Surprisingly enough, I just looked the scheme up for this comment, and it's still active:
- https://yakult.com.sg/yakult-lady-agent/
- https://sg.news.yahoo.com/memory-makers-singapores-first-yak...
The Yahoo article could help explain some of the economics behind it.
Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.
The key, I think, is "Most of them are self-employed". Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you're walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You're walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.
It also mentions that it was done to drive sales.
Yakult ladies aren’t classified as full-time employees, but kojin jigyo usha (roughly “sole proprietors”), essentially making them owners of bicycle-sized franchises. They purchase product from Yakult and make a profit based on what they can sell. Yakult says the average earnings of a Yakult lady are roughly $682 USD a month, compared to an average of $1,774 per month for Japanese women broadly. In Yahoo Answers forums, Yakult ladies claim wildly different profits: Some say they work only three hours a day and make more than the company average. Others claim to work far more, selling roughly $2,700 worth of product in a month to take home about $600, roughly a 22 percent cut.
...
As I left the Yakult center, my baby clamoring for her nap, I felt oddly disillusioned — not by the women themselves, or even the no-nonsense manager, but by the corporate trappings of their work. Before I looked into it, I had swallowed the lighthearted, easy glow of Yakult’s promotional videos, which recalled my own experience when I was a kid. I would like to believe selling probiotic milk drinks is just an aside to Yakult ladies’ main mission of maternal care in the community. In the fluorescent lighting of the Yakult center, I saw their labor.
It’s not that GDP is a poor measure, just that it is isolated as the only measure most policy is based on improving rather than being one metric in a portfolio of related metrics that balance technological progress, accumulation of wealth, and human thriving.
As Gary Stephenson rightly points out the culture of Economics in modern practice is not one of open query and scientific skepticism, but of proselytizing. More akin to a religion than a science.
My take on Economists is that they keep desperately trying to make people understand that prices are set by supply vs demand dynamics, while society keeps refusing to understand it.
/s
Edit: guy has now edited his comment like 5 times as a response.
(Edit: "How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?")
If you're asking about what's better than looking up GDP, they already said visiting the countries.
Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.
Note that I'm not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.
> Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the 'loneliness epidemic' I can't help but wonder if we're not trying to solve the wrong problem.
But then I realized we differed on what the root problem/solution were.
What economic/social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?
Another point the article doesn't mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they'd inevitably die.
you're reading the title wrong, they aren't "trying to solve the loneliness epidemic," they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that's the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.
Much like a soundless tree in the forest.
wild take.
Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve "the transformation of human nature itself". When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.
To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as "laboratories" to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere "thing," reducing individuals to a predictable "bundle of reactions". Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a "perverted animal".
James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in "high-modernist" ideology, which champions the "mastery of nature (including human nature)" through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable "generic subjects".
When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of "institutional neurosis" characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.
Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to "in-animate" them and transform them from living beings into inanimate "things"—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into "automatons" directly negates our fundamental "ontological vocation to be more fully human".
If we were to successfully "rewire" ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.
Our "flawed" social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.
I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.
Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.
My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn't get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline/risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.
Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don't live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.
I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.
I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.
The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient
If the fee is mandatory, it works similar to a tax, in which case it would be more correct than incorrect to say the BBC is state funded.
How much media can or rather may diverge from state opinion depends country to country.
I am not British so I could be wrong however. If you have evidence that the BBC lacks autonomy when it comes to foreign policy or to the royal family please share it with the rest of us.
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
How is that different from being state-funded? Everything state-funded is paid for by the general public, through taxes. That's part of what being a state is: an organization that forces people to pay taxes and directs them to various programs.
Are you claiming that the TV license fee isn't a tax? It's money that the state makes you pay so that it can fund something.
Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it, that doesn't make it "state funded" or a "state broadcaster".
There are plenty of taxes that only some people have to pay, for example, the fee to register a car.
> Furthermore the state isn't in charge of administering it anyway, it's a civil matter brought about by the BBC (or rather the company which is subcontracted to enforce licencing). The BBC has the authority to do this based on the Royal Charter that governs it
I'm trouble understanding how this doesn't make it part of the state? It is a 100% state-owned entity to which the state has granted (in a "Royal Charter") the ability to collect taxes... the distinction you're trying to draw seems meaningless to me.
Sure there may be two separate entities, one called "The UK Government" and one called "The BBC" where neither is part of the other, but structurally I don't see how you can claim that they're not both part of "the State" in general.
The enforcers work for neither the BBC nor the government but are subcontracted out.
> This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.
And if it is an ad, doesn't the FTC require it to be labelled as such?
There was a case where UK based influencer got into FTC trouble for the CSGO Lotto gambling site. He was promoting it without disclosing he had a stake in the site.
HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”
Edit: yep, appears Yakult has just kicked off an ad campaign putting Yakult Ladies front and center [0]
They don't eat yogurt or dairy in general.
They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.
A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.
Case in video: Chinese and milk tea
Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.
Lactose intolerance is not absolute.