Pi-Consulting

Tech rules. The average American comes up with more commercially exploitable technological innovations and ideas than people from practically any other country. The Finns, for some reason, seem to be the runners-up. Despite this, the typical American faced with a malfunctioning electronic device, notwithstanding his/her membership of the most technologically advanced society in man’s history, still usually resorts to ‘percussive maintenance’, i.e. thumping the crap out of the thing to try to start it working again. (Sources: World Economic Forum, The Dilbert Zone, Pi)

God gave Adam a luxuriant growth of facial hair, but every morning his sons laboriously scrape it off again. A huge global industry is based on this curious fact.

What do men use to keep themselves clean-shaven? A recent survey in Europe showed that 45% of European males have electric shavers, and that nearly two-thirds of them use some kind of wet-shaving system, whether conventional razors or the disposable kind. All together those who shave seem to represent nearly 90% of adult males. (There is some duplication: a significant number of ‘wet shavers’ apparently keep an electric shaver handy as well). That leaves around 10% of adult males who don’t give any direct evidence that they shave at all.

Logic says that we can assume that those guys all wear beards. In the absence of “Do you have a beard?” as a questionnaire item in most surveys, it’s perhaps as close as we’re likely to get. (But wait. Could these people be regular shavers who happen to use someone else’s razor? Their wives’ or girlfriends’, for instance? Ewwwww!!! If yes, Pi would like to hear from the Wronged Women whose shaving equipment is being borrowed by their Unprincipled Menfolk. In keeping with this website’s fearless editorial policy, We Will Name The Guilty Men).

Interestingly enough, a man’s propensity to wear a beard seems to vary according to a North-South divide, at least in Europe. A higher proportion of British men turned up in the “don’t shave” column than Frenchmen. There are considerably more bearded men in the chilly climes of Germany than in sunny Spain, where the clean-shaven predominate by a higher margin. Pi’s Law of Thermobarbanomics (“more heat, less beards”) could be close to becoming proven scientific fact.

Electric shaver owners tend to be older (peak age is 55+), and predominantly married. They seem to be the buttoned-up sort, who like organized routines, and judge a fellow by the car he drives. Wet shavers cluster in the younger age ranges, and are slightly more likely to be divorced or separated.

How do non-shavers differ from their clean-shaven brethren? For a start, they tend to be either way older or way younger, polarized to the under-20 and over-65 age groups. Many of the younger ones are students, and still single. Temperamentally, they can be casual to the point of untidiness, forthright to the point of rudeness, and they tend to do things impulsively, on the spur of the moment. They don’t really see cars as status symbols, don’t put much effort into appearing attractive to women, and are not particularly happy with their jobs. Barbarians, perhaps… ?

Paris is where good Americans go when they die, it used to be said. The same is true about Miami and the Latin Americans. People from all over Hispanic America speak of Miami with a wistful sigh and a flutter of the eyelids, as if it were some kind of earthly paradise. Instead of pronouncing the name “Mee-ah-mee”, Spanish-style, they call it “My Yammi”, much as Americans used to refer reverentially to “Paree”. Anyway, your blogmeister used to live overlooking Biscayne Bay and South Beach, and, with the curiosity that comes naturally to a Pi executive, studied up on what makes the place tick.

Pi knows that the most absorbing of all sciences is that of human behavior and interaction. All the really interesting places on earth are where races, colors, beliefs, languages, cuisines and tastes collide, and then collude. Rio de Janeiro is one such spot. Xenophobia rarely gets a toe-hold in countries whose populations are mostly immigrants. Such places also frequently have ports attached. Puerto Rico is another cheerful ‘melting pot’, given its kaleidoscopic – and mostly benign – racial and linguistic mix. New York used to be like that, and ought to be today, but somehow isn’t. Someone once acerbically described NYC as “White people in brown shoes exchanging sidelong looks with brown people in white shoes”. The different groups there seem to slide sullenly past each other like oil and water in a Petri dish, even within ethnicities. This may in fact have something to do with socio-economic stratification, or perhaps the concentration of lots of people in a small and very expensive piece of turf. (The imbecilically-named “War on Terror” sure didn’t help, enlarging latent mutual suspicions exponentially). Anyway, by comparison with NYC Miami is big and spread out, and everyone rubs along pretty much okay. (By the way, has anyone ever noticed the unusually high concentration of “Star Trek” fans in New York City? My theory is that Trekkies respond to, but fail to perceive, that venerable TV show’s real underlying themes, ie. [i] the very American concept of obedience to authority and [ii] the ultimate impossibility of any real accommodation with aliens, however liberal your persuasions).

