Tag: IKEA

Shared dishes

Suzie Wong. Suzie Q. Lazy Suzan.

All the S’s in stereotypes. All boils down to a round table full of shared dishes, each could easily meet  your dai;ly cholesterol quota.

Half roasted duck, half chicken ginger etc….

Hong Kong cuisine, served in Herndon (VA).

I thought about Nixon’s trip to China, and how many shared dishes he tasted then.

Now, we got Huawei branch in Herndon selling Symantec data storage equipment.

And Haier dorm fridges, well situated inside American campuses.

Right when Hollywood lamented the great days of “Emperor” (Gen MacArthur), the other empire has made inroads here, one dish at a time.

For here or for here?

It’s best to have it “for here” for these sorts of dishes (and fried rice to go).

Kids chowed down the rice, eyes glued to the I-pad’s screen.

(I-pad perhaps made in China also).

There you have it: the consequences of Ping Pong diplomacy (Ford exported – “ping” – cars to China, and Chinese goods “pong” back).

Those who trade tend not to fight (Bastiat’s Principle).

When we got here in the mid-70’s, there hardly was any “chinese” grocery stores. Now, several Lotte supermarkets are found in Loudoun Co.

Hyundai and Kia are sold side by side with Fiat and Audi.

Chinese buffet and American buffet. No ordinary Sunday.

Follow the money. Use all your resources. Cook up some secret sauce. Suzie Q, Suzie Wong, but be not Lazy Suzan.

Hard work and hard-earned money.

It’s all here, even in times of Sequestration.

Yes. There will be challenges in brand acceptance. Who wouldn’t! Ever heard of the horse-meat scandal in the UK and IKEA?

The story of WTO has many chapters, and each with its own sub-plots, full of conflicts. But in the end, let’s say 50 years from now, we hope to see a more humane and harmonious society around that same table, sharing dishes. Well, if India and China don’t go at each other in a contest for supremacy.

Blogging is sharing

It is also fun.

Certainly it is not work.

An insight here, a discovery there.

Hey, look at this!

I still remember appearing in a school play (Elementary).

Got a lot of laughs from the student body (playing a mother, Tootsie style).

Somewhere along the way, we have lost the inclination for play, the urge to create and an eye for  possibilities.

IKEA is redesigning its home-office furniture to accommodate digital demand of a mobile workforce (first they sit in cubicles, then they commute from home with virtual-style cubicles at work or at Starbucks and finally back to the office, per Yahoo).

More than furniture, we too will need to adapt (CD holder and PC desk anyone? before Goodwill takes them).

Even Palm is up for auction.

I didn’t  let Amazon‘s Fire go unnoticed.

Whoever named that product knows a thing or two about human need for tribal affiliation, for gathering around the camp fire.

Camera men and news men all know that viewers glue to the set when they show fire scenes.

TV screen has replaced that warm fireplace in everyone’s home. Now Amazon’s Fire (pad) wants to take it to go.

Hey look at this (from my Fire).

E commerce has just got leg.

No longer shoppers are desk-bound or multitasking during lunch hour (last-minute browsing and clicking “Put this in Shopping Cart” for the holiday season).

Speaking of Holiday Seasons. It looks as if we are home free with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas-shopping).

Consumers spending drives the economy forward (bulk shopping in December).

What is the point of putting up Christmas decoration in the house while telling your children to shut the door (to guests and families).

Kids are smarter than we think (mine said yelling is counter-productive i.e. honey makes for better mouse trap).

Back to my Elementary school play. Back to childlike creativity and imagination. Back to sharing. Back to the beginning when everyone got his/her allotted sparks of creativity and of the divine.

It’s still there, lying dormant underneath your Christmas decoration. Sharing is not seasonal. And the tribal fire has never meant to be extinguished. It was meant to be shared, in gathering circle.

Just like when we were told to sit in circle, at a school play, dressing up like Tootsie.

Trading down: Gap to Goodwill

You know how good the economy is by seeing how many Hummers are on the street. But we 2.5 per cent growth 1Q 2013, we go from Hummers to Hyundai, from Gap to Goodwill.

