On this day

22 years back, it was this day, just one of those warm afternoons during Diwali vacations, in Billimora, after a quarrel with my sisters, was waiting on the veranda for dad to arrive for lunch, while arranging & re-arranging in my mind as to what to say and what not to say when mom reports that 3 of us got into a muddy fight and messed up the house, to have the first go at how it was never my fault.
Just then I heard the vijaya super, MZA 9932, turning into our lane and ran to open the gate for him to drive smoothly into the parking. There were no fruits or any comics that day and he seemed to be in a hurry. I was all set to start my story, when he brushed me aside and said switch on the TV and said something about somebody being killed. All ready to do a favour to escape a scolding, ran to switch on the 1975 B&W model, Mandelia. Soon mom was in the living room and dad was telling mom, Indira Gandhi, our Prime Minister was shot dead. More than the news it was the way dad & mom were conversing that I got all engrossed and lost for a while. All the papers, radio & TV were screened for a little more information than the other.

After the initial shock, came the actual shock when we realized what it meant. It was followed by a week of sitar wadan on TV and radio with all entertainment called off. All the favourite programs like chitrahaar, evening serials and the whole of Sunday was doomed.

SAM WALTON - Made in America

I read "SAM WALTON - Made in America" probably a month ago and have been wanting to write about it since then. I also wrote a review of the book for our company's intranet but that still wasn't done to my taste. The book hits the right cord with you because Sam Walton, started small(he was a paper boy starting at age 11, worked and paid his way through college during the depression delivering papers) and worked his way to own an empire. I do not want to review the book because I am a mere book reader who dreams and preaches how book(s) inspires but do nothing in practical to show how, now that probably is because, good books inspire me differently and that is to buy more, read more & dream more.

I am just here to put down a few anecdotes and quotes from the book and some in my own words as I couldn't get the exact lines while surfing the net, which I loved. The book is full of small stories by Sam himself and his family and colleagues. Some of the quotes & anecdotes strike with you so well that you suddenly feel you understand retail discounting business. After a reading a few quotes here, you can choose if to pick & read.

While talking about how he had to close down his first successful store because he wasn't allowed to renew his lease, he says

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time

.



He owned Walton's Five and a Dime which was a discount store chain, latter he ran Ben Franklin's franchisee before he owned walmart.

Competition that led him to move from being a franchisee to opening up of first Wal-Mart discount store on July 2, 1962, was this barber, Herb Gibson who had started his stores with simple philosophy:

Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap

.

Wal-Mart wouldn't be what it is today without a host of fine competition, most especially Harry Cunningham of Kmart, who really designed the first discount store, and who in my opinion, should be remembered as one of the leading retailers of all time.

He also learnt a lot of tricks of the trade, specially book-keeping of the stores from JCPenny

Trip's Expense should be less than one percent of purchases made.

If you don't want to work weekends, you shouldn't be in retail.

Charlie Baum recalls:

We had a nice big sale, and we put barrels full of stuff all around the floor. Elderly ladies would come and bend way down over into those barrels. I'll never forget this. Sam takes a look, frowns, and says: 'One thing we gotta do, Charlie. We gotta be real strong in lingerie.

The greatest insight into retailing and discounting was told with this story: Selling more panties by pricing them a bit lower than the usual price, and hence still managed to have greater overall profit.

Name WalMart was suggested by Bob Bogle, first manager, Walton's Five and a Dime, Bentoville on a flying trip. To start with, his reason was that Walmart has just 7 letters as against earlier 'Ben Franklin' 11 letters. Hence it could save a lot of money in neon letters!! Sam didn't say anything at that time but later when Bob went by the new store's building he saw worker putting up neon signs of W-A-L and was headed up the ladder with an 'M'. He smiled and went on.

Procter & Gamble didn't pay any attention to WalMart until 1987 when WalMart began to "turn a basically adversarial vendor/retailer relationship into one that we think is the wave of the future: a win-win partnership between two big companies trying to serve the same customer." At the time biography was written, WalMart was P&G's biggest single customer!

Quite a few smaller stores have gone out of business during the time of Wal-Mart's growth. Some people have tried to turn it into this big controversy, sort of a 'Save the Small-Town Merchants' deal, like they were whales or whooping cranes or something that has the right to be protected.

