For another time, our friendly fast food restaurant is giving us a heart-warming news under the gloomy chilly weather — FREE SMALL COFFEE FOR A WEEK! With no purchase necessary, you can enjoy a freshly brewed small coffee as long as you are willing to take a second and walk in the restaurant.

When I was working at McDonald’s just like any other high school student who is eager to get their first job, I heard the complaints of my manager made about this promotion. “Those people in the head office have lost their minds! This is no different than burning bills.”

What my manager missed was the long-term strategy that the corporate have in mind. By cutting down price drastically, the restaurant boosts up its market share in a blink of an eye. This cost leadership strategy is subjected to attract wide range of customers regardless of the contribution margin each one of them brings in.

Certainly, such a giveaway can only be achieved by huge companies like McDonald’s. The other fast food chain restaurants are going to have a hard time to compete with this powerful and resourceful industry giant.

The smartphone market is going to be hit by a new heat wave at the end of the month–the Samsung Galaxy Note II. If you don’t know about its predecessor, the Note I, to have a general idea of this new product, this is a pretty decent approach: you drop the phone, you might kill a small dog.

The phone has a massive 5.5” screen which makes it genuinely impossible to be fit into most pockets. So what makes people want to buy this “bigger than an iPhone but not yet an iPad” phone? The value proposition of Note II seems to be stuck in between the one of a smartphone and a tablet.

However, Samsung has found a spot somewhere on the scale for this giant phone. It is a phone to give its owner an experience beyond a smartphone yet the owner is not burdened with the weight of a tablet. All in all, it is the solution for those who want both but would only pay for one.

If the Galaxy Note II turns out to achieve another successful sale, it might be a good idea to try proposing a product in the middle of a spectrum when both sides are occupied already.

Oct. 18, 2012. Akkad, Omar. <http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/gadgets-and-gear/gadgets/galaxy-note-ii-a-giant-stretch-of-the-word-phone/article4621461/?page=2>

What has been sweeping the front page of the economy news is the crisis and eurozone; more specifically, the potential bailout of Spain. If this nightmare became realty, it would be the fourth full-blown bailout in Europe.

As a legitimate soccer fan of Spain, this is a piece of very upsetting news which stalled me from updating to it until I came across a friend’s blog just now. The title “Spain does not need a bailout” was what caught my eyeballs. So the future of  Spain is not as worrisome as I expected?

If the realty is just as how the German Finance Minister describes, “Spain is doing everything necessary and needs no aid”, then all anxieties and worries are in vain.

However, a story can always be told by two sides. Statistics have come out and the figures are shocking. Unemployment rate in Spain has reached a historical high of 25.1%.  That is, one person  jobless out of very four!

This figure shows the continuously increasing unemployment rate in Spain in the past four years. Image adapted from Google Public Data

I will keep following the news and hope for more optimistic news.

Hewitt, G. October 2nd, 2012. Clock ticks on Spain bailout. BBC News. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19797656>

Fifteen years ago, when I was still living in China, my grandma always said to us, “there’s never that many motorcycles on the streets before. Even the alleys have got more crowded.” Four years ago, when I just moved back to Richmond, Canada, my mom told me, “the amount of cars now on the street is incredible. There were never that many cars in Richmond.”

The rate of economic growth in the past decade in both China and Canada was dazzling. After studying a few chapters of Microeconomics, I was very positive that such phenomenon reflects significant progress in the society and people in the society were better off with the rapid growth. I thought, arrogantly (arrogance came from understanding a few pages of the Econ textbook), resources have been utilized rather efficiently!

But such growth comes with tradeoffs. One of them is the compromise of public leisure spaces like playgrounds. I was completely unaware of the issue until I came across a blog of one of my classmate–Dayah Johal. She addresses the issue which more and more townhouses, which comes with smaller yards, are built in the city of Richmond while fewer and fewer playgrounds are put into proposal. Children then become the indirect victim of the municipal plan which favours in profitable real estate market.

This is a picture I took in May, inspired by such harmonious view.

Next time, while we are enjoying the harvest of economic booming, we might want to take a minute and think, “are we growing too fast?”

Dayah Johal. “Kids Contending in Construction”. Dayah Johal’s blog. Sept 12, 2012. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/dayahjohal/2012/09/12/kids-contending-with-construction/>

Borrowing ideas from Jane Austen, I would say, “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in desire of losing weight, must not go into McDonald’s.” Why? Everyone knows the answer– fast food gives you calories more than anything.

However, this restaurant is about to post calorie counts on all its menu next week to help customers make more healthful decisions when they are ordering fries and quarter pounders. A question quickly arose to me while I was reading an article reporting this oncoming event on New York Times, “why this the corporate giant making such an ironic move?”

I worked at McDonald’s for almost year. After that, I hardly  go there. I felt the oil and greasiness I had seen during that year would be enough to supply me with enough cholesterol and fat for the rest of my life psychologically! (ewww -.-)

The input of calorie counts really does not seem logical. Some argues that this has more to do with public relations than public health.  This argument is rather disturbing to me for knowing that in the world of business, the company’s benefit is sometimes more valuable than the well-being of the public. And oftentimes, PR is the means to make this happen.

The article can be found by the link http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/business/mcdonalds-to-start-posting-calorie-counts.html?hp

huge eraser for huge mistake

First week of university was certainly overwhelming. Unimaginably huge size of lecture classes, innovative teaching styles, 40%-worth finals all seemed rather terrifying to me. I kept thinking to myself, “what if I did this wrong”, “what if I didn’t get that correct”…

So, to give everyone a break from all the stress, here’s a very “easy-going”, oversized eraser that I came across at Chapters while I was looking for stationary. “For really big mistakes” is captioned on this eraser. I feel so grateful to the manufacturer of this eraser for the lighthearted mockery the eraser emits to me. Maybe it isn’t such a disastrous thing to make a mistake; maybe university isn’t as terrifying as it seems. It might be such a cliche to say that nobody is flawless, but not everyone is willing to admit this fact. Now, however, I will tell myself that it’s okay to make a mistake because I have a huge eraser!