Newt Gingrich for President and John Ensign for Vice President in 2012: it’s the choice ticket, a perfect representation of Republican moral values in statement and in practice.

There’s synergy in the pairing: I mean, they could cheat on each other’s wives with each other’s wives! It would save them time that they could otherwise spend explaining to us how the rest of America’s marriages should be arranged. How handy for them.

Our writer Jim has done an excellent job documenting how CafePress has deprived its shopkeepers of income by incorrectly calling listing shopkeepers’ own sales as coming from the CafePress marketplace directory. CafePress shopkeepers make significantly less money when their items sell through the marketplace.

As a result of these kinds of problems, many CafePress shopkeepers have pulled out of participation in the marketplace directory. Theoretically, that shouldn’t harm shopkeepers’ own efforts to sell their items without the marketplace’s outrageous markups. Of course, we’ve learned over the last few weeks that that the way that CafePress operates in theory does not match the way that CafePress operates in reality.

This brings me to Squidoo. Squidoo has been a good tool for CafePress shopkeepers, giving free space in which to develop issue-focused pages that can include quick-to-create modules for selling related CafePress items. Sometime in the last couple weeks, this system has broken down.

The image you see here is from a Squidoo page I set up recently to provide an easy way to follow news on the effort to legalize marriage equality in New York state. It’s the CafePress module in that page, which had bumper stickers, buttons and a tshirt for people who wanted gear to express support for the effort. As you can see, it’s blank.

Why is it blank? I had 5 items there before, and I certainly didn’t take them out. There are a couple of possibilities I can think of.

First, since I set up the module, Squidoo has altered its own model a little bit, offering different themes of appearance, and taking away a tool that encouraged Squidoo members to link to other Squidoo pages. It’s possible that this shift has caused some kind of programming glitch that empties out CafePress modules.

Second, since I set up the module, we at Irregular Times have removed our CafePress shops from the marketplace program. It’s possible that this shift has caused problems with CafePress modules at Squidoo. If this is the case, it suggests that CafePress was counting sales made as a result of shopkeers going through the trouble to market their own products, not as shopkeepers’ own sales, but as sales made through the marketplace. That would contradict what CafePress has told its shopkeepers, that marketplace sales were due to the hard work of people CafePress, and not shopkeepers’ efforts.

Whichever is the case, the timing couldn’t be worse for CafePress, which already is dealing with a large number of angry shopkeepers. There are a lot of Squidoo pages that had been directing traffic to CafePress, but aren’t any more. It’s likely that many CafePress shopkeepers who had maintained CafePress modules at Squidoo pages are feeling too disenchanted with CafePress to repair these modules, and may work with plain text modules linking to alternative print on demand companies, such as Skreened, instead.

When bumper sticker, button and t-shirt corporation CafePress announced back in April that come June 1 it’d hike prices to customers and cut payments to designers, designers expressed great fury. A number of designers said they’d boycott CafePress and simply stop uploading designs to be sold as a way of punishing the corporation. But measurements of uploads to the CafePress Marketplace system showed no sign of slowing then.

When I noted this, more than one individual said Aha, Just You Wait until June 1, when the changes were scheduled to go into effect. The idea was that people would keep going up until the pay changes went into effect, and then additions to the CafePress Marketplace would drop off.

Well, June 1 is here, and the price hikes for customers and pay cuts for designers have gone into effect. Regardless, new additions to the Marketplace are proceeding apace. These are my personal observations of the statistics reported on cafepress.com’s uploading system:

On Monday, April 6 of this year between midnight and 10:13 AM, 2057 new designs were uploaded to the CafePress Marketplace.

On Monday, April 27 between midnight and 10:05 AM, 2195 new designs were uploaded to the CafePress Marketplace.

This Monday, June 1 between midnight and 9:44 AM, 2010 new designs were uploaded to the CafePress Marketplace.

