And who are the people we rely on for movie and TV reviews? Well, traditionally, they have been “professional” reviewers writing for newspapers and magazines, or hosting TV or radio shows. For many people (including me), that goes even now, in the internet era; when I want to check out a movie review, for example, I’ll usually surf to Rotten Tomatoes, which gathers up reviews for movies from major newspapers and well-known blog sites. I feel I can “trust” the writers of those reviews.

Until the internet, most publications restricted their reviews to entertainment items – movies, plays, music, etc. But there was surprisingly little peer-review of consumer items (except for cars). What did you do if you wanted to know whether a particular TV set, video camera, refrigerator, etc. was worth the money? Why, you’d “shop around” – a term which consumers took to mean doing things like asking friends, quizzing salespeople, etc. But for the most part, buying a major appliance was an act of faith, because there were only a limited number of friends who probably bought the same item you were interested in – and of course, the salesperson wasn’t going to knock his/her own product.

But today, when you can ask anyone you want about anything, you’re not limited to checking out an item among people you personally know; you can find out what people think about consumer items on thousands of websites, where millions of people have posted tens of millions of opinions on hundreds of millions of items! Theoretically, no one should ever make a mistake buying anything anymore; when considering a product, all one has to do these days is check out the internet and see what “the cloud” has to say about the item in question. No longer does spending money have to be an act of faith; all you have to do is take your own online poll of what others who have spent money on the same item you’re considering say. How can you go wrong?

Here’s how: Have you ever posted an online review at a site like Amazon? Probably not; most people don’t unless they have some kind of motivation. Amazon.com has become one of the premier review sites for products of all kinds today. The site sells everything, and the product page (for every product) has useful information of all types about what you’re buying – including, and most important for our purposes, reviews of the product.

Who’s doing the posting? Well, we assume it’s people who have bought the item. But how do we know? Maybe a negative review was posted by someone working for a company making a rival product who is seeking to push sales in their direction – or who is afraid of losing their job?

While it’s hard to believe that someone would bother “gaming” review sites like this, it makes sense when you begin to realize just how pervasive internet shopping is – both for those who buy online and those who check out products on sites like Amazon before buying retail. In one sense, posting a review in an online forum can amount to free advertising – both positive and negative – when used astutely. And apparently there are some who do use review forums astutely, posting reviews for any number of reasons – promotion (self or product), revenge (against hated corporations, etc.), on-line socializing (participating in the “review community”), etc. Doesn’t anyone post a review for its own sake? Of course – but you have to be plenty motivated (or bored, or angry, etc. ) to bother with reviewing products, imho.

The possibility (and possible phenomenon) of product opinion manipulation has been noticed by others – including noted author Stephen Dubner, who co-wrote the book Freakonomics. Dubner notes in a blog posting that he checked out one particular reviewer whom he says, redates reviews in order to keep them near the top of the review list of chronological reviews on Amazon (the left review column), as well as on top of the overall review list for a product (the right review column). “I noticed this only because the same two-star review of Freakonomics kept magically appearing near the top of the reviews page,” Dubner writes, adding that the reviewer, for his own motives, posted a negative review of his book which, citing a scholarly study, may have impacted online sales.

I checked out the reviewer in question and discovered that, indeed, he was at the top of the Freakonomics review list – as well as at the top of reviews on dozens of other pages! Books, movies, CDs – the reviewer in question has over 2,000 to his credit, many of them quite extensive and well-written. Interestingly, every couple of days, five or six reviews appear under his name, many of them for older movies or books. Is there “redating” of reviews going on, like Dubner says? It’s impossible to know (unless you’re an employee of Amazon and have access to their server data). But it certainly makes you wonder!
This is not to imply any nefarious intent on the part of the reviewer, by the way; his profile indicates that he’s retired, so it’s possible that Amazon reviewing is this gentleman’s second career. But even if he’s on the up and up, is it not possible that others are gaming the system – for fun and profit? Most disturbing to me is the fact that Dubner’s blog posting is from 2005, while the reviewer is still hard at work, with his name still at the top of the review list on all the products he’s reviewed, for all I know (I didn’t check out all the 2100 plus product pages). And he’s not even the number one reviewer on Amazon, meaning that if there are “tactics” at work here, there may be a couple of thousand other people who are using them even more effectively You’d think Amazon would want to do everything it could to assure consumers that they can rely on reviews appearing on product pages. I didn’t look too deeply into other review sites, but if Amazon can be manipulated, others can be as well, cant’ they?

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That includes the shekel, which over the past year has lost a huge chunk of its exchange value versus the dollar. A year ago the exchange rate was about NIS 4.20 per dollar; today it is hovering around NIS 3.50 (actually, as I write this, it is NIS 3.39 per dollar).

International finance is a complicated subject – a lot more complicated than computers! Far be it for me to speculate on the reasons for the dollar’s doldrums, much less to predict on where it is headed. What concerns me is the very real issue of what my money – shekel or dollar – can buy.

As everyone who does business in Israel with dollars knows, a stronger shekel versus the dollar means a disadvantageous shekel exchange rate – i.e. fewer shekels for your dollars. If you sold your house for the shekel equivalent of $200,000 a year ago this week, you received NIS 840,000 for your property; today you’d only get NIS 700,000.