With 90% debt level, half-a-million debt per man woman and child, trading down is the least of our worries (Patriotic millionaires asked to pay more tax, instead of token donation of used computers or running shoes for write off).

Meanwhile, BRIC countries push up energy and environmental demand resulting in higher food costs.

Every summer, a bunch of senior citizens died of head exhaustion in their lonely Chicago apartments.

We said Goodbye to Dr Death. You can catch Al Pacino portraying him on HBO.

Here is our near-term play-outs : consumers retrenching i.e. value-shopping (Costco, Wal-Mart), the reincarnation of IKEA (renters nation) and office furniture, DIY online shopping (prosumerism meets e-com). In Micro Trends, the author already noted the return of knitting among teens.

The productivity movement is moving out of high-end enterprise, down to SME and public-sector (right!).

And the return of pig-ear antenna in our living rooms (Archie Bunker).

At the conclusion of President Obama town-hall style at Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered his signature hooded sweat saying “in case you want to dress like me” (the joke in context was that President Obama was the only one who made Mark sweated out in suit and tie).

Japanese business men were asked to dress down to save energy.

If you are familiar with Japanese business protocol, you will know how off-script this is (loosening a tie while partying already was too much. Now they are in Hawaiian shirts).

Brazil, however, has no problem with these new austerity measures: they look at this as a prolonged extension of their Mardi Gras. So much for trading down in post-Recession era.

Just make sure to buy supplies in bulk. And no traveling this summer to ease energy pressures. No wonder online ad spending is on track to double-digit grow. That’s where the action is. And where talents are flocking into, one recruitment tweet (CV) at a time. Even resume email service has disappeared as twitter now takes over. Elevator speech has “traded down”.

Forced leisure

MSNBC  interviews a blogger from Good magazine on automation nation.

The take away: automation is moving beyond manufacturing sector (e.g. Google test drove an unmanned vehicle in California, or Italian researchers tested a driver-less van, from Italy to China) to service sectors, such as health care .

Japan has been deep into robotic technology, a national policy to appease conservatives who were anti- immigration, and democrats who caters to its aging population.

Today, China has the fastest computer in the world.

Translation: it can develop faster elevators, bullet trains, assembly lines and bottling lines, weather forecasting, medical tech, bio tech, clean tech and up-the-value-chain services.

In short, all things that compute.

I cannot envision 1.3 Billion Chinese forced to travel and spend their leisure time away from factories and industrial parks

(take a nap in IKEA showroom, anyone?)

Unlike Japanese companies which have off shored their work force to counter balance their unfavorable currency (as of this edit, its Central Bank refuses to print more stimulus money, resulted in Asia’s stock plunge), Chinese companies have moved factories away from coastal cities as far as  Africa for cost-cutting.

Automation and offshoring  full impact will ease wage pressures and labor unrest e.g. Foxconn workers’ suicide.

It’s a Detroit way to fix Union challenge. First, they shifted manufacturing jobs South of the border, then, overseas. Then, service jobs were off shored as well. Now, even call centers in India’s major cities got further outsourced to secondary cities to shave off costs, with automation as first solution.

(I was just interrupted by a Spanish-speaking automated voice pitch from a retailer, probably urging me to rush to early Black Friday). First get someone else to do the job elsewhere. Then the machine. Then the customers.

Toffler was so prescient in observing trends such as pro-sumerism (the consumers contribute to the process of making the product e.g. stuff your own stuff animal, upload your Facebook data) and outsourcing. Kurzweil has been a thought leader in predicting that “Singularity is near“.

In the age of assembly line, Jobs the rebel, came up with the I brand (people buy the I phone cover to show individuality). Even I-robots invasion into our domestic lives. As Gordon Moore continues to see his “law” be self-fulfilling, Michael Moore will produce angrier documentaries i.e. about industrial changes and worker’s displacement.

