It's really become a game of chicken, ... But to mix my metaphors, the consumer has also become trained like Pavlov's dog. He expects the pre-Christmas sales and deeper price cuts through the holidays.

You, me - everybody else is going to see it. The general consumer is going to see it - in the grocery stores, everywhere. You are going to see prices increasing. Shipping costs have gone up, and they are going to pass it on to the consumer.

I don't think it's as much a game of chicken as it is a game of bully-boy on the part of the government.

If gas prices go up, the consumer is going to be a little tighter than they were.

The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.

Like the small boy who was given a hammer for his birthday and decided that everything in the world needed hammering, or like the proponents of modern science who try to fit all human experience to a model developed to make sense of physics, it’s all too easy to mistake a metaphors usefulness in one area for evidence that the metaphor should be applied everywhere—or, worse yet, for proof that the metaphor is somehow “true.” Just as with the boy—or the scientists—the result of this sort of approach is usually a mess.