Deals

Last week, everywhere you looked, that was all you could see - "deals". 50% off this, 75% off that, buy one and get one free, all kinds of stuff to mislead the consumer. It was so tempting to get 50% off stuff, especially when everyone tells you that this is the time of the year to be shopping, the time of the year when the best deals are available. So I went out shopping too, thinking the deals would only be available on that day.

I found yesterday that Macys, the store that advertises and makes use of Black Friday to the maximum has another sale this weekend - with the same 50% off of course. So what were they advertising about last week? What made last week the best week to shop?

In fact, come to think of it, although Macys has good stuff, the pricing is very misleading. There is no "real" price on any item - its basically an auction model, where the goods come in before the beginning of each season (sales for the next season begins way before the season itself, off) at heavy prices. The people who are particular about wearing in season and the latest fashion trends and colors buy those at exorbitant prices. After a while, the same items get marked down, and they have a sale, perhaps putting a discount of 40%. If you are unlucky, you could be paying as much as 40% more for the same item if you went shopping just one day before the sale day. And what happens when the items dont go on sale even after 40% discount? Well, they get marked down lower still. Finally it hits clearance, and they usually cost between 5-10$ at that point. Of course, one has to realize that the ones that end up in clearance are the sizes that no one can wear, the patterns that no one liked, or the cuts that did not suit most people. So the trick to shopping well is to go after it is marked down, but before people have finished buying up all the good pieces. And that is why sales are so popular here.. 

Except... what does it mean when there is a sale every 10 days or so? Are they reducing the price of items every 10 days? Isnt that an indication that their items are way overpriced to begin with? And if the store is not going bust after all these sales, surely they are conning us into paying more than we ought to?

A programming class that I took at Columbia had this interesting problem we had to solve : We had to write code that could play scrabble - we all started out with an initial (random) set of letters. In each round, a new letter would come up for bidding, and all the teams could bid on this new letter to try and get the letter (and win the game by making a 7 letter word). So at each point, when a letter came up for bid, we had to decide what that letter was worth to us and bid accordingly. Through trial and error, we learnt that the only way to get what was valuable through an auction was to put in a bid that reflected the true value of the letter for us depending on the state of our game.

Of course, estimating true value was a difficult problem. We knew intuitively what letters were more valuable or less valuable. But putting a number on it was not easy. We explored all kinds of things to arrive at true value. We never reached the right equations, and our player did not win, ultimately. But it was a valuable lesson, because I am applying it while shopping at Macys now :) .. I look at each piece and decide whether the cost reflects its true value to me. If it does, I buy, and if it doesnt, I dump it. It has proved to be a valuable aid in helping avoid regrets.

Funny how programming lessons can come handy while shopping.

Why I dont want to be a Domestic Goddess

I care a lot about what I eat, and so I subscribe to a number of food blogs. These blogs are maintained by similar food enthusiasts, who try out different recipes from different sources and then reproduce the recipe word for word in their blog along with pictures of the result. Many of them also quote their recipe source. When I first came to the US, I had one of these blogs too. I lost interest in it soon after I realized what a waste of time and effort it was. Besides, I stopped having much free time at hand too. But thats not the what I wanted to write about... one of the blogs I read had a recipe for a dessert which was sourced from a book named "How to be a Domestic Goddess".  The name caught my eye, and since I had given some thought to the whole idea of what good house keeping was, I decided to check out what this author thought was a successful homemaker.

What I found did not surprise me much. It was a book full of desserts. Every recipe seemed to have the same sets of ingredients in various ratios - all purpose flour, sugar, eggs and butter. And then a few other ingredients would be added -perhaps strawberry, pista, coconut etc, to add color and vary the flavor. Much like how they do for ice creams. There was not even one recipe I would consider an every day recipe. And there lies the probelm. Somehow, as a society, we seem to think that good housekeepers are those who can cook foods that resemble products from a bakery or a restaurant. The whole concept of "homemade" seems to be twisted out of form, with many bakeries professing to provide goods that resemble "homemade" and many homes trying hard to imitate the bakeries. One wonders here, who is imitating who? I know some food bloggers who bake a cake again and again and again until it looks just perfect, so they can photograph it, and then end up eating all the different versions. I wonder what makes them do that. What is so "homemade"y about buying industrial products such as all purpose flour and refined sugar and mixing them together with a stand mixer and baking it in an oven that looks like it belongs in a bakery? Arent you just recreating a bakery at home? And why is that a good thing?

