“I get up at 5am. I collect the milk myself from the farms in the village. I warm the milk,” Mr Michelin told me. “I scoop it carefully into cylinders. I pay attention to the varying consistency and taste of the curd. It alters subtly with the seasons, depending on the qualities of the grass. I mold the cheeses by hand. Every cheese is a little different.”
“That’s what gets me into trouble these days,” M. Michelin said. “Brussels and Paris say that the cheeses must all be the same. There seem to be new rules every month. How can I carry on if all my cheeses have to be identical?”
Surely, this is cause for Frexit.
This is a lesson that comes up at business meetings, and it has to do with McDonalds some years ago, coming out with a burger, where the hot burger was on one half of the bun, and the cold tomato and lettuce was on the other half. When you received it, you would put the cold food bun on top of the hot food bun, and enjoy. The problem was, that people who would drive through in the northern states were dissatisfied with their sandwiches, because the tomatoes in the south were bigger, redder, juicier than the ones in the north. The sandwich was discontinued, because you couldn't just ship fresh vegetables from one end of the country to the other. The lesson was that it did not matter if the customer was used to the northern sandwich or the southern, a matter of expectations, it had to be the same, or it was bad for business. A similar McD's lesson is the nice old lady who embellished the sandwiches, trying to make people's days with fun or love. It caused complaints, and the woman was told not to do that any more.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that this is taking over artisan French cheese, seems to be a sign that big business is expanding its reach as the article points out. A few years back, big business was differentiating itself from the bigger small businesses, putting the squeeze on highly successful local Ma and Pa stores and chains. There's a sucking away of the profits up to the stockholders, the growth of liens and such to the local levels. This leaves almost everyone broke, just broke at different levels, and no room for seasonally crafted cheese. Imagine a million dollar business, now a million in debt -- just as the homes of the employees are mortgaged to the hilt. Broke. The fruits of our labor are in the pockets of huge corporations.
There is no room at the top either for the creative genius needed for these cheeses to be marketed for all their worth. You cannot duplicate creative genius. You cannot hire 30,000 creative geniuses. The jobs at the top may be filled by B students, same with the corporate investors, but the workers and middle management must have the C and D students, even the E students, and ultimately robots and machine measure. Make it easy enough to make and duplicate.