Cooking Meth In The World's Most Dangerous City

BY TAIMUR KHAN

KARACHI, Pakistan — The holy month of Muharram is a dangerous time in Pakistan. It marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar but is also a period of mourning for Shiite Muslims. Each year, in the overflowing metropolis of Karachi, they take to the streets in processions by the thousands to observe Ashura, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hussein ibn Ali, the Prophet Mohammed's grandson, and one of the holiest days of the year for Shiite Muslims. It is often a bloody affair, and not just because of the ritual self-flagellation in which many of the devout partake. Over the past four years, with astonishing punctuality, Shiite processions and mosques have been brutally attacked by Sunni supremacist militants bent on starting a sectarian war.

In 2009, two bombs exploded along the parade route, splattering the concrete street with human entrails and shredded clothing, and killing 43. The following year, on Nov. 11, the Pakistani Taliban drove a car bomb right up to Karachi's elite counterterrorism Crime Investigation Department, destroying the building and killing 18. And in late November 2012, in Orangi Town neighborhood, two bomb blasts killed five people, as the city's undaunted Shiites continued with their mourning processions.
Understandably, Karachi's streets were tense on the ninth night of Muharram last year, as final preparations were being made for the Ashura festivities. Nervous government officials had cut cell-phone service across the city for 11 hours that day, hoping to prevent attacks. Some 10,000 police officers had been dispatched to the main parade route, though in a city with an estimated 20 million people, even this show of force was only a drop in the bucket.
As night fell on Saturday, Nov. 24, the deputy superintendent of police, Zameer Abbasi, was out making the rounds. He had decided to take one last patrol when he received a phone call around 9:20 p.m. about a small explosion at a nearby apartment building. "My first thought was that this might be a high-value target, a terrorist who had planned to target the procession but had made a mistake with the bomb," Abbasi later told me. When he arrived at the scene, smoke was pouring from a third-floor apartment window.
Abbasi didn't wait for the bomb squad to arrive. He quickly cordoned off the street and raced inside, fearing that there might be more explosives or a suicide bomber. When he got to the apartment, however, the scene was unlike anything he had seen before. A red chemical had been sprayed across the white walls. There was what seemed to be a laboratory: conical flasks connected by rubber tubing, sacks and boxes labeled with the names of chemicals, a small centrifuge. A silvery blue powder was spilled across the bathroom floor, and blood-red footprints crisscrossed the living room. "I thought this might not be the kind of blast I thought it was," Abbasi said. "It looked like some kind of chemical reaction had happened." He didn't know it at the time, but he had just made the first bust of a Pakistani meth lab.
IT'S HARD FOR AN OUTSIDER to understand the pace of change in Karachi these days. Statistics don't really do it justice. But here's one: From 2000 to 2010, Karachi's population grew more than 80 percent. That's roughly equivalent to adding more than New York City's entire population in just a decade. (For all the talk of the staggering boom of Chinese metropolises, the world's next fastest-growing city -- Shenzhen -- grew only 56 percent, adding fewer than 5 million people.) Over the past decade, millions of Pakistanis have fled the fighting and terrorism in their country's northwest to settle in Karachi, Pakistan's pulsing commercial heart -- home to banks and corporations, shipping and transport, entertainment and arts. But the flood of migrants in search of jobs and opportunity has also brought Karachi some less savory additions.
Gangs tied to political parties have long operated in the poorer parts of the city, running extortion rings and land-grab schemes. More recently, Pakistani Taliban militants have also gained a foothold in the city, carving out territory in neighborhoods like Manghopir, where they run criminal and smuggling rackets, rob banks, and administer a cruel and terrifying justice. From restive Baluchistan province, in Pakistan's west, a war economy driven by more than a decade of conflict in Afghanistan has opened Karachi and its ports to narcotics and weapons smuggling. Pitched firefights that go on for days between gangs, or between gangs and the police, are not uncommon.
As a result, Karachi is far and away the world's most dangerous megacity, with a homicide rate of 12.3 per 100,000 residents, some 25 percent higher than any other major city. Consider this telling statistic from a megacity next door: In 2011, 202 murders occurred in Mumbai, India. Karachi had 1,723 -- and more than 2,000 in 2012. Now added to this combustible mix are drug gangs often with links to Iran -- like the one Abbasi and his men busted. And they've brought with them a new commodity that is increasingly making its way from Karachi's ports to the wider world: methamphetamine.
Opiates had always been Karachi's drug of choice. With as much as 90 percent of the world's heroin production right across the border in poppy-rich Afghanistan, Pakistani drug barons have reaped the benefits of proximity. Despite a ban on opium production in 1955, Iran saw a heroin resurgence in subsequent decades, becoming a major regional production center. But after the mullahs came to power in 1979, the drug trade shifted east. Heroin was produced en masse in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fund the mujahideen fighting the Soviets. The drugs primarily went to market through Karachi's port and on to Europe and the Americas.
Setting up the infrastructure for this trade was almost a matter of policy for military ruler Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who created the National Logistics Cell -- essentially a military trucking business -- to transport heroin from the northwest to Karachi and bring weapons in the other direction. Even by the standards of rogues and dictators, Zia was unusually brazen and corrupt, with close associates implicated in drug trafficking and money laundering plots. Pakistan seemed on the verge of becoming a narcostate. In 1980, on his way to the United Nations in New York, Zia's diplomatic cargo was searched, and heroin was reportedly found stuffed into marble lamps. After the war with the Soviets and Zia's mysterious death, that transport infrastructure was more or less privatized by Pakistani cartels and drug mafias, and it has lasted through the present day. Today, as much as 40 percent of Afghanistan's heroin still transits through Karachi, according to the United Nations.
But as the global appetite for heroin has waned, producers and smugglers are turning to methamphetamine, demand for which is soaring in nearby East Asia. Iran has emerged as the biggest producer of methamphetamine in the region, but Pakistan still appears to be the natural transit route to eastern markets like Malaysia and Australia, as well as a major supplier of the precursor chemicals that are the drug's main ingredients. There are signs, however, that sophisticated labs are being set up in Pakistan itself, perhaps by Iranian syndicates. And links to Pakistani meth are showing up in places from Mexico to Melbourne.
AS ANYONE WHO has seen the TV drama Breaking Bad knows, the production of methamphetamine is a complex and combustible process, requiring a laboratory and various chemical ingredients, or precursors -- the most notable of which is ephedrine or its close cousin, pseudoephedrine. These precursors have legitimate uses in cough, cold, and allergy medications (they act as a decongestant), and drug companies produce them on an industrial scale. But in Karachi, which has an advanced pharmaceutical industry, it has become clear that production is being diverted to criminal enterprises.
In April 2011, Karachi port officials discovered 540 pounds of ephedrine hidden in packets of spice mix bound for Australia. That same year, officials in Tehran reported the seizure of 1,170 pounds of ephedrine coming from Pakistan. And in June 2012, a group of men with more than 1,750 pounds of meth was stopped at Karachi's airport. Authorities only managed to arrest one of the smugglers; accomplices waiting outside barged into the customs hall and fled with the drugs. But what really has international drug-control officials worried is the sense that these seizures are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, Australian police are investigating a Melbourne biker gang, the Black Uhlans, that is suspected of setting up a massive Indian meth lab and contacting a senior Pakistani government official about drug importations.
The U.N. International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) helps governments regulate and monitor the potential for illicit drug production, and Pakistan, like most countries, reports its need for ephedrine -- what are called annual legitimate requirements. In 2007, Pakistan reported a legitimate requirement of 11 tons of pseudoephedrine to the INCB. In 2010, it reported 53 tons -- nearly three times the amount that most countries produce, making Pakistan the world's fourth-largest producer of pseudoephedrine. That means that either a lot more Pakistanis have suddenly come down with the sniffles -- or the drug trade has, once again, corrupted officials at the highest levels.
In September 2012, former Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's son, Ali Musa, was arrested for allegedly pressuring officials, with help from the country's health minister, to increase ephedrine quotas for two pharmaceutical companies. One of these firms, Berlex Lab International, which was granted a license to produce some 14,300 pounds of ephedrine, claims it sold its tablets to a company called Can Pharmaceutical. But according to an Associated Press report: "[I]nvestigators discovered the address for the company was a residential house in Multan, and nobody answered the door. The owner of the company didn't answer his phone." No wonder that prosecutors speculated that the ephedrine was destined for meth labs in Iran. (Gilani maintains his innocence, and his lawyer claims the accusations were politically motivated.)
