He cried the words, “New Hannustmasgiving!” and jumped up and down clapping his hands, as if he finally understood everything.

The best we could figure out is that he decided that all of November and December could be summed up with a conglomeration of words made from: New Years, Hannukah, Christmas and Thanksgiving. So, since we’re trying to humor the loveable lug (believe us when we say a happy Sasquatch is a lot less damaging to the immediate environment than a ticked-off one), we’re going to celebrate November and December with weekly specials, all handpicked by Max, who does in fact have an uncanny ability to spot cool products (probably because they’re the ones that move in and out of our warehouse the most, who knows).

So now until the end of the year, you’ll receive a weekly email with three or four very specially priced products on them, and they’ll be good only until about noon the following Sunday… all in celebration of New Hannustmasgiving!

Here are the first items… offer will expire Sunday November 8th around noon!

White Used MacBook + Brenthaven Bag -  $689

In this economy, not everyone can afford the latest/greatest piece of computer equipment. But getting a certified Pre-Owned 2.0 GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo-based MacBook for only $689, complete with a nifty little Brenthaven padded case, is a great bargain for just about anyone. Max even sent one to a deer friend… (and no, that’s not a misspelling) of his in the forest. We have to chuckle wondering how long the UPS driver will actually spend driving around looking for the critter.

Check out this deal >>

Skullcandy FMJ Headphones, only $34.99!

Skullcandy FMJ Headphones - $34.99!

Since Halloween really is now New Hannustmasgiving Eve in PowerMax-land, we thought we’d throw in a pair of SkullCandy Headphones at a screaming deal (they actually hate seeing their stuff sold so cheap, but since this only lasts through Sunday we figure we can sneak it through and when we come in the office Monday to the sternly worded emails, we can say, “What are you talking about? It’s at the regular price!” Skull Candy has become one of our most popular headphone line, and most people absolutely love these over Apple’s ear buds. Except for Max, he just eats ‘em.

Check out this deal >>

LaCie 500GB Hard Drive, only $79!

LaCie 500GB Hard Drive -  $79!

And since nothing ruins a New Hannustmasgiving celebration like a crashed hard drive that was last backed up when Max was but a pup (actually, we don’t know what to call young Sasquatches. Pups? Kittens? Ewoks?), we’re offering this 500GB LaCie hard drive, designed by Neil Poulton (who we have to presume is talented and famous, but heck, for all we know, Neil Poulton might be a chicken farmer from Arkansas!) Okay, just kidding, he’s a famous designer (at least in France, even though they seem to make a big deal about frying up sticks of potatoes and bread dipped in egg and milk and calling ‘em something fancy), but we’re more interested in the fact that LaCie makes quality equipment than whomever came up with the design. Anyway, 500 giggers for less then the cost of a night out at the movies (okay, that’s the large popcorn all ‘round, but if you haven’t experienced the cost of movie popcorn lately, trust us that we’re not far off).

Check out this deal >>

Microsoft recently released a security report that makes me cringe: reports of Confickr and Taterf worm infections doubling through the first half of 2009.

What an awful thing - passing Confickr from PC to PC by way of a freaking USB drive. Having your computer for sale as part of a zombie net. Just waiting to see if your machine is going to start spamming all your friends while you’re away (or start eating brains…). Millions and millions of PC users have no idea if their machine is just going to freak out and go belly up one day. I’d be crushed if my MacBook Pro acted like those poor PC’s. Half my life is in this machine.

Computers certainly can make our lives easier - but easier doesn’t always mean safer. Especially with the reception Microsoft Vista has received, there are more PC users running out-of-date security software and simply not being as careful as they may have been years ago. Like when XP was first released.

We’re all sharing more of ourselves online these days thanks to social features being woven into every website - from online review sites to e-commerce. I feel safe sharing on my Mac. I feel safe knowing (almost) all those worms and hackers and malicious rogue/do-no-gooders don’t see the Mac as much of a target.

Maybe it’s because we Mac users are a little more savvy than the average PC user. Maybe it’s because hackers just aren’t writing worms for Macs. Maybe it’s just a safer system. Whatever the case, I’m wondering how many poor souls who saved $150 bucks on a Toshiba will be pawning it for a pre-owned MacBook after enduring one too many of these types of problems.