Changes that are almost at the “speed of thought”. Bill Gates could think of the title, but his successor is left holding the bag. Knowing that change is coming is one thing, adequately preparing for it is quite another. These days, one cannot fight against the machine (winning at one chess game doesn’t guarantee much). The cat is out of the bag. Even if we took the Luddites approach, 21st  century lifestyles can’t accommodate collaboration Amish-style.  We left our farms for the factories just to end up with forced leisure. No wonder micro-trends like knitting, pawning, flannel shirts are back (knitting for boys?).

Back to frontier days, and the spirit of survival. In the Golden State, digging equipment and Levis are back. The Alpha male mentality. Off the grid.

The good thing is , blue jeans are still in. If you can still fit in those. If not, off to Wal-Mart, where jeans are cheap (thanks to logistic and automation). Have you noticed there is no one around to help you find your size? Workers have all turned shoppers of goods produced by 24/7 machines that don’t take break or demand health care.

Machines can’t afford to take time off. Neither can we, but it is increasingly forced upon us.

I am “FONT” of you

The New Zealand health-care admin lady wanted to go for broke with her emphatic mode (ALL CAPS).

She got what she had wanted: people’s and the court’s attention. Fired, compensated but out of a job.

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/148175

To make sure forms were filled correctly, she applied a new tactic, ALL CAPS, and perhaps not without a dose of her own rudeness. People were made to feel “small” , their intelligence insulted. It’s her cheap “high” at the expense of  co-workers. It’s like the Bad Behavior Brigade who try to patrol the Parisian streets for Urine Sauvage where it says:

“DO NOT URINATE HERE”.

The court sided with her, not her employer.

It’s all in the font.

IKEA changed its font on the “I” and got complaint mail.

This reminds me of Readers Digest, especially the large print issues, which has just filed for bankruptcy and will be available only 10 times a year (down from 12).

Not sure their font size will shrink or not, but readership certainly has. Remember the Saturday Evening Post?

There is no reason to apply all CAPS (only when your key board got stuck, or it’s a life-threatening situation e.g. SOS!).

It’s an equivalent of shouting and screaming.

The co-workers were offended. The boss was offended, and felt that sacking her for the sake of many was worthwhile .

Either way, the culprit got her day in court, but did not learn her lesson. In fact, she will when looking for a job and found that everywhere else, HR have revised their workplace Netiquette, and while at it, they use her for a case study. GOTCHA!

It’s a good IKEA

A billion+  prospects. Wow!

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-ikea25-2009aug25,0,3900096,full.story

IKEA in China. More  a  theme park then a show room.

They try, they buy.

Today it’s the A/C and ambience.

Tomorrow, it will be CHIKEA everywhere (not only the font, but spelling change as well!).

One thing China does well is to mass-produce these household items on the scale hard to compete with.

But IKEA will keep reinventing itself, tossing in a satin pillow here and a straw basket there to create the right look and feel for the place. After all the construction “bad” loans comes interior decoration.

China, a hyper power of consumerism. The force of the unleashing wallet.

By 2020, we can expect a new generation of male child, mostly over fed and under exercised (due to the proliferation of automobiles and computer gaming) all want to start their own Alibaba or Baidu.

IKEA would then have to move up the value chain to accommodate Hummer drivers and Lenovo users (or suffer the fate of Sears, whose catalogue was first, just as IKEA’s now the most printed).

It made so much sense to see the Chinese bid for Unoco 76 gas and once failed, they hit the Safari trail in search for oil.

Young overseas Chinese workers will come home with a wealth of knowledge, having been exposed to the latest and greatest from abroad. While at home, their counterparts are still seen napping at the IKEA’s A/C theme parks.

Either the world is coming to China, or China will go out to the world. The Olympic is just a start. Central Casting is on a

look out for a new bad guy to play the role of   X as  “made in X” .

Back in the late 70’s, we used to laugh at “made in Japan” automobiles (remember the Datsun?)

I vote for the Made-in-China solar panels though.

They are quick to smell money-making opportunities. Either that or they will have to ship their workers overseas, as they did with trucks and cars during the pre-Olympic months to “clear out” the smog in Beijing.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Solar panel, at this time, is a good IKEA.