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My friend Ariel visited us in San Francisco and sang praises of the Costco shopping experience. It’s a shopping chain with a specific business model.
First you need to be a member to even shop there, you can’t even enter without a membership card. The basic membership card costs $55/year or $110/year if you want some extra buyback offers. It’s a brilliant way on their part to make you come to their store over and over again. Plus you have to appreciate the idea of paying someone so you can shop there. Brilliant!
The model is built on quality goods discounted a great deal due to large quantities. Sadly that doesn’t mean that it’s only them that have to buy the large quantities, the packaging itself is larger then normal and the consumer is forced to buy packs much larger than they would normally. I guess that works if you have a 7 member family back home and buy in large monthly shopping rounds, but for more casual customers it’s a complete overkill.
For example, you can’t buy a single loaf of bread, 2 are necessary, all cereals are sold in packs at least 3 times the normal ones, you can only buy 6 red peppers in pack, never just one… You get the picture. For someone like me who likes to try a lot of new products without committing to buy a gallon of it, it’s horrible. It also entails a lot of waste of the products that perish because they were necessary to be bought in such large quantities.
Don’t even get me started on the aesthetic appearance of the stores. It’s quite literally a giant grey block of concrete blocks occupying an entire street without any thought at all to architecture and pleasantness to the people who use it. It’s worse in many respects even when compared to the socialist functionalist architecture. Inside is not much better, simply a giant warehouse with people with oversized shopping trolleys bumping into each other.
I’m the type of person who would rather pay 10% more for their products and have a pleasant user experience while shopping. I enjoy exploring new food I haven’t yet tried before and the nervousness and ugliness of places such as Costco insult my sense of aesthetics as well as create a bad experience for me. I’d rather be enjoying my time. The quality of the products may very well be on par, but that does not balance the fact that I’ve had to buy 4kg of it and had a horrible time buying it. I’m staying with Mercator back home and Trader Joe’s and Rainbow Grocery here.
In fact I think that it can be quite handy for large, price sensitive families. But if you don’t consume a small tribe’s worth of food and actually care about user experience, Costco is a horrible choice to make. I consider it one of the worst manifestations of rampant consumerism and precisely where I wouldn’t want the world to be heading.
The glorious entrance. Membership cards are checked at entry. Those gray blocks are used for the entire outside surface of the store. I dare not call it facade.
Welcome to the warehouse.
Ariel and Miha, brave shoppers undertaking the task in high spirits.
A degustation in progress. Coincidentally, "Bolani" is exactly how I'd describe this store.
If that's the chips packaging I'm afraid to think of the nacho cheese gallons.
Me doing some weight lifting with jars of mayonnaise. Certainly healthier than eating it.
I took a walk on the streets of San Francisco yesterday. It was Christmas day. I don’t hold much emotional attachment to the day, let alone religious one and I find the mandatory shopping sprees absurd. It would have been a day like any other had it not emptied the streets of the majority of it’s usual tenants, who were most likely celebrating Christmas at home somewhere in suburbia.
That void was filled with extra waves of homeless and insane people. Walking on Market street, the main avenue of San Francisco going straight through financial district, there seemed to have been more homeless and crazy people than the ones who were not. A lot of them murmuring to themselves, shouting at passers by, asking for money. I must have gotten asked for change at least twenty times on this short stroll. A lot of these people seemed like they simply needed treatment in a mental institution. But nobody made them go, let alone pay for the treatment. They should. Society should.
A society should be judged on how it treats its weakest members. These people on the streets hold a mirror to the American society. If its citizens see the real picture, not the one filled with empty rhetoric of “greatest nation on Earth”, the picture is deeply disturbing. I’m not saying we don’t have homeless people in Slovenia or Europe in general. Of course we do and we should all strive to do better, nut nowhere in my travels in Europe have I seen homeless and ill on the streets on a scale such as here. Mind you, United States are supposed to be one of the wealthiest countries in the world. They rank 7th in GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity. So the lack of means surely isn’t a problem, the ideology and the lack of will emanating from it are.
One of the core tenants of American ideology is freedom. It’s the buzzword of political campaigns. They export their concept of freedom worldwide, along with a host of other ideological underpinnings. Who could be against it? Freedom is always good and an end it itself, right? It’s not that simple and here’s how the American perception of it goes horribly wrong.