Worryingly, the trend appears on the rise. The INCB notes that in 2008, Iranian authorities dismantled two meth labs; in 2010, that number had spiked to 166. That year, Pakistani officials reported four seizures of smuggled ephedrine, totaling 585 pounds, near the border with Iran, as well as more than 14 tons of diverted cold medicine, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Matt Nice, of the INCB's secretariat in Vienna, said that the size of some of the recent seizures of ephedrine originating in Pakistan suggests that a significant portion of legitimate cold medicine gets diverted to the black market. "If the [declared annual requirement] is so high that 500 kilograms can go missing, then that means you have something that's probably already been infiltrated," Nice told me.
A person familiar with the Gilani case, who requested anonymity, citing the ongoing investigation, explained how the scam allegedly worked. "You register yourself as a pharmaceutical company," he said. "Then you register yourself for a chemical like ephedrine. Then you get a quota for ephedrine on an export order, and then you say, 'Can I have this converted to local consumption because my export order has fallen through?' And then I take that, I falsify my distribution documents, and I have it smuggled." At many steps along this path, he said, it's necessary to bribe officials and bureaucrats to sign documents and deflect attention.
Corruption has a long, sordid history in Pakistan, but drugs add an extra layer of societal corrosion. On paper and anecdotally, evidence suggests that the meth trade is already having a deleterious impact on a country that doesn't need any more problems. Drug use, particularly of opiates and cannabis, is already high in Pakistan, with 1 percent of the population using heroin and 4.1 million people thought to be drug-dependent, according to the UNODC. But a 2013 report issued by the UNODC and the Pakistani government notes that a "detectable emergence of methamphetamine use has been found in certain areas of the country.… This finding is noteworthy because it is the first time a study has generated data relating to the use of amphetamine-type stimulants" in Pakistan. Just as the transport of massive amounts of heroin through Pakistan inevitably created a local market, and millions of addicts, the new focus on methamphetamine has led to a metastasizing trade on Karachi's streets.
"Crystaal," as it's pronounced, is everywhere, from the city's upscale neighborhoods to the poorer sections, like Lyari. The crime-ridden south-central district is Karachi's fiercest, a dense network of slums housing some 1 million people. It's basically a no-go zone for law enforcement. Police generally need to ask permission to patrol and must negotiate entrance with the district's crime boss: Uzair Jan Baloch, the head of the now-banned People's Aman Committee, a gang cum political party cum philanthropic organization. When police attempted an operation in Lyari this past April, Baloch's men held them at bay for days under a hail of bullets until the police retreated. In late July, an elite police ranger unit raided Baloch's mansion; he had disappeared into the night.
In Manghopir, a violent, impoverished slum in Karachi's north, the users are easy to spot. "I've seen these guys start banging their heads against a wall; they become out of control. It's like they are numb and don't feel pain," said a community activist who asked to remain nameless due to numerous threats from the Taliban and gangs. "Now heroin is ending and crystal is taking over." A gram of crystal goes for anywhere from 500 to 800 Pakistani rupees -- roughly $5 to $8. That's still more expensive than heroin, but users say the high is more intense. Most of the young men whom the activist sees tweaking in the streets are foot soldiers for Baloch's gangsters: "The gangs hire the kids, get them addicted to crystal, and then make them do crimes when they are high so they have no fear. Then they pay them with more crystal."
JUST TWO WEEKS after Pakistan's general elections this spring, I visited one of Karachi's largest drug-rehabilitation programs, the Drug Free Pakistan Foundation (DFPF), which treats around 4,000 addicts annually. The DFPF's headquarters are on a quiet street in the leafy Gulshan-e-Iqbal neighborhood, a middle-class area ruled by the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a secular political party that dominates politics in Karachi. The party's red, white, and green kite-shaped posters and painted slogans still adorned nearly every light pole and wall. Like all the major political parties here, though, it has an armed wing, and like the rest, it profits from an intimate relationship with criminal activities.
Approximately 1.2 million drug addicts, the majority of whom are heroin users, live in the city, said the foundation's director, Farheen Naveed. Beginning in 2010, however, she has seen an influx of meth addicts seeking help at DFPF. As we toured the foundation's headquarters, she noted the uptick. At the end of May, 35 of the 101 patients in DFPF's treatment center in the industrial neighborhood of Landhi were there for meth abuse. "The numbers at the facility today are actually much higher than I was expecting," Naveed said.
If Karachi's police seem helpless to combat drugs on the streets, perhaps Pakistan's Anti Narcotics Force (ANF) is the last, best hope to stem the large-scale trade and trafficking. Staffed by former military officers, the ANF is in practice a branch of Pakistan's powerful army, but it has received funding from the United States and guidance from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Its more than 1,500 well-armed troops form the front line in the drug war, and the force's website trumpets the staggering quantities of hash and heroin seized: 9,863 pounds of hash apprehended on May 1 in Killa Abdullah, 613 pounds of heroin on April 26 in Karachi. And on July 26, the ANF announced that its Lahore office had seized some 117 pounds of ephedrine, 95 pounds of ephedrine mixed with vanilla powder, and, bizarrely, 1,272 bottles of ephedrine mixed with jam. Often, though, the news releases accompanying such successes contain a line of boilerplate that speaks to the scale of the problem: "Although the endeavors of ANF are wholehearted and wide-ranging, the meager strength / resources remains to be a challenge." According to Naveed, "The crackdown on ephedrine has not had an impact on the prevalence of crystal use on the streets; it continues to rise."
Pharmaceutical executives in Karachi, however, say that the ANF has cracked down hard on access to ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, so much so that companies are afraid to apply for new quotas. Insiders say that this is blowback from the Gilani case: ANF officials are embarrassed that they didn't catch the scam themselves, and in an attempt to show their underwriters that they are serious, they have overreacted -- but will soon back off. The labs and the traffickers are likely biding their time, waiting to see whether the ephedrine spigot is easily loosened again. "I think that there is such easy money to be made [by diverting ephedrine] that I don't think it's going to go away," said a former official. "It's like bootlegging."
ONE YEAR BEFORE Ali Musa Gilani was charged in Islamabad, another young Pakistani man was arrested for his alleged role in selling ephedrine on the global black market. Shiraz Malik, then 34, was taken into custody last year after landing at Prague's airport on a flight from Dubai. He was later extradited to the United States, where he awaits trial in a federal court in California. Malik is accused of running a multimillion-dollar "industrial scale" online narcotics and precursor business, according to the U.S. attorney in California's Eastern District.
Undercover DEA agents found a website for a Karachi-based pharmacy that offered to ship a number of prescription opiates as well as ephedrine, according to a criminal complaint the DEA filed against Malik. After agents emailed the pharmacy, Malik is alleged to have written back offering to send samples of his wares via express mail. Between 2008 and 2011, Malik mailed everything from heroin to ephedrine powder to Ritalin. The agents wired tens of thousands of dollars to bank accounts associated with Malik in the United States and Europe. After accessing his email account, the agents found that Malik had done regular ephedrine business with customers in Mexico. (They also found photos of kilogram-sized bags of ephedrine packed in suitcases that were believed to be headed to Mexican customers. The shipment never made it. A Pakistani-American mule was arrested with the cargo as he attempted to fly to Mexico City.)
Malik has pleaded not guilty. But there is still what appears to be an online business directory listing for the pharmaceutical wholesaler -- Shama Medical Store -- that the DEA alleges was a front for Malik's operation. In the section for company information, the site reads: "we are abal to provide u any kind of medicion and any kind of row matirial all our tha world and we also doing drop shipping all or tha world." There's even a physical address, located in Karachi's Hijrat Colony neighborhood, which was described to me by an urban-rights activist as "a nursery of crime" controlled by a powerful drug gang known as the "Hamid Terha Group" (terha roughly translates as "crooked").
I decided to pay Shama Medical a visit this past spring and see whether I'd be able to get prices for ephedrine or bulk amounts of cold medicine. I brought along a friend who covers crime for a local newspaper, and we made our way to Hijrat Colony slum, which is bordered by railway yards to the east and a mangrove swamp to the west. We took a main thoroughfare near the port into the colony and were quickly squeezed to a standstill by the suddenly winding, narrow streets. We doubled back, stopping to ask for directions.
Finally, we pulled up to Street 56, got out of the car, and walked into an alley.
After a couple of hundred yards we reached a four-story concrete building with faded red paint that read, "Shama Hospital." Next door was Shama Medical Store. Both seemed abandoned except for a group of young toughs loitering in the shade outside. One of them, with a long beard and wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, asked us what we were looking for; the others just gave us hard stares. "Shama Medical Store -- is it open?" my friend asked haltingly. In the silence, I realized that the street, in the middle of a densely packed slum, was unnervingly empty.
"Yeah, it's here. But it's been closed for a long time," the bearded guy said -- just as an older man in a purple button-down shirt, gray suit pants, and pointy black dress shoes that looked to be made of imitation alligator stepped out of the medical store. A cell phone was pressed to his ear.
We should go, I whispered under my breath. So we did -- walking quickly back to the car and driving away, hoping we wouldn't be followed.
Later, through a well-sourced local contact, I inquired about whether the police and ANF had investigated Shama Medical. They said they had never heard of it.