Why not bring the celebration to your iPhone? Check out this list of 20 Halloween themed iPhone/iPod touch apps to make sure you’re the life of the party (or the bane of your neighbors)!

Pumpkins!

Hallowcarver ($0.99)

Drawing your jack-o-lantern on paper is soooo 2004! Bring your pumpkin carving planning into the digital age with this app which lets you carve your creepy right on your iPhone!

Crazy Pumpkin Lite (free)

Running out of jack-o-lantern ideas? Use Crazy Pumpkin Lite’s design combinations to craft your digital jack-o-lantern.

Halloween Experience ($0.99)

One of the more popular general Halloween apps, Halloween Experience gives you a chance to carve your own pumpkin, play games like hangman & puzzles, play spooky sounds, AND provides a count down of the days till Halloween. Certainly lives up to its billing.

Horror Apps

Slasher ($0.99)
Scare the life out of your victims - uh, “friends” - with this app which displays a kitchen knife on your screen and plays the vintage horror sound when you make a stabbing motion. Too classic.

Crazy Chainsaw ($0.99)

Is there anything but? You’ll be the life of any dinner party with this little app. Start up your chainsaw and scare your friends or just let your boss know how you really feel.

Ghost Detector ($0.99)
Nothing says “happy house warming” like a free ghost inspection. Make sure your next blind date is free of demonic possession with this little gem.

Saw VI (free)

Do you like creeping folks out? Record your voice as Jigsaw (you know, from the “Saw” movies) and email them to your amigos. Guaranteed to surprise…

Free Halloween Sounds (free)

What Halloween celebration would be complete without creepy sound effects? Grab this app and create a one-of-a-kind soundtrack with 15 different sounds. Conference calls will never be the same.

Zombie Me (free)

Ever want to become a zombie without the commitment? Now you can! Transform your (or your friend’s) picture into a brain-hungry zombie pic. Bloody mouths, wounds, scary eyes - oh my!

Zombietron (free)
We all know synth music soothes the savage undead - so make some of your own! Add movie effects like a chainsaw or shotgun for extra guffaws!

Spooky Games

Zombieville USA Lite (free)
Who doesn’t love a good zombie killing game? Rummage through the pockets of the fallen townsfolk for ammo (or loose change) and keep the undead hoards at bay.

Undead Attack! Pinball ($2.99)
Purge the town of undead baddies with something a little less traditional; a pinball. How could you not like a game that combines both zombies AND pinball?

MonsterKill ($0.99)

A fun twist on the classic castle defense genre - slice, shock, and broil wave after wave of classic horror monsters.

iDracula ($2.99)

A very fun, intense survival shooter which pits you against wave after wave of undead - and Dracula himself. Not for the feint of heart.

Trick or Treat ($0.99)

This cute, all-ages game is addictive! Simply catch candy corn and avoid the spooky ghosts. Friendly graphics make this a seasonal charmer for everyone.

Horror Master Trivia ($0.99)

Stump your legions of undead friends with this entertaining ride through the annals of the horror movie genre.

More Halloween Fun

“Ouija Board” - Talking Board PRO ($0.99)

Nothing transforms a pajama party into screenplay material quite like a seance. Up to four fingers can be placed on the Ouija planchette - but the spirits spell out the messages.

A Edgar Allan Poe - Collecton ($2.99)

The complete works of Edgar Allen Poe, on your iPhone, for less than 3 bucks. ‘Nuff said.

iSausage ($0.99)

Ok, so this isn’t exactly Halloween themed, but who doesn’t want to experience “a revolution in virtual sausage technology”?

Scary Riddles ($0.99)

Featuring over 130 Halloween riddles, this app is great for introducing the kids to spooky characters without, well, scaring them. Suitable for kids 4 and up.

So what are you waiting for? Ensure you’ve got the Halloween apps of the year cornered and have a fun, safe holiday!

The Superfluous Leopard?

Hey, what? We’re Apple resellers… we’re supposed to be all giddy about the latest and greatest offering! What’s wrong with us? But there is a truth out there that almost no one is willing to talk about (which is the kind of stuff I like to talk about), and that’s that this upgrade is virtually meaningless for that large mass of Mac users who don’t make their living in technology, or can hardly tell you what OS they’re using at the moment, or even exactly what kind of Mac they have.

