Spring Break
Case Rip Cord: Down and Dirty on the Farm
Uncle Jordy, Featured Columnist
Issue date: 3/25/02 Section: Humor
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A woman calling herself Grandma Judy called in from Flahrida this week and said she didn't understand all the acronyms here at Harvard Business School. So, just for her, the Case Rip Cord is going to spell everything out this week. In addition, most of the cases deal this week deal with agriculture, where everyone is an end consumer
Let's start today's agricultural journey with some basic crops, like cotton and wool. Did you catch bad puns in the film forTextiles and the Multi-Fiber Arrangement? They said threats were "looming" larger and protectionism was knocking the "starch" out of the industry.
Further down the textile supply chain lies the Inditex, S. A. case. This work comes to us from the University of Navarra, where math apparently is not as strong as trendy clothier Zara's ultra-responsive production cycle. Footnote 1 indicates to confused readers, "1 billion = 1,000,000,000." In Germany, four companies control 30% of the distribution, and independent retailers the other half. "The 1999 fiscal year was closed...with turnover estimated at 000 million euros and a profit of 000 million." At least they're controlling their costs.
Returning to commodity crops, The Great Corn Laws Debate had some "sweet" quotes. In 1843, Richard Cobden was most likely sporting a silly looking wig and the most pretentious of exaggerated British accents when he stated in the House of Commons, "Let a copy of the statutes be sent, if it were possible, to another planet, without one word of comment, and the inhabitants of that sphere would at once say, 'These laws were passed by landlords.'" Rumors at NASA report that this experiment is actually next up on their To Do list. Cobden's speech is countered by George Game Day, a man who should be anointed the patron saint of ESPN.
Bitter Competition: The Holland Sweetener Company versus NutraSweet: "In Roman times, grape juice was boiled down in lead pans to produce sapa, a sweet compound used for everything from a food additive to an oral contraceptive. ...use of sapa unfortunately led to neurological damage or even death." Kind of a super contraceptive, really—why kill just the sperm when you can go straight for the source?
Let's start today's agricultural journey with some basic crops, like cotton and wool. Did you catch bad puns in the film forTextiles and the Multi-Fiber Arrangement? They said threats were "looming" larger and protectionism was knocking the "starch" out of the industry.
Further down the textile supply chain lies the Inditex, S. A. case. This work comes to us from the University of Navarra, where math apparently is not as strong as trendy clothier Zara's ultra-responsive production cycle. Footnote 1 indicates to confused readers, "1 billion = 1,000,000,000." In Germany, four companies control 30% of the distribution, and independent retailers the other half. "The 1999 fiscal year was closed...with turnover estimated at 000 million euros and a profit of 000 million." At least they're controlling their costs.
Returning to commodity crops, The Great Corn Laws Debate had some "sweet" quotes. In 1843, Richard Cobden was most likely sporting a silly looking wig and the most pretentious of exaggerated British accents when he stated in the House of Commons, "Let a copy of the statutes be sent, if it were possible, to another planet, without one word of comment, and the inhabitants of that sphere would at once say, 'These laws were passed by landlords.'" Rumors at NASA report that this experiment is actually next up on their To Do list. Cobden's speech is countered by George Game Day, a man who should be anointed the patron saint of ESPN.
Bitter Competition: The Holland Sweetener Company versus NutraSweet: "In Roman times, grape juice was boiled down in lead pans to produce sapa, a sweet compound used for everything from a food additive to an oral contraceptive. ...use of sapa unfortunately led to neurological damage or even death." Kind of a super contraceptive, really—why kill just the sperm when you can go straight for the source?