The village that came back from the Dead

Eerie images of Chinese ghost town that has emerged from under water five years after earthquake

• Homes, offices and the primary school have emerged from the water revealing the village of Xuanping
• A huge earthquake devastated the village in 2008 causing it to be completely flooded by a barrier lake
• But the banks of the lake were severely damaged in July after the biggest flood in 50 years
• This has caused the the flood water to retreat and once again revealed the village

By Anthony Bond

These astonishing pictures show an entire village emerging from a lake -  five years after it was completely flooded following a massive earthquake.
Almost 10 buildings including homes, offices and the primary school have gradually emerged from the water after the village of Xuanping was completely destroyed in 2008.
An 8.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the village in Beichuan County, Sichuan Province of China, causing it to be completely flooded by a barrier lake.

Submerged: The town of Xuanping has suddenly emerged from a lake - five years after it was completely flooded following an earthquake

Revealed: Buildings which once made up the village have appeared again over the past two months

Devastated: An 8.0-magnitude earthquake hit the town in Beichuan County, Sichuan Province of China, on May 12, 2008 causing it to be completely flooded by a barrier lake

Different: With the buildings poking up from the water's surface, it gives the lake a mysterious appearance

Appearance: The village has emerged again after the biggest flood in 50 years damaged the lake's banks in July, causing the flood water to fall

Incredible: Yang Rong visits her old house and takes away her belongings after the property suddenly emerged from the flood water

In July, the banks of the lake were severely damaged after the biggest flood in 50 years causing the the flood water to retreat.
The water level has now fallen from 712 meters above sea level to 703 meters, resulting in the reappearance of the town.


Incredibly, the national flag hanging on the pole of Xuanping primary school has even been spotted.
Many people have returned to the area to look at their former village - with some even able to have a look around their former homes.

Reduction: This aerial shot shows the ruins of the flooded town peeking above the water. The water level has now fallen from 712 meters above sea level to 703 meters

Creepy: Houses and other buildings gradually began to emerge from the water on July 14

Mysterious: This shows one of the town's buildings which was completely submerged under water but has since emerged again after the flood water dropped

Return: Among some of the buildings which reappeared included the local primary school, which still had its national flag on the pole. This shows the roof of another of the town's buildings

Odd: As well as the primary school, the township government's dormitory and unit office appeared in the water

Upsetting: This man looks at his old house which has been left ruined by the flood water in Xuanping

The village's government dormitory and unit office appeared in the water along with a hostel and about 10 houses.
The emergence of the town is remarkably similar to part of the storyline in Channel 4's hit TV show The Returned.
The French series is set in a small mountain town in which many dead people reappear, apparently alive and normal.
They try to resume their lives as normal but strange phenomena keep occurring - including the water level of the dam mysteriously lowering to reveal dead animals and the steeple of a church which was part of a town flooded by water.

Going down: The water level has now fallen from 712 meters above sea level to 703 meters

Lower: The water marks on the lake's banks give a clear indication of how far the water has fallen

Strange: A hostel has also re-emerged together with a dormitory and nearly 10 houses

Dramatic: The emergence of the town is remarkably similar to the part of the storyline in Channel 4's hit TV show The Returned - in which a dam's water lowers to reveal a church steeple

Incredible: Some former residents of the town have even being pictured going back to their properties to pick up belongings

How Johnnie Walker Conquered The World

Straight Up

BY AFSHIN MOLAVI

Mexico is rising. You can see it in the country's swelling exports, the net-zero migration to the United States, the excitement of international bond investors, a recent credit upgrade from Standard & Poor's, a newly confident middle class, and a per capita GDP that has doubled since 2000. Not to mention a young, dynamic, handsome new president. In case you missed all these signs, though, you can also see Mexico's surge forward in a Scotch whisky ad.