If anything, one ought to expect this Monday to be slower, considering that some people are coming off a late Memorial Day-ish weekend and presumably less likely to be logging on. But the rate of uploads on these three Mondays is roughly the same. People seem to be sticking with CafePress in similar numbers; to the extent anyone is leaving CafePress in disgust, someone new seems to be arriving to take their place.

CafePress is a “print on demand” corporation. What that means, practically speaking, is that they have a set of printers in a handful of factories in the United States. The CafePress corporation uses those printers to put images made by graphic designers onto a variety of products, including bumper stickers, buttons and shirts. Because it uses printers rather than bulk silk screening, the CafePress corporation is able to print each item as it is ordered — on demand.

Up until this very morning, when CafePress sold an item with a graphic designer’s image on it, the price system for customers, designers and CafePress itself was simple and straightforward. For each product it sold, CafePress maintained for itself a certain guaranteed amount of money called a base price. When a graphic designer made an image available for sale on a CafePress product, she or he set an additional markup, a commission to be received by the designer for each sale of the image on that product. The price a customer actually paid for the product was the base price plus the commission. For example, until this morning CafePress set a base price of $3.49 for a 3×10 inch vinyl bumper sticker. We at Irregular Times set a commission of $1.16 for a Turn Off Your TV / Think For Yourself design printed on that sticker. As a customer, you’d have paid $4.65 for a bumper sticker with that design on it.

Starting today, that simple system has been replaced by something rather more complicated. From now on, how much a customer pays for a product, how much a designer is paid for the use of a design on a product, and how much CafePress pays itself depends on how the customer comes to chooses that product.

If you buy a CafePress product through a URL featuring a designer’s shop name, the system works the same way as it always did. The “shop” URL for the Turn Off Your TV bumper sticker looks like http://www.cafepress.com/irregulargoods.13734306. You might get to this “shop” URL from a Google search, or you might get to that “shop” URL from the graphic designer’s website, your you might find it on a bulletin board.

If the URL for the product starts with the name of the product type instead, then CafePress sets a different base price to pay itself and sets a different commission to pay the designer. In the case of the Turn Off Your TV bumper sticker, this different url looks like http://bumperstickers.cafepress.com/item/turn-off-your-tv-and-think-bumper-sticker/13734306. You might get to this different URL by using the little blue search box on the home page of CafePress, or you might get to it by a Google search, or you might get to that URL from somebody else’s website or bulletin board.

That’s the new system, starting today. Starting today, the CafePress corporation is putting all of its efforts into promoting this latter sort of URL and not the former. The latter sort of URL raises prices customers pay for the same products while cutting the commission graphic designers earn, down to a mandated 10 percent of the price paid by the customer. It’s confusing, and the reasons for the split are obscure, but the effects are demonstrable.

To return to our example, if you go to http://www.cafepress.com/irregulargoods.13734306 to buy the Turn Off Your TV bumper sticker, you’ll encounter the old price structure, in which you paid $4.65, Irregular Times received $1.16, and CafePress received $3.95. But if you go to http://bumperstickers.cafepress.com/item/turn-off-your-tv-and-think-bumper-sticker/13734306, you’ll pay $5.00, Irregular Times will receive $0.50, and CafePress will get $4.50.

In this shift, the base prices for items — Customer Price minus Designer Markup — are going up. The source for the old base prices is a list here. The base prices under the new system are figured as the price to the customer minus 10 percent.

Old Base Price for Bumper Stickers: $3.65… New Base Price for Bumper Stickers: $4.50

Old Base Price for 2.5 inch Buttons: $2.99… New Base Price for 2.5 inch Buttons: $3.60

Old Base Price for 1 inch Buttons: $1.49… New Base Price for 1 inch Buttons: $2.25

Old Base Price for 11×17 Posters: $4.99… New Base Price for 11×17 Posters: $7.20

Old Base Price for Round Xmas Ornaments: $5.99… New Base Price for Round Xmas Ornaments: $9.00

Old Base Price for 10 Pack Greeting Cards: $14.99… New Base Price for 10 Pack Greeting Cards: $17.20

Old Base Price for Organic Men’s American Apparel Shirt: $19.99… New Base Price for Organic Men’s American Apparel Shirt: $23.40

Old Base Price for Junior Raglan American Apparel Shirt: $17.99… New Base Price for Junior Raglan American Apparel Shirt: $21.60

Old Base Price for American Apparel Thong: $7.99… New Base Price for American Apparel Thong: $10.80

CafePress is not putting itself in a competitive price position, and its explanations for the changes do not match with observable reality. It’s typical behavior for a profit-maximizing corporation, not all that surprising.

