Recent events have moved the line between Cheap Knock-Offs and Counterfeit goods.
Last week, major UK supermarket chain Tesco was caught in the act of selling what turned out to be a bogus bottle of Louis Jadot Pouilly-Fuissé wine.
Danny McGowan bought two bottles of French Louis Jadot Pouilly-Fuisse wine, reduced from £14.49 to a bargain £5. He [noted] that the label “looked photocopied” and the bottles had a screw top instead of Louis Jadot’s usual cork. But when he opened them at home, he discovered the fine white wine was actually cheap plonk.
While it’s estimated that 5% of the wine sold today is Counterfeit, most of the dubious stuff is up at the high end, where it’s worth everyone’s while to monkey with reality. The most famous example were the Jefferson bottles whose history was recounted in The Billionaire’s Vinegar which we reported on last year. Those babies went for north of $100,000 … each.
Whoever produced the bogus Pouilly-Fuissé is giving the real hardworking counterfeiters a bad name. It’s a shame and embarrassing. They should have come up with their own cheap label for their own cheap wine. Producing a great Knock-Off instead of a crummy Counterfeit.
They should Think Different, as a modern philosopher once said.
And speaking of Thinking Different, how about this for a unique idea … Counterfeiting people.
A union protesting the hiring of non-union workers is hiring non-union pickets to impersonate union strikers.
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line [pretending to be union workers]outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor … [so] the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines.
It’s always better to have been born lucky than to have been born smart.
That’s just my opinion, but the evidence is all around us.
Take for example, Unfunded Pension Liabilities.
You could have worked most of your life for a Private Company that didn’t put enough money into their pension scheme to actually pay your pension when the time came. This story has an Unhappy ending.
Or you could have worked most of your life for a Municipality that never even had the money to pay your pension in the first place no matter what they claimed. This story has an as yet Undetermined ending.
Or you could have worked most of your life for a small Scottish distillery with god knows what kind of pension scheme, that got bought out by a huge multi-national corporation who for sure was not funding anyone’s pension scheme. But this story has a Lucky ending.
An ending so good, we can drink to it.
Being Lucky Never Gets Lost In Translation
Said multinational corporation is Diageo, the world’s largest beer, wine and spirits company.
Diageo, the maker of Johnnie Walker whiskey, found an innovative way to plug a gaping deficit in its pension plan: put aside 2 million barrels of maturing whiskey from its distilleries in Scotland.
Diageo said Thursday it would transfer ownership of £430 million, or $645 million, worth of whiskey to a pension funding partnership. Diageo employees would not receive their pensions in whiskey rather than cash, but the move does give them a guarantee that they would not walk away empty-handed should the company default.
By the way, that picture of Bill Murray is from Lost In Translation, one of our all time favorite films. Five Stars at least, and Bill Murray should have gotten Best Actor for his role as Bob Harris, an actor in Japan for a week doing whisky commercials.
In the film Harris was working for Suntory, and the film takes its title from the scene where Murray is attempting to deliver the famous line,
For relaxing times, make it Suntory time.
With Diageo’s announcement, now we could change that to,
As a recovering procrastinator, I am big on last-minute gift ideas.
Here’s one for Father’s Day, and there is still plenty of time. Hours even.
So what’t the gift?
A Manly Rat. That’s also smart.
Specifically, an African giant pouched rat, about 30 inches long including tail. These are he-man rats, the kind that send cats fleeing. What’s more, we’re not talking about just any giant rat, but an educated one with the rodent equivalent of a Ph.D.
A Dutch company, Apopo, has trained these giant rats, which have poor sight but excellent noses, to detect landmines in Africa. The rats are too light to set off the mines, but they can explore a suspected minefield and point with their noses to buried mines. After many months of training, a rat can clear as much land in 20 minutes as a human can in two days.
In addition to earning their stripes as mine detectors, the giant rats are also trained in health work: detecting cases of tuberculosis. Possible TB sufferers provide samples of sputum, which are then handed over to the rats to sniff out. This detection process turns out to be much faster than your typical microscope examination. A technician with a microscope in Tanzania can screen about 40 samples a day, while one giant rat can screen the same amount in seven minutes.
For a donation of $36 you buy a year’s worth of bananas for Ratso. And you can do it with the click of your mouse (sic), in plenty of time for Father’s Day.
Rat? That's Not A Rat, Now THIS Is A Rat
Speaking as a Dad I’d much rather get this than a tie, or even (gasp) a bottle of wine.
When you sit in an airplane seat you need a lumbar support, especially if you have a bad back. And since something like 70% of the population has one or will have one, this tip goes to the heart of any travel plan.