The television spot says nothing about the product but everything about the country's long march from poverty toward prosperity. In the advertisement, thousands of Mexicans, men and women, young and old, are bound by chains to a massive boulder. They trudge forward up a dusty mountain, faces contorted and blackened, eyes downcast. The boulder pulls them back. A buzzard circles above. They push forward again, straining and wincing, and then -- with a crunch -- the boulder slides back downhill, throwing them to the ground.


But not so fast. One by one, they stand up and unchain themselves. Unburdened, they walk with gritted smiles and purpose up the dusty talus slope, leaving the boulder behind. Cue the soaring music. Cue the blue-sky vistas. Cue the tag line: "Keep Walking Mexico."


It's a brilliant ad, and you'd be forgiven for not immediately realizing it's for Scottish booze. (Frankly, the Sisyphean strivers look like they'd prefer water.) The only hint is the familiar Johnnie Walker logo, the stylized "Striding Man," accompanying the tag line. The metaphor of national achievement is clear, but the ad doesn't just tell the story of Mexico today. It also highlights Johnnie Walker's aggressive push into emerging markets and the rush by multinational consumer-products companies to catch the middle-class tsunami that is transforming the world.


The Brookings Institution's Homi Kharas estimates that the global middle class will hit 4.9 billion people by 2030, growing by 3 billion from today -- and they'll spend $56 trillion a year, up from $21 trillion today. Virtually all that growth will come from emerging economies. That's a lot of people walking upward -- and a lot of potential Johnnie Walker drinkers.


That's why executives from Starbucks to McDonald's to Coca-Cola see their future in the global middle class, and that's why Johnnie Walker's parent company, the booze behemoth Diageo, is pushing into liquor stores from Chile to China. Paul Walsh, a Diageo board member and former CEO, said in a statement about 2012 business results that the firm's "expanding reach to emerging middle class consumers in faster growing markets was the key driver of our volume growth." And Johnnie Walker, the world's No. 1-selling Scotch whisky, has been a crucial part of that growth. Today, four bottles of Johnnie Walker are consumed every second, with some 120 million bottles sold annually in 200 countries. Five of Johnnie Walker's top seven global markets are in the emerging world: Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, China, and a region the company calls "Global Travel Asia and Middle East."

From a small town in the Scottish Lowlands, the Striding Man has come a long way -- and he's still walking.

ASK ANYONE who travels in emerging markets or developing economies, and chances are they've been offered Johnnie Walker. These are just some of the places I've seen it poured: at a Beijing gathering of techies, a four-day wedding in Jaipur, countless bars in Dubai, a Nile cruise in Egypt, the home of an Arab diplomat in Bangkok, private homes in Tehran, a middle-class Istanbul house, and diplomatic parties in Riyadh.

Journalists who spent time in Baghdad during the Iraq war marveled at the easy availability of Johnnie Walker Black Label, even when food staples were scarce. The late writer Christopher Hitchens -- who fondly referred to the drink as "Mr. Walker's amber restorative" -- accurately noted that Black Label was "the favorite drink of the Iraqi Baath Party." In Saddam Hussein's era, a smuggler could make a good living taking crates across the border for thirsty Iranians. On a trip from Tehran to Iran's Kurdish regions on the Iran-Iraq border in the late 1990s, I stopped at the small city of Mahabad. A local smuggler peered into the car window, saw a group of city slickers from the capital, and asked simply in his Persian accent: "Johnnie Valker?" He, of course, offered us "very good price, my friend."


It's uncanny, the ubiquity of the striding Scot and his blended whisky (no "e" for the Scottish kind). It's everywhere, particularly among the upper end of the middle classes that the world's corporations are chasing. In Thailand, businessmen place a bottle of Black Label on the table before a closing negotiation. In Japan, bottles have become an essential part of the ritualized gift-giving culture. In India, one of Bollywood's most famous comedians even took the name Johnny Walker. It's such a status symbol in Asia that Johnnie Walker knockoffs aren't hard to find. You probably wouldn't want to serve guests the counterfeit liquor, but the bottle looks good on the mantle.

And in Africa, the newest gold mine of emerging markets, Diageo is cultivating a fresh generation of whisky drinkers. In downtown Nairobi, a 20-story billboard of the Striding Man towers alongside a skyscraper. African musicians and athletes have been named "brand ambassadors," and premium magazines are running a series of print ads that say simply: "Step Up." As in, step up to a better life, step up to the middle class, step up from that stale beer to a higher state of being: Become a whisky drinker. The print advertisement hawks Red Label, the brand's cheapest distillation (a favorite of Winston Churchill, with soda) and the presumptive first step in Johnnie Walker's color-coded upward journey through Black, Green, and Gold labels toward that nirvana of prestige: Blue Label.

The campaign seems to be working. Johnnie Walker sales are up 38 percent in East Africa and 33 percent in South Africa, and Diageo is doubling down, investing $368 million to expand operations in Nigeria, Africa's biggest market.


It's a classic strategy: reach the growing middle classes by selling them not just a product, but a lifestyle, an aspiration. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz often talks about selling an experience; coffee is an afterthought. The message from Diageo is similar: Keep Walking, you emerging middle classes; keep rising, and oh, by the way, treat yourself to a little Johnnie Walker while you're at it.

SO HOW did a little whisky company from a little country become the global brand of upward mobility? Or, to repurpose a question once posed by Scottish judge Lord Cockburn, no fan of his countrymen's favored drink: "Whisky no doubt is a devil; but why has this devil so many worshippers?"


In 1819, a young John Walker, the son of a local farmer, opened a small general store on King Street in Kilmarnock, a town in Ayrshire, Scotland. A general grocer, Walker also sold wines and spirits, including his own blended whiskies. The author Robert Bruce Lockhart noted that Walker's "capital was tiny and his business small and purely local," but he "had his full share of Ayrshire grit and thrift." For the first 30 years, his business was steady but unremarkable and "gave no indication of the fortune that was to come," Lockhart wrote in his 1951 book Scotch: The Whisky of Scotland in Fact and Story. In 1852, a devastating flood nearly ruined Walker. He lost everything and had no insurance.

But that "Ayrshire grit and thrift" kicked in, and he methodically rebuilt his business, gradually bringing his son, Alexander, into the trade. This would prove to be a turning point. Although the bottle carries his father's name, Alexander Walker -- whom Lockhart described as "a man of immense energy, vision, and ability" -- took the elixir global. When he joined the business, whisky produced only a fraction of the company's revenue. By the time Alexander died four decades later, handing Walker's Old Highland Whisky to his two sons, it was one of the world's largest purveyors of Scotch whisky, and a global brand was born: Johnnie Walker.


Alexander Walker actively engaged in the Adventure Merchant Business, a guild of sorts that tied together Scottish manufacturers and shipowners -- all of whom benefited from their membership in an empire on which the sun never set. The terms of the company's arrangement were fairly simple: The shippers would take goods with them on their journeys around the world, sell them, take a commission, and remit the remaining profits to the firms. Walker's whisky thus bobbed along the  British Empire's trading routes for decades.


