The latest NAB business survey shows employers easing off on letting go of workers and more inclined to take workers on. And it accords with what they are also telling the Commonwealth Treasury.
Only 1 in 5 employers felt the need to trim staff in June, down from 1 in every 3 in March.
The proportion expanding their workforce climbed from 8 per cent to 10 per cent.
"Employment is still going backwards, but not at the rate it was," said NAB chief economist Alan Oster. "We are no longer seeing large chunks of labour shedding."
The finding mirrors that of the Treasury's Business Liason Program which found this month that job cuts were becoming "less prevalent" and that some retailers and construction firms were taking more workers on...
Extraordinarily good conditions and forward orders for retailers and motor vehicle traders as well as improved conditions for construction contractors pushed the NAB's business conditions index to its highest point since before the late 2008 financial crisis in June. Business confidence turned positive and climbed to its highest point since December 2007.
"I am surprised by the results, and I am concerned they won't hold," said Mr Oster. But June appears to have been the best retail month on record, right up there with December when the first stimulus cheques arrived. Car sales are probably being boosted by tax breaks in the Budget and the extension of the first home boost is feeding construction."
"But can we be sure the jobs market will continue to improve when when each of those supports is removed later this year? I'm not sure."
Mr Oster is maintaining the NAB's forecast that the unemployment rate will peak at 8 per cent, somewhat below the government's forecast of 8.5 per cent. But emboldened by the survey other forecasters think things now won't get that bad.
"We would only expect 7.5 per cent now, not much higher," said UBS economist George Tharenou. "We are now expecting 6.5 to 7 per cent," said CommSec economist Savanth Sebastian.
Every forecaster expects Australia's unemployment rate to continue to climb beyond its present 5.8 per cent even if the jobs market does turn. Immigration and the annual influx of school leavers means employment needs to grow by about 3 per cent a year in order to stop the rate climbing.
Treasurer Wayne Swan took credit for some of the change in sentiment saying as he moved around the country, businessmen and women have told him "again and again that stimulus means they still have customers coming through their doors, and that means they can hold on to more staff than they otherwise would".
The former boom states of Queensland and Western Australia now have the weakest business conditions according to the NAB survey, with NSW the strongest, and Victoria the middle of the pack.
Mr Swan said the global recession still had "some way to run".
"The terms of trade effect alone is expected to cut about 3 per cent from national income over 2009/10," he told an audience at the Australian National University in Canberra.
"And the effect does not stop there - it cycles into weaker business profits and hence into weaker investment and employment outcomes. It also shows up in weaker government revenue."
"Budget decisions are going to remain difficult for the next few years at least."
Published in today's SMH and Age
Graphic: From here
NAB June 09
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Worried about losing your job? Breathe more gently.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Our banks are getting bigger
It's time to act
Australia's banks have gained near unrivaled dominance over the financial system, accounting for almost $90 of each $100 lent - an all-time high.
The market-share figures for May, covering personal loans, housing loans, commercial loans and lease finance come as Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner lends support to a new financial system inquiry.
Addressing international regulators in Sydney Mr Tanner said the pace of financial innovation had now "outstripped the capacity" of regulators to keep up.
"The world has changed beyond recognition," he told the conference. "Whether we’re talking about the United States or Australia, we need a regulatory regime that’s appropriate for 2010 and beyond, not one that simply reinvents the past"...
Australia's last inquiry into the financial system in 1996 and 1997 took place at a time when competitors to the banks had a large and growing share of the market.
The May figures show the share of new loans issued by building societies, credit unions, wholesale lenders and finance companies falling to a record low 10.6 per cent, down from 15 per cent a year ago.
The banks' share was a record 89.4 per cent, up from 85 per cent. The banks' share of new mortgages climbed from 90 per cent to 92 per cent and their share of motor vehicle and other lease finance jumped from 35 per cent to 45 per cent.
Former Competition and Consumer Commissioner Stephen King said there was now a real question as to the degree to which the big four banks "were keeping each other honest and were kept honest by facing competition."
"These figures show the smaller players are becoming less relevant as a constraint on the banks. We have a straight out competition problem. The last 18 months have reversed a 20-year trend for the banks to face more competition," he said.
Professor King is one of the six public policy economists who last week petitioned Treasurer Wayne Swan asking for a new inquiry into Australia's financial system.
