Austerity

With budget deficit looming in every corner or government municipalities such as in IL and CA, many American feel that the only way to lower austerity and budget deficit by either increasing tax revenue or reducing government debt.

Is it a feasible, really, to ramp up domestic consumption based on solely domestic production and service? Is it truly sustainable to survive only on purely American products and services for American? Likewise, for Italian's for Italian, French's for Frenchmen, Greek's for Grecian?

You can help local economy by, let say, cutting your hair at your local barber, buy meat and produce from localized grocers or local farmers market or to the extreme if truly you have time and do not mind the effort, you may opt to grow your own food in your backyard and breed your own chickens for the poultry and eggs. Still, is it sustainable for a modern country such as USA to go back into traditional agriculture way of life?

Many patriotic slogans encourage people to avoid Walmart, Target, and other big box stores, both brick-and-mortar and online. The new-wave just like Occupy Wall Streeters, demands big government to stay out of business world and be more like a police and weeding out liberalization. Demanding more social equality and more job creation and stop corporate greed.

Stop liberalization of economy? Really, does one think stopping capitalism is the fairest of all ? I do not particularly keen on it since socialism nor  heavy government intervention blocking economy laissez faire. Just let the ball rolls on its own. Just like the government should let the housing price in US fall down further due to lack of demand, lack of jobs that lead to lack of purchasing power. After it falls then it will find the supporting cushion to remain steady or go back up according to economic health.

More governmental intervention will create more policy and jobs within the government itself. Then, usually there is tender bidding for governmental contract and it is usually potpourried with cronyism and favoritism. Thus, will it truly create more job growth to the correct targeted population? If jobs are not created or tax break is given only for those who win the tender then tax revenue cannot be increased. Unless, the government is willing to do more work by chopping the big project into piece-meals and scattered them into several local vendors across regional geography, then it will become more effective.

Economic globalization is inevitable. So to reduce budget deficit that is currently blamed mostly on China, US must export more. Period. Export more intangible services to create more nominal value. When the rest of the world relies on cheaper production cost of daily living necessities such as clothing, plastics, machinery, automotive from China and India, US can create more ideas such as financial derivates products, film and music industry, art industry, financial trading proprietary, education, and more. Export those intangible services and brainchilds to countries worldwide. Let's be honest, every corner of the earth have their eyes fixated and entertained by anything happening in Hollywood. Even Bollywood movie industry is named after Hollywood world-known movie industry.

One country cannot close its own door towards the world and when US impose Yuan (Renminbi) appreciation pressure to China, it won't be beneficial for country such as US nor the world economy as whole. The snowball effect is tremendously devastating.

Start an Urban Clothing Store - Distro or Indie Clothing Store

Urban Clothing Store, widely known as Distro or Indie Clothing Store, sell unique hand-made clothing mostly shirts and jeans. Accessories are also sold under Urban or Indie ' flag such as sneakers or hats, scarves, funky jewelry, shoes, and more.

Simple items that can be home-made in smaller home industry scale such as:
1. Take plain basic t-shirt in white. Tie into a scrunchie and dip into coloring in multiple layers. Untie and dry the t-shirt
2. Take plain basic t-shirt in different color. Embossed with unique wording and catchy phrases.
3. Take any t-shirts in different color. Sew in beads and rhinestone to create abstract pattern or girly wording
4. Take any simple white sneaker and decorate with any creative material that you can think of
5. Take any ethnic fabrics or thread or beads and turn them into clothing and jewelry
etc.

Prepare, plan and execute:
- target market: population, age, demographic
- location: city corner or malls or web presence such as online shop
- brand identity: using cartoon pejorative or hyperbole words, using local ethnic slangs, using sexist or specific chauvinistic or feminist words and or design associated-details
- brand and product pricing
- effective and efficient production
- broadcast, publish and market the business: use marketing from sponsoring local band to putting newspaper or magazine print ads; use social network platforms such as tumblr, facebook and twitter
- sell, sell and sell

How to Protect a Company during a Relocation

Company's relocation is sometimes felt as inundating task. However when the goal finally achieved it would give satisfying result. Relocation is caused by several reasons such as: cost cutting, company expansion, warehouse enlargement, etc. but at the end the purpose is to gain more profit.

Here are several factors that needs to be remember during the process of relocation:

-  Provide new address and forwarding address towards any business partners, suppliers or vendors, banking, insurance, governmental affairs, taxation and customers
-  Maintain a consistent phone number that can be reached at business hours as a customer service base
-  If data or inventory are overwhelmingly large, appoint a moving person-in-charge or project manager to be the specific go-to-person when there is questions to be answered. This person must prepare several plan and even several what-if scenarios problem solution during the company's relocation
-  Shred unwanted documents and purge out unneeded supplies, equipments. You can donate some excess inventory as well if company decides to write them off.
-  Provide email address for customers to reach Customer Service Department in any Company's website or social networking sites.
-  Schedule the moving transporter and new place set up in accordance to the moving plan
-  Be aware of potential hazardous or accidental incident that may be happened due to fire, electrical wiring, and so on during the equipment moving

How to Manage

Managing is more than a deep expertise in the specific field but more in the sense of human psychology. Learning to manage is more by doing rather than by reading theoretical books because we are dealing with human beings who have emotion and needs. Managing without the human side of it will feel too cold and abrasive, hurting team members and treating members not more than a widget maker in an assembly line.