Of all the notions I've heard about Wal-Mart, none has ever baffled me more than this idea that we are somehow the enemy of small-town America. Nothing could be further from the truth: Wal-Mart has actually kept a quite a number of small towns from becoming practically extinct by offering low prices and saving literally billions of dollars for the people who live there, as well as by creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in our stores.

Initially, most electronic items used to be imported from Japan and Korea alone, and latter as part of the win-win partnership they worked out deals with local American companies to buy x no of pieces every month/quarter and thus cutting down on the cost of electronic goods considerably and invariably giving the local companies a lot of sale.

To promote, Phil Green, who once made the world's largest Tide display at one of the oldest WalMart stores, promised a TV for 22 cents in a promotion to celebrate George Washington's birthday, which was on February 22nd. The only hitch was customers had to find the TV set. It was hidden in the store! The crowd brought the house down! He admitted that "playing hide-and-seek with merchandise was a terrible idea.

He did the Hawaiian shirt and grass skirt hula on Wall Street in 1984. Hula was a result of his losing bet(betting was often an another way to motivate people to do their extra bit) to David Glass that 'we couldn't possibly produce a pretax profit of more than 8 percent'.

Sam Walton wanted to be the BEST retailer and NOT the BIGGEST. According to him " There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. "

The number you have dialled...

My 8 year old nephew, yesterday night, wanted to call his dad. I was in the drawing room doing something.I see him dialing the number after reading out aloud judiciously. After a few trials

N:You shut up yeh correct hai(bangs the phone)
dials again
N:You idiot, give the phone to appa and dont eat my head ( bangs again)
dials again
N:Maine tujhe bola na, mera sar mat kha, ek lafa maroonga.

Since the STD at home is locked, he would be hearing the lady say "The number you have dialled is wrong, Please check the number and dial again...Tumhi dial kelela number chukez ahain etc etc".

Bad Dreams

Arent there times when you get up from your sleep and say 'Thank God, That was just a dream'?
and
Arent there times when after many many sleeps you get up and you think 'Oh God, I wish it was just a dream'?

To Kill a Mocking Bird - Harper Lee

This book was read, reviewed & awarded the Pulitzer even before I was born. It doesn’t require a review by me to be read, but nevertheless 'Yours truly' feels indebted to review it here and let all know what a great book it is. It explores with rich humor and great honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the 1930's. Yes, its about racial discriminations but so well written from a six year old's point of view that you cannot help smile many times at the many many incidents. It provides a very refreshing read with humor & quotes that make you want to go back to many pages & quotes and read it again & again.

Since I had already crossed our budget on books, that month, I insisted Risha to buy this one & lend it to me to read, which she kindly obliged. Now, after reading it, I want to own one copy, stack it up on my shelf, very proudly lend it to someone and then never remember who (thatz the life cycle of most of my books).

Prologue of the book mentioned a courtroom drama over the rape of a white lady by a black guy, calling for justice over racial prejudices. I started reading the book for the intense sad story & mainly the courtroom dramas. I love movies, books that depict court room dramas and have dreamed about being a lawyer for a short time in my childhood, mostly I wanted to be a detective like Nancy drew and famous five. All my skills i.e the skill of arguing & detectivegiri were honed at home with dad & mom. But there is this thing about parents, how much ever you are convinced that you won your argument, they win the case and you aren’t finally allowed to go for parties/movies or whatever it is. Thinking about it, this is after I wanted to be a detective, inspired by Famous five, Nancy drew & Hardy boys. Coming back to the book, the narrator of "To Kill a Mockingbird" as I mentioned, is the 6-year old Jean Louise, 'Scout' who lives with her brother Jem and widower father who is a lawyer in a small town in the US called Maycomb. The court room drama is all from her perspective and there are even gaps during the main proceedings when she goes out of the court to help a friend who is feeling giddy and so we loose track as to what happened in court then.

There are times when Scout makes you smile & laugh with her thoughts about her brother who she thinks tries to put-up a brave act in front of her but otherwise is equally shit-scared like her of the dark. Also her thoughts about their friend Dill, their neighbour Boo, the various old ladies in the neighborhood, the poor boy in school, their teacher, their schooling etc etc.. is all that literally goes on inside a 6-year old's head.