"The last financial system inquiry was carried out against a background of the banks facing increasing constraints on their behaviour from emerging competitors, and that has turned around - a 180 degree change," he said.
What the people who say we don't need an inquiry are ignoring is that the rest of the world is changing. In the UK and other countries the old rule book is being thrown out. We can't act as if we are an island."
Australia's Financial Services Minister Chris Bowen Sunday opened the door to a new financial system inquiry saying he "would not rule out" such a review "at the appropriate time".
Treasurer Wayne Swan is understood to also be open to the idea of an inquiry after the dust has settled on the current financial crisis.
Mr Tanner said Australia’s regulators had been vigilant in overseeing Australia's financial sector but that it was clear that a new international rules were needed. "We cannot simply restore past regulation, as appealing as it may be to some," he added.
New lending for housing hit a record high in May with the figures showing a sharp jump in borrowing to buy investment properties, suggesting that more investors are "positively gearing" to take advantage of high rents and low interest rates
Published in today's SMH and Age
Here's Tanner's full speech.
Why you shouldn't trust a mortgage broker
Today's Australian:
"The Commonwealth Bank has told 8000 mortgage brokers from a variety of broking firms they will no longer be able to offer the bank's home loans if they fail to write enough business for the bank.
Wayne Ormond, executive chairman of Queensland-based mortage brokers Refund Home Loans, told The Australian yesterday the CBA had written to his firm last month stepping up a demand first made in January that each of its brokers submit four home loans per quarter.
Mr Ormond said Refund employed 270 brokers, meaning the group would have to put through 1000 CBA home loans every three months...
"It would be valid for consumers to ask: if a broker is recommending a CBA loan, is that the best loan, or is it being recommended so the broker won't lose his accreditation?"
Well what about private foreign debt then?
It's climbed enormously since the 1970s, taking up where government debt left off:
A lot - but not all - of it has been borrowed for worthwhile purposes.
Recently it's been leveling off:
This is the Parliamentary Library paper that explains what's been happening.
A commenter asked whether I thought the explosion in private foreign debt mattered much.
I replied that I didn't think it mattered much in and of itself.
But I noted that markets may (suddenly) take a (quite possibly irrational) set against it, which would make my own views beside the point.
I wrote about the danger here.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Worried about government debt?
Then don't look at this.
It'll make you realise you should have been worrying much more all through the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s:
Thanks to Bill Mitchell for reminding me.
The source is the Treasury itself. I wrote about it at the time here, as it happens earning a Saturday morning phone call expressing the Opposition's displeasure.
STOP PRESS: The Parliamentary Library have just put out a paper on the topic.
Getting China wrong
Guess what? Tomorrow's must-see conference, the 2009 China Update, is hosted by "The Rio Tinto - ANU China Partnership".
No joke. Check out the sponsorship notice at the top of the conference website.
John Garnaut's typically brilliant report from China in today's Herald and Age begins like this:
"WHEN Rio Tinto holds press events in China, its public relations firm sometimes hands out red envelopes of cash to Chinese journalists who are kind enough to turn up.
Well, doesn't every company in China do it?
No, the best multinational companies do not. And the best Chinese journalists don't accept those "expense" payments, either..."
Read the full thing
Let's see... Australia's AWB stooped to bribery and suffered the consequences, it is alleged that a subsidiary of our Reserve Bank also stopped to bribery and it is awaiting the consequences. Hasn't this taught firms such as Rio anything?
At least Alan Jones hands out money as if he means it
The other media barrons play both sides of the street.
This breakdown of their political donations from Crikey:
Oh, and John B Fairfax and Ramsay/Prime.
Why oh why do they bother with the G8?
Italy? Germany? The G8 is no way get the globe on board
Nina Hachigian at the East Asia Forum
"The underlying trouble is the G-8 itself. The world simply needs a different set of countries at the high table of global governance to tackle today’s challenges.
Inertia was the mother of this G-8 summit. The G8 occurs because the member countries—the United States, Germany, Japan, France, Great Britain, Canada, Russia, and Italy—agreed a number of years ago that it would. Over the years, though, the G-8 has lost credibility because it does not reflect the realities of power, influence, and capacity in the world today...