But Walker understood that to truly make his mark, he needed to conquer a market much closer to home: London. In 1880, he opened offices in the city and became his company's first brand ambassador. As Lockhart noted, "he understood the art of personal advertisement," riding around town on a specially built open carriage known as a phaeton, a mode of transport favored by royals and the superrich. Drawn by "two superb ponies," the conveyance "attracted the desired attention and increased the still-more-desired sales."


Walker is also credited with the unique square-shaped bottle and its distinctive sticker, angled at precisely 24 degrees. The square shape allowed more bottles to fit on a shelf, and the logo's angle helped catch the eye. (Later, in Prohibition-era America, the square-shaped bottle proved ideal for smuggling: It fit perfectly inside a hollowed-out loaf of bread.) Walker died in 1889, but the steady hands of two Walker kinsmen and a young Ayrshire native of great ability, James Stevenson, guided his growing enterprise over the next half-century.


In 1908, the owners reached out to a leading artist of the era, Tom Browne, to help them design a poster. Over lunch, with just a few sharp strokes of his pen, Browne sketched what would become one of the world's most recognizable advertising icons. "The Striding Man was critical," whiskey historian Kevin Kosar told me, because it differentiated Walker from other scotch purveyors, which tended to play on Scotland's traditions of bearded men in kilts playing bagpipes, an image that lacked universality. "The Striding Man looked English, not Scottish. He carries a monocle, so he is literate. He carries a walking stick and wears a top hat. He is a dandy," Kosar explains. No rough Scot blowing funereal horns; here was a gentleman on the move.


By the early 20th century, the firm had it all: a growing business, a winning icon, new markets. Then came World War I, and business slowed worldwide. By 1925, John Walker & Sons found itself forced to enter a whisky cartel known as the Distillers Company. "After the war, there was a strong incentive for the big companies to lean on each other for strength," says Kosar. "Grain had been requisitioned, markets shut down. It seemed like a good idea to partner up to weather the storm."


World War II brought another storm, but its aftermath produced a historic march of growth in the West and rising fortunes elsewhere. Johnnie Walker made a big push into the U.S. market, advertising in gentlemen's magazines and targeting the successful, aspirational male. But the company also went after newly opened overseas markets. Japan, where men soon developed a copious thirst for Black Label, proved to be an early post-World War II success. Back in the States, Johnnie Walker started appearing on the silver screen in movies from Blade Runner to Raiders of the Lost Ark, making it not just a drink but a cultural icon.

In 1986, the Distillers Company was bought by the Irish brewery Guinness, which merged 11 years later with Grand Metropolitan to create Diageo. Listed on the London and New York stock exchanges, Diageo is now the world's largest spirits group by revenue, with bold-faced brands including not just Johnnie Walker but Smirnoff vodka, Captain Morgan rum, and Tanqueray gin. Diageo is an alcohol colossus that already generates nearly 40 percent of its sales from emerging markets, and that fraction is set to rise to 50 percent by 2015.

TODAY, DIAGEO is walking toward India and the acquisition of United Spirits, the country's largest alcoholic drinks firm, with 60 percent of the market. In July, it acquired a 25 percent stake in the company, and it aims to own more than half. Indians consume more whiskey than any other country in the world, and the distribution network Diageo would get with the purchase of United Spirits is akin to a raw materials producer gaining access to internal rail networks or shipping ports. Diageo has also acquired Brazil's Ypioca, the third-largest producer of cachaca, the popular sugar-cane-based spirit that adds the kick to caipirinhas from Sao Paulo to San Diego. It also recently had its eyes on Mexico's Jose Cuervo, the world's top-selling tequila-maker.


China is the big prize, though. There alone the middle class has grown to some 350 million people. According to consulting firm Ernst & Young, by 2030 China could see 1 billion people in the middle class -- some 70 percent of its projected population. And they'll be toasting to their success: The market research company Euromonitor International predicts that China alone will contribute 50 percent of the volume growth of the spirits industry in coming years. China is already the world's largest spirits market, followed by Russia and then India, though the South Asian giant will move into the second spot this year, according to industry estimates.


But will Chinese start quaffing scotch? On a per capita basis, whiskey consumption is still relatively low, with baijiu, a heady clear-colored liquor distilled from sorghum, still the preferred blend. But Johnnie Walker is striding ahead. In 2011, Diageo acquired a controlling stake in Sichuan-based Shui Jing Fang, a maker of baijiu, and the company has actively been courting young, urban professional Chinese -- "chuppies" -- with the familiar "Keep Walking" ad campaign. Since 2011, two "Johnnie Walker Houses" have opened, in Shanghai and Beijing, offering tours that mix a dab of Scottish heritage, a dash of whisky education, and a jigger of clubby exclusivity. On sale, of course, is the full array of Johnnie Walker blends, including exclusive limited-run editions of the super-high-end King George V Blue Label, which can run north of $600 per bottle.


Admittedly, Johnnie Walker and Diageo have made a few mistakes as well. A recent ad campaign for Blue Label, featuring a computer-generated Bruce Lee spouting inanities about the good life in a Hong Kong penthouse, drew ire from devoted fans of the martial artist, who was a teetotaler. The company's big investment in Turkey in 2011 -- the $2.1 billion purchase of Mey Icki, a major raki distiller -- came as the Turkish economy started to cool and the government clamped down on alcohol ads. What's more, the World Health Organization is issuing warnings about rising alcoholism in Africa -- Diageo's next big growth market.


Meanwhile, some scotch devotees argue that Johnnie Walker has forgotten its roots. Clearly, it's not soaked in nostalgia for ye olde Scotland. Today, Johnnie Walker is part of a massive conglomerate that has more than 25,000 employees and production centers in Australia, Cameroon, Canada, Ghana, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda, the United States, and the United Kingdom (including Scotland). In late 2012, Diageo bulldozed the last production plant in Kilmarnock, the birthplace of Walker's Old Highland Whisky.


As Kosar and I spoke about the future of Johnnie Walker, he sent me two images. The first was the original Striding Man design, Tom Browne's big advertising hit. The second was today's logo. I saw the difference right away: The Striding Man has had a face-lift, literally. His face no longer exists. He has become a silhouette, a colorless everyman. He could be anyone -- and you could be him.

source: foreignpolicy.com

How I Smuggled 'Porn' Out of North Korea

By Isaac Stone Fish


On Wednesday, the occasionally reliable South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that a dozen performers, including Kim Jong Un's ex-girlfriend, were executed for making sex tapes, some of which "have apparently gone on sale in China," violating North Korean laws against pornography.

The story has been picked up by FoxNews and theTelegraph, among others, though it's impossible to judge its veracity. Still, this seems as good a time as any to tell the story of how I smuggled pornography out of Pyongyang.

On a trip to North Korea in September 2011, my tour group stopped in the city of Kaesong near the South Korean border. One of the few North Korean cities open to U.S. tourists, Kaesong is perched near the Demilitarized Zone, the heavily fortified, 160 mile-long border separating the two Koreas.

Tourism in North Korea involves minders shuttling you between Kim family monuments, punctuated by pre-arranged restaurant meals and, occasionally, opportunities to shop. Right around the time we were allowed to photograph a rock memorializing Kim Il Sung's last known calligraphy, our guides took us to a little stand. And in one of the few places selling goods to foreigners, amid bitter ginseng candies and wooden backscratchers and berry liquors, I purchased a silkscreen that, to my untrained eye, looked a lot like topless women bathing by a lake.

Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul, tells me the silkscreen, pictured above, is a reproduction of a well-known painting by 18th century Korean artist Sin Yun Bok, called "AScenery on Dano Day." For North Koreans, "this will have a soft porno appeal," he says.

This probably wouldn't be remarkable anywhere else, but North Korea is one of the world's most conservative countries. It was shocking when Kim Jong Un appeared on television in July 2012 with (unlicensed) Disney characters, but more because the video also included women in strapless dresses -- bare shoulders in public are practically unheard of in Pyongyang, outside of a gymnastics outfit. In The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, defector Chol-hwan Kang gushesabout his first experience with erotic film in South Korea. "One night seemed too short a time to make up for a lifetime of North Korean prudishness," he wrote in his 2000 memoir. We had entered a fairyland. We couldn't believe our eyes."

Obviously, porn exists in North Korea. Former CIA official Henry Crumpton, in his 2012 book The Art of Intelligence, wrote "I've never met a North Korean diplomat who did not want porn, either for personal use or resale." And in 2009, South Korean media released a video, allegedly for internal North Korean use, featuring scantily clad women dancing to pop tunes.

As I was leaving the country, a border guard at the Pyongyang Airport, perhaps suspecting I was a journalist, gruffly and methodically searched through my bag. He unpacked my clothes, ruffled through my books, and peered into my Dopp kit. When he came across the red bag housing my silkscreen, I grew nervous and smiled awkwardly. He unfolded it and stared at the image. If memory serves, I was the last one of my tour group to go through security, and my mind briefly raced through the consequences of spreading illicit materials in the world's most repressive country. He looked up at me, only to flash a delighted grin, gently return the silkscreen to its bag, and wave me through.

source: foreignpolicy.com

My Experience Photographing the Yakuza

By Christopher Jue

After watching the movie “The Last Samurai” at a theater back home in Southern California (where I’m originally from), my curiosity for Japan inspired me to go and discover what it’s like. I took a couple of vacation trips out there and met a lot of good people before I found a job that sponsored my working visa to officially let me move out to Japan in 2005.


I actually majored in IT while in college, so the company that hired me was an Internet service provider in Tokyo. At that time, photography was entirely just a hobby that I had no intentions of making a career out of. While doing the IT stuff, I would shoot a lot of personal work related to Japan on the side, ranging from tourist landmarks to Japanese cars, people, events and fashion.


In 2008, I got an email from a CEO of a small Japanese modeling/talent agency asking if I was interested in working with him as a photographer and coordinator, so I jumped ship from the corporate IT life and have been working on interesting projects ever since…

Although I work with a diverse range of clientele, one of the most interesting assignments that I was able to take on to date was with The Times. Whenever I get commissioned with this newspaper, it begins with an “are you available and interested” type of conversation between myself and their Tokyo bureau staff, followed by a final confirmation from the desk in London.


The brief that was presented to me this time explained that there were lots of crimes happening within the community of Kita-Kyushu area, ranging from arson, to threatening phone calls, to people being slashed in the face by machetes. Basically, my job was to illustrate the dangerous goings on that were happening in the community and behind the closed doors of the Kudo-kai — the organization that the police and local people believed was ultimately responsible.

As this was a first-of-a-kind type of assignment for me, I was looking forward to it. After all, it’s not everyday one is allowed into the headquarters of a large mafia organization.

Even though I wasn’t too familiar with this particular Kudo-kai Yakuza group in the beginning, I thought to myself that sometimes it’s probably best not knowing too much. If I knew the organization, it might have changed my perspective and how I photographed them. It’s just like consistently looking at other photographers’ work, you become influenced by their style and the pictures you take are not really yours anymore.

In the beginning, I imagined the Yakuza would be stiff and serious — you know, mafia type personalities — but it was the total opposite. They were surprisingly welcoming and we were all treated with complete respect.

We saw a lot while inside their closed quarters, but there was one particular floor we couldn’t go into because they mentioned it was just a typical “messy” office with papers all over.

There are always challenges when I step out on a commissioned assignment, but the one main challenge for me every time is whether or not I can bring back usable pictures that are also visually stimulating. On this story, however, I was super focused rather than nervous and trying to make sure I had a variety of shots to choose from at the end of the assignment.

Nothing insidious or particularly eventful happened, but the Yakuza did insist on driving me in a separate car from the rest of the The Times staff at one point. Focused as I was, I thought they were going to drive off in another direction, but I assumed it was just so I could shoot from the car comfortably.


Afterwards, The Times staffers were joking with me that they were going to kidnap me and have me work as the organization’s staff photographer. It made for a valuable lesson in safety and understanding that it’s always the first priority while on any assignment.

It’s always better to ask permission rather than running and gunning the shots, especially when you’re dealing with the Yakuza.

---

About the author: Christopher Jue is a photojournalist based our of Tokyo, Japan. He considers his images vibrant, honest and straight to the point. Visit his website here.

'Sex Boxes' Now Open For Drive-In Brothel Business In Zurich

By John Heilprin

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty ImagesVisitors walk by so-called "sex boxes" decorated with posters of a prevention campaign against AIDS on August 24, 2013 during an open door day at a sex drive-in in Zurich

ZURICH, Switzerland — No car, no sex.

That’s the rule for an experiment Zurich is launching Monday to make prostitution less of a public nuisance and safer for women.

Switzerland has long been famous for its mountaineering, chocolate and precision watches, but a lesser known aspect is its legal prostitution since 1942, for which its largest city is one of the main centres in Europe.

Fashionably teak-coloured open wooden garages, popularly called “sex boxes” by the Swiss media, will be open for business for drive-in customers. The several dozen sex workers who are expected to make it their new hub will stand along a short road in a small, circular park for clients to choose from and negotiate with. The park was built in a former industrial area nestled between a rail yard and the fence along a major highway.

AP Photo / John HeilprinProstitutes will be concentrated in a small city park built for more than USD $2 million in the Altstetten area of Zurich

The publicly funded facilities — open all night and located away from the city centre — include bathrooms, lockers, small cafe tables and a laundry and shower. Men won’t have to worry about video surveillance cameras, but the sex workers — who will need a permit and pay a small tax — will be provided with a panic button and on-site social workers trained to look after them.
As far as Daniel Hartmann, a Zurich lawyer, is concerned, it’s a win-win situation.

“Safety for the prostitutes. At least it’s a certain kind of a shelter for them. They can do their business, and I respect them,” he said. “They do a great job, and they have better working conditions here. … They’re not exposed to the bosses, to the pimps, in here.”

AP Photo/Keystone, Ennio LeanzaProstitution is legal in Switzerland, but Zurich restricts it to certain areas, and is experimenting with the drive-in facilities

On Saturday, Hartmann was one of several hundred residents, including many women and a small throng of journalists, who flocked to the only “open house” that Zurich will offer to give the public a better idea of how its taxpayer money has been used.

Most of the visitors said they came out of curiosity and haven’t really come to terms with the idea, but hope it will at least improve safety. Others were amazed and a bit amused that a whole group of strangers would spend a rainy afternoon openly discussing professional sex.

