You’ve done it!
Once again, you have located Bully Pulpit, your headquarters for thoughtful commentary on 20th-century literature, modern business models, Pulp Fiction, mundane cuisine, exotic cuisine and the consumer woes of the sclerotic Soviet Union.
We shall discuss the last category first.
Back in the days of the former USSR (Universal Shortages for Subjugated Russians), it took six months of waiting to get a couch. Five years to get a telephone landline (party line, of course). And nine years for a Lada, which was the most popular car in the way that gonorrhea is the most popular venereal disease. The Lada cost 10 years’ salary, boasted 76 horsepower and often arrived pre-broken for your convenience. The Nazis created the People’s Car with Volkswagen and succeeded. The Soviets countered with the Peasant’s Car, and also delivered on the promise.
Hold the thought. Now a brief word on Catch-22, one of the great triumphs of post-WWII fiction. Joseph Heller’s classic anti-war novel is a hilarious, tragic and withering satire of Army bureaucracy and the then nascent military-industrial complex. The protagonist was Capt. John Yossarian, a B-25 bombardier buffeted by the lethal absurdities of war and in a constant, futile struggle to outwit them. He became entangled with Lt. Milo Minderbinder, an opportunistic and charismatic mess officer at a Pianosa, Italy Army Air Corps base, who built a colossal black-market syndicate after contriving to buy eggs in Malta for 7 cents apiece and then sell them in Pianosa for 5 cents at a profit.
(Minderbinder also cornered the market for Egyptian cotton, which he was unable to sell at all, and so coated balls of it in chocolate and sold them to the Army as a dessert. This was a less successful initiative.)
Tuck that away as well, please — for now, obviously, we shall discuss croquettes. I refer to the down-market fried dumpling that is prized in many a country and many a culture for its rib-sticking simplicity, whether we’re speaking of pierogies, latkes, crab cakes or chicken croquettes, the middle-American staple from the old pulpy inner pages of Good Housekeeping magazine. I have no doubt that the Cleaver Family and the insufferably wholesome Andersons of Father Knows Best — not to mention the Brady Bunch bunch — were crazy about croquettes, those crunchy, savory cholesterol bombs usually filled with minced meat, potato and onion, and fried in oil. Two is a treat. Three is an overdose.
But sometimes, something ordinary suddenly becomes a craze. Just for instance, Tater Tots, which are themselves little mini-croquettes that seem to have become America’s go-to comfort food. Which at least reflects their intrinsic yumminess, versus the pretension that often undergirds a food fad. In the 60s, it was fondue, for all those striving rat racers imagining themselves as wealthy Swiss sophisticates. In the 80s, nouvelle cuisine. Recently, avocado toast and artisanal anything. I should add the pandemic nobody talks about: “gourmet” cupcakes, which for the past five years have had otherwise rational beings stand in line for the privilege of paying $7.99 a pop. To quote John Travolta as he samples Uma Thurman’s fountain drink in Pulp Fiction, “I gotta know what a $5 shake tastes like.” (Mind you, this was in 1994. Reimagine the line as, “I gotta know what a $10.04 shake tastes like.”)
Now, once again, these are disparate concepts we’ve been considering, but — as promised from the get-go — they happen to have all converged. May I call your attention to an article published Monday on CNN.com. It’s a travel piece focused on a local butcher shop in Takasago City, Japan. The store is called Asahiya and it is owned by a 3rd-generation butcher named Shigeru Nitta. His most popular offering is a croquette, filled with potato and Kobe beef.
It is sold, mostly online, at $3.70 apiece. Yes, he takes aged, three-year-old female A5-ranked Kobe beef (alleged to be the tenderest and most flavorful in the world), mixes it with pulverized local potatoes, stuffs the mush into a pierogi and fries the fuck out it.
There is a word for this, but it is not “stupidity.” It is “phenomenon.” So popular are the Japanese meat latkes that would-be customers are confronted with a slight back-order problem. If you are thinking about Christmas and purchase now, expect your delicious croquettes to arrive in 2052.
That’s the year. A year in the quite distant future. Talk about your supply-chain issues. Enjoy your croquettes. I will be dead. And you might be, too.
You may wonder, “How do you have a 30-year-waiting list for frozen comfort food?” Aha, there’s a three-part answer.
1) Mania. Demand stimulates more demand and occasionally mass hysteria. For instance: Cabbage Patch Dolls, 17th century tulips, Bitcoin and Pete Davidson.
2) The Minderbinder Secret. Sell at a loss. Every sale costs you money, but you make it up in volume.
In the beginning, in 1999, he told CNN, “We sold Extreme Croquettes at the price of JPY270 ($1.8) per piece ... The beef in them alone costs about JPY400 ($2.7) per piece. We made affordable and tasty croquettes that demonstrate the concept of our shop as a strategy to have customers enjoy the croquettes and then hope that they would buy our Kobe beef after the first try.”
Aha! That would be the final part of the answer.
3) It’s a loss leader.
The Meat Tots are a means of promoting his other Kobe beef cuts. By only making 200 packages per week, he kept overall losses down. Demand is so high, however, he now turns out 200 packages per day. As they say, he loses money on every sale but makes it up in volume.
“We hear that we should hire more people and make croquettes more quickly, but I think there is no shop owner who hires employees and produce more to make more deficit … I feel sorry for having them wait. I do want to make croquettes quickly and send them as soon as possible, but if I do, the shop will go bankrupt.”
Now, it may well be that there are not entirely transparent benefits accruing to Nitta-san rendering his business model more sensical; CNN didn’t promise an investigative piece. In any event, his is a small-scale enterprise. I know of a guy who just paid $44 billion for a company without the slightest idea of how to monetize it. He is now in the process of removing all the meat and potatoes before he fries the flimsy wrapping to oblivion.
That, Bob, was delicious!