Swans on Tea

Via Kottke, The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp
Stories circulated of a padre who started off round the camp with a tin of cheese and five cigarettes and returned to his bed with a complete parcel in addition to his original cheese and cigarettes; the market was not yet perfect. Within a week or two, [...]

Babies by mail (and the picture from the Smithsonian)
After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination.

Ketchup
A whole lot about the king of condiments, without getting into shear thinning and thixotropic properties.
It explains why Barenaked Ladies can’t find the fancy dijon ketchup they want in “If I Had a $1,000,000″
What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of [...]

Mechanization and Standardization
. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.
Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.
(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring [...]

The saga of the CEOnistas
“They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues,” said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. “Right in front of my daughters.”

Business section of the LOLcat Times-Gazette, headline about the pedestrian eating habits of a well-known an activist shareholder
Icahn Has Cheeseburger
(sometimes on the treadmill, all one can do is think silly thoughts)

Or so I gather from The Five Forces Circles of Hell
A discussion of some of those “five forces” (Supplier Power, Customer Power, Threat of New Entrants, Threat of Substitute Products, Industry Rivalry) with a couple of examples of exploiting them, offensively (good) and defensively (bad). i.e. pleasing the customer is an aggressive [...]