Black Friday Recap

How did Black Friday go at U.S. retail this year? I am hearing stories that point in quite different directions.

• Store workers described foot traffic as “surprisingly quiet.” News reports mentioned generally quiet foot traffic in stores.
• Shoppers went to several of their favorite stores and found impressive bargains, but didn’t necessarily spend much.
• More stores, including office supply stores, opened in the early evening on Black Friday Eve.
• Shoppers made an effort to avoid shopping for the entire day as a protest. They were protesting commercialization in general, extended store hours, a department store’s inclusion of captive marine mammals in a parade, or the street shooting in Ferguson. One mall closed completely for the day to avoid protestors.
• Reports of a boom in gun sales, the biggest day ever by some counts, with firearms being seen as more useful after the decision not to indict the Ferguson shooter.
• Walmart workers were on strike.
• Shoppers who wanted to avoid the crowds made all their purchases online.
• Shoppers said they had finished their shopping either before Black Friday started, or early in the day.
• There was heavy highway and street traffic in shopping areas.
• I saw a 100-car backup approaching an automobile dealer’s tent event.
• The first big attempt at Black Friday in the United Kingdom was marred by pushing and shoving and other incidents of in-store violence.
• Shoppers said lower gasoline prices might make them spend more freely.
• Snow on the ground in wide areas might have reminded shoppers that Christmas is coming.

In my case, it was a busy day with little time for shopping. I spent perhaps 15 minutes in stores shopping, but didn’t buy anything. It is hard to say at this point what this year’s Black Friday indicates, but retailers counting on a single day of sales to put them in the black must be feeling a little let down this morning.

Power Strip Meets USB Charging

Here is a sign of the times, something I came upon during my holiday shopping: a power strip that provides 2 USB charging outlets along with 4 grounded electrical outlets (made by Inland and seen in the Micro Center catalog). It makes sense as a product. If you are using several outlets at one place, there is a good chance that one of the things you are doing is charging a portable device. The USB charging port is the only well-accepted standard connector for this purpose. This combination device costs noticeably less than the combination of a power strip and a USB cube that you would otherwise deploy. Next, as the USB charging port becomes more common we may see it used for purposes other than charging, that is, to power devices such as musical instruments. This may be a bit of a design challenge. Most such devices require a higher voltage or more power than the USB charging standard provides, but the cost savings might be enough to nudge designers to make a device work with half the voltage or half the power so that it can fit within the limits of the standard.

This Week in Bank Failures

Accused: Prosecutors in Belgium say HSBC is involved in steering clients toward tax evasion vehicles in Switzerland. Belgium is thought to have missed out on probably less than €1 billion in tax revenue because of the bank’s tax evasion schemes. A similar investigation is underway in France, the bank says. Separately, prosecutors in France are looking into reports of insider trading by executives at BNP Paribas.

Layoffs: Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is closing its offshore banking operations in the Caribbean and closing some other wealth management offices. A published report estimates 300 job cuts.

Seeking capital: Lorain National Bank in Lorain, Ohio, is seeking a buyer and expects to close a sale before the end of the year. The bank took large losses that started in 2007 but received a federal bailout, repaid in 2012 when the bank returned to profitability. It has $1 billion in deposits.

A Senate bill would require the president of the New York Fed, one of the country’s most powerful financial regulators, to be nominated by the U.S. President and confirmed by the Senate. The move comes as policymakers review evidence that the New York Fed is effectively owned by the Wall Street banks it is supposed to supervise.

Fuel Cells: The Other Side of Batteries

In my last post I mentioned nanotechnology as one avenue being explored as a way to make batteries that recharge faster. I may have misled by failing to mention a completely different approach that is on the way, perhaps sooner than nanotech batteries. If you imagine an electric battery that is recharged not by adding electricity but by putting in fuel, then what you have is a fuel cell. The consensus of engineers is that the fuel of choice is hydrogen gas, resulting in a term I am sure you have heard, a hydrogen fuel cell. Despite the different name and some differences in the construction, a fuel cell puts out electricity in essentially the same way a battery does. Hydrogen fuel cells have been around for years and have been much talked about, and now, the first mass production fuel cell cars are on the way next year. The first hydrogen fuel cell cars will cost about the same as a comparable battery-powered electric car, and surely within a few years we will have a good sense of how well fuel cell cars are doing.

At CNet:

Fuel-cell cars gain momentum with Toyota Mirai; Toyota announced the production version of its Mirai fuel-cell car today, ahead of the Los Angeles Auto Show, adding momentum to previously slow fuel-cell car development.

Smaller Cells for a Faster Battery Recharge

The widespread use of electricity to power vehicles depends on making the batteries less expensive, lighter, and perhaps more durable. For the past decade, the big push in battery technology has been toward improvements in materials that increase the electrical capacity of the battery without adding too much to the manufacturing costs or weight or losing anything in reliability. The improvements, though, haven’t been coming in as fast as had been hoped, and now some researchers are looking in other directions. One thought that is showing some promise is the idea of reducing the time to recharge a battery. If the battery recharges faster, then for many applications including cars, the capacity of the battery becomes less critical.

A shorter recharge time fundamentally means a smaller cell size. Cells are the chemical components inside a battery that store electricity, with at least three layers of different materials chosen for their contrasting electrical properties. A simple battery may contain only cell, a lead-acid car battery, six cells. What if you made a battery with millions of tiny cells? With smaller cells, the distance from the middle of the cell to the edge is smaller, and that should make it possible for the battery to charge faster.

Prototypes prove this works in practice, but it is an immense manufacturing challenge to make so many small cells quickly, so that the manufacturing costs are low enough to be practical. The answer might be found in recent advances in nanotechnology. Nanotechnology creates a range of small devices by getting materials to go together consistently on a small scale.

Wendy Koch writing in National Geographic explores the nanotech side of batteries in a new story:

Tiny Batteries Could Revolutionize Green Energy; Nanotechnology could dramatically improve energy storage for electronics, cars, and buildings.