For years I would stuff a pillow or blanket behind my back. I stopped doing this, not because the airlines started charging for pillows and blankets, but because they don’t work.
Years ago I discovered the Eagle Creek Lumbar Support. This thing is brilliant. It inflates with a puff of air to give outstanding lumbar support. The killer feature is that it conforms perfectly to your back and the seat. Plus it has a bit of give during the bounces.
The Patek Is For Sure Pretty, But The "Cush" Doesn't Need Winding
You can forget the traveler’s checks, but don’t forget your lumbar support.
I have an acquaintance in the packaging industry whose products utilize a super-strong cardboard. You can stand automobiles on boxes made of his cardboard; we are talking here about serious robustness.
Their shipping containers are used to transport auto engines and heavy machinery.
Sit in your car, raise your hand up to touch the ‘head-liner’ on the inside of the roof, and you are probably touching another of their products.
Because their business was dependent on the (cyclical) auto industry, my acquaintance decided to look into other applications for their product that would be less cyclical.
He came up with the idea of making coffins for people who were planning to be cremated.
Brilliantly non-cyclical.
This was many years ago, and people were still purchasing expensive conventional caskets for their departed relatives despite the fact that they were going to be cremated, casket and all.
Unfortunately (at that time) the funeral industry was not receptive to new, cost-saving, ideas. And it’s not like consumers were demanding cardboard caskets.
His idea died a quiet death.
But times have changed. Cardboard is the New Green.
Google ‘Cardboard Caskets’ if you don’t believe me.
With Better Timing, It Could Have Been 'From Roads To Riches'
Next will be promotions that include casket offsets for people attending the funeral.
And whenever I make Pasta I thank Ron Popeil, Pitchman Extraordinaire who perfected the Infomercial and made pasta a part of my life.
There's More! Click Picture to Play Video
I knew I loved Ron Popeil, but I didn’t know how much until I read the first chapter in “What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures” by Malcolm Gladwell. The title of that chapter says it all; “The Pitchman – Ron Popeil and the Conquest of the American Kitchen”.
Gladwell begins by describing one of the world’s oldest professions:
You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” – the perilous, crucial moment when he goes from entertainer to businessman. If, out of a crowd of fifty, twenty-five people come forward to buy, the true pitchman sells to only twenty of them. To the remaining five, he says, “Wait! There’s something else I want to show you!” Then he starts his pitch again, with slight variations, and the remaining four or five become the inner core of the next crowd, hemmed in by the people around them, and so eager to pay their money and be on their way that they start the selling frenzy all over again.
He then gives a bit of background to let you know Popeil didn’t just stumble upon success:
Ron Popeil started pitching his father’s kitchen gadgets at the Maxwell Street flea market in Chicago,in the midfifties. He was thirteen. Every morning, he would arrive at the market at five and prepare fifty pounds each of onions, cabbages, and carrots, and a hundred pounds of potatoes. He sold from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, bringing in as much as $500 a day. In his late teens, he started doing the state and county-fair circuit, and then he scored a prime spot in the Woolworth’s at State and Washington, in the Loop, which at the time was the top-grossing Woolworth’s store in the country. He was making more than the manager of the store, selling the Chop-O-Matic and the Dial-O-Matic. … “He was mesmerizing, … there were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking. He would go into the turn, and people would just come running.”
Ron Popeil’s success came from hard work, and the design of unique and compelling products. When coupled with his unmatched ability to “pitch” them to TV audiences the resulting sales were staggering. His crowning achievement, The Showtime Rotisserie is set to soon surpass $1 Billion in sales! Unbelievable.
But I’m much more interested in the Ronco Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker.I mean anyone can Rotisserie a chicken, but when you have your peeps over and make fresh pasta for them right before their eyes, you are a hero! And Ron made me a hero many times over.
After serving faithfully for many years, my own Ronco Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker finally gave up the ghost a while back. When I tried to purchase another I was stunned to find out that Ronco was out of business and there was no joy to be had in my personal Pasta World. Drats.
So I tried to replace it with an Italian machine whose brand I won’t mention. Disaster. It didn’t hold a candle to my beloved Pasta Shooter. As fate would have it some friends had purchased a Takka Pasta Maker from Macy’s about 20 years ago and had never opened the box. They were gracious enough to pass it along to me and when I opened it I discovered that it has a virtually identical mechanism to Popeil’s version. The only difference is that my Takka is built like a Russian Tank with lots of heavy metal where the Popeil used plastic. This baby will be with me until the end!
Here is the video I filmed last night. Bob The Pasta Maker is back! I think of it as my homage to Ron Popeil. The first section shows the ‘mixing’ part of the process. Add oil olive and eggs to 50/50 semolina /white flour. Then next the breath-taking extrusion phase where the pasta is actually ‘shot’.
