FT: Train Making, Engineering, Robert Winston, models Download FT_Train-making with the FT_ Robert Winston - FT
Categories
- Arts
- asia
- Banking/Finance
- beauty in the world
- Books
- Cities
- competition
- Culture & Commerce
- Current Affairs
- Demographics
- Design
- Economics
- Education
- Film
- Food and Drink
- Fun
- Future
- Games
- Health and Medicine
- History
- Industry
- Innovation
- Leadership/Mgmt
- Malaysia
- Manufacturing
- marketing
- marriage
- Music
- People
- Psychology
- Public Policy
- Religion
- Science
- Search
- Singapore
- Sports
- Stats & Math
- Strategy
- Television
- Travel
- U - Academic
- U - Endowment
- U - House
- U - IP
- U - Strategy
- U - Tech
- Web/Tech
- Weblogs
Recent Posts
- ST: More men are eschewing off-the-rack shirts for ones that are made to measure
- interesting movie reviews - roger ebert
- Song: Sun Equals Fun
- NY TImes: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
- ST: Not enough sleep?
- ST: Keep track of your kid
- ST: Non-discrimination in Singapore? Not so, Prof Koh
- ST: More execs cycling to their CBD offices
- ‘The missing piece in a smart government’
- FT: Coding
May 2012
Categories
- Arts
- asia
- Banking/Finance
- beauty in the world
- Books
- Cities
- competition
- Culture & Commerce
- Current Affairs
- Demographics
- Design
- Economics
- Education
- Film
- Food and Drink
- Fun
- Future
- Games
- Health and Medicine
- History
- Industry
- Innovation
- Leadership/Mgmt
- Malaysia
- Manufacturing
- marketing
- marriage
- Music
- People
- Psychology
- Public Policy
- Religion
- Science
- Search
- Singapore
- Sports
- Stats & Math
- Strategy
- Television
- Travel
- U - Academic
- U - Endowment
- U - House
- U - IP
- U - Strategy
- U - Tech
- Web/Tech
- Weblogs
Search Me!
Analyze Me!
November 30, 2011
September 30, 2011
August 24, 2011
FT: Big US chains begin to ‘shrink’ their stores
August 7, 2011 5:10 pm
Big US chains begin to ‘shrink’ their stores
By Barney Jopson and Andrea Felsted
Walmart wants to open 15 to 20 Walmart Express stores by the end of next year
American shops are getting smaller as retailers seek to reach consumers through new compact formats in the face of a stagnant economy, demographic shifts and a growing demand for convenience.
Retailers including Walmart, Office Depot and Best Buy are introducing smaller stores in urban areas, a departure from the “big box” stores on which they built their success at out-of-town sites in the past three decades.
More
On this story
Tesco, which has forged into the US with stores that are smaller than traditional supermarkets, is shrinking its format further with convenience stores that might be dubbed “micro-boxes” by US standards.
“The cookie cutter, one-size-fits-all doesn’t seem to work that well any more,” says Ira Kalish, director of global economics at Deloitte Research, who links the shrinking of stores to the diversification – or fragmentation – of consumer profiles and preferences.
But the convergence of so many retailers on small formats is creating stiff competition and exacerbating the difficulties of operating on expensive and unfamiliar plots, squeezed between the offices, car parks and apartment blocks of big cities.
Walmart, the discounter that dominates US retail, has opened three Walmart Express test stores in recent months and says it wants to open 15 to 20 by the end of next year.
At about 15,000 sq ft, the Walmart Express stores are just 8 per cent the size of Walmart’s trademark Supercenters, which are 185,000 sq ft and cover the same ground as two-and-a-half standard football pitches.
Tesco of the UK began its move into California under the Fresh & Easy brand with stores of between 7,000 sq ft and 10,000 sq ft. But to push deeper into urban areas it plans to open stores as small as 3,000 sq ft, roughly the size of a UK convenience store.
“We are always looking at different sizes of stores,” says Tim Mason, chief executive of Fresh & Easy.
The shrinking of stores is partly borne of the “age of convenience”, says Ken Berliner, president of Peter J Solomon, a boutique investment bank. “Consumers want more choices. Retailers need to offer whatever the consumer wants to buy, however they would like to buy it, whether in stores, through a catalogue or online.”
Cash-strapped shoppers are also less willing to fund long drives to big boxes given high gas prices.
That helps explain the post-crisis popularity of small-format dollar stores – Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Family Dollar and 99 Cents Only – which between them already have more than 20,000 stores. They, too, are building more.
Consumers’ expectations for convenience have been raised by online shopping, an option that has harmed Best Buy, the US’s biggest traditional electronics retailer.
Part of its response has been to create small-format Best Buy Mobile stores, which sell telephones and tablet computers and will expand in number this year by 150 to 325.
