Who knew, Tide does dry cleaning.

Once Tide was just a brand of laundry detergent. Then, post-Katrina, Procter & Gamble created the Loads of Hope program providing free mobile laundry services for disaster victims, and branded it with Tide. And now the next logical step: P&G has opened and expanded Tide-branded brick-and-mortar dry cleaners, with one new here in Fishers.

A really fascinating story of how P&G got into the provision of laundry services and not just one of the physical inputs for others' labor.

One of the Austrian (Kirznerian) defenses of advertising is that it is a way for us to discover things we didn't know we didn't know. Advertising need not provide us with "information" to do this - it simply needs to capture our attention and get us to go "wow, who knew?"

This is exactly what happened with me and the Tide cleaners thing. I was glancing through the weekly coupon mailer and there was a full-page insert with a discount coupon for the new one opening up where I live. I had that Kirznerian moment of discovery: "I didn't know that I didn't know there were Tide cleaners!" I never would have searched for them because I didn't know that I didn't know.

Advertising is crucial for activating our alertness as consumers to entrepreneurial opportunities for purchases. And this is a great example of why advertising that provides quite little in the way of "information" can be really important to the competitive market process and enhancing consumer surplus.