Beef Compared to Shrimp

As the price of beef creeps up, it is seen less as an everyday food and more as a luxury or specialty food. I saw another sign of this in a restaurant buffet today. Compared to two years ago, the restaurant has reduced its use of beef by half. It is in fewer recipes and is sliced thinner when it is used. At this restaurant, the same thing is happening, though to a lesser extent, with fish.

The transition is easiest to see by comparing these food ingredients to shrimp. The role of shrimp in the buffet has not changed, but now, beef is used at least as sparingly as shrimp. Fish, which used to be as common as shrimp, is now only a single item on the buffet.

Watching a Century Take Shape

The 21st century will not be remembered for bigger and better internal combustion engines, nuclear power plants, or universities, not any more than the 20th century is noted for its advances in coal-burning trains, plantations, and razor blades. Those are things that seemed especially important at the beginning of the century but were not so impressive a few decades later. The defining qualities of this century are slow to take shape and perhaps not so easy to recognize at this point. Perhaps, for example, the Internet and electrical storage are two of them, but the technology changes so unpredictably it seems too early to say. The reason to try to get an early fix on which innovations matter and which ones don’t is so we can stop investing in things that won’t matter or aren’t what they seem to be. But the last eleven years have already given us reason enough to doubt our ability to predict.

Gingrich Forgets to Show Up

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is getting killed in the polls. Public opinion polls show him losing one third of his support in the last few days.

What happened? My take on it is that the turning point was the job Gingrich forgot about. He started slipping about the same time word got out that Gingrich had completely forgotten about a job that paid him just over $250,000 a year.

I think it’s fair to say that the average voter can’t relate to this situation. Heck, most workers, if we have a minimum-wage job, will take it seriously enough that we will show up for work on time day after day. Gingrich had a job that paid 15 times that much, and he not only did not take the job seriously, he completely forgot he had it.

Maybe someone appointed Gingrich to a job of substantial responsibilities, and he completely blew it off, but they kept paying him in the hope that he would start working eventually. And that is one of the more favorable interpretations.

It could just as easily be that the job was not really a job at all, but merely a purchase of influence, a transaction with the same purpose and effect as a bribe. Either way, such a situation reflects poorly on a person’s work ethic, no minor consideration when the same person is asking to be put in what is said to be the most important job in the world.

It also clashes with two of Gingrich’s political positions. He has spoken harshly of unemployed workers, teenagers especially, blaming them for their own lack of work. And he has railed against the corruption of Wall Street. In both cases, given the recent news, the natural reaction is, “He is even worse than they are!”

There are only a handful of states more favorable to Gingrich’s cultural outlook than Florida. Today’s primary election in Florida will inevitably be compared to South Carolina. There, Gingrich took 40 percent of the vote, enough to win the state. But that was before people were talking about the job Gingrich forgot he had. Polls are predicting Gingrich’s results in Florida will be around 30 percent. If that comes to pass, it will show that voters took notice.

Bank Transfer Day Was Big

Banks and analysts have had time to add up the effects of Bank Transfer Day, and it is clear now that the movement was about as big as it seemed at the time. Roughly 1 million consumers and businesses moved checking or savings accounts from large commercial banks to credit unions and local community banks during a period of 7 to 8 weeks. A similar large number, though much harder to estimate, closed credit card accounts. Credit cards are harder to estimate and the impact harder to assess because not everyone who closes an active credit card account is able to pay it off immediately, and most of the credit card accounts that were canceled were cards that the holders weren’t using anyway.

A banking industry association might dismiss this as “an exceedingly tiny fragment” of the industry, but it is large almost any way you look at it. More than 1 out of 200 U.S. banking customers took part in some way. That makes Bank Transfer Day larger than all but a few banks. Large banks regularly spend billions of dollars in advertising and marketing trying to move market segments smaller than this.

More importantly, the movement put bank executives on notice. Bank of America acknowledged it had taken a hit when it reported its earnings, but whether they acknowledge it or not, all the large banks lost more than the usual number of customers. As a result, banks are starting to ask, “What will our customers think?” It’s a question that, for years, they hadn’t had to entertain.

Incremental Advances in Musical Equipment

The new musical equipment at the two major trade shows this month may not have shown any breakthroughs, but the incremental improvements are ones that matter. We’ve seen guitar-shaped performance keyboards before, but this one has a USB interface, so that it can plug directly into a computer. Digital pianos and accordions aren’t new, but the new ones are lighter and less expensive than ever before. Auto-tune isn’t new, but built into a guitar — that’s new. As for drum synthesizers, the latest one isn’t based on samples, and won’t end up sounding like too much of the same tones after a while.

The new thing in guitar stomp boxes was one that is non-dedicated. Plug it in to an online store and you can program it to become any kind of stomp-box effect. These examples from the world of musical equipment show that it doesn’t take an unexpected innovation to change the way people work. Obvious combinations of well-known technology can have that effect too.