In late 2008 President George W. Bush brought the Group of 20 to life at the leaders’ level, recognizing that China, India, Brazil and other major economies needed to be at the table to plan a coordinated response to the global economic crisis.
In response, Italy this year decided that instead of giving up the G-8 host prerogative — the political equivalent of a cheetah giving up its prey — it would also invite the G-20 countries to meet alongside the G-8. That idea was later pushed aside and the three-day summit now includes meetings of the G-8, the G-8 plus emerging economies, the Major Economies Forum (17 countries), and the G-8 plus emerging economies plus leaders from select African countries. That’s a lot of Gs.
The most valuable commodity in international politics—leaders’ time, especially President Barack Obama’s time — is being lavished on all these meetings. I truly hope breakthroughs result because the issues on the table could not be more serious—the economic crisis, development, and climate change, among others."
Saturday, July 11, 2009
"Woolies boss heavied me: Choice man"
It's war, and of course this is great, but Woolies is cheaper than IGA - GroceryChoice (deceased) said so
Story 1 - AAP
Consumer group Choice has set its sights on keeping the two supermarket giants honest - a job it says went begging following the scrapping of the Grocery Choice website.
Choice has ordered its policy and campaign teams to drop all other issues to try and figure out how to bring down supermarket prices in Australia, which rate among the highest in the developed world.
Story 2 - Kelly Burke SMH
NICK STACE has sat with Sinn Fein and Ulster Unionists at the bargaining table; he has had tough dealings with giant European car manufacturers and survived the political uber-egos of 10 Downing Street.
But it was a meeting that took place in Australia on the morning of June 5 this year that the chief executive of Choice says has been the most hostile and intimidatory in his career. That meeting was with the Woolworths boss Michael Luscombe.
Worth a read.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Reading Terry McCrann
Here's John Quiggin:
Terry McCrann has responded to the call for a new inquiry into the financial system with a snark-filled piece which is of sociological, if not intellectual, interest. Let’s jump to his last para.
What next then? Setting up a government-owned home-buying service at the Post Office? Presumably two others among the ’six-pac’, Nicholas Gruen and John Quiggin, would love that, provided it directed the trusting unsophisticated only into carbon neutral homes.
But that, as I observed, is the charitable interpretation...
The less charitable view is that McCrann rejects climate science because his world view is incompatible with the existence of the atmosphere, or any kind of global public good. There’s plenty of evidence for this interpretation in his column. On McCrann’s apparent view, the fact that Australia is not in a deep recession proves that there is, and can be, no such thing as a global recession. Since we haven’t been affected, there’s no need to worry. To quote his column
For their call for a massive, Campbell-and-Wallis type inquiry into the financial system actually lacks ‘a problem’ that has been exposed and thereby needs fixing. … global financial crisis. Not many dead or even injured in Australia. From any systemic fault, that’s to say.There is a real problem here. McCrann is significantly less ignorant and wilfully stupid than the average defender of economic liberalism in Australia (compare for example, Andrew Bolt or the Institute of Public Affairs). But he can’t allow himself to be much smarter than his readers, and stupidity and ignorance (whether endowed by nature or acquired by effort) are essential if you are to be a full member of the tribe. In a period when social democracy is on the rise, we need better opponents than this.
Here's McCrann's column:
ONE Stephen King writes silly fantasy and horror fiction – the other Stephen King writes international best-selling blockbusters.
The so-called 'people's bank' proposed by the first King, the dean of economics and business at Monash University and five fellow 'influential' -- they wish! -- economists, is an idea whose time has definitely come.
In 1911. When King O'Malley founded the Commonwealth Bank.
And then gone. In 1990 when one of his political heirs and successors, Paul Keating started its privatisation. Thereby posing the question: which bank is now just another bank?
A sale, it might be noted, which not exactly incidentally, coincided with the bankruptcies and forced sale of the other three 'people's banks' -- the State Banks of Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia.
There are two insurmountable functional problems with the concept of such a bank -- which were exposed so graphically in the 1980s and Keating understood only too well.
Plus the huge all-encompassing holistic one -- "I'm from the government and am here to help you."
Oh yeah, sure. Only a particular type of economist could still believe that.
Only an even narrower group, well represented by this 'six-pac' would have sufficient intellectual arrogance to believe they could design the right can-opener. The one to open the can (of worms?) in which such a bank would be found.