As a technology company, Apple obviously has to drive toward new technology in order to keep its products fresh, interesting and competitive, and of course to continue to generate revenue. Someone using a G3, G4 or G5 Mac who is perfectly content with their system doesn’t make Apple any new money. So the pressure is on… upgrade or be left behind!

This doesn’t mean that I think Apple shouldn’t be doing exactly what it’s doing. Snow Leopard was a very smart upgrade… I was delighted when I heard what their plans were over a year ago. Stop the feature wars, let’s go back and really tighten up the code, make it smaller and faster and just plain better… behind the scenes. They’ve accomplished this in spades with this upgrade, and all the technology geeks and fans with Intel-based Macs should upgrade as soon as they know all their key software works properly. You can find a number of Snow Leopard compatibility lists.

But I think that legion of Mac users who are tootling along just fine with their current used Macs sans problems will be better off waiting a bit. Let the upgrades happen, the software incompatibilities flesh out and the bugs be found. The same with companies with installations of multiple Macs on their networks. The faces of most competent IT managers blanch the minute they hear about someone upgrading to a new OS, and these are largely the same people who have had a copy of Snow Leopard installed on their home machines the minute a developer copy leaves the Apple campus. But playing around with technology is one thing, making sure everything works on a network is another.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it is a motto that is very, very appropriate to personal computers.

All I’m trying to say is that if you’re reasonably happy with the performance of your Mac and you’re not a techno-geek, don’t worry about upgrading right this moment. If you have a G5 Mac and it’s doing everything you need it to do, the fact that the Leopard OS is the the end of the line shouldn’t make you lose one wink of sleep. When you’re ready to upgrade… When you feel like the computer is lagging, or there is some software you really want to use but can’t, then a new Intel Mac with the latest/greatest software will be just the ticket. At that point, Snow Leopard is simply the best PC operating system you can own. But, so is a Mercedes or Bugatti or whatever (I’m not a car guy), but that five-year-old Toyota that’s running fine didn’t suddenly become obsolete because a fancy new 2010 Ferrari was introduced.

Personally, if I really wanted to increase my performance on my Mac, I’d get a bigger display. There is no single piece of hardware or software that increases my productivity more than seeing more information on my screen at a time. I’m not speaking for everyone, I’m just sayin’… At any rate, if you happen to need/want the latest OS from Apple we’ve naturally got Snow Leopard for sale. We’ve also got a great promo going with the fine folks at Softpress - buy Freeway Express or Pro and get Snow Leopard for free.

Of course, if you’re hankering for Snow Leopard and still running a beloved G3, G4 or G5, our Mac trade in makes it crazy easy to upgrade and get that new Mac with the latest Apple has to offer.

Look out killer!

It’s hard to know exactly what drove Cupertino to push the release up (back-to-school? pre-empting Windows 7? They just plain got it done faster than they planned?), but this next release will tweak and refine the operating system we all know and love. It’s not so much a replacement for Leopard, but more of an “under the hood” performance and future-looking update. As many now know, this is an Intel-only release: Power PC users will have to make due with their old OS. Even with the Intel-only requirement, some very well-paid guy named Piper Jaffary thinks Apple will move something like 5 million copies of Snow Leopard this quarter, or something in the neighborhood of $110 million dollars in gross revenue.

The enhancements in OS 10.6 are centered around efficiency and extended Microsoft Exchange support, which some speculate are geared toward further enterprise market penetration. You’ll also get something in the way of 7GB of disk space back with the install, which is almost unheard of when adding software to a computer!

As discussed at WWDC, the Finder has been completely rewritten - although users will see no difference in the front-end - and will take better advantage of the underlying technologies in OS 10.6. Ultimately, using Snow Leopard doesn’t feel much different than Leopard, but as the tweaks and fixes and updates pile up, the OS continues its march ahead of any competition.

Look to PowerMax to help you with your Snow Leopard order, and any questions you might have about your system. And of course, don’t forget that we take trade-ins, so if you’re ready to hop on the back of this big cat but have a G3, G4 or G5, we’ll be happy to make your transition as smooth as it can possibly be. Call us at 1-888-769-7629 or email sales@powermax.com.

