There's jumping the shark, and then there's jumping the round (number). This is the name I'm giving to when forces of inflation are actually felt by the consumer, and something that has cost a nice round number for a long time, practically becoming a tradition, finally goes up in price. For my generation, it's things like twenty ounce bottles of Coke for a dollar, slices of pizza and subway rides for a dollar fifty, the New York Times for 25 cents (and then 50 cents), and various monthly services, such as AOL, for twenty dollars a month. For our parents and grandparents it's a lot of things like that for a nickel (in fact it does seem to really proceed in fits and starts--there were 5 and 10 cent stores, now there are 99 cent stores, but were there ever 50 cent stores?). Things like movie tickets seem to rise so rapidly that they never really rested on a nice price. But whatever it is, it always hurts, especially when it requires you to come up with an inconvenient odd number of coins to pay with exact change. Others have probably named this before, and probably better, and as usual I'm leaving that research as an exercise to the reader.

Now Netflix is going from $20 to $22. Obviously the change thing doesn't apply, but somehow the loss of that nice number still feels terribly inconvenient, a disruption of the proper order. Of course it makes one wonder again if one should be indulging in such a luxury service. Netflix surely knows all this and would not have done it if they were not losing money by the boatload. I do pity them this, since it's such a great service and idea. It amazes me how difficult it is for most businesses to make money even when they appear so successful. It probably has a lot to do with the problems of growth, with too many people getting hired into useless jobs and the company engaging in too many expensive activities that don't really help anything.

My real problem is not with Netflix lately, but with the postal service. The inconsistency with which my discs get back to Netflix, despite dropping them all in the same mail drop at the same time, is quite dramatic. Well, so far it's 1 day to 3 days. But 3 days is pretty dramatic for a trip that takes an hour and fifteen minutes on the subway. Perhaps this is an opening for another business, mail for within big cities that can be much more efficient than a system built for the whole country. Then this business will lose millions every quarter and raise its prices.