Tag: Downside

Where are You Getting Your Sporting Goods?

Danny Wright asked:

Sporting goods have a large industry in society because of how much impact sports has on the world. People buy sporting goods of all kinds including sports apparel, team apparel and sports equipment. The best way to narrow down where to look for your sporting goods is to determine what you are looking for.

The internet is the most convenient place to look for the item you want. You can find a plethora of different sports stores online that sell anything and everything related to sports. Although you do have to pay for shipping and wait for your item to be mailed to you, the options you will have will be far greater than those in the actual stores.

So where do you even begin to start looking you may wonder. If you want sports equipment, there are several nationwide sporting goods stores that sell a variety of sports equipment. Places like Sports Authority and Dick’s Sporting Goods have stores all over the United States. These stores are convenient because you can find all equipment for all sports at one place as well as footwear, sports apparel, outdoor apparel and golfing equipment.

The downside to purchasing sporting goods at a generic store like these is that you may not find the highest quality stuff on the market. Certainly you can find quality items, just not always the top of the line. In order to find the top of the line sporting goods you will want to go to a store that specifically sells what you are looking for. If you want soccer equipment, go to a store that specializes in soccer. If you want a specific baseball bat, going to a baseball specific store will give you a greater chance of finding it.

Another type of sporting goods that brings in a lot of business is team sports supplies. The best way to show you passion for your favorite NBA team or NFL team is to sport their attire. Whether you want a team’s hat or a favorite athlete’s jersey, there are stores online and shops you can visit to find what you’re looking for. One of the most notable stores for team supplies is online at Eastbay.com. You will find everything imaginable at this site, plus some.

There is a plethora of sporting goods stores around the world for all different kinds of items. From sports equipment to sports apparel to your favorite team items you can purchase online or in person at various stores. Just keep in mind, if you know what exactly what you want, the easiest route might be to purchase your sporting goods online.

Are We Heading Towards A Cashless Society?

James Woolley asked:

The western world is advancing at such a rate now that it seems almost inevitable that we are slowly heading towards a cashless society. You only have to go outside and go about your daily life to see how fast technology is advancing.

Take London as an example. They’re actively encouraging people not to carry cash around with them with recent initiatives they’ve introduced.

First of all they issued Oyster cards, which people can use to pay for London’s bus and tube networks, and just recently the Evening Standard made it possible for customers to pay for their newspaper via a cashless payment card.

Now I hear that they’re considering making it possible to pay for parking in the city via mobile phone rather than parking meters so this is yet another reason for people not to carry cash around with them.

If this spreads to the rest of the UK, and if other countries adopt similar initiatives, then it’s surely only a matter of time before the whole of the western world uses technology in the form of prepaid payment cards to make cash obsolete.

The only reason we need cash at the moment is to pay for those small items from retail stores, but the technology is clearly there to make payment cards fit for this purpose, and I think pretty soon it will become the norm to pay for everyday goods via some kind of payment card.

Furthermore the fact that more and more people have mobile phones and access to the internet means that people could quite easily make payments to a payment card via these means. Therefore they would just need to transfer money electronically to their card so they can use it on the high street.

Of course the major downside is that we are heading closer towards the Orwellian world of 1984 and Big Brother where the government knows exactly what you are doing as they can track all your activities electronically.

However as long as you’re not engaging in any criminal activity then I don’t think there’s any major cause for concern, although I’m sure the conspiracy theorists won’t agree.

Ultimately you can’t stop advancing technologies and no matter how much you dislike mobile phones, the internet, and the Big Brother world we are becoming, it’s surely now only a matter of years before we become a cashless society where digital money replaces physical money.