With PowerMax, we’ve teamed up with the great folks over at Softpress to offer a white-hot deal: Freeway Pro and Snow Leopard, shipped, no tax for $229.00! Get your copy today

Freeway Pro Snow Leopard Bundle for $229.00

From the online shopping perspective, this means shoppers have been able to use any data point (price, shipping options, location, number of rebates, etc) to effectively “sort” online retailers - they get to define the success criteria by which retailers will be compared. This has effectively created a race to the bottom of every possible success criteria. Wanna make sure you’re at the top of the (real or imagined) price column? Better have the lowest price. Oh, you better offer free shipping to cover that base too… What about rebates? How many of those can you shove in there?

For the longest time the (arguably) most important aspect of shopping - the experience - has been completely missing from the equation. Sure, pricing engines, forums, newsgroups, etc have been around for years, but research is time consuming and most niche communities are product focused. Determining what it’s like to actually do business with a company is left to searching through comment strings or Google results. The barrier to finding relevant feedback on retailers wasn’t terribly high, but just high enough to make you think twice about the trade-offs.

Thankfully things have been changing. The rise of Social Media and its perpetual connectivity means sharing your experience (or listening to the experiences of others) has never been easier. Hated your experience at the Outback? Your friends will savor every unbearable detail in your blog post. Or maybe toss that new trendy clothing store into a Twitter search and see what other folks are saying about it, then ask them if they’d shop there again - right now.

Social Media has fundamentally lowered the barriers for learning about (and thus incorporating) other people’s experience into your “retailer success criteria”, and quite frankly we couldn’t be happier about it.  Sure, price is still important, but filling in the rest of the picture before you make a decision is just one “What are you doing?” away. The importance of the experience has reached critical mass and retailers need to be listening to you. We do, here with our article blog, through feedback@powermax.com, and on Twitter. You’re always welcome to share all the good, bad, and ugly details with us (and everyone else).

We really encourage everyone to participate and share their experiences because sometimes the people most likely to share things online are the grumpy, sometimes unreasonable ones. We all love to let people know when things don’t go our way, and in the beginning of a movement of this type - when only a small percentage of people participate - those voices are out of proportion to the real experience most people encounter. And while companies need to hear the complaints, if there are hundreds more people who were delighted but don’t bother to share (it’s a lot easier to get riled up about a bad experience than be delighted enough with a good one to take the time), then the grumpies sometimes have a little more voice than they should. After all, those shopping decisions would be much easier for everyone if 100% of a company’s customers posted their comments, so the closer we can get to that, the better!

The new 13" MacBook Pro - $1,199

There’s a new MacBook Pro in the family, the 13″ MacBook Pro. The MacBook already has the wonderful aluminum unibody enclosure - this new MacBook Pro offers up 40% more battery life, a built in SD card slot (I’m going to use the heck outta this. - ED), advanced graphics, a FireWire 800 port and one of the most beautiful displays available today - the Apple LED. The best part? You get this package for less than $1,200!

The 15″ and 17″ MacBooks have also been updated. Both get the new Lithium-polymer non-removable battery, which is said to be good for a full 7 hours. The 15″ MacBook Pro specs are now 2.53/2.66/2.8GHz with list prices as $1,699/$1,999/$2,299 respectively. The 15″ also gets the SD card slot (at the expense of losing the Express Card slot), and supports up to 8GB of RAM.

The 17″ MacBook Pro retains the express card slot.

The MacBook Air received a serious price cut!

What about the MacBook Air? Well, how about a $300 price drop for the 1.8Ghz model? Sounds great right? If you’re looking for a 128GB MacBook Air you’ll now find that at $1,799 - a full $700 price cut!

The iPhone 3G [S] has arrived. The S stands for speed apparently. The new iPhone will launch applications and render web pages significantly faster. With a new processor, Apple claims 2X the speed of the previous generation. Launching messages 2.1X faster & loading the NY Times in Safari will take place at 2.9X the current model - all while consuming less battery life.

The new iPhone camera has an increased resolution of 3 megapixles - which should provide better quality images in every condition. It’s a totally new camera with auto focus, auto exposure, and auto white balance. Tap focus was also introduced, which is a nice use of the iPhones native interface. Apple loves the touch.

All camera functions are available to any application - with photo/video geotagging. Did we mention video? Yeah, the new iPhone supports VGA at 30 frames per second. You can edit/trm videos using the touch function and fire your new video around the globe with email, MMS MobileMe or post straight to YouTube. Neat stuff.