The first functional problem is such a bank's core ethos.
Is it designed to be commercial? If so, what's the point, if it's just another bank doing exactly what the other banks are doing? Which means paying market rates of interest on deposits, charging market rates to borrowers.
Which is exactly where the Commonwealth Bank was in 1990. But doing things sub-optimally because of legacy restraints and the fact that it was still 'from the government'.
Even accepting the 1980s disasters that also had been created in the private banks, Keating knew that unless it was sold, in the long run it would wither and die in public ownership.
Which also buries the idea that such an institution can 'keep the bastards honest.' It didn't work in 1990 and it won't in 2020. Because the market essentially does, even though 98 per cent of you won't believe it.
The alternative -- then and now -- is to make such a 'people's bank' operate with government subsidies in order to subsidise some or all of its customers in some way.
That is the path to all sorts of disasters, as we saw in those earlier 'people's banks'. It's moral and actual financial hazard on a grand scale.
You make it 'uncommercial', you introduce serious distortions in the market, which at best damage activity and, at worst, end in disaster.
Have any of the 'six-pac' heard of Freddie and Fannie? In their different way, intended to achieve precisely what this bank would try. On both the deposit and lending sides.
As the Bankers Association was quick to point out yesterday -- true, partly speaking its book -- the first victims of such a bank would be all the small banks and building societies and credit unions. Thereby actually strengthening the Big Four.
In simple terms whether or not it had actual subsidised rates, a government-owned bank would have an overwhelming competitive advantage against small financial institutions -- which presumably will have lost their government guarantee.
An advantage, especially in the wake of the very financial crisis, the very consequences of which, the 'six-pac' letter is purportedly designed to address.
Well, it'll just be a 'post-bank' - taking deposits and making plain vanilla housing loans.
Easier said than done. You have to set up an infrastructure, you have to build staff.
Or does the 'six-pac' envisage it operating like another service in the Post Office. I'll have a book of 55c stamps and a $350,000 housing loan, thank you.
Their bigger point is even sillier, but also provides us with a possible pathway to what's it all about Alfie? Actually, Christopher -- one of the six, Christopher Joye, who seems to have a thing about securitisation.
For their call for a massive, Campbell-and-Wallis type inquiry into the financial system actually lacks 'a problem' that has been exposed and thereby needs fixing.
Both in the big -- global financial crisis. Not many dead or even injured in Australia. From any systemic fault, that's to say.
And in the small -- yes, the securitisation which funded the alternative lenders has disappeared. But not because of anything that happened here. And actually, good riddance.
Is there any evidence that home buyers are having trouble getting finance? And on very attractive terms, with the basic mortgage rate just 2.8 percentage points above the Reserve Bank's cash rate.
Joye and fellow letter-writer, the Melbourne Business School's Sam Wylie, seem besotted by the securitisation dynamic which proved such a moral and financial disaster in the US.
Wylie wrote a very silly article, attacking variable rate housing loans. When the evidence demonstrates we have been extremely well served by the system of banks taking variable term deposits and lending mostly medium-term at variable rates.
It's proved best for borrowers. Official rates have been cut by about the same in the US and here. But while our borrowers have seen their rates drop by nearly 400 points, in the US the average borrower has been lucky to get 100 points.
And thereby also most effective for monetary policy. The RBA cuts (or hikes) and it actually feeds into market rates. In the US, the impact is muted.
In their grab-bag of 'ideas' the 'six-pac' did highlight some big and important issues, like our foreign debt and unsophisticated investors getting access to trustworthy investment.
But it was ever-thus and can be addressed or looked at individually on their merits.
It is not a sensible basis for a massive inquiry into 'the financial system'. Far less, for starting down the path to ever-broadening government delivery of financial 'services' to the unsophisticated.
What next then? Setting up a government-owned home-buying service at the Post Office? Presumably two others among the 'six-pac', Nicholas Gruen and John Quiggin, would love that, provided it directed the trusting unsophisticated only into carbon neutral homes.
Graphic: Peirce clipart
Read the full thing......
Join John Clarke and Bryan Dawe with Kevin Rudd in Rome
Enjoy!
It should start in Windows Media Player when you click this.
