Category: Culture
Crying over cheap milk
A long long time ago I posted about milk prices. I suggested they were too high. Or that people should complain about them, rather than about the price of petrol. Milk, is, afterall, completely renewable.
Image Credit: Flickr
Now. I know farmers work hard to earn a living. And I hate that their prices are essentially controlled by our retail duopoly. And I know the margins are pretty low in milk farming because they are being, no pardoning of this pun, milked for every drop.
But I don’t share the dairy lobby’s angst when it comes to the price of milk (see another story where they call price drops “un-Australian”) in Coles and Woolworths (Update: Franklins and Aldi have joined the price war).
The supermarkets are having a price war. So what. This happens all the time in retail. But when it comes to milk, and the price of milk, this is a useful pawn in an economic game. Milk prices are determined by a contractual arrangement. And the contracts are up for renegotiation soon. That’s all these calls to boycott Coles and Woolies milk are. And they’re a little dumb.
Using milk as a loss leader to attract customers (and promising that they’ll wear the costs of dropping the price, rather than the farmers). Now, I am all for lobby groups looking to protect their interests. That’s how capitalism works. So I think it’s great that the dairy guys are out their suggesting Coles and Woolworths won’t wear the cost of a price drop for long. But this argument kind of misses the point of loss leading.
I’m sure the big two would love to have the farmers making no profit on their labours at all – but what they wouldn’t like – is for all the milk farmers to go out of business at once. Leaving them with no supply. Loss leading is essentially a marketing tactic, and I’d hope (perhaps naively) that the cost of dropping the price of milk to $1 a litre, is coming from the marketing side of the supermarket budget, rather than the procurement side. Choosing a staple product like milk to fight with a competitor who in just about every sense offers an identical product is a great move.
Unless there are farmers out there who like selling their milk at below cost (and already the lobby groups seem to be making noise about that being unsustainable) – I’d say the big two will wear the costs for so long as it is making them money to do so. There is no benefit to them if the milk industry dries up. There is benefit to them if they steal market share off one another. They’re targeting each other. Not the farmers. Obviously they want to cut down their overheads as much as possible – but it’s not a particularly sustainable business practice to be running your suppliers out of business in a price war. The whole idea of a loss leader is that they lose money there because nobody just goes to the Supermarket to buy milk, but they might pick one supermarket above the other if their milk is cheaper. It’s marketing. The money to do this probably comes out of a marketing budget.
If they figure out how much they’ll lose selling milk at below cost for a year (say 30c a bottle) and how much profit they’ll make per customer gained, across their whole basket or trolley of goods (say $50) then it’s a pretty simple question to answer… the idea that this will be passed on down the chain is a bit odd – especially since it’s only on their branded lines and the prices of the other, no doubt more popular milk (based on observation at the fridge in the supermarket) have not changed (as far as I know). This is just two companies trying to one up each other to get customers through the door. It’s marketing.
How to fight this battle
Calling giving the average Australian a bargain “un-Australian” is not a winsome PR strategy. It looks like whinging and whining. If the milk lobby really wants to fight against these chains, if they really want to hurt the supermarkets, they should team up with butchers and greengrocers and urge people not to boycott Coles and Woolies milk, but rather to embrace this as a chance to hit them in the hip pocket. If you want to punish them for being “Un-Australian” you should be encouraging people to snap up the cheap milk and buy nothing else from them in protest. The milk industry should embrace this as an opportunity for people to rediscover the joy of drinking milk. Start promoting making milkshakes at home. And then encourage people to get their veggies from a fruit market and their meat from a butcher – and see how long this lasts.
Coffee Out the Nose Funny: David Thorne’s American snow trip adventure
There are very few things in this world that are genuinely laugh out loud funny when you’re reading them in your head. David Thorne’s delightfully nasty bits of revenge, posted online for the world to see, are up there with the best of them.
David went to a ski shop in the US. The service was less than adequate. The gloves he purchased, that he was assured were waterproof, were not. They got wet, and the black ink that provided their ebony colour ran. And it ran all over his jumper. And when he went back to exchange them the staff abused him. So this is what he did:
The store received 5,000 calls enquiring about the free snowboard. And this email exchange ensued.
It was at this point in the exchange that coffee shot through my nostrils:
“I should probably be thankful that your staff were too occupied with having their earlobes stretched by Tonka-truck tyres and wearing pants around their knees to sell me a snowsurfingboard made of sugar or goggles made of bees.”
Or perhaps this point:
“Also, I apologise. While the average male height of 5″9 statistically means anything under is considered short, my question was without diminutive intention. I’m sure there are many advantages to being so small. Target carries an excellent range of boys clothing at competitive prices and a lower centre of gravity should, once helped up onto the ski-lift, allow you to snowboardsurf with greater stability. If I were small, I would buy a cat and ride it.”
There is, as is often the case with Thorne’s work, a language warning attached. It didn’t end all that well. Thorne punctuated the exchange with this:
What do you get if you combine the Matrix, Transformers, Terminator and Voltron?
