Pro Commerce

Medieval Cleaning

There is an online fact site that seems to be very popular, Quora, which is consistently wrong on one point.  I just wanted to set the matter straight.

Quora is consistently asked whether people in the Medieval period took baths or cleaned themselves significantly.  The answer is always ‘yes’ and the readers are told that taking a bath in a large tub was common.  

The first problem with this answer is that it doesn’t refer to any geography.  The questioners are probably talking about people in Europe.  In this case Quora is completely wrong in the answer.

In Finland, Hungary and Turkey, the citizens regularly took steam baths, used bathing pools or saunas throughout history.  The same is true in Japan.  In the areas of West Africa that I am familiar with, bathing was ubiquitous.  This was also true, much earlier, in the Roman Empire.

For the rest of Europe, bathing and washing the body was not done.  The popular theories of the time were that being unwashed was healthy and deterred skin infections.  Additionally the smells of everyday life were so egregious that covering one’s body with notions was necessary to survive the fetid smells of everyday life.  Sewer systems were unknown in the English-speaking and European worlds.

All of this is readily determined by reading the literature of the time.  The Japanese were so offended by the horrid smell of Europeans, they were made to stand outside during all encounters with Japanese and forced to live on a separate island.  Africans reacted the same way to Europeans as did Muslims to the Crusaders.

In summary, most Europeans for 1,000 years didn’t bathe or wash.  Many other parts of the world testify to the foul smells of Europe.

What Happened?

Elon Musk happened.  Nearly all the big tech companies laid off workers in large numbers within the past few months of 2022 and 2023.

This seems to be a big secret.  None of the media reports what just happened.  I want historians to know first- hand.

Two things happened.

• The first was that Elon Musk bought the online site twitter.com and proceeded to fire 2/3rds of the employees.  Roughly 5,000 employees out of 7,500. What everyone in management around the world realized was that the company ran just as well or better with the remaining ⅓ of the employees (2,500.)  Fellow tech companies were forced to question whether the same excess of employees was also a problem of theirs. They proceeded to fire many employees.
• The second was that many tech companies withdrew operations from Russia on orders from the U.S. government.  As I said in an earlier blog, every company in the world that uses American tech immediately had reason to doubt the reliability of American tech companies in providing continuing maintenance support.  Since competitors have not fully entered the market, the full impact is still a long way off but the initial impact was evident in year- end 2022 tech sales data. Firing followed.

Any action by Elon Musk is significant.  Mr. Musk is a technical and a managerial genius of historic proportions.  He created the first successful electric car in this century, the Tesla, which has the largest global market as of this date and is very profitable.  He created the first successful commercial space rocket company in history. Musk’s SpaceX launched more successful rockets last year than NASA launched in its whole history.

Bed Bath Bad Marketing

Bed Bath just escaped the second threat of bankruptcy. But it won’t survive.

“At its peak in 2017, Bed Bath & Beyond had 1,560 stores with 65,000 employees, bringing in $12.3 billion in revenue. But in the nine months through November 2022, it posted sales of just $4.2 billion, and its headcount dwindled to fewer than 30,000.” said a past CEO.

BedBath was founded in 1971. It filled an important cluster of niches that were formerly many of the niches filled by department stores.  It was a smaller version of Macy’s with a greater selection in each category. 

The big marketing mistake was sending millions of 20% discount cards to everyone in their marketing areas.  That is a terrible marketing mistake.  It has the following problems:

• It tells everyone that the prices without the discount cards are too high.
• That ALL the prices are too high.
• That it is only worth shopping at the BedBath stores when the shopper has a recent discount card.
• It made it very hard for the company to have an online store.  Would an online store be 20% less all the time? Would it have a 20% discount at checkout?  

All national stores need an online outlet. Bed Bath was foreclosed from this  vital business option.

Management knew the problem but was trapped in this marketing nightmare.

“Like any form of promotion, it becomes a drug,” a former CEO said. Over the years, attempts to pull back on the mailings or reduce the discount backfired. “Once you’re addicted to it and your customer is addicted to it, it’s a very difficult thing to wean them off of.”