Starting price for the new iPhone is $199 for the 16GB version, $299 for the 32GB version. Both will be available June 19th (just one day after the launch of the Palm Pre. Excellent move Apple. - ED) The previous 3G iPhone remains available at the super discount price of just $99. No reason not to have an iPhone these days.

Snow Leopard - Mac OS 10.6

Snow Leopard has arrived, and it’s got a load of refinements across the board. Exchange support is built right in, and apparently Apple decided to refine over 90% of the OS. The beloved Finder was completely rewritten — although users won’t actually see any changes. The magical Dock now has Expose support — click and hold to get the window you want. This is a really slick addition.

Snow Leopard will install up to 45% faster (although many folks will never actually install their OS…). The best part? Once you install Snow Leopard you recover over 6GB of disk space! Mail is up to 2.3x faster as well. The price for all these goodies? Just $29! That’s right - upgrade your OS for less than $30. The family pack will be available for $49 - both will start shipping (downloading?) in September.

MacBook Laptops
The perfect device for your grads next adventure - give them the gift of the ultimate portable computer - the MacBook. Wireless, legendary reliability and all the joy of working in OS X. A MacBook will make anyone happy they made it all the way to graduation. (And don’t forget a bag to protect that new Mac computer!)

Top Sellers

$988 - The 13" White MacBook was recently upgraded by Apple.

$1,281 - The Unibody MacBook features a precision aluminum unibody enclosure. Very cool.

$1,388 - The MacBook Air is just 0.76 (back edge) to 0.16 (front edge) inches. The ultimate in mobile notebooks.

$81 - Timbuk2 laptop Messenger Bag.

iPods
Who doesn’t want one of the coolest accessories around? Grab an iPod for your grad and give them the gift of music. The iPod touch offers wifi without the costs of an iPhone data plan!

Top Sellers

$219 - The 8GB iPod Touch

$239 - The 120GB iPod Classic

$298 - The 160 GB iPod Classic

Display
Increased screen size means increased productivity, so give your grad the advantage of more screen real estate. We’ve got a few of the 20″ Apple LCDs which are no longer being produced - so you can offer the increased productivity of a larger (or second) monitor and still save!

Top Sellers

$472 - 20" Apple LCD Display

$894 - 24" Apple LED Cinema Display - super sexy, and greener than ever.

Storage
Don’t let your grad lose all those critical files! Give them the gift of data security with a new external storage device. If they need a bullet-proof backup or just large scale file mobility these storage selections are just the ticket.

Top Sellers

$108 - LaCie Rugged All-Terrain 250 GB Hard Drive

Corsair 16GB Survivor USB 2.0 Flash Drive

Apparently Microsoft’s executives spent a lot of time watching cartoons when they were kids (or perhaps still do). The little Apple mouse is making this elephant of a company run so scared that it’s airing competitive ads against Apple, despite the fact that it still commands roughly 90% of the market.

The one I get the biggest kick out of is with Lauren:

If you watch the first part of it closely, you’ll see her walking into an Apple Store (which they call the Mac Store) to do some “shopping.” The very next scene where she walks out of the store, you can see that she actually spent about three seconds inside, because the guy on the sidewalk approaching the door at the same time has only made it a handful of steps past the door when she walks back out. Apparently Microsoft doesn’t have the budget for an editor good enough to properly fake it?

The other interesting thing in the commercial was when she says, “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” Hmmm. So I guess they’re going after the ten percent of the Mac computer market that doesn’t consider themselves cool? To top it all off, Lauren is an actress… apparently it’s hard to find someone on the street who would be excited to be given 700 bucks for a free Windows laptop? Heck, I’d take that deal (I’d just return it later and exchange it for something I’d actually use).

My two main thoughts on this campaign are thus:

1) If you feel you have to compete on price, then you’re pretty much admitting you don’t have the same quality of product. The whole ad is a sham of course, and it’s pretty easy to prove that the “cheaper” thing is as well. I won’t go into as much detail as I could, and in any case any Windows vs. Mac debate usually ends in name-calling because some people like Windows (I personally think they are simply used to it) and some people like the Mac OS, but if you only look at the fact that Apple controls most of the user experience by marrying hardware and software (which is what has made the iPod so dominant), while Microsoft has to contend with multiple hardware manufacturers for the computers, not to mention all the peripherals, video cards, etc., you can extrapolate that just in working around driver conflicts and viruses alone, Mac users are probably more productive overall. Let’s give them a ten percent advantage for the purposes of this point.

