Bargain Fever

When Coca-Cola offered the first retail coupon in the 1880s, customers were thrilled. But today, one in four American shoppers will buy something only if it's on sale, and almost half of all merchandise carries a promotional price. The relentless pursuit of deals has totally disrupted the relationship between buyers and sellers. In this playful, well-researched book, journalist Mark Ellwood investigates what happens to markets when everything's negotiable.

Money Habits puts together some of the best advice on how to save, spend, and invest your money. Open this book and you will open new opportunities for your financial freedom; you will access a new way of understanding how the monetary mechanism works – an easy-to-follow guide to adopt simple habits that can change your life for good because even if it doesn’t bring happiness, money can bring a lot of nice changes. The question is: are you ready to learn how to create a budget and make your money work for you instead of simply work for your money? Are you ready to jump off that always-drifting boat which holds captive those people (who are most people) who have lost control over their financial situation?

From 1850 to 1859, Charles Dickens 'conducted' Household Words, a weekly miscellany intended to instruct and entertain predominantly middle-class readers. He filled the journal with articles about various commodities, many of which raise questions about how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell goods and services.Although studies of Victorian commodity culture have tended to focus on the novel, scholarly interest in Victorian periodicals and material culture has been prompted by recognition of the major role the press played in disseminating knowledge and information about the proliferating world of goods. At the same time, periodicals like Household Words were themselves commodities that relied on their marketability for survival. This book provides a cultural study of the journal's representation of commodities that records the changing relationship between people and things exposed in the contributors' attempts to come to terms with the development of urban commodity culture at mid-century.