THE BREADLINE VS. THE-BREADLINE; OR, WHY OUR SITE ADDRESS HAS THAT ANNOYING HYPHEN IN IT

When I decided to set up a recession-themed blog, “The Breadline” was the very first title that popped in my head. For once in my life, I thought I’d go with my gut rather than agonize over coming up with something cleverer. So I went online and discovered that the domain name thebreadline.com, with no hyphen, was available for sale via BuyDomains.com, a subsidiary of a company called NameMedia, Inc., in Waltham, Massachusetts. I left a message with BuyDomains announcing my interest in purchasing thebreadline.com.

Very quickly, I was contacted by a nice woman from BuyDomains.com named Maureen who told me that the address could be mine for the peculiarly specific price of $3,188—more than ten times what I was prepared to pay, and an especially ridiculous sum for a cash-strapped blog about cash-strapped people. I asked if this price was at all negotiable—into, say, the realm of the sane. Maureen politely explained that these numbers aren’t randomly picked out of a hat, but based on a carefully calibrated set of valuating factors and algorithms. The fact that “the breadline” is a familiar figure of speech, and that the domain I wanted is a dot com rather than a less desirous dot net or dot tv, meant that I was firmly in four-digit territory. The best Maureen could do, and only if I acted fast, was $2,500. In no way was that going to happen.

But I was stubborn in my wish to stick to the site name The Breadline, some way or other. I subsequently learned that the less typographically mellifluous the-breadline.com was available for a tiny fraction of its fancier, unhyphenated sibling. So, in the spirit of recession and tight budgets, the-breadline.com it is. Meanwhile, we eagerly await a super-fancy, Flash-enabled, widget-encrusted site called thebreadline.com, hyphen-free and bankrolled by a prosperous multinational corporation.

—David Kamp