So let’s say you use your computer twenty hours a week. If you’re ten percent more productive over those twenty hours, you’ve gained two hours over your Windows counterpart. Over the course of a year, that’s 104 hours of more productivity. If you make $20 an hour, that’s $2,080 a year in time saved or productivity gained. Heck, cut it in half, and give the Mac a 5% advantage. Still over a grand. And that’s at $20 an hour; a lot of people make substantially more than that. In addition, Macs are not anywhere close to $1,000 more than their equivalent PC counterparts… and those savings, with whatever numbers you want to plug in there, are for just one year; most people keep their PC’s for three to five or more.

Personally, if I had to use a Windows machine I’d probably be about 50% as productive because I’d spend so much of my time being annoyed. On the other hand, my salty language vocabulary would expand significantly.

Throw on top of that the fact the Macs hold their resale value an order of magnitude better than virtually any PC. We should know; we take used Macs in trade all the time. Find out how much you can get for a five-year-old Windows laptop. Pretty much nothing. Compare that to the $700 or so you we’d give you for a five-year-old 17” PowerBook. Even if a Mac were many hundreds of dollars more than an equivalent Windows PC, in a few years you’d have gotten that difference back in cold hard cash, plus some.

If Microsoft’s marketing department ever takes on local amusement parks, you’re going to start seeing the slogan: “We’re Cheaper than Disneyland!”

Yeah, but…

2) No one with half a brain should really believe that having only one company in a market or industry is good for any consumer. It’s why we have anti-monopoly laws. What Microsoft is proving with this ad campaign is they don’t care a whit about the consumer, because obviously 90% isn’t enough for them.  If Microsoft isn’t happy unless it’s a monopoly or near-monopoly, then it’s not happy unless it can exploit it’s customers to the fullest possible extent.

They dismissed Apple as irrelevant when they only had 5% of the market. But now that they’re making it into double digits, somehow this leviathan is getting a bit jumpy… with ads that scream, “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Well… we’re cheaper, that’s what! Yeah, we’re cheaper! Take that you cool Apple users!”

But this message that “they really are cheaper” is just as fake as Lauren’s shopping trip into the “Mac Store.”

To create real progress, the debate should be directed toward the root cause of what ails us today; and that isn’t:

— whether we should raise taxes on the rich vs. extending more tax benefits,

— or creating more entitlement programs vs. letting communities handle those problems…

Those are all symptomatic issues. It’s as if certain realities have become so entrenched, we can’t even put them forth as debatable without being decried as unpatriotic.
When we see the growing disparity in incomes in this country, we can either bemoan the “lack of morality in the rich” or “the laziness of the poor,” or realize that our very system actually encourages a certain percentage of our society to create greater wealth for themselves at the expense of the general populace. Setting about attacking them with higher taxes actually does nothing to address the problem; in fact, it may encourage more of it.

And that system is all about Wall Street, or for more specific clarity, the community created by residents called publicly traded companies.

Where we’ve been duped is in the belief that Wall Street is actually a proper reflection of our collective wealth and/or health of the economy. The truth is that Wall Street itself encourages the development of “phantom wealth,” as coined by author David Korten  (http://www.davidkorten.org/) in his illuminating book, “Agenda for a New Economy.”

Wealth that is created only from our imaginations (we must remember that money is simply a symbol we have created for ourselves… on its own, a dollar bill is only worth the paper its printed on), simply transferring digits from one electronic source to another, does not really benefit anyone except the few that take some of the profit from the transaction (which is at the core of the whole meltdown started by the mortgage industry). There is no true resource or product resulting from those dollars rushing around, and that is what helps create the monetary wealth disparity we’re seeing today. It’s not that the American dream of entrepreneurship and individual wealth-making is inherently bad, it’s the way that has been created to make that very easy to do while not contributing anything at all to our society as a whole that is bad for us collectively.

When Liberal and Conservative politicians alike debate about taxes and spending, they’re ignoring the basic structure of this part of our economy. In effect, they’re busy yelling at each other about the best way to apply lipstick to the pig.

In addition, as a result of the Wall Street structure, American corporations especially have been engaged in a mania to get bigger and bigger, often by acquisition. However, my personal experience with companies large and small has led me to create an axiom:

As the size of a corporation increases, the collective I.Q. of the organization drops in direct proportion.

