A few random thoughts

Until recently, I was unaware that it was possible for a person to ride a bicycle for 18 miles and whine the entire time.

Tax day is always like a little party at the post office, except for the actual party part. It's a remarkably cheerful scene around here. If you go down to the main post office at 30th street, there's live remotes from radio stations and all kinds of promotional stuff going on, and it's open until midnight, so the good times just keep on coming.

The biggest marketing event of the year is in progress now. I'm speaking, of course, about the Starbucks relaunch. Starbucks is a business classic tale of success leading to overexpansion leading to decline. In all of these stories at some point someone notices that something's gone off the rails and frantically tries to get the company back on track. That's what's going on with them now and we won't know if it'll help for many months. At the moment, all I know is that they're ditching the green logo on the cups (are they going to make their signs brown too? Ugh.) and everything has the word "fresh" on it. We'll eventualy see if there's a strategy behind this or if they're trying out lots of unrelated things to see what works, though that's usually a recipe for disaster.