Target, a Walmart rival, is next year planning to open five experimental City Target stores, which will be between 60,000 sq ft and 100,000 sq ft, compared with the typical 135,000 sq ft.
The downsizing also signals that retailers are adjusting to a higher concentration of people in urban areas – one result of the housing bust, which emptied new developments in the Sunbelt states of the south-western US.
John McIlwain, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute, says two deeper demographic trends are also at play.
First, people in their 20s and 30s are living in urban areas longer than previous generations because they are marrying and having children later.
Second, baby boomers are moving back into city centres because they want to be able to walk to shops and entertainment.
But, in spite of retailers’ plans, city-centre stores are “typically not their first choice”, says Mark Keschl, national director of retail at Colliers, a property agency.
Retailers can run big-box stores off a single blueprint for inventories, staffing and fixtures.
But in each city location, they must adapt to a different set of constraints, ranging from narrow lanes for their trailer trucks to the existence of labour unions, he says.
Some retailers are not keen on the idea. Safeway, a grocery chain whose typical stores are half the size of a Walmart Supercenter, has two small shops in California but they are “a labour of love”, says Melissa Plaisance, head of investor relations.
“We are profitable in both, but it’s very hard … Hard to do enough volume to cover the costs.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011
June 26, 2011
ST: Plumbing Singapore's water story
Jun 21, 2011
TABLE TALK WITH ASIT BISWAS AND CECILIA TORTAJADA
Plumbing Singapore's water story
By Cheong Suk-Wai, Senior Writer
Sharing their lives and their life's work
DIFFIDENT yet direct, Canadian don Asit Biswas and his Mexican wife Cecilia Tortajada are that rare couple who share not only a life together but also their life's work. These global water experts have been blown away by Singapore's long view and relentlessly efficient ways with water. Here they are on:
'You can plan for a once in a 1,000 years flood, which means that for 999 years, you won't need such infrastructure. Do you want to spend an enormous amount of money on that?'
'You can plan all you want, but if you have one of those rains, there's nothing you can do - well, yes, there is: You can go to the top of your house until the floods subside.'
'With Singapore, everything is always a process. Whereas in many other places, once a global event like the World Cup is over, everything is finished and everyone is finished!"
'Development in Singapore did not happen around water. But development in Singapore would not have happened had there not been all this planning for water.'
'I was in front of this giant of the 20th century. (I felt) a sense of awe and reverence but in two minutes, he put me and my wife at ease.'
'Here is a man I could work with all my life. And if there is a next life, I hope I have a chance to work with him again.'
Prof Biswas and Dr Tortajada are writing a book about Singapore's stellar success in managing its water resources. -- ST PHOTO: RAJ NADARAJAN
ONE evening in Spain in 2006, global water experts Asit Biswas (AB) and Cecilia Tortajada (CT) sent a last-gasp e-mail message to Mr Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of Singapore's national water authority PUB.
Professor Biswas, 71, and Dr Tortajada, 48, are husband and wife, and they were then preparing to contribute to the Human Development Report on the world's best water management systems, including those in Britain and the United States when, six weeks before their deadline, someone said they should study Singapore's water systems. So they shot off a note to Mr Khoo, even as a friend who used to work in Singapore warned them that it would take ages to get such data from the Government.
However, Prof Biswas recalls, 'Lo and behold, when we woke up the next morning, we received an e-mail from Mr Khoo saying, 'What do you need? Whatever you need is at your disposal.'' So the Biswases not only got to report Singapore as an epitome of water management, but are now also completing a book titled The Singapore Water Story, which they hope to launch here next year.
Working with PUB impressed them so, they nominated it for the Stockholm Water Prize in 2007, the Oscars for the industry, and PUB toasted its eventual win in Sweden with Newater, the reclaimed water produced by PUB.
Prof Biswas, himself a Stockholm Water Prize winner in 2006, is the founder-president of the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico, of which his Mexican wife is deputy president. Between them to date, they have advised more than 20 governments on national and international water policies and best practices, including recommending that the National University of Singapore (NUS) set up the Institute of Water Policy. They met when Prof Biswas was at the World Bank and advising the National Water Commission of Mexico, where Dr Tortajada worked.
Prof Biswas is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at NUS' Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, while his wife is a visiting don at the same school. They sat down with me earlier this month to discuss the recent floods here.
AB: One of the facts of life anywhere in the world is that you cannot eliminate floods completely, technically or otherwise. You can only manage them, and control them - to a certain extent. I try to tell my students at Oxford University that no society has unlimited money to do so.
CT: But the Government's response to the floods here was fast, which you don't have in many other places. And it's good that the people of Singapore question the Government because then it improves. Many people in other cities say, 'We'll live with this', and as a result their governments tend not to bear responsibility. But again, you can have big barriers in Orchard Road, but if you have higher precipitation than that, there is nothing you can do because the infrastructure is designed to keep out a certain amount of water at a time.
