… as Starbucks announced that its geek chic patrons can now pay for their half-caf non-fat soy mocha lattes with their iPhones. (Source: CNNMoney.com).
But there’s a supply chain lesson here for all of us: Give your customers want they want, and they’ll keep coming back.
Now if they’d just roll out trenta soy capuchinos above the 49th parallel …
Like just about every other commodity these days, Copper, used in everything from construction and cars to telecommunications and power, is surging with a price increase of a good 50% or so in the past year. The outlook for 2011 (AGMetalMiner.com) is that demand will continue to exceed supply and that global stock levels, which have been declining rapidly over the last six months, will continue to do so. Copper is making a comeback, and we are going to feel it in our pocket books.
Since MetalMiner does such a great job of tracking copper prices, along with prices for other metals, and regularly provides us with copper outlooks while doing so, I’m not going to beat the horse up any further but instead focus on a recent story in The Globe and Mail about how “the commodity cycle speeds up” and the impact this is having in The Great White North.
According to the article, the trucks and shovels are rumbling again near the peak of Copper Mountain which is home to the Copper Mountain project, located 270 kilometres east of the Port Metro Vancouver. Copper Mountain was shuttered in the mid-1990s due to low commodity prices and the area has been quiet since then, but now sparks from welders’ torches crackle and fly inside the massive hangar-like processing mill that stands 10 storeys tall. Outside, several 240-tonne, seven-metre-tall trucks — price tag $3.5-million each — bump along at 15 kilometres an hour, hauling away waste rock from the once-prolific pit 3.
In other words, millions of dollars (about $438 Million on reconstruction to be exact) are being spent to revive a mine to mine a commodity that is cyclical in nature and that will, inevitably, fall below the threshold price per pound required to make the mine profitable (and see the mine closed for the fifth time in its history). Which leads one to ask, in the global commodities surge, are we Canadians going cuckoo for copper?
A recent inforgraphic on “The Great Recession” over on Focus.com really puts things into perspective on how bad the Jobless Recovery really is. As the infographic begins, Americans are suffering the highest figures of unemployment since The Great Depression, and the worst part, there’s no end in sight. Employers are still intending to make do with what they have for as long as possible, even though job satisfaction is at an all time low.
Considering that it will take the US nine more years to recover the jobs lost during the recession at the current rate of job creation, it’s unlikely that the economy is going to bounce back quickly. The end of the recession is going to linger on and when the emergency benefits run out for the 4.04 M people on it, it’s going to be obvious that it truly is the Great Recession.
With unemployment hitting all time highs in certain parts of the country, logistics costs still high, duties and taxes rising across the globe, disruptions affecting over 4/5ths of extended supply chains, and home-sourcing looking more-and-more attractive for many US-based enterprises, will this be the year that we all start singing Chuck Berry’s Back in the USA?
For some of us, it’s hard to believe that Wikipedia went online only 10 years ago today in the same month that saw the creation of AOL Time Warner and the launch of iTunes, which put Apple back on the map.
Where would we be without Wikipedia?
Sitting in the library waiting six weeks for an inter-library loan? (Those of us who did graduate degrees more than 10 years ago remember this, and not too fondly might I add!)