CafePress may try to dress up today’s announcement with a barrel full of hand waving, a slapdash cloudiness of vocabulary and a few other mixed metaphors’ worth of dazzling PR-speak, but what their news release all boils down to is this:

1. Come June 1, the print-on-demand corporation CafePress will increase the prices shoppers pay for its shirts and other gear.
2. Come June 1, CafePress will decrease the commissions paid to the sellers who make designs available on CafePress products, especially on non-apparel items.
3. Starting now but especially after June 1, CafePress will work to undercut designers who maintain their own shops and also sell on CafePress’ “marketplace” search engine.

The result: less independence for designers who work through CafePress and a greater profit margin for the CafePress corporation.

These are strong claims, so let me back them up.

CafePress will increase prices shoppers pay.

A simple comparison of the few examples CafePress reveals in today’s announcement to designers reveals a consistent trend toward price increases. In the system CafePress works by now, CafePress sets a “base price” and a shopkeeper adds a “markup” for every item. For example, our made-in-the-USA I Am Not A Second Class Citizen T-Shirt has a base price of $21.99 (reflecting a hefty markup for CafePress above the wholesale price it pays for the shirt). We’ve added a markup of $2.51 for each shirt, and that makes the retail price for the buyer $24.50.

Here are some base prices for five items CafePress sells:

Men’s Light T-Shirt: $14.99
Women’s Zip Hoodie: $34.99
Keepsake Box: $19.99
Small Mug: $10.99
Large Poster: $17.99

In the new system, if a designer chooses to sell on a traditional static html “shop” page she or he maintains and promotes (like www.cafepress.com/irregulargoods), she or he can continue to set prices like before. But if she or he makes merchandise with his or her designs available on CafePress’s search engine and own set of dynamic web pages (what CafePress calls its “marketplace”), retail prices will be set by a central committee at CafePress (making the “marketplace” less of a real market). Designers won’t be able to set a markup — they will earn a 10% commission off the retail price instead.

Here is the new, higher retail price range CafePress mentions today for five example products:

Men’s Light T-Shirt: $20.00 - $25.00
Women’s Zip Hoodie: $35.00 - $40.00
Keepsake Box: $22.00 - $28.00
Small Mug: $12.00 - $18.00
Large Poster: $18.00 - $25.00

If shirt retail prices rise $5-$10 (as indicated by the example of the light t-shirt), then for shopkeepers like us who markup by $2.51, or even for shopkeepers like Green Gecko who markup by $4.00, the result will be a retail price increase for shoppers.

CafePress will decrease the marketplace commission paid out to designers, especially for non-apparel items.

When it comes to shirt sales, people who add a low markup won’t see much change in commission: if the retail price for a dark made-in-the-usa shirt goes up to $25, we would still see a $2.50 commission, a mere decrease of a penny. But designers like Green Gecko, who currently add a markup of $4.00 or more (look it up for yourself, you’ll see these folks are more common), will see a decrease in their commission.

The effect is much more pronounced for items with a low base price. Buttons sold through CafePress currently have a base price of $2.99, and shopkeepers usually add $1-2 in markup for their profit. (We add $0.96, but psssst… we also produce our own buttons of exactly the same size for $2.95 including shipping and handling.) If CafePress sets its no-negotiation retail price for buttons in its “marketplace” at $3.95 (you think this includes shipping and handling, by the way? Think again: delivery at the speed of first-class mail will cost you another $7.00), that gives designers a much-lower profit of 40 cents, while CafePress rakes in more profit.

