athletic shoes (and home furnishings)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sat Sep 23 17:57:50 UTC 2006


At 1:41 PM -0400 9/23/06, Alice Faber wrote:
>Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>
>>
>>most people i know don't seem to use the yellow pages at all any
>>more.  no wonder.  especially when it's easy to surf for this
>>information, and you can even compare prices.
>
>Indeed. I just bought a new over-range (the official descriptor is "over
>THE range", for reasons I don't understand) microwave oven. The two
>local appliance stores I was familiar with have gone out of business,
>and I was hoping to buy from such a shop rather than Home Depot.
>However, the New Haven Yellow Pages has no major heading
>Appliance-Dealers or some such; there's Appliance-Repair, though, but
>most repair shops don't sell appliances. (I finally found some local
>appliance stores through Google, and ended up buying from Home Depot
>anyway.)
>
>In regard to your other point, that I snipped, that the Yellow Pages are
>primarily an advertising medium, and not a source of information for
>consumers, well, if I can't figure out where to look for microwave oven
>dealers, I'm not likely to see their advertisements.
>
I was looking in those same New Haven Yellow Pages today (plus the
Yellow Book) in search of produce stands--not the little roadside
ones that I assumed wouldn't have a listing, but the more official
kind of farm markets that have an indoor component and take credit
cards.  I know they're listed in the White Pages, but I couldn't
remember the names (we usually grow our own tomatoes, so it's been
awhile, but we went fallow for the year and I had a craving for
actual local tomatoes--the supermarkets seem to be proud that the
ones they stock for $1.99/lb. are "Imported", and this in August and
September).  The Yellow Pages had no or virtually no listings for
Vegetables, Fruits, Produce, Farm Markets, Orchards or anything else
I could imagine.  I don't know if the problem is advertising costs or
lack of imagination.

LH

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