A good year for some (really):
The year so far
Male employment down 56,400
Female employment up 25,800
Teenage employment down 31,000
Adult employment up 400
NSW employment down 6,200
Victorian employment down 13,200
Queensland and WA down 18,100
South Australia and NT up 11,500
Trend figures, ABS 6202.0
Women are the surprise winners from the the changes that have flowed from the global financial crisis, with the latest jobs figures showing that female employment has been climbing at a time when male employment has been sliding.
In the first six months of this year an extra 25,800 women have found jobs at a time when the number of men with jobs has slid 56,400.
And the extra jobs for women are not - as widely believed - part-time.
Trend figures produced by the Bureau of Statistics show that the number of women employed full-time has climbed 26,500 over the course of this year while the number of men employed full time has slid almost 100,000.
Asked why he thinks women should be doing well at a time when men are suffering, Melbourne Institute labour economist Mark Wooden says the male story is a "classical downturn story".
"The female story on the other hand is completely bizarre," he adds...
"The only explanation I can come up with is that the industries that are continuing to do well are those that employ women."
An examination of industry trends reveals that employment has been growing in the fields of health care, social administration and arts and recreation while shrinking in the fields of mining, manufacturing and real estate; lending weight to the Professor Wooden's suspicions.
It's not the only clear demarcation in the latest employment figures. A Herald analysis shows that of the 30,600 jobs lost so far this year, all but 400 jobs have been been lost by teenagers.
This doesn't mean that adults haven't also lost jobs in big numbers this year. As in all years, they have. But it means that almost all of the jobs lost by adults no longer in their teenage years have been replaced by new jobs offered to such adults. The young haven't been so lucky. Teenage unemployment has climbed from 13.5 per cent to 17.4 per cent.
"Employers are hoarding labour," says Commonwealth Bank economist Michael Workman. "Unfortunately it means young job seekers lose out."
Australia's unemployment rate barely changed in June, inching up a mere 0.07 points to 5.8 per cent confounding repeated forecasts that the rate is about to surge.
"If the consensus forecasts since October had been correct, by now we would have lost 118,000 jobs," said Mr Workman. "Instead we have lost 25,000. Jobs are holding up because low interest rates and massive government spending have lifted incomes and confidence."
NSW remains by far Australia's worst performing state, although Victoria is catching up to it, losing 13,200 jobs in the first half of this year, double those jobs lost in NSW.
The NSW and Victorian unemployment rates stand at 6.5 and 6.0 per cent, well above the national average, and far higher than the 5.4 and 5.1 per cent recorded in Queensland and Western Australia.
Employment Minister Julia Gillard yesterday stood by the Budget forecast that unemployment would peak at 8.5 per cent, but other analysts began to move their forecasts down.
"We're now expecting the unemployment rate to top out at just 6.5 to 7.0 per cent," said CommSec economist Savanth Sebastian. "However it's important to remember that employers are cutting hours if not jobs and that will dampen consumer spending."
Yesterday's Austrade-DHL Export Barometer lent weight to suspicions that employers are reluctant to let workers go finding that most exporters expect orders to pick up in the coming year.
Published in today's SMH and Age
Graphic: DryIcons
Thursday, July 09, 2009
So how'd we get to be buying all this bottled water in the first place?
Al Jazeera's reporting our news. But how did it come to this?
"The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries." - Bottlemania, Elizabeth Royte
What do you buy each time you reach into a shop fridge grab a 600ml bottle of water?
About one-quarter of a bottle of oil, according to most authoritative estimate - taking into account the oil that has been used to make the plastic, turn it into a bottle, transport it to you and then take it away to be buried, burnt or recycled.
And you are buying more water than you imagine: typically double what’s in the bottle when the water needed to cool and clean the bottling machines is taken into account.
So how did it come to this, and why is it still like this when both water and oil are more scarce than they have ever been?
That’s the mystery tacked by American author Elizabeth Royte in an engrossing new book, Bottlemania: How water went on sale and why we bought it...
We didn’t used to buy bottled water in modern times, although we certainly did in earlier times when public water wasn’t safe.
It began with Orsen Wells intoning in 1978 that “There is a spring and its name is Perrier.” Sales trippled on a campaign built not around thirst, but image.
Then in 1989 came polyethylene terephthalate.
The new so-called PET bottles were “cheap, light, shiny, bright and clean.”