CafePress will undercut designers who sell on the marketplace and on their own shop.

In its announcement, CafePress has declared its intention to stop linking to designers’ shops from the marketplace pages displaying an item. This makes no sense from the buyer’s point of view, who may want to buy similar items from the same designer. It also doesn’t help the individual designer, obviously, since as discussed above she or he stands to make more profit from his or her own shop. But it does make sense for CafePress… if it is interested in taking shoppers’ traffic away from designers’ shops and onto the price-controlled marketplace.

Designers of items that sell on both their own shops and the new marketplace will find themselves in a fix. On the one hand, bumper stickers will have to retail for $10 on the marketplace in order for designers to make as much profit per sale as before. On the other hand, if CafePress doesn’t raise the retail price of its bumper sticker exorbitantly — say, to $3.49, designers could find the marketplace version of their item out-competing the shop version of their item… and producing more profit for CafePress and less profit for the designer. The shops are undercut by the marketplace, inducing designer/shopkeepers to lower their prices on their shops, again with the result of lower profit for designers.

I’m not making a moral case here that CafePress is a bad corporation that must be spanked for its naughty behavior. Corporations are built to squeeze people — it’s not good or bad of them, because corporations have no souls. This is just what they do, and the CafePress corporation is doing what it’s doing for a reason — most likely (despite CafePress’ oblique protests to the sort-of-contrary) because its sales are way, way down and it’s looking for a way out of its own hard times. Screaming at the unfairness, the injustice of it all won’t accomplish much, because despite its VW-bus ad copy the CafePress corporation is not organized around principles of fairness or justice.

I’m making a practical case directed primarily at designers for CafePress, and here is the case’s conclusion:

If you are a designer for CafePress who is dependent on the marketplace model, then well, chum, you’re out of luck, at least until you find a way to become independent of the CafePress marketplace.

The best way to become independent is to maintain a website that has something to do with more than selling things with pictures printed on them, a website that has to do with matters you care about. People who care about the same matters but are not interested in buying things with pictures printed on them will visit your website, and they’ll talk to you, and you’ll talk back, and you’ll have a good time. People who care about the same things you do and who also want to get a thing with a picture printed on it will find you and make a purchase through links from your web page. It’s a no-pressure way of making a living connected to things you care about, and I for one really like it.

If you are a designer for CafePress who is not dependent on the marketplace model, then there’s really no more reason for you to put your product on the marketplace. It’s turned from an enabling tool to an exploitive tool, and who wants to be exploited any more than necessary?

Independent shopkeepers, consider withdrawing your products from the marketplace. The next time our kids give us an hour or two of free time, we here at Irregular Times certainly will. I don’t expect many people to follow suit, because independence is a bit scary to most people, but I do think it would be in many designers’ best interest. If enough people do follow suit, then the highly controlled marketplace CafePress has fashioned may collapse on account of its own emptiness.

As the economy implodes, I’ve been watching my mailbox fill with more, and more, and more offers from the services that print bumper stickers, buttons and t-shirts with various designs on demand. These offers promise me $5 off a purchase of $20, free shipping, extra business cards included, even a chance to win a prize… if only I will buy something, anything from them.

I can smell the desperation in those messages, and the desperation is understandable. Budgets are getting tight all over America, and one of the first things to go in any clampdown on expenses is discretionary spending. A bumper sticker, a button, or a t-shirt is a discretionary purchase, an optional item that might help one spread some message but really isn’t necessary. So of course visits are down to print on demand services like CafePress:

Of course sales are down at print on demand services like CafePress and Zazzle. My question isn’t even how sales are at outfits like these. My question is, which print-on-demand service will close first?

