Been away visiting friends for the Fourth in Roswell, New Mexico. 
Wouldn’t you know it – our visit would be the week of the International Alien Convention. We were married there 30 years ago and one night long ago my cosmic conscious was awakened and I imagined the idea for CoolProducts.com. : )
The real purpose of the trip was to visit my daughter in California. Along the way we stayed in Amarillo, Roswell, Sedona, Kingman, the mountains of California, Las Vegas, Green River Utah, Boulder and Hays, KS.
Some shopping observations from the trip:
1. Some of my most serendipitous shopping moments happen in tourist or college town boutiques. I like unique, new items and it takes work to find them.
2. It’s hard to focus on the tastes of others – but it is harder when I’m on vacation.
3. Outlet malls are crazy in California. We pulled into one that was overrun with tour buses, and maybe 200 Japanese tourists. The Coach Purse outlet was insane. There were vast numbers of Japanese men in line, loaded up with four or more $300 purses. (Retail $400). Way to market the bargain, Coach.
Some general shopping observations:
Retail has been stuck in the browse/self service mode for 50 years or more. It used to be that local merchants knew you and could help you based on familiarity. In the modern world, not so much.
CoolProducts seeks a better way to serve people. We are about to unveil an easy to use artificial intelligence (alien) to help shoppers get to the most interesting gift ideas from 1000s of merchants in a fraction of the time. We’ll employ Social Psychology and Computer Science to quickly help you find “out of this world” products.
