Article 1
Ferrari attraction
The Penske-Wynn car dealership in Las Vegas had a problem when it opened. About 1,600 people a day were trooping in to admire the Ferrari and Maserati sports cars parked on the showroom floor. Staff spent as much time on crowd control as selling care. The dealership began charging a $10 entrance fee to anyone not intending to buy a car or not bringing one in for service.
With about one-fifth of the daily visitors claiming to bo prospective buyers, the dealership could bring in close to $100,000 a month in admission fees - as well as selling 20-30 cars a month, of which a little more than half are used models. Prices for the cars range from $170,045 for a Ferrari T430 coupe to $254,150 for a 612 Scaglietti.
An analyst observed that it was interesting that people were paying to enter a car showroom, while General Motors almost had to pay people to come to its dealerships.
Article 2
PepsiCo's sweet taste of success
If all goes to plan, Florida's sweetest and juciest oranges will soon grow in Punjab. Farmers in the northern Indian state grow mostly wheat and rice. However, four decades of intense cultivation have led to a sharp drop in the underground water level and made the soil poorer. Because of this, the farmers joined with the state government and Pepsi Co of the USA to experiment with planting different varieties of citrus fruit from Florida and California, whose soil and weather are comparable with those of the Punjab.
For Pepsi Co and other Western food companies this kind of initiative is the key to long-term competitiveness in one of the world's fastest-growing consumer markets.
'The government wants diversification, the farmers want higher income, and the company wants local availability of citrus,' said PepsiCo India's executive director of exports.
A quarter of Punjab Slate's agricultural revenues could come from citrus by 2015, local officials estimate.
Article 3
Million Dollar Homepage
Twenty-one-year-old Alex Tew was looking for ways to raise money for his university studies. In August 2005, he had what he called 'the perfect idea': 'simple, catchy and cheap'. He opened a one-page website, divided it into a million pixels (or dots), and sold the space as advertising. He sold his pixels for one dollar each, the minimum purchase being 100 pixels.
Tew spent the money generated by the first sale on promoting his website, the 'Million Hollar Homepage'. After a couple of months of intense media coverage, he had sold about $400,000 worth of pixels.
Because of its high traffic and low prices, his site was in great demand among companies that needed advertising space, including The Times newspaper and Yahoo. In late January 2006, the last pixels were sold, and Tew became a millionaire.
Tew knows that this idea will only work once, but he says he has learnt a lot about business, and he is already working on his next venture.