And although I make this look easy in the video, knowing how quickly to add the liquid and exactly when to extrude the pasta really does take some skill. It’s me and Ron on this one; but while I can mix with the best, I know I can’t pitch like the Master.
Finally as an extra credit bonus, if you want to see a typical Ron Popeil price countdown (and you should), here’s your YouTube link.
The Internet trend of showing photos or video from the unpacking of a retail box of some desirable product, such as the latest laptop or portable music player.
Since we try to remain fashion forward, it’s time to hold our very first Not A Mystery Unboxing.
And don’t be intimidated.
Remember what Sarah Palin said, “I may not know as much about Unboxing as the East Coast elites, but I sure as heck know what I like when I see it!”
Thanks for that Sarah. We will now proceed to Field Dress a Box before your very eyes.
For this Unboxing we’ve chosen a recent purchase from Amazon; Kettle’s Lightly Salted Chips (Crisps to you Brits), 4-Ounce Bags 15-Pack.
We chose this product because (a) it was recent, (b) it was large. Plus, the fact that it consists of Chips makes it sound Hi-Tech.
Here we go:
Unboxing Is The New Field Dressing, Take Note Sarah!
The outer package as delivered by UPS 2nd Day Air from Amazon (free with our Amazon Prime membership). Note the Fragile sticker, which is a bit of a head scratcher for a box of Potato Chips, but I guess you can never be too careful.
Poping open the outer Amazon shipping box, we see brown butcher paper. No plastic air bags or bubbles in this box. Very Green; shout-out to Amazon for sustainable packing!
Opening the outer box a bit more we see that in fact we have an inner package.
And now we can see the original Kettle’s master pack box. Shipping specialists will note that although there is no cushioning between the outer and inner box on the sides, that the boxes have maintained their good alignment. Perhaps the Fragile notice induced UPS to play nice during shipment?
We’ve now taken the outer Amazon shipper away and what remains is the Kettle master pack. Note the white tape seal across the top says “Lightly Salted” to avoid confusion and add authenticity. Well done, Kettle!
And finally, we open the Kettle shipper and see our individual packs of Chips or Crisps, standing straight up at attention, like pert Little Rogues. Bravo.
Product Shot, Front:
"Made From REAL Potatoes"
Product Shot, Back:
"Absolutely Nothing Artificial"
And Finally the Chips/Crisps themselves:
Kettle Baked and Lightly Salted, Delicious
To sum up. Great product, met all our expectations with no surprises. Quality of Chips/Crisps and packing excellent. Amazon and Kettle doing a good job of producing and delivering a sustainable, REAL, Chip/Crisp.
Having gained some confidence in this our first Unboxing, the plan is to next take on a product with moving parts.
I find these figues from The Economist hard to swallow.
Every year 76m Americans become ill because they have consumed contaminated food—a staggering 26,000 cases per 100,000 population. In Britain, where people consume far fewer hamburgers, generally eat out less often and buy nowhere near as many ready-meals, there are 3,400 cases of food poisoning per 100,000 population annually. France is safer still, with only 1,200 annual instances per 100,000 people.
Stats From Economist, Graphics By Bob
But while the Economist article is pretty impersonal, a NY Times article brings it right back home, describing the trials of Stephanie Smith, 22, who was paralyzed after being stricken by E. coli in 2007. After reading this, I have to say it’s going to be a while before I wrap my mouth around a hamburger again.
Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen.
The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.
Using a combination of sources — a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger — allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.
One of the problems is that the folks who make the hamburgers don’t monitor the incoming cuts of beef for contamination. Even worse, the slaughterhouses won’t sell to anyone who actually does check their input, because this would shut them down (sic)! The article named only two producers who monitor their incoming meat: COSTCO and Bubba Burger.
Costco said it had found E. coli in foreign and domestic beef trimmings and pressured suppliers to fix the problem. But even Costco, with its huge buying power, said it had met resistance from some big slaughterhouses. “Tyson will not supply us,” Mr. Wilson said. “They don’t want us to test.”
And I hate to say it, but the French have it all over us when it comes to food safety. I recently heard an interview with a French butcher who explained that every cut of meat that he sells can be traced all the way back to the specific animal it came from.
Maybe we can learn something from the French after all.
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in the Bronx during the 50′s.
We had all the modern conveniences. Like Good Humor Ice Cream delivered daily in the summer down at the corner. Served up by the Good Humor Man himself. Otherwise known as some kid with a summer job, but at the time he looked pretty big to me.
