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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.
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Product of the day

By Megan McArdle

Jan 15 2009, 12:05 PM ET Comment

All right, so I'm kind of an infomercial freak.  I can't explain why the raw hucksterism so appeals to me, but there's something in the combination of honest greed and mutually acknowledged prevarication that is deeply compelling.







Today, I was watching this and meditating on the signals of relative quality. Those pads that are supposed to cleanse the toxins from your body through the soles of your feet, for example, offer a free lifetime supply, which is a pretty good sign that you will not voluntarily pay money for their product again.

The Sunbeam Rocket Grill, on the other hand, seems like it's priced on a classic printer/razor revenue model:  sell the unit at cost and make money off critical accessories--toner, or blades.  In the case of the Rocket Grill, you pay for the parchment bags that stuff is grilled in.

This is a pretty strong signal of how much Sunbeam believes in its product.  And yet, still, I am not tempted to buy a Rocket Grill.  I don't own a FoodSaver either.  I wonder if this pricing model doesn't work against the product--making it seem less like a splurge than an ongoing project.  I'm just not willing to make that kind of committment to something I see on television at three in the morning.
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