Promising Improvements is a Customer Service Error

Well now, unless you're Japanese or otherwise come from a culture of performative apologetics, I do recommend dispensing with promises to improve. All promises accomplish is to massage the egos of high-cost customers. If you care to improve your service, simply do it.

That being said, if you are in court, the gravity of a promise is considerably different. But most customers do not carry the force of the law, and it is pompous disservice to higher institutions if customers are led to believe that they do.

The "Profit Centre" is a Regrettable Error

Traditionally, it has become the case that,

- "cost centres" refer to supporting operations, and

- "profit centres" refer to core value-chain operations ...

... furthermore often we encounter the entirely ridiculous practice where,

- "profit centres" refer to sales operations.

This is ridiculous because profits are composed of sales and costs, and this equation is completely obfuscated if sales are otherwise equated with profits.

In fact, "profit centres" don't exist within individual businesses units. In a map of business units, each business unit can be a profit centre or a loss centre. Within each business unit, profits result from a VALUE-CHAIN.

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What more can we do to clean up this corruption of language?

The context for this language often arises in the activity of analysing profitability. In a map of business units, we can encapsulate value-chains within business units, and so this is relatively easy. Within each business unit, an analysis of profitability must take into consideration the OPPORTUNITY COST of alloting the HIRED TIME of each INDIVIDUAL TALENT, to this or that activity. From this observation we should proceed to understand that even staff in a sales function should not be judged primarily on sales, but on contributions to profitability based on such a model.

This is where the fun begins.

Conversing with the Waters

I'm been thinking about girls that say, "is this real?" or "this is real," or "you're not even sure if that was real" ... in the context of the script of Gaslit where the character says "it" is not "real" when her boyfriend doesn't look her in the eye during sex.

I think it boils down to a certain type of person who isn't comfortable with detailed verbalisation of their internal cognition. Because this type can't recognise the use of semantics to a satisfactory degree, they infer based on intuitive trust (that is, at their convenience, without systematic empirical observation), that certain counterparts at certain points in time do share their own state of mind.

This is generally dangerous for people who project their own desire for intimacy upon others who do not share their state of mind. It is also awkward for other parties when the projectors discuss the realness of their mutual relationships, because their counterparts may generally guess about what is being spoken out of general politeness.

Reality is an interesting subject - more so when one or more conversants has doubts about their fundamental experiences.

I am not sure if it is better for me to swear off relationships with cognitively insecure people, or if I should devote more time to nursing their minds.

2022 : Malaysian Modernist Cuisine Still Immature

These are ballpark figures.

Watching food TV (somebody fed Phil) with my friend. So gastronomic tapas in Spain go for €15-20 per course at StreetXO, and Sala de Despices serves the whole multi-course menu for €40-45. Minimum wage in 2022 is €1000/month or €7.82/hour. So we're talking about spending 6-10 mwh for one of these dinners.

In Kuala Lumpur the equivalently positioned gustatory dining experience should therefore go for around the same numbers but in Ringgit - our mwh is now RM7.21, and the mwm is RM1500. These are all nominal figures. I think that we tend to pay at least 2-3x in terms of mwh at gustatory dining locations in KL (if not 20-30x), because the focus tends to be on the purchase of imported ingredients instead of local produce.

Gustatory dining in KL needs to fall into the RM60-100 per dinner range before we can consider our labour market "well-developed" enough to fully elevate the processing of domestic produce. For reference the price of a kilogram of chicken in KL vs Madrid now is like RM8.90 (strained: current headlines) and €3.98.

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Of course, weak purchasing power for gear affects KL's market the same way weak purchasing power for food imports does ... but that's part of my point - where is the greater value from leverage on low labour costs, which should be expected to result from this forcing factor? And yes, local demand has no local reference for quality, and continues to be foreign oriented - still all the same point I am highlighting.

Malaysians have no good, modern, local food.

Disambiguation of Key [ Income Statement ] Line Items

_Example provided is for a F&B business._

Collections : What is collected from customer ...

= [ net sales ] + [ SST ]

*SALES*

Gross Sales : Big number that is rarely reported ... because it is ...

= [ net sales ] + [ sales discounts ] + [ sales allowances (price reductions due to defective goods) ] + [ sales returns ]

Net Sales : Actually useful ...

= [ gross profit ] + [ direct costs ]: 

*DIRECT & INDIRECT COSTS*

These refer to the costs of production of goods and services sold.

[ Cost of Sales ; 

Cost of Goods Sold ; 

Direct Costs_or_Expenses ] ... all of these terms mean the same thing; some may be _fixed_ such as the rental on a dishwashing machine, some may be _variable_ such as the ingredients used to make pies.

Indirect Costs_or_Expenses : How much would be spent during a fictional 0-production month, such as in pre-opening, on [ labour ex-production ], [ materials ex-production ], [ utilities ex-production ], [ ads ], [ interest owed on loans ], [ amortised charges like annual fees ], [ depreciation of CAPEX ],  etc.; some may be _fixed_ such as the rental of a premise, some may be _variable_ such as seasonal maintenance.

Direct Costs : 

= [ total costs ] - [ indirect costs ]

... therefore 

*NET SALES is sales, [after deducting allowances, discounts, and returns], but [before deducting the following]*

- fee of : performance marketing

- fee of : middleman (POS, platform, etc.)

- fee of : PSP / payment service providers

- fee of : transportation / delivery

- cost of labour for production

- cost of materials for production

- cost of utilities for production

*PROFIT a.k.a. EARNINGS a.k.a. INCOME*

Gross Profit :

= [ net sales ] - [ direct costs ]

At this point in the income statement, we encounter *EB-salad* because there are all sorts of "Earnings Before X" subtotals which an author may choose to write about. But in general ...

Net Profit :

= [ gross profit ] - [ indirect costs ] - [ tax ]