The converse is true, too – or should be; prices for products imported from the US (or from China, since they are usually denominated in dollar terms) should be sinking in shekel terms. An item that cost $1,000 a year ago – NIS 4,200 – should now cost only NIS 3,500.

I haven’t noticed a rash of price cutting for products imported from the US, or usually sold in dollars. At 4.2 versus 3.5, the dollar has lost about 20 percent of its value against the shekel; hence, we should see prices on a wide array of products being cut by 20%

But we have not. In many cases, prices on dollar-denominated goods quoted in shekel prices have actually risen. That means, in some cases, prices on these goods are as much as 25% higher in shekel terms than they were a year ago. The folks selling these goods – as diverse as computers, brand-name clothing and footwear, and industrial products – really have a nerve, if you ask me.

When things are moving in the other direction – that of a strong dollar – they don’t hesitate to raise the price of their goods in shekel terms, with the excuse that they have to pay the same dollar amount regardless of the shekel’s value. The same thing should apply when things swing the other way, and the shekel cost of the dollar-denominated goods goes down!

In fact, the gap between what the price is in shekels and what it should be in dollar terms has blown wide open – which gave me an idea. What if you were to take a quick hop over to New York – say for just a couple of days – and go shopping? For one night, I guess you could get away with sleeping on the subway. But even if you wanted to stay for a week or so, you could find a reasonably priced motel (like for $50 or $60 a night) for the price of a train ride to the suburbs, and really have a nice time. And if you have relatives or friends to stay by, this would be a good excuse to visit.

Could you save enough money on the dollar/shekel price “spread” – the extra discount you get by buying things at the real dollar price, as opposed to the now-artificially hiked up shekel price – to make such a trip worthwhile? Such was the question I posed to myself, and here are my findings.

• A cursory examination prices for the same or very similar products here in Israel and at Amazon.com revealed some major price differences. At an Israeli auction site, for example (http://tinyurl.com/2pokzm), a Toshiba Satellite Core 2 Duo 1.5GHz 120GB laptop with 2 GB of RAM was going for NIS 4,568 (plus NIS 69 shipping and handling). At NIS 3.50/dollar, that comes out to $1,325. That doesn’t sound too bad, unless you consider that a better model (with a 200 GB HD) is available at Amazon.com (http://tinyurl.com/34rwwd) for $730. So, if you were buying a Toshiba Satellite laptop, you’d be $595 ahead if you bought it in the US.

• What about an HP laptop? This one (http://tinyurl.com/32yttf) at another site is being offered for NIS 5,999 – $1,714 at current rates. It’s got a Pentium duo-core processor, 2 GB RAM and a 250 GB hard drive. I couldn’t find the exact model and specs at Amazon, but this one (http://tinyurl.com/34jq5m), if you don’t mind an AMD duo-core processor, is pretty close – and it’s only $1,000. If, however, you must have an Intel processor, try this one (http://tinyurl.com/2v9ek3) – for $1,100. It’s got a 240 GB hard drive, Duo Core Intel Processor and a fingerprint reader to boot. Savings on this item – at least $614.

• Let’s move on to the Macbooks (you know you want one). The Israeli agent for Apple products, iDigital (http://tinyurl.com/386vzd), sells the basic 2.1 mhz white Macbook (1 GB RAM, 120 GB hard drive) for NIS 6,199 – or $1,771. Compare that to the price you can get it for at Amazon – $1,094 (http://tinyurl.com/3dvk93). They’re even offering a $75 rebate on this item, which would bring down the cost to $1,019. But we won’t count that. Savings on the Macbook – $677.

And if you’re in the market for the newest edition of Apple’s laptop, the Macbook Air, you’ll save even more – NIS 10,000, or $2,857 for the iDigital version (http://tinyurl.com/2vahb8), compared to $1,794 for the same one at Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/2wl9lq) – a full $1,063 less.

• What about an iPhone? Well, they don’t officially sell it in Israel yet. However, a friend of mine (who couldn’t get a visa to the US and decided he couldn’t wait) told me he spent NIS 3,500 on one – a cool $1,000 – for the same phone the Apple store sells in the US for $399. To be fair, however, if you do buy an iPhone in the US, you have to unlock it to use it with local cellphone networks – a process I’ve seen widely advertised for NIS 249, or $71. Still, for the $529 you save on the iPhone, you could get two of them for the price of one here.

If you were to use my modest shopping list as a purchase guide, then, you could buy two laptops – the HP and a plain white Macbook – and an iPhone (with the Israeli conversion fee factored in) for $2,663 in the US, compared to $4,485 in Israel. That means to make a trip to buy these three items worthwhile, you’d have to spend less than $1,822 in airfare and expenses. Can it be done?

I checked the Web sites of several airlines for prices on flights between today and tomorrow, returning in a week (you could return in as little as three days on all of them, actually). On Turkish Airlines, with a stop in Istanbul, a round-trip ticket this week is $1,032.26, and on Lufthansa it’s $1,033. Cheapest ticket: Olympic Airways, which will get you to New York and back for $987. I checked El Al, of course, but for some reason their Web site doesn’t let you price round-trip flights leaving from Israel.

If you take the Olympic flight, you’ve got $835 to spend for the vacation part of your trip. But of course, we haven’t factored in staying by relatives, buying other expensive stuff (maybe your friends will want to give you a list), frequent-flier miles toward your ticket, etc. Whatever is on your list, remember: the spread can be your friend!