If you got an ice cream cup instead of something on a stick, it came with a little flat wooden spoon. If you chose the ‘ice’ on a stick there was work to be done to peel the paper off before you could take that first cold bite which froze your mouth and throat in a wave of pain when you swallowed. Which tasted really, really good in the midst of that summer heat and killer humidity.
But I digress.
Up in our apartment we didn’t have air conditioning, but we did have Seltzer every night with dinner. It was delivered every week by, wait for it, The Seltzer Man.
Again, no surprises in the 50′s
The Seltzer came in wooden cases filled with 10 or so big green, blue or clear bottles with embossed logos and lettering on the surface. On top was a silver colored valve, sporting a hair trigger. I think the bottles in this picture are a bit vintage, but it gives you an idea.
The first time you opened the value on a new bottle the pressure would invariably shoot seltzer all over the kitchen. It was absolutely, positively impossible to open the value slow enough to avoid that first spritz. Kind of like when you first learned to drive with a stick and were letting out the clutch with your Dad telling you to go slow.
But I digress, again.
This was all brought back to me recently by an article in the NY Times about Ronny Beberman, one of the last Seltzer Men.
Remember kids, we are not talking about some pansy Perrier with a twist of lemon.
We have a product we are real proud of, that starts with New York City water which “comes right outta the pipes, right outta the ground” and then beaten (literally) into Seltzer. Watch the video if you don’t believe me.
This is Manly Seltzer, delivered by a Man’s Man.
Great stuff.
[Full Disclosure Note: At one point back in the 50's we learned that these bottles had a disconcerting habit of blowing up once in a while if there was a defect or chip created during the re-cycle process. After that discovery my Dad wouldn't put the Big Bad Boy right up on the dinner table. They hadn't invented Class Action Lawsuits yet, otherwise it would really have been all over.]
As recently reported in the Financial Times, the Swiss have stuck their foot in it once again,
The Swiss penmaker Montblanc, in a jarring attempt to raise its profile in India, has unveiled a gold-and-silver fountain pen to commemorate Mahatma Gandhi, the independence leader whose austere asceticism was at the heart of his liberation campaign.
The limited-edition Mahatma Gandhi pen, priced at Rs1.1m ($23,000, €15,800, £14,400), has an 18-carat solid gold, rhodium-plated nib, engraved with Gandhi’s image, and “a saffron-coloured mandarin garnet” on the clip. The pens were unveiled this week, before the national holiday on Gandhi’s birthday.
And here is the rhodium-plated nib of the pen, where Gandhi, with his bamboo stave in hand, is engraved. Classy, eh?
Looks like a bit of a marketing oxymoron, given that Gandhi was famously Non-Elitist as described in Wikipedia,
As a practitioner of ahimsa, he swore to speak the truth and advocated that others do the same. Gandhi lived modestly in a self-sufficient residential community and wore the traditional Indian dhoti and shawl, woven with yarn he had hand spun on a charkha. He ate simple vegetarian food, and also undertook long fasts as a means of both self-purification and social protest.
So it looks like the Swiss are going down 0 for 2, what with their miserable showing in the Polanski affair.
We note that the Swiss are conspicuous by their absence from the recent poll on National Self-Interest.
Perhaps they’ve covered the mirrors in their house, or at least should consider it.
Note: At first I thought FT had made a mistake, because Montblanc is headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. But with some further research I discovered that in fact the company was founded in 1906, and is a subsidiary of Swiss holding company Compagnie Financière Richemont.
What is it about Warren Buffett that The Economist doesn’t like? Not only do they associate him with income inequality, they don’t even give him a credit in the footnotes. Plus, I don’t believe those are his hands holding that cash.
This is a mash-up of the first degree, and I would support Warren in a defamation claim as it makes him look like Mr. Greed.
Warren's Picture Used Without Attribution
And to even imply greed isn’t very fair if you look at recent history,
In June 2006, Buffett gave approximately 10 million Berkshire Hathaway Class B shares to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (worth approximately US$30.7 billion as of 23 June 2006) making it the largest charitable donation in history and Buffett one of the leaders in the philanthrocapitalism revolution.
You could have let Warren work for you and gain some of that wealth yourself (to give away),
According to “Rich Dad’s Guide to Investing”, written by Robert Kiyosaki, “if you had invested US$10,000 in the company in the 1950s, it would have been worth more than $200million today”.
And OK, suppose you didn’t have $10,000 in the 1950′s. You could have invested $1,000, and the result would be sitting on (only) $20 million while you read this.
But I missed that train.
Note: There’s a bit more to this than meets the eye. If you have time (sic!), note that the data came from Saez & Piketty and check out Emanuel Saez’s website, plus this Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal. We call this ‘behind the scene eco-politics’, where ‘eco’ is short for ‘economics’.
