Retro Saturday: The Dark at the End of the Supply Chain Tunnel

image courtesy Skyscraper City

 As we continue to write, we are not in the Industrial Age or Post-Industrial Age.  We are in the Age of the Supply Chain, dating back to the start of the Industrial Revolution.  It is all about maximizing the profitable production of goods and services by minimizing human labor, and, in its current, mature phase, relentlessly driving down the cost of that labor through a globalized market.  I've stopped counting the number of times I've encountered, in print or video, some entrepreneur or executive speaking rapturously about a new plant or process that will radically decrease the need for human beings. All of these corporations, of course, require an affluent base of consumers to buy their stuff.  They just don't want to have to be the ones employing them, or paying them a living wage.

I was reminded of this by an article in the current issues of the always excellent Business Week.  The great economist Peter Drucker, no friend to the middle class, still believed that once you got beyond a 20 to 25 ratio between average worker and executive pay, it wasn't good, and that executives raking in the cash while laying off workers was “morally unforgivable.”   In Disclosed: The Pay Gap Between CEOs and Employees, BW writers Elliot Blair Smith and Phil Kuntz reveal that currently that ratio between average worker and top executive pay is somewhere around 495.  There's also a list of how the ratio plays out for 250 of the country's leading corporations.

In some cases - Oracle, CBS, Disney, Exxon, to name just a few - the employees of corporations with a high ratio are getting a pretty good buck.  More common, however, are highly paid executives running companies predicated on their workforce receiving marginal compensation.  Starbucks has a ratio of 1,135, Chipotle 778, Target 664.

So, here's a couple of our Age of the Supply Chain stories.

image: the Chuckman Collection

 The Architecture of The Age of the Supply Chain: The Epic Saga of Sears in Chicago depicts a time when Supply Chain economics provided better lives for an expanding middle class.

photograph: AP

The Dark at the End of the Supply Chain Tunnel actually dates all the way back to 2010, but explores some of the darker manifestations of current trends, which have only accelerated since this post was written.  Have we gone from burning off the fat to eating away the vital organs?  Will the greatest success of the Supply Chain be to make human beings (a/k/a ourselves) an expendable commodity?

Target Goes Rad/Red at Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott

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Business Week writer Matt Townsend is calling it Target's "most radical experiment since bringing designer goods to the masses 15 years ago," and it's right here on State Street, in the landmark building Louis Sullivan designed over a century past for Carson Pirie Scott.  The department chain, like Lord and Taylor, decided there wasn't much future in Chicago's center city, and shut down their flagship State Street store in 2007.

Yet even as traditional department store chains deep-sixed the downtowns,  the competitors who have been eating their lunch - big box retailers like Target, who built their empires on cheap suburban land, vast parking lots and warehouse-styled stores - are now turning to the city as the best bet to keep their companies growing.

According to the Business Week story, in the first quarter of 2012, Target has added but one new location.   The smaller-sized State Street store is a prototype for growth via moving into downtown.  And so they're working on re-calculating their winning formula - athletic clothes rather than women's apparel at the entrance, smaller sizes and product lines suitable for apartment dwellers,  and - window displays.  The State Street store will be the first Target ever to use window mannequins. 

A DSW Shoe outlet has just opened south of Target, in the last Carson's addition on State Street, the design handed over, not to Sullivan, but to Burnham.  And more big changes for State Street on our their way.  Burlington Coat factory is going into the space recently vacated by Filene's Basement at 1 North State, and Old Navy is leaving its flagship store at State and Washington for smaller digs in the former Border's store at State and Randolph.  While The Gap told the Sun-Times' David Roeder that they'll continue to use the Washington Street building for "other concepts", the sale of the building last year for $23,000,000 would indicate that new, taller construction may be in line for the site, once home to W.W. Boyington's 16-story Columbus Building.

 Target is scheduled for a July opening, with other in-city stores set for L.A. Seattle and San Francisco.  You can read the Business Week article - and see a striking rendering for the L.A. store - here.

Weekend Reading: Lady Gaga gets Fryed, Groupon's gag writers, Bikini Waxes, Kissinger's murderous sycophancy, Hunt Lieberson's sublime Berlioz

Some great weekend reading:

Not-So-Odd Couple - This weekend's Financial Times' Lady Gaga Takes Tea with Mr. Fry offers an engaging and enlightening account of the inimitable Stephen Fry's visit with the unsinkable chanteuse.

Kissinger's China - also in the FT, the last British governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, reviews Henry Kissinger's new book On China, and paints a portrait of a brilliant man devoid of any moral sense. In his latest work the chronic enabler of blood-soaked tyrants offers up a whitewashing of Mao's crimes, to which Patten provides an sobering rebuttal.

Over at Business Week, there's a portrait of New Royalist Torquemada Grover Norquist. When even Tom Coburn thinks someone's a dangerous extremist, you know you're dealing with a real piece of work. Also in Business Week, there's a discussion of the relationship of the bikini wax to Brazil's measure of inflation.

On the music front, The Financial Times finds Glyndebourne's Meistersinger flavorless mush, and reports that, after a slew of cancellations of dates earlier this year, including Chicago, Maurizio Pollini was back in top form at a Royal Festival Hall recital that included Chopin, Schumann, and Stockhausen Klavierstücke.

Over at the Sunday New York Times, David Streitfield's Funny or Die: Groupon's Fate Hinges on Words suggests that Groupon's continued success may hinge on its gagwriters - "musicians, poets, actors and comedians" who write the copy that keeps subscribers clicking coupons.

Elsewhere, Zachary Woolfe has a glowing review of the new live recording from 1995 of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's sublime acount of Berlioz's Les Nuits d'Ete , plus a selection of Handel arias, a must-have release that has been topping out my iPod for the past few weeks.

Red Line Station Applized as Apple Mania Descends on North Avenue for opening of Lincoln Park store

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A drear, rainy day didn't stop Macaddicts from turning out in force for the Saturday opening of Apple's new store at North and Halsted.

According to the website infoAppleStore.com, nearly 300 people were standing in line by the time the store opened at 10:00 a.m., with mayoral hopeful Rahm Emanuel earlier working the line, shaking hands and asking, "What are you going to buy today?"

As the rains came, store employees handed out Apple branded umbrellas, which were collected as customers entered the store, in small controlled batches, to the thanks of employees, applause . . .

and even high fives . . .

In essence, the steel-clad store is a 6,500 square-foot rectangular tube for selling. open at both ends with all-glass facades, centered by the iconic Apple logo floating above in benediction.  According to Crain's Chicago Business, the property on which the store stands, formerly home to a gas station, was acquired for $10.5 million by an unnamed Mexican investor, with Apple paying a cool $750,00 for leasing rights, which extend through the next 30 years.

The total size is 18,000 square-feet, including the back-office basement and adjacent, marble paved plaza.  Included is a flush-surfaced shallow fountain that's the very model of Apple minimalism.

infoAppleStore.com has an informative and entertaining account of the preparation and opening here, including links to other accounts and some great photos far more professional than what you see in this post.  (They had better weather: that's my story and I'm sticking to it.) See our previous report on the Lincoln Park Apple store, including a more detailed account of the elements of the design here.

After the break: read about the Apple-funded North & Clybourn station rehab (with pictures) and John Sculley's take on his days at Apple.