Answer: Something like this:
Life imitating blog: why you should work hard in science
A few days ago I posted this little cartoon to exhort you, my dear readers, to work hard on learning science stuff. So that you could ride cloned prehistoric animals. Because that’s where it’s at. You’ve got two Pterodactyls and a Microsaurus…
Well, anyway, it turns out that in life imitating Jurassic Park, the Wooly Mammoth will be available for your riding pleasure in a matter of years. Maybe.
A guy named Doctor Akira Iritani wants to impregnate an elephant with a baby mammoth.
He intends to use Dr Wakayama’s technique to identify the nuclei of viable mammoth cells before extracting the healthy ones
The nuclei will then be inserted into the egg cells of an African elephant, which will act as the surrogate mother for the mammoth.
From the Telegraph.
Tumblrweed: White People Rapping Badly
Your weekly single serving tumblog is White People Rapping Badly. Pretty self explanatory – and if you can stomach these you should check it out.
“Science has show that for every Eminem, there are approximately 598,467 white people that try to rap but can’t. This is devoted to bringing you the best of the worst.”
Data auralisation: Music is my train station
Alexander Chen is working on a project turning those train route maps you see all around the world into a musical instrument.
Watch the demo:
Conductor (Interactive instrument in progress) from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.
He has set them up so that the train schedules, and intersections determine the order the notes are played in, and how frequently, which is a pretty nifty piece of data visualisation, or perhaps actualisation, or auralisation…
Real Life Fruit Ninja
A couple of rude words in this. But it’s funny.
Don’t play with knives people. Don’t do it.
Build your own horoscope
It turns out writing horoscopes is really, really, easy.
Information is Beautiful posted this great breakdown/wordcloud from 4,000 horoscopes.
It can’t be too hard to string a sentence together with a few prominent words. So write one in the comments, here’s mine:
“You will sure feel better if you use your mind”
Axe Cop: “A” for Awesome
Axe Cop is a web comic written by a six year old (it started when he was five) and illustrated by his much older brother. Very cute idea. It features a regular “Ask Axe Cop” feature that I’ve enjoyed reading.
It’s now a book Amazon Link
Got any other webcomics I should be reading?
Slow photography
A while back, somewhere or other (I found it, I found it), Arthur linked to this slow blog manifesto. I read it. I thought about it. I rejected it. Mostly because slow blogging here would bore me, and I hope you. And you’d fall asleep. Fall out a window. And die. And I don’t want that (though if you want a slow blog check out Venn Theology).
But I do like the idea of thinking about what you’re doing and why. And I think less is more is a good rule of thumb – if not one I’m buying into here. I have limited time to blog the whole internet and publish it as a book before the Internet disappears.
As a photographer, I have a tendency to shoot, and shoot and shoot. It wasn’t uncommon during our tour of Greece and Turkey for me to finish a day with over a thousand pictures. And plenty of them were of the same thing as I fiddled with camera settings. This means editing. Lots of it.
So I’m a fan of this “slow photography” concept:
“For most people, including me, photography is most often about documentation or record-keeping. It is about taking a photograph as an effort to grab a moment as it rushes by, to stage a tiny revolt against the tyranny of time. That’s why traditionally we photograph at moments you might think of as scarce. Few people photograph their daily commute, but most of us only go to high-school prom once—or maybe twice. A baby soon becomes a child, but humans look vaguely middle-aged for decades.”
Slow photography is about moving on from trying to record everything (which is my approach here) to trying to create beauty. Which is what I’m after when I take photos.
“The difference between documentation and the beauty impulse is that the latter has the power to produce not just a memory, but an emotional response in any viewer. That’s very different from the impulse to record. For group pictures are never beautiful, nor are photos in front of the Eiffel Tower. (It is big, and the subject is too small.)”
What this looks like is a three step process (according to that article – which elaborates on these points):
Step 1 in slow photography is spending a long time studying the subject.
Step 2 is the exercise of creative choices—the greatest pleasure that our automatic cameras rob us of.
Step 3 is playing around in post-production, whether in a darkroom or using photo-editing tools
Here’s a photo I took that maybe falls into that category…
Straight as an arrow
Recipe for awesome video:
Small camera.
Bow and arrow.
Sticky tape.
Combine, press record, and fire.
Would be better with good sound, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Tumblrweed: Sad Keanu
Sad Keanu is one of my favourite memes. Did you know there’s a tumblog dedicated to photoshopped Keanu images? No. Well. Now you do.
There’s also this interview with Keanu where has has a little chat about the meme (see 3.24, via Time).
Baltimore’s Police Chief on The Wire: “I don’t like you”
The Wire is a gritty police drama focused on the city of Baltimore. It doesn’t really depict the police institution in the most flattering light.
David Simon, the director of The Wire responded, and I think we can all say “oh snap”…
Others might reasonably argue, however that it is not sixty hours of The Wire that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility.
Coming soon, Obama’s views on how the West Wing makes the presidency glamourous.
Via 22 Words.