AB: If you look at the way some of the shopping malls in Orchard Road are designed, any time the floodwaters go over street level, all the water can go only into the basements. That design is not the best. What you have to do is provide some sort of buffer or walls for malls so the water is kept on the street and does not flow down to mall basements. That will not need an enormous amount of money.
CT: What's happening now is that people are wealthier and their shops have more expensive goods. So their losses are higher, not because of unusual floods but because they have much more goods, which are much more expensive.
AB: And with urbanisation, everything is made of concrete so the floodwaters also have difficulty percolating. So these are some of the things which need to be explained to the people so they realise that there is nothing wrong with floods, but we have to be prepared to manage them.
AB: I cannot tell you with a straight face that the weather has changed. But as a scientist, I can confirm that the weather is changing slowly, although we have no evidence. The weather throughout history has always fluctuated.
AB: Climate change has become a very popular topic. But it is such a complex topic, we really do not understand it fully. There are so many things going on at the same time that no scientist worth his salt would tell you, 'This is the reason the climate is changing.' And there is a minority of scientists who are still saying that there is no such thing as climate change. That is also a problem because science does not progress by consensus. The next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report is surely going to increase the range of the potential for climate change, because people are realising that if something happens, something else changes, and that affects something else and you don't know the final result.
CT: Its efficiency. What the Government calls 'PPP', that is, the public sector, the private sector and the people, is something I like very much because normally, you have the public and private sectors and the people are always left aside, but not in Singapore. Also, nowhere else have we found such long-term planning.
CT: It is so. But at the same time, many cities globally have many constraints they don't plan for, or respond to.
CT: No. Singapore at independence did not have money. That Singapore has money now is a result of long-term planning and hard work, not otherwise.
AB: Also, we had two interviews with Mr Lee Kuan Yew for our upcoming book. He's the only leader in the world who's been interested in water. And we asked him: What, initially, got him interested in water? He said two things: One was that when he was a young man during the Japanese Occupation, the British blew up the Causeway to stop the Japanese from coming to Singapore. And below the Causeway was the pipe that was bringing water in from Malaysia. So Singapore had only one week's supply of water left and that made him realise how dependent they were on water from outside.
The second thing he said was that after Singapore became an independent country in 1965, the British High Commissioner came to see him and told him that the Malaysian prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had told him that Singapore would have to do exactly what Malaysia wants, otherwise they would turn off the tap. So Mr Lee brought the best people in Singapore together and said, 'Tell me how much rain falls in Singapore, and how much of it we can collect.' And from then on, he had three to four people in his office all the time to decide whether some developments could go on or not, depending on the water used.
CT: Technology exists everywhere and very wealthy countries could have the same technology that Singapore uses. But they cannot come to the same solutions because, unlike Singapore, they have not sorted out their institutional, legal and corruption problems.
AB: You have extremely good technocrats in Singapore but I'm sorry to tell you that there are not very many policy experts. Policy looks at a longer-term vision and has a governance aspect, whereas planning and management look at details.
CT: I don't think that the water sector in Singapore is short on skills to develop policies; I think it has developed the policies and their implementation but it could gain much more with support and dialogue from the universities here.
June 06, 2011
May 30, 2011
FT: Global menu: Kicking up a stink
Global menu: Kicking up a stink
By Fuchsia Dunlop
Published: May 20 2011 17:49 | Last updated: May 20 2011 17:49
 |
| Cheese-tasting in Shaoxing; stinking beancurd on sale in the market; a beancurd vendor |
It was lunchtime, in a private room at the Xianheng Tavern, the most famous restaurant in the ancient Chinese city of Shaoxing.
I opened the plastic boxes that I’d carried, sealed, all the way from London, and the stench of farmhouse cheeses began to waft across the room. The Chinese chefs and waiting staff seated around the table eyed them warily. Only two of the younger chefs had any cheese-related experience. None of the others, including the manager and executive chef of the Xianheng, Mao Tianyao, had tasted it in any form.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Some like it haute: French ‘palaces’ - May-20
FT Foodies: Sam Hart - May-20
Monks’ brew - May-13
Eat, drink, revolt! - May-13
FT Foodies: Marguerite Patten - May-13
Some like it haute: Vacherin pudding - May-06
Cheese is not a favourite food in China, to put it mildly. Traditionally, dairy products were associated with the nomadic people who lived on the fringes of China and who were regarded as fearful barbarians. The Han Chinese, with a few notable exceptions, avoided eating dairy foods altogether: many were, and still are, lactose-intolerant. In recent years, influenced by western lifestyles, Chinese parents have begun to feed milk to their children, and their purchasing power has contributed to soaring worldwide milk prices. Cheese, however, is still generally regarded as beyond the pale. A few sophisticated Shanghainese might eat Stilton just as sophisticated Londoners eat tripe and chitterlings, but many people, especially in the provinces, have never tasted it.