Will CafePress be the first to close down its shop? It has a lot of designs to sell, but it has also recently expanded into international sales, recently laid down somewhere between $15 million and $20 million to buy the niche service Imagekind, and there are rumors and denials that CafePress borrowed a bit less than $10 million from venture capitalists. Last year’s overhauls, which involved the introduction of a slow design system and the slashing of commission payments to designers, has users disgruntled. Big $$$, unhappy people.

Or will Zazzle be the first to close down its shop? This printer’s website background color is black, an advantage that should never be dismissed. But this outfit spent last year spending some serious cash to acquire the disaster called Goodstorm and apparently pay off Cafepress users in order to switch all their products to Zazzle. Big $$$, happy people?

My bet for the service to stick around is Skreened. It has a small number of employees, a small need for equipment, and no need for big overseas purchases, since its clothing is all made in the USA. In lean times, smaller operations can keep right on chugging at a smaller scale without all the corporate bloat to support. No big office complex in trendy, expensive California. Working at its small scale Skreened innovates and attracts innovative designers. In my opinion the people at Skreened are most likely to continue succeeding at what they do.

Plus, I just plain like ‘em.

After the election of Barack Obama on November 4, people understandably ordered a large number of Obama buttons, magnets, bumper stickers and such in celebration. But if we cancel out that wave, what other hopes and concerns and angers are people feeling the need to express? To provide some glimmers of an indication, here’s a list of our top ten selling non-Obama, non-McCain, non-Palin, non-Biden, non-Inauguration, non-election buttons, stickers and such in the two days that have passed after the election:

1.
Godless Bumper Sticker

2.
Atheist Button

3.
Winter Solstice Greeting Cards

4.
Abolish the Electoral College Bumper Sticker

5.
Better a Gay Marriage Than a Sad Marriage Bumper Sticker

6.
Earth’s Axis is the Reason for the Season Bumper Sticker

7.
If Everything Changed After September 11, Why Isn’t Same-Sex Marriage Legal Yet? Bumper Sticker

8.
I Support Same-Sex Marriage Bumper Sticker

9.
Peace Bumper Sticker

10.
I’m Straight, Not Narrow Button

Religious freedom, marriage liberty and a little bit of peace. Is that too much to ask?

It seems that Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is the Sarah Palin of Minnesota - and no, that’s not a good thing.

During a TV interview, Representative Bachmann accused Barack Obama of being “anti-American”. That’s crazy enough to warrant attention, but Bachmann didn’t stop there. Bachmann called for an investigation to identify anti-American members of Congress. She said,

“I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would love to see an expose like that.”

An investigation to identify anti-American members of the government? It seems like I’ve heard about that happening before. When was that? Oh yeah - the Joseph McCarthy hearings back in the 1950s before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Apparently, Michele Bachmann thinks that Americans would love to see a repeat of those hearings. Count me out.

The response to Bachmann’s call for a hunt against anti-America members of Congress has drawn a strong response, but not the sort that Bachmann was hoping for. Her challenger, Democrat El Tinklenberg, has received something like half a million dollars has been donated to the Tinklenberg for Congress campaign in just the 24 hours since Michele Bachmann’s outrageous remarks were broadcast on TV. These aren’t big donations. They’re small donations from grassroots opponents of Michelle Bachmann. There have been hundreds of thousands of donations to the Tinklenberg campaign from Friday to Saturday.

An opinion poll taken a few days before Bachmann started calling Barack Obama “anti-American” showed her with a just a 4-point lead over her opponent - within the margin of error. Keep your eyes out for a new poll taken after this weekend, to see where Bachmann’s tirade leads her.

What sort of political animal are you, anyway? Are you a sheep, looking to follow the herd with the hottest political button out there right now? Or are you an odd bird, looking for a bumper sticker that others have overlooked or disdained, something with a message that will distinguish you from the rest?

Be you motivated by conformity or dissonance, we hope you’ll get something out of our latest lists of Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin bumper stickers and buttons, each sorted according to popularity in sales. Whether you choose to focus on the most popular or least popular messages out there is up to you. It’s a long list, so either way you go you’ll have a fair amount to choose from.

