Super 88 in Allston/Brighton: One Chinese supermarket fails, another rises in its place

(Photos at bottom of post) I returned to the Boston area ten years ago after living overseas for most of the 1990s. One thing that immediately struck me was the demographic changes wrought by the influx of immigrants from countries that had been closed off for many decades, or had never sent many people in the first place. They included Brazilians in Framingham, Russians in Brookline and Newton, and mainland Chinese immigrants moving to towns and cities inside and outside Route 128.

I was most interested in the mainland Chinese, not only because I could communicate with them, but also because many settled outside of the areas that earlier groups from Hong Kong, Guangdong, and Taiwan, as well as overseas Chinese from Vietnam, had established along the Chinatown/Quincy axis. The new wave from Mandarin-speaking areas of mainland China included businesspeople, laborers and restaurant workers, and a massive number of highly educated people who had either come to the Boston area for graduate school or had settled here to work in the computer industry and IT, hospitals, and biotech companies. Many bought houses or rented in the western suburbs. There were many reasons for doing so, including easier commutes and good public schools. But there was another reason, too: Ethnic Chinese communities had reached a critical mass in several areas (including Newton) and new arrivals were drawn by the presence of other Chinese people, businesses and services.

However, some of the businesses and services took a few years to catch up. While food is a central aspect of Chinese culture, I noticed that the spread of Chinese supermarkets to areas where the new immigrants had settled was slower. In 1999 and 2000, buying Chinese cooking ingredients involved a trip to Chinatown or one of the smaller Korean markets in Newton or Cambridge. But from 2002-2004, a number of medium-sized Chinese markets opened up west of Boston, including one in Newton Corner and another off Route 60 in Waltham. However, the biggest splash came when Super 88 (a supermarket chain that we had known from its cramped location in the South End) opened up in Allston where Brighton Ave. meets Comm Ave., right on the Green Line and Boston University's western edge. It was very large and had a great Asian food court and two parking lots.

It was an instant hit. We visited there a week or two after it opened and saw families literally running to the store from the nearest T stop. Local students loved the food court. We started going there once every few months, to stock up on certain ingredients that were hard to find elsewhere -- Taiwan rice wine, shuijiao, special vegetables, etc.

But then something strange happened with Super 88. Around 2007 or early 2008 we noticed shortages of certain items in the Allston store. By late 2008 the shelves had a very limited selection, and there were few other customers in the store. This was a problem for us, because by that time the other Chinese supermarket we frequented in Waltham had gone out of business and we hated dealing with parking in Chinatown. I checked on the Allston Super 88 in August of this year when I visited the Asian food court (which was thankfully still thriving) but was shocked to see the grocery store's cash registers had been pushed back 30 feet and the shelves were nearly bare.

Obviously the business was having problems, and the Boston Globe had some articles which hinted at what was happening: Trouble over wages, creditors who said they weren't paid, and the owners filing for bankruptcy.

But we visited Super 88 this weekend after having lunch at the excellent Japanese ramen place adjacent to the food court, and were surprised to see fully stocked shelves, Cantopop playing in the aisles, and items like fuzzy squash, frozen duck (head on), and Cow brand body soap for sale (see pictures below) -- proof that a new chain, the Hong Kong Supermarket, was indeed taking over. The staff are still wearing Super 88 uniforms, but the bags say Hong Kong Supermarket and I expect that the big sign outside will change over soon, too.

Pictures from today's trip to the market:

 

 

(See some of the comments about this post/issue on Universal Hub)


Other posts by Ian Lamont:

• Autumnal
• Another print publication throws in the towel, GateHouse/CNC picks up the pieces
• Robot overlords take over suburbia
• Taiwan double takes, 1993-2009
• Robots and politics, or would the real candidate please stand up?
• Before there was the Rte. 128 technology corridor ...
• China's Charter 08 and the Chinese Internet

The crisis in journalism: Short-term hope, long-term uncertainty

It's a tough time to be a journalist, but at the same time I see some reasons to be optimistic. I thought I would share some of my thoughts about what's going on, and offer some insights into where the news industry is headed.