How to manage in a simple way:

1.  Understand your team. We must understand the background and the expectation of each individual member within your team you are leading. For example: the family circumstance that may hinder them from working late at night or start too early in the morning, etc.
2.  Get a clear goal on the overall organization and communicate it towards your team
3.  Break the final goal into several stepping stone that is easier to digest and to achieve within a period of time
4.  Understand individual strength and weakness. Acknowledge when specific individual member has particular expertise in a task and assign the right task towards this person
5.  Delegate appropriately and correctly to the right individual who has the tenacity, skills, ambition and knowledge
6.  Reward achievements whether it is overall team success or an individual milestone
7.  Be professional and respect everyone boundary between personal life and working life

How to Interpret Financial Ratio

Interpreting Financial Ratio actually use simple logic just like understanding fractions.
Financial Ratio is usually derived from 2 factors. The first is usually in the top of the fraction called Numerator. The second is usually in the bottom of the fraction called Lower Denominator. A simple way on how to interpret Financial Ratio:


1.  Anytime you see Financial Ratio called "X" O "Y" (meaning "X" over "Y") we will know that X is the numerator and Y is the lower denominator. The lower denominator is the base of the interpretation. Meaning if it is for example Return On Asset (ROA) then we are interpreting ratio of income on the relationship towards the amount of asset. It means we are understanding how big the income generated by the company or the business compared to the size of asset that is invested in the business process or the company. In short, in calculating financial ratio we are deriving the relationship between the numerator and the lower denominator.

2.  Define each of the numerator factor and the lower denominator factor so that you will clearly understand what the factor function and definition.

3.  Understand that the result could be a whole number (with decimal) positive and negative, but it also can be presented in terms of percentage as well.

For example: Let's take Quick Ratio.  Quick Ratio equals to Current Assets divided by Current Liabilities.  Here, the numerator is Current Asset whereas the lower denominator is Current Liability. Quick Ratio shows how fast the short term asset can be to cover or pay back short term liability if needed. In other words this ratio shows the company's liquidity. The bigger the Asset, the more liquid the business can cover its Liability.

How to Help an Unemployed Person

These days when unemployment is so rampant, anybody could be the next one who got the pink slip due to company's cost saving lost to global competition. If we are still holding a job, no matter how much we dislike or like it, we should be very grateful and try our best to keep it.

When we have a neighbor or friend or ex-colleague who got chopped off we could at least do these things:

1.  Sympathize. We should sympathize but not overtly since we must respect other people's feeling or grieving
2.  If this is our close neighbor and the family is very close to us, we can offer to give them some baking or cooking once every so often
3.   Look at our human resource database to check whether there is any appropriate job opening matches his/her qualification, then forward it to him / her
4.  Encourage him / her to keep looking at different job databases and try to get interviews as many as possible
5.  During this upcoming Holiday Season is the perfect time to start hunting for retail job. No matter how small it is, tell him / her that this could be a good starting point
6.  If money is not a problem, encourage him / her to go back to school or try to acquire new skill
7.  If this person is pretty seasoned and has tremendous experiences, encourage him / her to start an entrepreneurial journal. Moreover if this person has other unique skills such as sport coaching, music, craft, flower arrangement, baking, cooking, writing, music, etc. they can start their self-employment journey such as: selling hand made items on etsy.com, opening a children or baby daycare, opening a cupcake bakery, teaching piano or violin, etc.

Uniqlo vs. Gap The Battle of Non-Luxury Fashion Retailing

Retailing battles is getting more and more fierce in US. According to abcnews.com, Uniqlo a Japanese -brand retailer is expanding and building more square-feet stores presence in big metropolitan cities area such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Unlike Gap, the American brand retailer that is currently downsizing its stores presence, Uniqlo is ambitiously keen on capturing the largest audience, the untapped tired-of-branding-consumers.

American retailers have done top notched job in creating standardized visual merchandising and display to grow brand consistency in the past 2 decades. However, the creation of overlapping smaller niche target new things and in around 2006-2007 Forth & Towne was chopped off soon after its launch. Gap was very diligent creating more sub-brands (such as: babyGaps) and more brands online and brick-n-mortar (such as: Banana Republic, Piperlime, Old Navy, Athleta). Still, some could overlap even though there is differences in style and price points within them each.

Unlike Gap, Uniqlo is selling its non-logo non-branded everyday apparel with its mix-n-match flare depending on personality.  Their items are: all kind of shirts and T-shirts, basics such as underwear, socks and even baby onesies, hats, jeans, pants, colorful basic sweaters and sweatshirts. Personally I found it a bit tad boring but with the reachable mass-produced price point it will be an attractive choice. I call it Walmart staples goes department store. We shall roll the dice and I think it will have major traction in bigger metropolitan areas compared to less traffic areas.

Uniqlo has been expanding vastly outside Japan particularly in HongKong and China. Almost in every Jusco Department Stores or medium-to-large Malls I found in HK and China, I will find a Uniqlo store in it. At first, when I saw the checkered shirt with the baseball-inspired cap on the mannequin I thought, okay this more like a cross between American Eagle and Abercrombie & Fitch. Later,  my husband bought a pouch of 3-pairs of socks and he likes them.

Just like watching the battle between Zara vs. Mango, H&M vs Forever 21 and other non-luxury fashion retailing, shows that surviving the retail battle is even more crucial during the upcoming Holiday season starting this Thanksgiving. And the saga continues...