Best Business Commentary

Email rehab

Employees don’t exactly embrace “no email” Fridays, says Sue Shellenbarger in The Wall Street Journal. Several companies have implemented Friday or weekend email bans to “encourage more face-to-face and phone contact with customers and co-workers, raise productivity, or just give employees a reprieve from the ever-rising email tide.” Initially, “efforts to communicate in other ways may be halting at best.” And some employees will “fight back like recovering smokers in a nicotine fit.” But cold turkey is the only way to combat “the email habit.” And managers: workers come around and will eventually thank you.

Poor millionaires

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“It is increasingly expensive to be rich,” says George Will in The Washington Post. The Forbes “Cost of Living Extremely Well” index—“yes, there is such a thing”—has been rising much faster than inflation. But the psychological price jump may be worse: envy increases “perhaps even faster” than wealth does. So while “certain clothes, luggage, wristwatches, handbags, automobiles, etc.” used to be enough to set you apart, such “cachet is a casualty” of this age of mass-produced luxury goods and “so much money sloshing around” to buy them. After all, “when there are 379 Louis Vuitton and 227 Gucci stores, who cares?”