First, the state of the industry today:

• A seemingly never-ending cascade of layoffs and restructuring, especially at older publishers which used to enjoy monopoly or oligopoly status. 
• An inability on the part of publishers and advertisers to find an online business model that works. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has some bizarre concepts about the way the online news ecosystem should operate, but when it comes to online advertising he is right on target: "There is an almost infinite increase in inventory for websites and for display," he noted earlier this year. This results in a great deal of "downward pressure" on CPMs. 
• A broken system of journalism education: Too many students with unrealistic expectations, too many programs that are preparing too many people for careers that don't exist (this fall, 49 percent of students in the Columbia journalism masters program are in the print track), and too many teachers with impeccable 20th-century credentials but little online media experience.
• Widespread unwillingness in sales and editorial departments to let go of old ways of doing things and experiment with/expand new initiatives.

So who will save journalism? I'm encouraged by inroads made by blog-based news sites and new news technologies. TechCrunch's "Scamville" exposé of Facebook gaming ripoffs put the New York Times' lapdog coverage of the industry to shame. I regularly use Techmeme and Twitter to keep abreast of what's going on in the world, and to monitor interesting online discussions.

But these services can't replace quality reporting and investigations. It's simply too expensive for current online business models to support. In the short to medium term, I see an opportunity for local and national television news websites to pick some of the slack -- they have far more robust advertising-based revenue streams than newspapers and magazines, and some broadcast outlets (at least in Boston) have proven to be avid users of new technology and shown a willingness to experiment with ways in which online and video content can be integrated. They are taking some important steps toward reinventing themselves online, and that's a good thing.

Long-term, however, broadcasters' rich revenue model will fade, as advertisers move away from expensive 30-second video clips and demand more interactivity and engagement from their campaigns. What will replace it? That's the billion-dollar question that publishers are trying to figure out. Until they do, many sectors of the news industry will continue to downsize and disintegrate, as fast-moving broadcasters and technology-driven upstarts pick up some of the pieces.

Sources and research: Twitter, WFXT Facebook page and website, WBZ website, New York Times website, TechCrunch, Fake Steve Jobs blog, IAB website, Poynter Online

Related blog posts by Ian Lamont:

• The business of media: The newsosaur speaketh
• Boston Globe advertising: What's wrong with this picture
• Google News: Biased or broken?
• Boston Globe relaunches forums, but they're doing it all wrong
• What is the future of print publications?
  

The Social Enterprise

Since September, I've been experimenting with a new blogging focus on The Industry Standard. The blog is called "The Social Enterprise," and it's all about how companies and large organizations are dealing with technologies relating to collaboration, communication, and community. It's a rich topic area that lets me talk about the various networked technologies that are transforming the workplace, from Google Apps to Second Life.

Naturally, there is also a big focus on social networks. For instance, this week I had a chance to write about Salesforce.com's new "Chatter" tool. Here's an excerpt:

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it probably is a duck. That is, unless you're Salesforce.com, and you're talking about its new Chatter application. While observers have looked at features like profiles, status updates, Twitter and Facebook integration as proof that Chatter is an enterprise-grade social network, the company and its executives are taking pains to call it something else -- a "social platform," or, as carefully noted by Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff, a collaboration tool …

"The Social Enterprise" has also led to some opportunities to share my thoughts on other sites and Twitter, and take part in a panel discussion on enterprise social technologies at a Bentley University entrepreneurship class a few days ago.

But my Industry Standard blog is my main outlet. Here are some posts which illustrate the kinds of topics and technologies I'm writing about:

• Real-time search and Twitter: What's in it for corporate America?
  
• The write-once, run-anywhere dream fades as languages and platforms proliferate 
• Microsoft vs. Google: When it comes to the cloud, it's war  
• Amazon Relational Database Service hits the cloud, but users wonder what will happen to SimpleDB   
• Outside the U.S., alternate social networks grow under Facebook's shadow
• Abandoned sims in Second Life: Don't forget to turn out the lights 
• Social networking in hospitals: A nuisance and liability, or "important adjunct" to traditional communication? 
• Readers respond: Apple Inc. and the "unpleasant odor" of social media  
• A lesson from the Sidekick's cloud failure: Personal phones are used for work
  

The business of media, part II: Blame journalists' ethical lapses?

