Live from Austin!

I’ve beem thinking about how one can actually spot shady businesses. It’s not as easy as it initially seems—there are plenty of dodgy retailers that manage to look totally legitimate, and there are plenty of good companies that you might assume to be crooks because (for instance) they don’t list any kind of address online.

For example, if you’ve ever shopped online for camera equipment, or browsed the ads in magazines, you’ve probably seen lots of stores in New York selling photo equipment at way below MSRP.

Don Wiss decided to start a project to photograph the actual storefronts of all the discount camera businesses in NY and NJ. He has put the photo gallery on his web site.

For instance, I’ve seen legit-looking ads from Cambridge Camera in magazines, so it’s interesting (ahem) to see their actual business premises.

In the UK we call these places “box shifters”. They all used to collect along Tottenham Court Road in London, though that may have changed.

The problem is that not every obscure online store in Brooklyn offering amazingly low prices is run by crooks. I bought our new TV from Best Buy Plasma in Brooklyn. It arrived promptly, in perfect condition, and has made me very happy; so Best Buy Plasma are clearly not to be confused with PC And Plasma.

Similarly, HKFlix are legit and knowledgeable (in my experience), even though it seems to be almost impossible to find out where they’re actually located. (No address on the site, domain hosting points to Hawaii, stuff ships from California.)

Generally speaking, I’ve been able to shop online and save a ton of money and not get ripped off. But I don’t think I could write down a set of objective criteria for working out if a vendor is honest; it’s usually an intuitive decision for me. I do a bunch of research, but ultimately there’s some kind of non-logical synthesis of the available information.

I first visited the USA in 1990, travelling with a Japanese friend. We wanted to visit New York and Boston. Most people would have stayed in New York, and travelled to Boston; but I remember having a hunch that things would be better the other way around. So we spent more time in Boston, and reduced the New York visit to a long weekend.

Perhaps my problems with New York stem from the fact that we were politely relieved of our excess cash by a gentleman who had taken it upon himself to introduce visiting tourists to the city. I don’t think that was the real problem, though; I’ve had worse experiences in other cities that I still like. No, I think my real problem with New York was one of expectations.

I’ve been to Birmingham, and I don’t feel the need to speak out about how awful it is because, well, nobody really expects any different. But New York gets fetishized as the ultimate city, the place everybody secretly wants to be, the cultural center of the universe. If I’d merely been expecting a large, seedy, run-down looking city with a bunch of art galleries, I would have been OK—but I had been lead to expect so much more.

Still, it has some impressively tall buildings.

I took some photos from the top of the World Trade Center, but it was pretty dull up there. You couldn’t look down, because there was a fence to keep you away from the edge, and anyway the edge just leads to a wide safety ledge a few meters below. You could look out across the city, but the street level was mostly shrouded in a brown haze of smog. Ultimately the whole thing was like a lot of the art in the city—the most impressive part of the experience was the concept.

No, the best place to experience the World Trade Center was from the bottom, looking upwards.