The $US30 Pixis (Pixies?) are back-ordered already, probably because this is the best deal in town. This news does two things: It raises the possibility of a free-on-contract Pixi sometime in the near future, and calls into question again whether or not the Pixi can ever be a truly good deal. Today, the Pre is $US100 at Amazon, so a $US30 — or even free — Pixi might not be worth the loss of screen size, speed, Wi-Fi and camera quality. And as BusinessWeek crunches it:

Amortised over the required two-year contract, with the cheapest offering being Sprint’s $US70 a month unlimited data, 450 voice minute Everything Data plan, the Pixi works a out to $US74.15 a month and the Pre to $US76.25. Not much to choose from there in budgetary terms.

And that’s at $US100 and $US150 prices for the Pixi and Pre, respectively — not the new bargain basement rates. What does that leave in the Pixi’s favour? Size? Style? The fact that its name actually sounds like a noun? [EverythingPre]

In fact, they went so far as to call in the same crowd-control experts that help to keep things under control at major events like the Super Bowl and the Olympics. Each store will have its own game plan, but the vast majority of locations (not just Super Centres) will be open for 24 hours starting on Monday, November 26 (Thanksgiving) and ending the next day in the evening. That way, Walmart hopes to prevent mammoth crowds from gathering outside the store waiting for the doors to open. They are also putting many of the most popular items behind displays, where employees will supervise lines and hand out the products to customers in an orderly fashion. Additional workers will be stationed outside the store to help direct foot traffic.

Because of incidents like the one at Walmart, the National Retail Federation has, for the first time, put together a list of guidelines aimed at crowd-control in stores. Of course, even with all these precautions, I fear that this year will bring more horror stories about deadly violence erupting between crazed bargain hunters. [NYT]

What surprises me about these facts and figures — apart from iTunes skyrocketing again after the introduction of variable pricing — is the fact that CDs are not completely dead yet. They are clearly going down, but I had this mental image in which all of those round mirrors were destroyed, melting like Dali clocks in a desert of indifference. [Mint]

The first shot at Amazon reported by the WSJ is kinda weak in the grand scheme of things: Yesterday, Walmart started selling 10 “hotly anticipated” books, like almost-President-of-the-United-States Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue for 10 US bucks. The paper kind. For the same price as the pretend books you buy on a Kindle. Amazon fired a volley back, matching the price. Walmart went to its classic $US9 position this morning. Ker-plow.

This is apparently deeply frightening to publishers. Why? Because once people expect a book for $US10, they’re not gonna pay $US28 for it, which would seriously alter the economy of the publishing industry. And I mean, they’re already deathly afraid of the very uncertain future of publishing. A standard $US10 price would make books feel more disposable — granted, this is the future that’s coming with eBooks anyway.

Walmart actually still makes a bit of money at that price — and obviously Amazon does hawking eBooks for that much. The people this would seriously screw are independent booksellers, who couldn’t scrape by on margins that low. Which makes you wonder how they’re going to continue existing in a world where we’re all buying books, for cheap, on tablets. Amazon and Walmart’s likely just the beginning of the end. [WSJ Image via Ryan Conway/Brave New Films/Flickr]

A customer “eventually” notified the manager, and the DVD was removed from the player. “Eventually” as in, “after we all got our fill of the hot action”. So that’s what this guy was looking at! [swtimes via obscuredrugstore]

Now that Apple is slowly and quietly switching all its freshly DRM-free tracks to a popularity-based variable pricing scheme, we almost didn’t notice that Walmart and Amazon have taken the same step.

Amazon now has prices ranging from a low of $US0.79 to a high of $US1.29, the same as iTunes, and its highest priced tracks now make up ten of its top 100 list. Walmart, for its part, is a little cheaper, from a low of $US0.64 to a high of $US1.24. It looks like the music labels have finally gotten their way in this battle. [Electronista]

While both companies saw explosive growth from when they were founded (both in 1962) until just a few months ago, when the retail sector imploded, the way in which they expanded was markedly different.

Whereas Wal-Mart spread from a central point like your traditional virus, Target was more like a metastasising cancer, beginning in the central U.S., like Wal-Mart, and then popping up in targets of opportunity wherever there was good business.

And now, just like Wal-Mart, they to have a Gizmodo writer comparing their stores to something terrible that can invade the human body. Victory! [FlowingData]

For $US15, I can’t imagine exactly how good those sensors are—my experience with Jack Potty’s brand, Safety 1st, has not been positive at all, but that’s not the real issue. I know Walmart is trying to help, and I’m sure it makes sense to them: The percentage of people who throw away most of their Social Security checks on slot machines probably do tend to spend whatever remains at Supercenters.

But how will this affect kids, mentally? Risk of gambling addiction aside, a friend of mine said it best: When our girls are old enough to visit Las Vegas and look out over the sea of slot machines, will they say, “Wow, check out all those public restrooms!”?? Scary. [Walmart via Consumerist]