You are the type of person who knows everything that needs to be known about a product before making a purchase. Family and friends worry that some day you will leave home in the morning, deep in thought, and end up in another state. Today, you are likely to spend a great deal of time watching the shopping channel seeking to buy either a 50-foot blue garden hose or a turbo-powered vacuum cleaner. Be on the lookout for infected paper cuts. You should consider shopping at stores or businesses beginning with the letter H, but do not buy any products with a serial number or product code containing the number 077289. Your preferred shopping venue is the Internet. Your special symbol is the exclamation point (!).

As a Purple Smarphin, you are the brightest and most intelligent person you know. And that goes for shopping, too. You know exactly what you want. You know exactly what it costs. You know exactly when and where to buy. But, of course, shopping is only one of the many activities that attracts your intellectual attention. You shop when you need to and buy if have to, but shopping is not the end all of your life.

This is the official item in the National Income and Product Accounts maintained by the Bureau of Economics Analysis measuring capital investment expenditures. Gross private domestic investment is expenditures on capital goods to be used for productive activities in the domestic economy that are undertaken by the business sector during a given time period. These expenditures tend to be the least stable of the four expenditures, averaging between 12-18 percent of gross domestic product. This percentage tends to be at the low end during business-cycle contractions and at the high end during business-cycle expansions. The other official expenditures included in the National Income and Product Accounts are personal consumption expenditures, government consumption expenditures and gross investment, and net exports of goods and services.

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Our pedestrian's jaunt through the economy is not, unfortunately, an unrestrained shopping spree for confectioneries, spark plug tools, and Houston, Texas. We have other important errands to run. At the moment we need to hike over to Shady Valley's exclusive provider of cable television services, the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television Company, Inc., to inquire about a mysterious fee that appeared last month's bill.

The good news is that the Merciless Monolithic Media Masters (the 4M people) Cable office is a mere 2 miles (3 kilometers for the metrically inclined) from the Shady Valley Central Town Sprawling Hills Shopping Mall. A hop, skip, and a moderately long jump later, our excursion through the economy takes us to the front door of the 4M Cable Television Company where I hope to discover why last month's cable bill included a $3,569 charge for something called "The Vacation Channel." I didn't even know I had a vacation channel. (But, I'm sure it's a great channel, and if I don't have it, then I will certainly subscribe. Please don't disconnect me.)

Of course, because this an afternoon workday, the doors of the 4M office are locked. I can almost make out, through the expensive stained glass windows, what appears to be several Merciless Monolithic Media Masters Cable Television employees, with champaign bottles in hand, dancing on expensive mahogany desks. Let's not disturb them. As they say in the cable business, an upset worker is a disconnected customer.
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