Freedom can be divided into negative and positive freedom. Negative and positive are not value judgments, but simply terms for different types of freedom. Negative freedom means freedom from something. Freedom from oppression, control, the freedom to do what you like, go wherever, speak whatever. It’s more focused on the individual.
Positive freedom however, usually comes from being part of a community, collective and the possibility of self-realisation in that community. It provides us with freedoms that come with a communal life, life in a society. We forfeit some of our negative freedoms in exchange for positive ones by living in a society. We give up our negative freedom in exchange for living in a society being protected by laws and other social norms.
To give a banal example, we could have the negative freedom to kill other people, but as societies can’t function that way, we have made social norms and laws deeming that unacceptable, and for forfeiting that negative freedom we get the positive freedom of being protected by those same norms and laws against us getting killed. Another example could be giving up the freedom of having sex with whoever for the benefits of a family life (nothing personal against polygamous arrangements, simply giving an average societal example :)). For more reading on positive and negative freedom (or liberty) check out the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and of course, Wikipedia.
How does that relate to the homeless people on the streets of San Francisco? Well there’s always a balance between negative and positive freedoms. Shift towards the extremes of negative freedoms and you get a Hobbesian world of “Homo homini lupus est“, meaning men being wolves to fellow men, a world of constant conflict among egotistic individuals. Shift towards the extremes of positive freedoms and you get a collectivist society where individual freedoms are trampled for the supposed benefits of the collective, sort of an Orwellian 1984 dystopian world.
The problem with American society is that it perceives freedom mostly according to the definition of negative freedom. The individualistic sense is very strong and that precludes the establishment of more community based mechanisms which would generate positive freedoms for its citizens. Positive freedoms emanating from solidarity and even long term self-interest, like guaranteeing people free education and healthcare. Picking up mentally ill people from the streets, curtailing some of their negative freedoms in exchange for the positive freedoms of care and being an active member of society.
On the other hand, American focus on negative freedoms has had some benefits in helping to produce a vibrant and dynamic economy. After all, I am here, raising funding for our enterprise, because there is a vibrant technology and investment ecosystem here. But that ecosystem exists as much as a result of negative freedoms of enterprise free from disruptions, as of the positive freedoms of establishing a legal framework of fair competition and society actively investing in its development (Silicon Valley can trace a lot of its roots to government military research).
My point in all of this is that the United States have missed the balance and lean too much towards the negative freedoms. The result are homeless people on the streets and a host of other issues who would not have to exist on such as scale had some more pragmatic reason been applied. The loss of some negative freedoms could be minimal compared to the positive freedoms gained. American people are being presented a false choice of freedom versus no freedom. Cling to outdated or misunderstood 18th century ideals at your own peril.
My Erasmus classmate Selina and two pretty fun French guys dressed in broads. Guess which is which. ;) :P
Honestly this post mostly exists to test how WordPress publishing works from the iPad. So far pleasantly surprised, although there are still some things to be ironed out.
Last weekend we hopped over “La Manche” to London in order to engage in our brand of tomfoolery and general fun.
Among the places we visited was the Wellcome Collection, where they are holding an exposition titled The High Society about the use of drugs throughout human history and cultures. Apart from the more common drugs like alcohol, cannabis, coffee, cocaine etc. you also get to hear about the more exotic ones like Ayahuasaca, Kava root, Fly agaric (ok, you’ve probably seen that one before), Betel nuts and so forth.
They also featured some very nice Infographics about drugs by David McCandless, explaining everything from the different effects of drugs to the economics of the drug trade.
Try to catch the exposition if your in London, it’s on display till 27th of February.
What really caught my attention were these posters from the era of alcohol prohibition in the United States.
Does this kind of discourse remind you of anything today? After that they legalized alcohol and the world somehow did not come to an end. Drugs need to be legalized, not for ideologic reasons, but for pragmatic ones.
Got interviewed about our trip from St. Petersburg to Beijing for Slovenian radio. I’ve had a pleasant chat about the trip with Nejc Jemec from Val 202 and you can check out the result below. Sorry international readers, the whole thing is, of course, in Slovene.
Oddaja Generator 9. 1. na Valu 202 (the interview part starts at 32:30)
Horseback over Mongolia with Joni and Tim
