Global

People complain about globalisation, that it destroys jobs and livelihoods and traditional ways of life (why is this a bad thing anyway? subsistence farming doesn't look like much fun either) but it does mean that I can go into a 7-11 and buy a folding umbrella for $5. What's so remarkable about this, when you think about it, is that when I'm in the 7-11 I'm right at the very end of the value chain. The guys who runs the 7-11 (a franchisor?) is making money, 7-11 is making money, there's a guy who drives a truck who brings the umbrellas to the 7-11 and he's making money (or his employer is), the company that owns the ship that brought all the umbrellas here is presumably making some money from transporting them, then there's probably half-a-dozen middle-men and, ultimately, a factory in China that's making them. And everyone in this chain is making money - that $5 goes partly to costs (the plastic and steel in the umbrella, the shipping and trucking and whatnot) but also to profit. And they can still get this umbrella all the way from a factory in China into my wet hand here in Sydney for $5! Granted, it's not going to last a long time, it's not the sort of umbrella I'm going to expect to hand down to my sons like a Patek Philippe watch, but then again, it's only five dollars!

The alternative, I guess, would be to produce umbrellas here, and it's hard to see how that could be done at a reasonable cost. And what about those $40 DVD players?