I could give a hundred examples, but perhaps the easiest analogy is to think about making a deal with a sole proprietor on a handshake. Then try that with a Fortune 500 company. Fifteen versions of a legal document that has grown to ten times the size it needed to be later, you might have the same kind of deal… but probably not even then. You can’t tell me that getting more stupid is ever a good thing for a society, but the whole system encourages as much of that as possible.

The thing many of the “elite” don’t want us to know is that most powerful entity in the world is… us: the consumer. We ultimately control which companies are going to fail and succeed, and how vibrant the economy is. For example, as soon as we got pelted with enough news to scare us, we pulled back and stopped buying, and guess what, the economy went into a downward spiral, and the world’s leaders are in a dither.

I submit that we could get our economy back on track, reduce the income disparity between classes and reduce the power wielded by a small minority of Wall Street titans by collectively doing one thing: do as much purchasing as possible from non-publicly traded companies.

Obviously things like computers, where you only really have a choice between Apple and Microsoft, and cars, TV’s, etc. are going to have to be purchased from these gigantic corporations. But think about this scenario: if Americans staged a collective boycott against, say, large publicly traded restaurant chains, and instead swarmed local or regionally owned entities, suddenly McDonalds and Burger King and Subway and Denny’s would have a problem. But the *true* economy would not be affected negatively, because people would still be eating out as often. In fact, the overall health of the country would actually be improved because the power of the few would be spread out to the many. That’s pretty much the whole point of democracy, isn’t it?

As to the effect this would have on the stock market or your 401Ks, if the current economic situation hasn’t told you how tenuous that whole system is, and as a result the value of all of the phantom wealth you thought you had, then nothing will. And of course if this actually happened, it wouldn’t dismantle all industries on Wall Street, because some industries like automotive, steel, electronics and so on need large companies to run them.

I would also submit that there are only cultural downsides to companies like AIG, Citi Group and McDonalds getting as large as they are. We have the detriments of their existence proven by the fact that the government has to spend billions of our money to keep the first two afloat, with the latter simply making us fatter. Speaking of which, I was chatting with an executive of a confectionary company recently, who told me that the price of chocolate has doubled over the last year or two simply because the industry has been consolidated into a few dominant players. If paying more for your chocolate doesn’t get you riled up, maybe nothing will.

We were recently very proud to receive one of four annual “Torch Awards” from the Better Business Bureau for Community Involvement. How often do you think a Best Buy or Home Depot or even your local Apple Store would even be considered for an award of this type? All the money you give them flows to the home offices and the Wall Street elite.

Since I’m trying not to make this an overlong article (some might say “too late!”), I have to gloss over a bunch of points that lends credibility as to why this is a movement that should gain momentum. But just ask yourself, why did the economic bubble really burst in 2008? The answer has to do with our system whereby a very small group of people was able to create these huge engines of wealth for themselves, and an unwary public, and irresponsible politicians on both sides of the aisle, have let them do it.

So ask yourself: would you rather enrich the stockbrokers, the financiers, the bankers and the ultra-wealthy when you put your dollars into the economy, or would you rather benefit hard-working entrepreneurs of smaller companies, your neighbors, and others who are busy creating real wealth from their efforts, not just paper phantom wealth only a few people get to enjoy?

Since we’re not a publicly traded company, one might think the above message is a bit self-serving. But this has a lot to do with exactly why I have no interest in turning us into one. I know that I’d be one of the few beneficiaries; none of our employees would truly benefit (there aren’t many experienced and dedicated workers who would say that working for a large corporation, with its politics and policies and bureaucracy, is better than working for a company like ours, which has about 200 employees). Plus, we’d be buying into the system that is slowly corrupting the economic prosperity of this great country of ours. I’m to the point where I wouldn’t even consider working for a publicly traded company, no matter what.

Just think about it. If you’re politically or socially aware, you probably donate money to causes you believe in. If you stop and think about whom you’re benefiting when you spend your money with large chains or corporations (ultimately, hardly even the shareholders… mostly the traders and financiers and Wall Street power brokers) vs. smaller, closely-held companies, whether in your communities or over the web, the extra few bucks you might spend that you might have saved buying at Wal-Mart, Best Buy or Costco, might just be more effective dollars at enacting real change than donating to a political cause.

Something to think about next time you’re ready to buy anything.