Brigitta Hanselmann, a retired special needs schoolteacher from Embrach, Switzerland, said: “I have to think about it for a long time, because it’s so incredible that a city offers that to the men, and it’s interesting that there are many, many women here who are looking at it.” She called the sex boxes “an effort to control a thing that you can’t really control.”

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / Getty ImagesVisitors walk next to "waiting benches" on August 24, 2013

Voters in Zurich approved spending up to 2.4 million Swiss francs (US$2.6 million) on the project last year as a way of relocating the sex traffic away from a busy downtown area where it had become a public nuisance and safety concern due to lack of sanitation, aggressive men, and associated drugs and violence. The city, which only allows prostitution in certain areas, also plans to spend 700,000 francs (US$760,000) a year to keep the sex boxes running.

Jean-Marc Hensch, a business executive who heads a neighbourhood association in another part of Zurich, said he hopes the sex boxes succeed because otherwise the prostitutes might return to his area. He also cited the disgusting lack of sanitation in other city areas where prostitutes and their clients defecate and urinate in the streets and gardens, or have sex in the open because they have nowhere else to go.

“It’s an experiment,” he said. “It was absolutely urgent to find a solution.”

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty ImagesVisitors inspect on August 24, 2013 a so-called "sex boxes" during a doors open day at a sex drive-in recently unveiled by the city of Zurich which local authorities say it will enable them to keep closer tabs on prostitution, a year after voters backed the plan. Due to be opened officially on August 26, the nine boxes are located in a former industrial zone in the west of the metropolis. The site will be open daily from 7:00 pm to 5:00 am, and only to drivers, who must be alone in their vehicle if they want to pass the gate. AFP PHOTO / FABRICE COFFRINIFABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images

The drive-in garages, or sheds, have no doors to shut and come equipped with an emergency call button on the passenger side of the structure that sets off a flashing light and a loud alarm inside an adjacent office building where the city will post social workers specially trained to provide a measure of security. The Zurich police say they will beef up patrols around the perimeter to protect the sex workers when they leave and enter.

Modeled after the drive-in brothels used in several cities in Germany and the Netherlands, which have had mixed success improving safety, the sex boxes will be open daily from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. The city painted the outdoor bathrooms in soft pink and blue, strung colorful light bulbs among the trees and posted creative signs encouraging the use of condoms to spruce the place up a little and make it seem more pleasant.

We built the place to be secure for the sex workers. It also had to be discreet for the sex workers and the clientele. But we thought if we build the place, we can also make it look good

“We built the place to be secure for the sex workers. It also had to be discreet for the sex workers and the clientele,” said Michael Herzig of Zurich’s social welfare department. “But we thought if we build the place, we can also make it look good.”

Along with improving safety for prostitutes, the sex boxes are seen as a way to curb illegal trafficking among crime syndicates. Prostitution, escorts and massage parlours are a thriving business in a nation with wealthy and international clientele and tourists.

Zurich requires that street sex workers register with city and health authorities, and it offers health checks and requires that sex workers be at least 18 years old, in keeping with a Council of Europe convention on protecting children from exploitation and abuse.

In Switzerland, anyone who works in the sex trade must be at least 16, the legal age of sexual maturity. The income is taxed and subject to social insurance like any other economic activity.
But some cities have their own rules and some of the 26 Swiss cantons (states) have adopted separate legislation on prostitution. A special unit of the cantonal police force, usually the vice squad, carries out inspections of prostitutes in red light areas.

No video surveillance was installed at the sex boxes, so as not to scare off business, but also because police and city officials concluded after studying the handful of other such facilities in Europe that the only thing that would improve safety is an on-site security presence. To use the place, sex workers also must obtain a special permit, at a cost of 40 Swiss francs ($43) a year, and pay 5 francs ($5.40) a night in taxes, which helps the city offset maintenance costs.

“We can’t solve the whole problem of exploitation and human trafficking,” said Herzig, “but at least we want to reduce the harm, especially the violence.”

source: AP

The Middle East Explained In One Excellent Letter To The Editor

The letter ran in Thursday’s Financial Times.

An In-Your-Face Look at Handguns from Around the World

By Amanda Gorence

Smith and Wesson .38 revolver

Guns have a massive amount of power associated with them. They are designed to kill. We decided to photograph portraits of them in a similar way you might photograph a powerful person. Like powerful people, pistols have this ‘perfect’ quality that we wanted to explore. As we started shooting them, we could see flaws in their design. Metal burring around the barrels, scratches in the metal. This imperfection and detail were very interesting to us; connecting us back to these images as ‘portraits’.
We also loved the impossible perspective these portraits provided. Typically, when you see a gun at this range and perspective it’s usually seconds before the pistol is fired. This makes it very hard to examine at point blank range. As the viewer, you want to lean in and see the detail; but at the same time it’s very uneasy to be as close as you are to the barrel of a gun.—Peter Andrew

Point Blank is an ongoing series of handguns from around the world by Toronto-based photographer Peter Andrew, Simon Duffy and Derek Blais. Captured in extreme detail, the large-scale ‘portraits’ are undeniably in-your-face, lending an intensity you can’t turn away from. Andrew says they are meant to be studied like you would a face, the detail and imperfections found within building a story that make us wonder where they’ve been or why and how they’ve been used. The trio has photographed seven handguns thus far and continue to build the collection. The project was recently featured in the 2013 Communication Arts Photography Annual.

Desert Eagle

Uzi

Glock

Smith and Wesson 9mm

Rhino

Beretta

Ikea is worst in Customer Delivery

Ikea is so good at so many things. Why is it so bad at delivery?

By Jessica Winter

A woman sits at a model room in an Ikea store. Courtesy of epsos.de/Flickr

It all started because I wanted the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. Not a new, licensed reproduction—I wanted the scuffed-up, 1960-vintage Nelson Swag Leg Desk I found on eBay. It seemed to me mostly irrelevant that I could not afford the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. But my husband suggested a budgetary adjustment: Instead of pairing the Nelson Swag Leg Desk with pricey custom-built bookshelves as planned, we could economize with a jumbo set of Ikea’s Billy bookcases, which fit the appointed space almost to the centimeter. At first, I resisted this financially expedient arranged marriage of a modern-design icon to a prosaic dorm-room staple that I associated with beer pong and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Eventually, though, I started talking myself into the compromise. I tried to think of it as a chic high-low flourish, like Anna Wintour pairing couture with jeans on her first Vogue cover, or Mike D plonking a Target pouf smack in the middle of his otherwise ultra-customized Brooklyn townhouse. Or something.

We completed the order, absorbing the blunt force of the flat $99 delivery fee. But the odyssey of the Billy bookcase, we discovered, had only just begun.

• June 7. We buy the bookcase.
• June 13. We receive an email from Ikea: “Your order has departed from the IKEA Distribution Center.”
• June 16. We receive an email from a company called UX Logistics stating that our order is ready to deliver.
• June 16, Part II. Email from Ikea: “Your IKEA order is ready to be delivered. … You will receive a call within 2 to 3 business days to schedule your delivery date.”
• June 17. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 21.
• June 21. Another email from Ikea, asking to confirm our order.
• June 21, Part II. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 26.

