IKEA is Soylent Green

Firstly, towers of ilium would like to apologize for not posting in the past two days.

The big news is that the Market Basket standoff has ended, and the good guys seem to have won. The challenge for Arthur T. Demoulas is the restoration of his business model and management of debt. I regard the whole affair as an example of how the wisdom of Peter Drucker can prevail over the stupidity of modern business practice. Arthur T. has demonstrated an understanding of the purpose of a business--that it must create and sustain a customer. Too many firms today assume that the customer already exists, and that the purpose of the business is to extract rents and profits that are funneled to a small group of people.

I was reading a blog yesterday that claimed that 75% of the images in an IKEA catalog are computer generated. Although I might be tempted to feel bad for the photographers who aren't getting the work of shooting staged sets of home decor, I know that the labor associated with good renderings takes a lot of time and effort. Design on a computer is still design--only certain tedious tasks are streamlined so that the focus can be on more options.