The book is really amazing. And the Title holds the moral of the story, which as Scout's father says “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird”. The comparision here is of Mockingbirds as good, innocent people who are destroyed by evil and hence The moral being To protect the vulnerable. The story stands so relevant even today.

The art of EmailId creation

Disclaimer: Any names, emailids mentioned below are fictional and the
resemblence is mere coincidence ;)

Off late with some considerable amount of time on hand, when I get forwards
that offers nothing new in them and in most probablitlity its the same fwd
I got in 2002, 2004-jun, 2004-dec, 2005...and now again, so these days,
time is spent reading emailids than the fwds themselves, i.e, to who all is this mail fwded to ...then keep searching for familiar names, long lost friends etc etc. Then shoot a mail to one of those long lost ones and tell them long stories about how I rang them umpteen times and never got a response ...you never pick up....oh how
mean of you ...oh is 98324324 not your number? ... thatz not even 9
digits...oh sorry .....and so on.


While this is on, I started reflecting on the art of email creation on
various sites which was evident in the mailids present on the fwd list.
Most times the best emailids like your fullname, name_surname are all taken
and the suggestions they give you are with some random number looks even
more pathetic. I believe ...

According to me, the most boring people create email ids using their first & last names like e.g sunitathomas, komala_priya_krish_anand_viswanathan(I
dont know if that length is possible)

Some geeks who play the 'I am not plain jane' try NOT to give away everything but still maintain the identity hidden like and_math(something to do with and gates & maths) or ro_jo(the one who cries) from which its very difficult to know what exactly is the name.

The creative group gets their kick by adding adjectives, verbs,birth dates
to their names like lazyjames, sexysam, smirkykap, amitatwork, rysaindian, nyve1214 or aminuk or imfun or blackrioruzy or even the self-imposing iamurfriend@xyz.com. Therez also the ones which can make a conversation difficult like

A: I will write to you, Your email id?
B: mailarvind@xyz.com
A: ok, got it, arvind@xyz.com right?
B: No, mailarvind@xyz.com
A: yeah yeah I will mail you

or
A: That was fun, how about I mail you next time
B: sure, writetome@abc.com
A: ok, abc? what site is that?anyway, ur email id?
B: writetome
A: yeah but your id
B: writetome
A: you mean snail mail?
B: who snail?
and so on


Then there is the 'I am single, ready to mingle' groups, the ones who do not want to give away anything in their emailid, generally used for bride/groom search or for chatroom searches, some samples of these could be bridesearch, f22delhi,
catchmeifyoucan and I am sure there are more entertaining ones as well

There is also the lovey-dovey emailids, the Iandmy wife or Iandmyhubby email-ids. A couple of years back, ok maybe a decade back(pretty old now..cough..cough) I also thought it was very cute but not any more. Recently I happened to see a mail from one of my ex-boses as "Sunil & Priya" where the email id still is sunil@xyz.com. This Sunil & Priya should be in their early 50's if not late and now I know there are quite of few of you who while reading this are thinking,oh, how chweeeeeeeet and are already dreaming about you having an emailid with your spouse's name as if thatz an exotic get-away in the maldives. At the risk of sounding unromanctic & insensitive, I see a few good reason why people have these ids, One (totally beaten), Guys, my spouse knows my password, Secondly, yelling out aloud, guys this is accessible to my spouse so pls dont send prohibitable content here and the day the password has been changed go change your name back to "SunilOnly" or create a new mailid and send it around.

This could be taken to a new level and make your email ids your name
plates, write to Mr&MrsSinha@xyz.com or take it an another step further
Mr&MrsSinha@2sukhwanicamppune.com ..uh so should i snail mail or email or
throw mail

Would be very unkind if I dont mention the "you half and half me" here.
They are they ones who will cut names of spouses & self into halves and put them togather. Now, this concept was totally driven by the malayalis of Kerala where they name their child in that manner pitilessly.A classic example would be of a girl named shitty bcoz her mom was shija and dad Itty(yeah, thatz a christian name) and obviously they didnt know what shitty meant too.

All said and done, in my opinion your emailid gives a sneak preview into your personality.