It is impossible to stop mail-out discounts.

Discount mail-outs work for grocery stores because so much inventory is seasonal and the effect is to be a seasonal reminder. Such grocery mailers are also for specific items that are sometimes temporary real loss leaders.

This is a lesson for all businesses.  Sales of any type are risky unless done with a specific marketing goal in mind. Even then they are questionable.

Capitalism, AntiSemitism

Two words you won’t find me using.

Capitalism is part of the Marxist analysis of economics with capitalism as opposed to socialism and communism.  A meaningless economic category.  Russia may have a backward economy and China may have a command economy but both use capital in vast amounts and the capital is controlled by many different entities. 

Marx used a labor theory of value which is irrelevant and totally disparaged.  It is useless in explaining rents, prices of most goods including art, financial markets and most everything else.

Marx’s economic analysis is also wrong because he saw the world in Charles Dickens' terms based on the free labor that was sweeping into urban areas as newly efficient agriculture freed up workers. Workers who then moved into the new wage labor market in the early 1800s.  The rudiments of the modern economic world. The early stages of an economic system that didn’t last very long.

The basic flaw in Marxist analysis is that capital is found everywhere in the modern commercial world. Regardless of the type of economy.  For example, the U.S. government, including the military and national parks has more dollars of capital than all the top hundred global corporations put together, but the U.S. is called ‘capitalist’ by Marxists.

Capitalism is a meaningless term.  I use modern commerce. Which I further divide into trade (flower shops), industry (Lowes) and clientry (personal services like lawyer).

I don’t use anti-Semitism either.  Semitism is a sweet innocent word that comes from linguistics referring to a whole cluster of languages including Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Ugaritic and Ethiopian. A nice sweet word.  

Anti-Semites on the other hand murdered millions of my cousins painfully, barbarically, children, old people and anyone who was vaguely Jewish. Anti-Semites still want to murder Jews.  All Jews.  There is nothing nice or sweet for people who want to see me and my fellow Jews dead.  People who, to the last one, want the only home of us Jews, Israel, destroyed. 

Anti-Semites should be called what they are: Jew haters.  That is what I call them and that is what they deserve to be called.  Black, prominent or British upper class; they are haters and don’t deserve to live peacefully in a decent society.  Elijah Mohammed, Kanye West and Brian Eno are not decent people.

Jew haters certainly don’t deserve to be referred to with a trite anodyne term for a language group. They are not anti-Semites, they are Jew haters.

Israel Today

No one who follows this blog will fail to know that I am a strong supporter of Israel and consider Bibi one of the greatest leaders in all of Jewish history.  World history for that matter.

I lived in Israel in 1958-9 when Israel was a Kibbutz socialist heaven.  It was the heaven American Lefty-Jews still romanticize. 

Bibi has been a leader who changed Israel into the most successful nation driven by modern commerce and the most successful innovative nation on the planet.

The 60% of American Jews who vote Democrat and long for the lost socialist nation of Israel, are drifting away from support of Israel. The proportion of such Democrat Jews is growing.

First to understand why this drift is happening it helps to read Israeli news.

Sarah Rinder (Mosaic 1/23/2023) has found a way to demonstrate the distance that separates these American Jews from Israel.  Here is some contemporary popular Israeli music.  Compare it to American pop music and rap.

This music references the horror of living with Arabs who kill your fellow Israelis every day, every month and every year. Here is what Rinder says about the music and the singer:

“It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.”

Unless and until Israel can move the Gaza and West Bank Arabs out of Israel, the division between Israel and American Lefty-Reform Jews will continue to grow.

My own naive solution to the Israeli-Arab problem is to pay some Arab nations to take the West Bank and Gaza Arabs who are ready to leave (those between 13 and 25 years old).   We could start with an offer of $1 billion to take 4,000 of these Arabs.  Plenty of Arab countries are corrupt enough to want the money.  

Once the process begins, most members of the U.S. Congress and most European nations will see this as a solution and it should catch on.