The advertisements used the pop star Madonna and pictures of waterfalls and mountains to imply that drinking bottled water was a “path to enlightenment - like practicing yoga or eating organic food”.
Sales exploded from 115 million to 4 billion in seven years.
Along the way there was help from a myth – that each of us needed to drink eight glasses per day.
Royte traced it back to the food and nutrition board of the US National Research Council which once said that an adult needed one millilitre of water for each calorie of food.
But the board also went on to say (these days unreported) that most of that water was already in the food we ate. Cooked rice and noodles are full of it.
And there was a particularly nasty attempt to change the attitude of restaurant patrons. Waiters were trained to shame them into paying for bottled water, sometimes by forcing them to repeat the word “tap”.
In Canberra, with tap water too good to bottle, we should be above that.
Published in The Canberra Times, June 22, 2008
Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought it, Bloomsbury, June 2008
http://www.bottlemania.net/
Extract:
"The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste tests against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But why did the marketing work? At least part of the answer, I'm beginning to understand, is that bottled water plays into our ever-growing laziness and impatience.
Americans eat and drink more on the run than ever before. The author Michael Pollan reports that one in three American children eat fast food every single day, and 19 percent of American meals and snacks are eaten in the car. Bottled water fills a perceived need for convenience (convenience without the calories of soda, that is): hydration on the go, with bottles that fit in the palm of the hand, in a briefcase or purse.
According to research conducted by the Container Recycling Institute (CRI), between 1960 and 1970 the average person bought 200 to 250 packaged drinks each year-mostly soda and beer-and many of those were in refillable bottles. When I was growing up, my family drank only from the faucet and from family-size containers. We quenched our thirst, when out and about, with water from public fountains. Either that, or we waited till we got where we were going. On picnics, we might have a big plastic jug of lemonade, homemade. Sure, the grown-ups occasionally bought beer, but the idea of single-serve beverages were considered, by and large, frivolous.
Today, the tap is just as alien to today's youth, who've grown up thinking water comes in bottles, taps aren't for drinking, and fountains equal filth. Kids like having their hands on a personal water bottle, but they have no interest in washing that bottle out, to be reused another day, or otherwise taking responsibility for their waste.
Stores selling water are on every corner, while drinking fountains or restaurants happy to fill a glass for free are increasingly rare. "As refillables were phased out, as technology developed to enable single-serving plastic bottles, and as industry marketing efforts were ramped up," CRI reports, "packaged beverage consumption grew and grew." The success of portable water in the nineties hinged on the mind-set, established in the seventies and eighties, that it was okay to buy-and then toss-single servings of soda while on the go. In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 686 single-serve beverages per person per year; in 2007 we collectively drank fifty billion single-serve bottles of water alone. An entire generation is growing up with the idea that drinking water comes in small plastic bottles. Indeed, committed tap-water drinkers are far more likely to be older than devoted bottled-water drinkers.
Like iPods and cell phones, bottled water is private, portable, and individual. It's factory- sealed and untouched by human hands-a far cry from the public water fountain. (Fiji exploits this subliminal germophobia with its slogan "Untouched by Man," as does a company called Ice Rocks that sells "hygienic ice cubes"-springwater hermetically packaged in disposable plastic.) Somehow, we've become a nation obsessed with hygiene and sterility. Never, outside of an epidemic, have we been more afraid of our own bodies. Supermarkets provide antibacterial wipes for shopping cart handles. Passengers bring their own linens to cover airline pillows. Supermarkets wrap ears of corn in plastic: corn still in its husk! (The downside, besides mountains of waste, is the development of super-resistant bacteria immune to most of the commonly used antibiotics.)
In Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Benjamin Barber argues that consumer culture has turned adult citizens into children by catering to our narcissistic desires and conditioning us to passionately embrace certain brands and products as a necessary part of our lifestyles. Is it narcissism that pulls people into stores the second they feel thirsty? Or is it a need for emotional succor?
City dwellers walk down the street swigging; they stand in conversation and mark time with discreet sips. You see it in lines at the movies and in cars on the freeway. (But only in the United States, Michael Mascha, the bottled water expert I'd enticed to sample water with me, says. "In Europe, no one walks down the street sucking on a bottle of water. We wait and we have a nice meal.") Surely these people have access to water at the end of their journey and are in no danger of desiccating on the spot. No, this is water bottle as security blanket."