So what about Miami? Definitely another ‘melting pot’ market. You’ll hear Spanish in ten different dialects, (some mutually incomprehensible), plus Portuguese, French (and its Creole derivatives — all the taxi drivers are from Haiti), even Russian. Oh, and English, though it’s not always immediately recognizable as such. Miami is one of the few places where you will encounter Americans making a serious effort to speak a foreign language, whether it be Spanish or, of course, English.

Miami as a city is a jigsaw of different cultures, languages, tastes, diets and shopping habits. Older retirees from the North-Eastern US and sun-seeking newcomers from all over the States rub shoulders with conservative Cubans, dance-mad Dominicans, nostalgic Nicaraguans, and folk from every other corner of the Americas. Burger King vies for your lunch-money with Pollo Tropical (spicy chicken, yellow rice, fried bananas and salsa) and innumerable Cuban and Caribbean-style eateries, serving rice, beans, ‘yuca’, fried plantains and roast pork. Oh, try the “Vaca Frita”, why don’t you? It means “Fried Cow”.

When the writer moved to Miami, he was told how lucky he was to be living here. “What makes Miami such a terrific place”, said my witty NYC-bred informant, “is that it’s so close to the USA”. Indeed, the city has been chosen as Latin American HQ by big hi-tech and service companies, media conglomerates, ad agencies and dozens of manufacturers. (Despite this trend, some Chicago- and Minnesota-based corporations frankly shuddered at the thought of having to mix with all those flaky, unpredictable and tempestuous Latins. Realizing that you can’t easily run a Latin American business from the shores of the Great Lakes, such outfits tended to opt for an HQ in Fort Lauderdale, forty miles up the coast from Miami, on the basis that “At least that’s still the real United States”).

Anyway, the melting-pot thing really works. Miamians turn out in market research surveys to consider themselves 70% friendlier than the rest of the USA. Oh, and nearly two-thirds luckier: Miami Latinos outscore the nation by +63% on weekly purchase of lottery tickets. ¡Mucha suerte, damas y caballeros!

The Product Placement (PP) industry, as it relates to movies and television, was an American invention, and largely remains an American preserve. This is for the overriding reason that Hollywood, the filmed entertainment world’s HQ and epicenter, is located on American soil. Its executives, financiers and writers dance to the tune of American message-mongers, sliding everything from branded beer to iconic cars into the movie fare we watch. The PP industry bankrolls Hollywood to a significant degree, and helps to ensure that $100 million movie productions don’t cost $150 million or more. Even the Pentagon – and its army, navy, marines and air force divisions – have their own anonymous-looking but luxurious offices on Hollywood’s outskirts. They run these “entertainment liaison offices” to ensure that Uncle Sam’s latest combat hardware gets a favorable showing, and that the US military continues to occupy a big and favorable corner of America’s – and by extension the world’s –subconscious. Did anyone think that “The Hunt for Red October”, “Sands of Iwo Jima” and “Air Force One” got made without a generous slab of cash from the Pentagon? Welcome to America’s world of product placement, where all-conquering technology, prominently featured in the movies and on TV, makes sure that America’s military continues to get – and the profitable armaments industry to produce – well… all-conquering technology! Source: London Sunday Telegraph, Pi

As this site reported on March 17th, “America’s consumer electronics (CE) industry is grappling with stringent new federal and state legislation to ensure that manufacturers ‘take out the garbage’ as they sell-in new gizmos like HDTV. The issue is a serious one, with the impending switch-off of analogue TV services likely to mean huge numbers of old TV sets getting left on the sidewalk”. We spoke too soon. A new CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) study posits an “afterlife” for many superannuated TV sets. “While some have speculated that millions of TVs would enter the waste stream, …results of the (CEA) study …show that households …expect to remove fewer than 15 million televisions from their homes through 2010. Ninety-five percent will be sold, donated or re-cycled”. Nearly half of OTA-only (i.e. traditional “over-the-air”) TV households “expect to buy a digital converter box, …and to continue using the same TV”. When the old set has to go, re-cycling is increasingly the disposal method of choice, with consumers reporting 30% more TV’s recycled in 2007 than two years earlier. Pi salutes this impressively green and responsible consumer trend! Sources: CEA, Pi.