
Socks Don’t Match? How About a Subscription?  - peter123
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/03/19/socks-dont-match-how-about-a-subscription/
======
mdasen
This is why people don't have money. 40,000 people in Europe pay $7.42 a pair
of socks?

1\. Collect socks

2\. Figure out how to get people to pay 5x retail for something readily
available everywhere.

3\. Profit

 _who has time to shop for new ones?_

Hmm, it is time consuming. I mean, the whole grabbing a package takes forever.

 _There is nothing that is less satisfying to me than going to a store to buy
socks._

Yeah, it's just so difficult and disappointing. I guess she's got a really
hard life what with her sock problems.

\--

The article compares them to Netflix, but Netflix is different - they're
offering a service at lower cost with greater variety. This company is
offering less variety at higher cost. This is why people have trouble with
their finances - they start spending money they don't need to be spending on
services and products they don't need. Yeah, everyone needs socks, but they
don't need a service to sell them socks at way above retail. How hard would it
be to bookmark socks you like on Amazon and order them when you need them? Or
go down to the local store and purchase them?

~~~
patio11
_This is why people don't have money._

I think the point of items like this is not "I am going to spend the rent
check on socks" but rather "I have money which is more than sufficient for my
needs, but my life is stressful and I have very little time, and I will
willingly trade money for time or stress relief, even in doses that seem
smaller than some people might appreciate."

My business is built on charging people $30 for something they could do for
free. Of course, its only free if you think the extra hour of your life it
costs you was valueless. My customers don't.

I paid $3.50 this morning for a coffee and pastry when I could have brewed my
own darn coffee and packed a pastry from home for a third of the price. Is
that rational? Eh. $2.50 saved a day times twenty work days a month is about
$50. That's sort of below my feel-burning-urge-to-change-habits line these
days, particularly since the equivalent amount of mental effort of my business
would have much better returns.

~~~
BvS
What about buying socks when you are at a clothes shop anyway. Even if its
only every two years, you could easily buy 20 pairs at once since you are
hardly running the risk that they will be out of fashion next season.

Even rich people go to buy clothes themselves at last once every other year,
don't they? Seems like less time in contrast to fill out an online form.

------
ryanwaggoner
I know a lot of people will think this is ridiculous, but I would pay for
something like this. I hate shopping and I seem to perpetually be short on
socks and underwear. Unfortunately, I never remember when I'm actually
somewhere that sells them.

Actually, I take it back. Socks are consumables, but they're not perishable,
so it would seem to make more sense to just buy 100 pairs every five years or
something.

------
jwilliams
I've been doing something like this for a couple of years -- Picked a
popular/long-lived brand of sock, and that's all I buy. No more pairing, no
more pairs lost due to losing one, or one getting a hole.

------
profgubler
I love this idea even though it is expensive. I would never pay these rates,
but I think they are missing out on revenue gold. If all the socks you get are
the same, like the article says you gather a lot of socks. But if you throw in
variety to the sock it is inevitable that people will lose one.

This makes it so that your customers become life long customers as they would
always have to replace the mismatched socks. This eliminates customers
dropping out after 4 years.

------
brandnewlow
Solution: Stop caring if your socks match.

~~~
jrockway
That's one solution, but it always bothers me when I know I am wearing socks
that don't match. So, I buy big bags of identical socks every so often. $20
lasts for about two years, and since I only own one type of sock, it's not
possible to have non-matching socks.

Personally, I think my idea is a lot better than a "subscription".

~~~
brandnewlow
That's pretty close to what I do as well.

------
tocomment
I really hate matching socks, it seems like such a waste of time. Every time I
do laundry I think to myself "There has got to be a way to make the socks
match themselves". I mean the dryer is already moving the socks around, and
probably bringing every sock by every other sock. Can't there be a way to make
like socks attract, stick together?

Alas, 29 years and I still haven't thought of anything :-(

~~~
josefresco
Solution, have all your socks be .... wait for it ... THE SAME

I work off 1 big package of socks at a time. Matching them is easy because
they're all the same.

Genius.

~~~
randallsquared
I try to do this, but when I go to buy socks, they never have the kind I
bought last time. Instead they'll have pointlessly changed the design, or the
color will be slightly darker or lighter, or they'll have changed from sizes
of 6-8, 9-11, 12+ to new improved sizes of 7-12 or something, meaning I have
to either have socks that fit less well or change brands, which means they
don't match any longer... it's all pretty annoying. Lots of cheap,
interchangeable goods are like this: if you don't buy them every week, every
time you go to the store all the options are different.

~~~
jerf
White socks. I have white socks. There's always socks in the store that are
white, or possibly grey in areas covered by shoes.

To notice that my two white socks don't _perfectly_ match, someone would have
to come up to me and roll up the legs of my jeans. At this point, I believe
they've got me beat on the "social faux pas" scale.

Socks are cheap enough that I throw them out individually if they get holes,
or, rarely, if I just don't like how they feel. Most of the time I just get on
with it.

I have a much smaller pool of black socks for formal events. Right now I've
got "too thin" and "too thick" black socks, but I wear them rarely enough I
don't worry about trying to find any that are "just right".

I don't spend much time worrying about socks. I don't spend $10 a year
worrying about socks, let alone per month.

~~~
bena
White socks ftw.

I can't believe people have a problem with this. I learned this from my father
when I was still a young boy. Buy white socks, stop worrying.

~~~
lpgauth
White socks are great for sports, but you don't look very serious wearing a
black suit with them...

------
smokey_the_bear
Amazon has something like this. I noticed it as an option for buying iced tea
bags, I could select to automatically repeat my order every n months. Don't
know what other products they offer it for.

37signals story about it - [http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/512-amazons-
delivery-subs...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/512-amazons-delivery-
subscriptions)

------
nike
I vaguely remember hearing a speech by the founder in Switzerland around 2002.
If I remember right, he had a single employee and was making ~1M CHF annual
revenue at the time. He was so confident of his product that he listed his
competitors on his own website - and he would mark each one that went out of
business.