For years, I thought cakes were great. Now things have changed, I am all about cooking foods that can be eaten everyday. Well, I mean food that can be eaten everyday without worrying about going overweight or developing heart disease. In some sense I am sort of trying to go back to cooking the way they were doing it in the pre industrial era. I dont know where I got this notion that pre industrial diets were better for health.. perhaps it is this book I read about indigenous diets and how they can prevent disease that was written by a doctor who travelled to different parts of the world to find out what the health secrets of various indigenous people were. She chose 7 different places in the world which she found were "cold spots" for certain modern diseases such as breast cancer, depression, diabetes, heart disease etc. At first she was trying to find something common through all the diets to figure out what we could recreate to achieve the same health benefits. What she found however was that there was no secret ingredient - the indigenous people ate both vegetarian and non vegetarian depending on where they were from. For example, in iceland, people mostly ate fish, while in mexico, the diet was corn, rice and beans. The indigenous people were sometimes overweight, but they showed no symptoms of the kinds of diseases that is common in most developed and developing regions. The conclusion she drew from all of this was that it was cooking and eating traditional recipes, which seemed to be complete and balanced that kept them in good health. So the answer in the end was simple - try and cook the meals your great grand mother made, from the scratch. And make sure you combine foods the way she told you they must be combined...

Gee.. long story. What I am really trying to say is... I think at some point we lost our traditional knowledge of what keeps us healthy and what does not, and ended up looking to corporations and businesses for ideas on what the right thing to eat was. And it resulted in us slowly changing out diets until it became the mess it is today. Dont believe me? Look at some of ads they show on TV... Just a few days ago, while I was reimaging my laptop, I happened to wander around the office and watch some commercials on TV. The first one was for pizza. And the next one was a stool softener. So first the businesses market their foods to you and make you ruin your bowels, and right after that, another business tries to set your stomach right with some more artificially ingested chemicals. I wonder why there are no ads which say..."The only thing you have to do to make sure you are "regular" is to eat the right a balanced and complete home cooked meal".

Hmm this is getting to be a long rant, so I guess I will stop now. Either way, I dont ever want to be a domestic goddess and ruin my bowels.

Shopping - Culture

So far, I used to think of ads as a means by which you come to know of a product / service. I never gave it more thought than that. But if you look more closely, you can look at the ads in general that are shown in a country and get a sense of its prevailing culture. If you look at ads in India, especially the ads that are targeted at women - such as the oils, soaps, cooking ranges or other household electronics, you will notice that the ad shows a whole family and how the woman is able to take care of her in laws, husband and kid better because of this new product. Some ads show the husband and kids playing outside and coming back in with dirty clothes and the woman taking it all with a big smile because she has this new soap with some "proactive" ingredients that will clean everything effortlessly. Similar concepts show up for washing machines too. For oils it shows the woman taking care of the health of the older people in her family. Ads for other products use family too - for example, some product that is supposed to reduce acidity in the stomach shows a big family gathering and people eating a lot and then someone using this product to reduce acidity. I dont know if "family based advertising" has gone down after I left India. I never seem to get time to watch much of TV when I go back there now. But it definitely used to be based a lot on families. I guess the ads are sort of targeted at our psyche that wants the big happy family life. 

The other big class of ads in India are targeted at younger women who are not yet married. For them, it is all about fairness creams and lotions. And that ads invariably show these girls using some or the other product and as a result getting married to a handsome man in a lavish wedding. And of course, that must be the best way to sell anything (similar concepts show up for almost all fairness creams, sometimes for soaps, very often for sarees, and of course, for jewellery), because every girl wants the lavish wedding and the handsome man. As soon as she gets married, I guess she is considered to fall into the other category where she should be taking care of the whole family.

In the US though, the whole family is rarely shown. Women's products are shown a lot, but it seems to only show "earlier" and "later" or just a woman with skimpy clothes looking very made up and surreal. The ads show women of all color and race, and I have not yet seen an ad show what effect the product had on her social life.  Is this because "family" wont sell here? In fact, the only product for which I seem to notice "family" come into the picture is for medicines and restaurants. Some medicine ads show people able to enjoy a family outing because they are taking medication. Does it mean people here only become aware of families when they fall ill? Some restaurants show the whole family eating junk food together. What does get shown most often however is stuff like "Shop until you drop" or "Maxinista / Fashionista" or being "in season", as though having all the latest and best things is an achievement in itself. It seems based on the premise that women will keep buying stuff whether they need it or not. And it does not seem to serve any purpose, other than being fashionable. That makes me wonder if all American women are really like that - do they only care about buying more stuff and presenting themselves with "new looks" every day? No other goals in life?