And on and on and on. Each afternoon, my husband would call UX Logistics, who’d say something like, “We can’t deliver your item because it hasn’t arrived,” then call Ikea, who’d say, “They do have it—you need to call them back and find out why they’re not delivering it,” and so forth. At one point, my husband asked Ikea to cancel the home delivery so we could arrange to pick up the bookcase ourselves. Easy for all concerned, right? Wrong: Ikea claimed that cancelation of the delivery was impossible, because the bookcase had already been delivered—to UX Logistics, who said they didn’t have it. Even if we canceled the order outright, Ikea told us, we’d be on the hook for the delivery to the delivery company who hadn’t yet received the delivery.

It turns out that Ikea is not just a furniture retailer. It is also an epistemological time machine, casting into doubt everything we thought we knew about semantics and the space-time continuum and the ding an sich of particle board.

The nightmare of Ikea delivery is a truth so universally acknowledged that even the company cops to it. Chief marketing officer Leontyne Green talked about her own “very frustrating” Ikea delivery experience in a December 2011 Ad Age profile, which stressed the firm’s ongoing efforts to improve delivery and overall customer service. But as anyone who has found herself dissolving into the hypnotically well-appointed cattle chute of an Ikea showroom can tell you, this is not a company that does things by accident. The who’s-on-first shambles of Ikea delivery isn’t the flaw in the Eivor Cirkel rug. It’s instead a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. Here are five reasons why.

Ikea has no rational economic motive to offer halfway-decent delivery. Like many big-box retailers, Ikea outsources all its delivery. “With sporadic orders over a wide geographic area, Ikea would need a fleet of trucks that might be idle one day and not able to handle the load the next,” says Robert Shumsky, a professor of operations management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

Of course, other furniture retailers such as Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn juggle similar logistical challenges, but have nothing like Ikea’s reputation for delivery debacles. Ikea may be OK with this because it doesn’t have much competition in the bargain furniture business—there’s no one else selling couches quite so cheap. The company sees its customers as fundamentally different: thriftier, for sure, but also stronger, more resourceful, stoic in the face of challenge! According to Santiago Gallino, also a professor at the Tuck School, “Ikea’s target customers are consumers who prize ‘value,’ and are willing to spend their own time to save money”—by pulling items from the warehouse, assembling the items themselves, etc. “Asking the customer to spend time to come to the store is consistent with this segmentation strategy,” Gallino says.

Ikea, unlike so many other retailers, has little to fear from Amazon. Consumers are increasingly conditioned to assume that virtually any product—even heavy, unwieldy products—can land on their doorstep 24 hours or less after purchase. Just one case in point: the frighteningly fast and cheap deliveries of heavy bulk purchases available via the Amazon subsidiary wag.com. But Ikea is, at least for the time being, immune to these expectations. According to Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, “Amazon can disrupt anything that doesn’t have to be assembled or curated”—in other words, anything that isn’t Ikea. But heavy flat-pack furniture deliveries are a conundrum even Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet solved, and the most dazzling page of Amazon can’t begin to compete with any given IKEA alcove. “Yesterday, you didn’t know you needed a new strainer,” Frei says, “but today you do, because of how it was curated in the Ikea kitchen. Amazon can’t do that.”

Making you wait might make you happy. The longer we waited for Billy, it seems, the more we pined for Billy, which heightened our satisfaction when Billy did finally arrive. “The advantage of making people wait is that it creates a sense of anticipatory excitement,” says Michael Norton, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. Norton and Elizabeth Dunn’s recent book Happy Money makes the case that a pay-now-enjoy-later model of consumption leads to greater customer satisfaction than the enjoy-now-pay-later logic of, say, Amazon Prime.

Making you work might make you even happier. The 2011 article “‘The IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love”—written by Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely—argues that successfully assembling an Ikea product can lead us to value the item more than if the item arrived on our doorstep camera-ready. I jokingly ask Norton if my husband’s unpaid internship as an Ikea fulfillment manager might have created its own Ikea effect. “I’m not so sure the answer is no,” Norton says. “It was a real pain in the butt, but we do misattribute effort to liking, so he might actually like the bookcase more because getting it was such a hassle. There’s something about service recovery that creates a different, more meaningful experience.”

Or not. “Working as Ikea’s fulfillment and transport manager had no impact on my enjoyment of the shelves once they arrived,” my husband said in a statement to Slate.

Being icy and withholding is part of Ikea’s unique alchemy. “Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,” Frei says. “There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency—there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.” Ikea makes great stuff cheap—and that is the draw. Helping you obtain that stuff, or even find it in their store, is not part of their mission, which also explains why you’ll rarely spot an Ikea employee who isn’t either working a register or hauling purchases to the parking lot. “If you come to their showroom seeking out a specific thing and you can’t find it,” Frei says, “you’ll probably just go and buy an adjacent thing.”

Without meaning to, I recently tested this last hypothesis at my local Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shumsky had mentioned that he’d wanted to purchase a Spoka nightlight for his daughter, but Ikea doesn’t deliver this item and his nearest showroom is two and a half hours away. I’m only about five miles from mine, so after checking online that the Spoka was “most likely in stock” in Red Hook, I hopped on my bike to go buy one for him. But once I’d slowly wended through the endless floor displays to the lighting emporium, I couldn’t find the Spoka nightlight, or any nightlights at all, or anyone on the floor to help me find the nightlights, so I bought and ate an Ikea cinnamon bun and got back on my bike and rode home. I know that Ikea won’t lose any sleep over me and my failed nightlight quest (which cost them all of $15) or the Billy breakdown. But it’s still a little strange—a little analog, a little pre-Amazon and pre-Apple Store—to realize that a bad customer experience is part of the design of a good business strategy.

No One Wants To Be A Drone Pilot, U.S. Air Force Discovers

The Air Force's drone program is too unmanned for its own good.

By Kelsey D. Atherton 

Predator Drone Pilot Wikimedia Commons

While the vast majority of U.S. Air Force pilots still control their aircraft from inside the cockpit, about 8.5 percent are drone pilots who operate their vehicles remotely. That percentage is expected to grow, but there's a problem: the Air Force can't get enough people to volunteer for the training, according to a new report written by Air Force Colonel Bradley Hoagland for the Brookings Institution think tank.

Here's the challenge: Drones are usually chosen for jobs that are "dirty, dangerous, or dull"—with dull being the key word here. Some surveillance drones require round-the-clock shifts, and the very stressful work is so time intensive that drone pilots often cannot take advantage of additional training and education, which in turn dampens their prospects for career advancement, according to the study.
Burnout also seems to be a major concern, as drone pilots quit at three times the rate of manned aircraft pilots.

If the Air Force can figure out how to get more people to sign up for drone training, the problem should self-correct: A larger pool of drone pilots would hopefully mean shorter shifts and more time for career advancement.

One way to increase the number of drone pilots would be for the Air Force to alter its requirements for pilots. The Air Force only allows commissioned officers to fly drones, and commissioned officers must have a bachelor's degree in addition to technical training. By contrast, the Army allows warrant officers, who only need a high school diploma or GED, to fly both unmanned aircraft and helicopters.
Or, it just might be that actually flying through the air will always be more awesome that piloting an aircraft from the ground.