Some of our most popular sellers as of late:

“That One” Obama 08 Button
Hope, Not Fear: Obama 2008 Sticker
Hockey Mom for Obama bumper sticker
Sarah Palin? Appalling Bumper Sticker
Sarah Palin is an Idiot (bumper sticker)

A handful of our least popular items:

Gee, John, I’ve only got the one house (Bumper Sticker)
I would rather eat slugs than vote for McCain Bumper Sticker
Unitarians for Obama bumper sticker
I Supported Clinton First, But I Support Obama Now bumper sticker
Zamboni Drivers for Barack Obama button

That last one we can’t offer any more; we got hit with a trademark takedown, and we just don’t have the heart to stick up a “Ice-Smoother-Outer Drivers for Obama” button.

For a fuller list, um, see the full lists!

Earlier this year I looked at statistics of bumper sticker, button and t-shirt sales from the 4th week of May 2008 and compared them to our sales statistics from the 4th week of May in 2004. What I found indicated that the two elections were very different. In May 2004, about 10% of our election sales were in support of John Kerry, while about 90% of our election sales were in opposition to George W. Bush. In May of 2008, on the other hand, about 96% our election sales were in support of Barack Obama, with only 4% of sales in opposition to John McCain. My conclusion at the time was that the election of 2008 seemed to be much more driven by support of Barack Obama than by opposition to John McCain.

I’ve just finished looking at our sales statistics from October 1 to October 15, 2008, and they show the same pattern, broadly speaking. During the past two weeks, 85.4% of our 2008 presidential election-related sales have been of items in support of Barack Obama. Just 14.6% of our our election 2008 sales have been anti-McCain or anti-Palin sales. That’s a smaller gap than what we saw in the spring, but it’s still a huge gap.

I’m pretty confident that this difference represents something real; over just the past two weeks, we’ve sold many thousands of items, making the mass of sales large enough to swamp out the oddities of random buyers. To the extent that our website would introduce bias, it would be in the anti-McCain direction, since over the past few months our editorial position has been much more anti-McCain than pro-Obama. Our own sales stats lead me to believe that on the Democratic side of the equation (we simply won’t sell items that support the Republican agenda), the election seems to be motivated mainly by support for Barack Obama. Messages of opposition to John McCain are secondary.

Because schadenfreude is so much fun.

Sarah Palin says that she has special foreign policy expertise because she lives in Alaska, which is next to Russia, except for all that water between the two countries, what with that maritime thing and all.

Other people say that Sarah Palin isn’t ready to become President in the likely eventuality that John McCain dies in the next four years.

Help build common ground with this campaign tshirt, which suggests that Sarah Palin go back to doing what she does best - standing in Alaska, watching the skies just in case Putin rears his head into our airspace.

Help Sarah Palin see Russia again. Send her back to Alaska, where she can conduct her foreign policy studies without bothering the rest of us.

Also available as a bumper sticker and a political button.

Republicans are all agog over Sarah Palin. They’re practically drooling. It isn’t for the policies of Palin, though, or the substance of Sarah, so much a it is for her image. It’s Republican identity politics at its worst. They say that Sarah Palin is the hottest VP from the coolest state. Really. That’s what the GOP is putting on buttons.

As for myself, I have a bit of trouble finding a woman who is as mentally unhinged as Sarah Palin is, to be hot. When you’re always wondering if a woman is going to stab you in the back, or put a rabbit in the crock pot, or leave a moose head in your bed, or try to take you to her weird Wasilla church of prophecy, it’s kind of hard for a man to feel any kind of real attraction.

That’s why I responded to the Republican political button with a design of my own: Sarah Palin, the craziest VP from the coolest state - she’s come undone. It’s on a shirt too… and another Sarah Palin video podcast.

McCain More of the Same Banner	McCain More of the Same 2.25" Button	McCain More of the Same Magnet
McCain More of the Same 3.5" Button	McCain More of the Same Sticker (3×5)	McCain More of the Same Yard Sign

Well, he is, you know.