Link Banana

While I think this

…so I attached no value to time.

is probably a mistake, I found Jennifer Reese’s exploration of the cost-effectiveness of making some basic foods at home quite interesting.

The Economist’s Asia.view column has some interesting thoughts about how Asians shop to day and how they’re likely to shop in the future. It’s not unlike America at the start of the last century:

But as America grew richer, people started buying more processed foods, which supermarkets could sell more cheaply because they could buy them in bulk. Refrigerators spread, allowing households to shop only once a week, not every day or two. And women entered the job market in large numbers, where they found better uses for their time and talents than sizing up a cut of meat or double-checking the shopping bill.

What most distinguishes South Asian shopping is not culture, but abundant labour and onerous regulation. The number of human transactions required to buy a packet of milk or a loaf of bread in India can be bewildering: a boy gathers your order and dusts it off, another man handwrites the bill and tots it up, a third hands you your change, if they have it. But Indian shops employ so many people because they can. The family members who help out at the store often have nothing better to do. Likewise the customers who shop there rarely have to be anywhere else anytime soon.

Paul Mecurio had a charming piece in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine about what shall be called “consumer rage.”

I’m one of those people who yell at store clerks. Not just any store clerks, but the ones who are rude, incompetent or indifferent. In other words, all store clerks. I’m the guy who always has to speak to the manager. In my head, I’m “Consumer Man”: a superhero fighting on behalf of oppressed consumers the world over. In my wife’s head, I’m crazy.

“Someday you’re going to scream at the wrong person,” she says. “And you’re going to get shot.” This “wrong person” has figured into so many of our conversations that I feel as if I know him, even though I really know only two things: 1) he’s “wrong” and 2) he’s going to shoot me.

The Economist’s “Christmas Specials” (on the right, just under the ad) are without a doubt some of the best reading I did over the holidays. It wasn’t until a new issue became available that I remembered how much I’d enjoyed them. They’re all very long, but very worthwhile.

The story linked in the title is about the shopping center. It tells the essential story of the rise and fall of the indoor shopping mall. At its beginning, the concept was praised for creating an urban-like atmosphere in the middle of suburbia. But it was and is precisely that artificiality that made it so dislikable, and now so rarely built. As the piece explains, developers are still trying to copy shopping districts of large cities, but they’re now doing it out-of-doors.

Others that I liked were: “The Summer of Acid Rain,” the tongue-in-cheek “Mao and the art of management,” the history of charts in “Worth a thousand words,” and “Census sensitivity.”