Month: November 2010

I think this blog posted by Jennie Yang  is very interesting..

It is rather surprising and kind of untypical of the Canadian government to be so negligent about what Canadians consume. I have not yet had a chance to read if the government has justified their unwillingness to label the so called genetically modified foods. However, I personally do not think even if the government agreed to label such foods, it would make a significant difference on the market.

In the first place, how many people do we know or have we seen that read the labels and details provided on packages. I have seen and know only a few. How about you? In the second place, Labelling genetically modified foods may discourage some people from buying them and send them looking for foods without that labelling. This will definitely lead to a spike in the price of these supposedly healthier or safer foods. This increase in price will force lower income people to look for lower cost foods, which eventually could be those labelled genetically modified foods. And finally, have we done many surveys to find out what percentage of the people knows what is meant by genetically modified products? Personally, I believe that the word “modified” may even give a positive tone to the label and many people might think such products have a modified or improved quality. My Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines “modify” as “to change something such as a plan, opinion, law or way of behaviour slightly, usually to improve it or make it more acceptable”.

Even if we can prove that products laeblled genetically modified are harmful, we need to call them something else; otherwise, even labelling them may be misleading many people, especially laypersons and ESL people.

While browsing through the various postings by my classmates this week I came upon  calvin kwok`s blog  entry about the Blackberry Bold 9780 and how the price for this phone differs from Telus to Rogers to Bell. This started me thinking not only about price discrepancies in the marketplace, but also about why companies retain loyal customers despite having higher prices than other companies in the same field. The main thought I had is that these companies are actually in the business of providing a service, and that they use products mainly to attract customers. But once they have the customer, the service will be what keeps them. Products are generally bundled together with a package of services, and it is the package that needs to be examined for value not just the product. For example, two years ago I had a package from Rogers that offered me international phone calls for $1.75 per minute. Then Rogers offered a Blackberry that came with a package of $.30 per minute. As an international student this was a quite a savings, and this is the main reason I would hesitate to switch to another company just because their latest Blackberry was a lower price than Rogers.

Vanessa’s blog  about why there is so much disparity in prices for Big Macs around the world caught my attention because it focuses on questions I have often asked myself. My assumption has always been that the price of any product is determined by the very macro influences Vanessa mentions, namely local production, delivery costs, advertising and whatever the market will bear. These may actually be the true reasons, yet there is something about this that doesn’t seem to add up. The most costly part of any hamburger is the meat, so one would assume a Big Mac would be more expensive to produce in countries that have very little land they can devote to raising cows and that require the meat to be flown in from distant markets. One country that fits that description is Japan where pasture land is scarce. Yet the least expensive market (in the Ukraine) and most expensive (Sweden) are both in Europe, where eating meat is traditional. Also, Japan has had financial difficulties in the past couple of decades that would make the importing of meat expensive, certainly more so than Sweden. Perhaps this is where the “whatever the market will bear” influence comes in to play because as far as I know Sweden’s economy has been and still is very stable compared to Japan’s so consumers in Japan may be eating out in fast food restaurants far less than in Sweden.