But if the Chinese disdain the cheeses enjoyed by Europeans, they themselves adore some stinky foods that would appal many foreigners. Shaoxing, an hour’s drive from the Zhejiang provincial capital Hangzhou, is best known for its rice wines, but it is also the Chinese headquarters of “stinking and fermented” (chou mei) delicacies. Although I first went to Shaoxing to taste the wine, over several visits I became fascinated by its odorous foods, including the relatively well-known stinking beancurd, and also “fermented thousand layers” (made from beancurd skin), and various semi-rotted vegetables. All were shocking at first taste, with their earthy, old underwear aromas, but strangely addictive. “Fermented thousand layers” reminded me of the part of a high old Stilton that is closest to the rind, that yellow, sandy bit that gets right up your nose, dirty and delicious.
Over several visits to Shaoxing, I wondered what the locals, such ardent lovers of rotted soymilk and vegetable stalks, would make of rotted cow’s milk, otherwise known as cheese. Finally, I returned to Shaoxing with a boxful of artisanal cheeses from Neal’s Yard Dairy in London, including the smelliest I could find in the shop. I had selected one mild hard cheese, Isle of Mull, to serve as a kind of toe-in-the-water; Stichelton, which is an unpasteurised version of Stilton; pale, veined Harbourne Blue; Ardrahan, a fairly whiffy washed-rind cheese that I adore; Milleens, another washed-rind variety with a punchy, farmyardy aroma that acquires a hint of ammonia as it ripens; and a wildly smelly Brie de Meaux. By the time I reached Shaoxing after a week on the road, the cheeses had all ripened nicely, and some were beginning to ooze.
At the Xianheng, a waitress cut the cheeses into pieces, and the assembled tasters began to pick them up with their chopsticks, sniffing and tasting. And where I had been impressed by what cheese and stinky soya products had in common, these culinary professionals were immediately struck by their differences. “Although in some ways you could say the flavours of cheese and fermented beancurd are similar,” said Mao, “vegetable stinky foods are very clean and clear in the mouth (qing kou), and they disperse quickly, while milky foods are greasy in the mouth (ni kou), they coat your tongue and palate, and they have a long, lingering aftertaste.”
Two other chefs said the cheeses had a heavy shan wei (muttony odour), an ancient term used by southern Chinese to describe the slightly unsavoury tastes associated with the northern nomads. Another said that the selection “smells like Russians”. “The difference,” he added, “is that the stinky things Chinese people eat give them smelly breath, while stinky dairy things affect the sweat that comes out of your skin.”
Chinese fermented beancurd, an intense-tasting relish, had always reminded me of a ripe blue cheese, but the Shaoxing tasters, faced with a Stichelton, disagreed. “It does have a rich umami taste,” said chef Chen Judi, “but there’s also a bitter aftertaste that people in this region wouldn’t like at all.” Several of the tasters were repelled by the sourness and astringent aftertaste of the Isle of Mull, which I’d thought was the most innocuous. “Our rotted thousand layers just doesn’t have that sour taste,” said Mao.
The cheeses they found most palatable were the Harbourne Blue (“this is quite close to Shaoxing tastes,” said Mao, “neither bitter nor sour, and quite clean in the mouth”) and, surprisingly, the very strong Milleens, with its ammoniac whiff. “I think people here would be able to tolerate this,” he added. The only cheese that provoked real consternation was the Brie. “It has this animal stench that assaults your nose,” said Dai Jianjun. “Definitely the stinkiest,” said Mao, “I really can’t bear it.” Most of the others agreed. Only one chef, Sun Guoliang, actually liked it. “It has such a complex flavour, like stinking beancurd, rotted thousand sheets and fermented beancurd, all mixed together.”
After our first course of cheeses, we tasted some stinky local dishes for comparative purposes. And I had to agree with the assembled company that, despite the formidable aromas of the steamed stinking beancurd and the rotted amaranth stalks, their flavours were clean, dispersing quickly in the mouth, without the creamy clinginess of cheese. The cubes of fermented beancurd, too, had a magnificent creaminess, but it didn’t hang around: quickly vanishing to leave room for appreciation of the delicate soups and stews that came afterwards.
Much as I love cheese myself, by the end of the meal I was beginning to understand why a Shaoxing local might turn up her nose at Brie, while enjoying the stinking beancurd that perfumes entire neighbourhoods. I was, however, fascinated by how well the mellow tastes of Shaoxing’s amber-coloured wines matched the local stinking delicacies, a marriage as perfect as port and Stilton. The next tasting, perhaps, should be a gathering of European oenophiles around a table of Shaoxing wines and cheese.
‘Shark’s Fin & Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China’ by Fuchsia Dunlop, is published in paperback by Ebury Press on June 2
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.
Recent Comments