A comment left on the Poynter journalism website, in response to the news that Jack and Suzy Welch are giving up their BusinessWeek column:

"... Can someone please tell me why Suzy Welch was allowed to write an article on workplace ethics and workplace romances? We bemoan the fact that publications have no credibility, and then turn the podium over to the Jayson Blairs and Suzy Welchs of the world. Noted plagiarist/fabricator Mike Barnicle's star never dimmed, thanks to unfailing support from his television news cronies. The list goes on. And we wonder why people don't want to pay for the content."

Backstory: Suzy Welch, nee Wetlaufer, was a Harvard Business Review editor who started a romantic relationship with Welch after interviewing him -- but didn't reveal the relationship in a timely fashion, even though her interview was about to be published. The result was a staff revolt at the Review, and Wetlaufer's eventual resignation.

But it's a bit harsh to cite isolated incidents such as these as the reasons behind the publics' unwillingness to pay for online content. Yes, people get angry about these incidents, and gripe about perceived biases and shallow coverage. Yet most do like learning about what's going on in the world around them. But they've been conditioned to expect it for free. In addition, the huge increase in the number of potential sources online lessens their dependence upon the mainstream media outlets which until recently held a near monopoly on news and other information.

Related blog posts by Ian Lamont:

• The business of media: The newsosaur speaketh
• Boston Globe advertising: What's wrong with this picture
• Google News: Biased or broken?
• Boston Globe relaunches forums, but they're doing it all wrong
• What is the future of print publications? 

Office for Mac alternatives: Google Docs

A friend wrote to me about an Office for Mac crash, which wiped out her Entourage email on her MacBook. She asked what I would recommend to avoid such a situation in the future -- perhaps switching to a Dell?

In my opinion, switching to a Windows-based Dell would be a mistake. I use Windows XP on two laptops (Sony and Lenovo) and am constantly frustrated by unexplained Office crashes, long startup times, bad UI design, and problems with OS and software updates. A new Dell might minimize some of these problems (if the reviews of Windows 7 are to be believed) but I am skeptical, based on my past experience with Microsoft products, and the known security problems with Windows in general.

So what's my recommendation to avoid the data loss headaches that my friend experienced? The basic solution involves backing up data regularly. When I was grinding through my grad school thesis, I often used the "email to self" trick on my old iMac (i.e., copies of Word docs and Excel spreadsheets were saved in my Web-based email program) as well as manual backups to DVDs and later an attached external drive. But now better solutions can be found in Google's "cloud," as well as OS X itself. Here's what I told her:

1) If you are using Office for mostly basic functions (simple word processing, spreadsheets, email) switch to Google Docs. This is a super, free Office-like suite which is fine for the basics, backs up regularly and efficiently, and only requires a browser to work. Even if your Mac blows up you'll still have access to the files. You can also set up an "offline sync" which saves copies of your files to your hard drive, which is useful if you are using the laptop on a plane where no Internet access is available. The files are only viewable by you by default, but you can share them with others too (you have to give them permission and they need to have a Google account as well). For email, you can use Gmail to access your entourage email (or just back it up) but the setup may be a little technical. All of this is FREE and works on Macs or PCs with no special software installations (all you need is a browser and a Google account). The main problems with Google Docs is a lack of a "track changes" feature and no advanced formatting options for major projects ...

2) Get an external hard drive and back up all your data on your MacBook automatically, using "Time Machine" (see it in "System Preferences"). An external hardrive should be less than $100, but once you set up the Time Machine, your machine will make backups of your data every hour, if you want, and it's relatively easy to resurrect an old archive if you have a crash with Office or your computer.

I use both Google Docs and Time Machine, and really like the functionality and ease-of-use of both applications. That said, Google Doc's Achilles Heel is the password that protects them from other users accessing them. If you don't use a strong password, or someone is able to get their hands on it, your files stored in Google Docs may be at risk from being seen by others or deleted (there are, however, security settings that lessen this risk for enterprise users). If Google can figure out a solution to this problem for normal users (as well as the "track features" issue noted above) I predict Google Docs will really start to make some inroads against the MS Office juggernaut.

Louis Menand and the American PhD problem

When reading magazines in the evening, I don't usually mark up articles with notes, highlighted sections, and other marginalia, but the most recent issue of Harvard Magazine features a book excerpt that absolutely warrants it.

The excerpt is from Professor Louis Menand's forthcoming book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, and examines various problems afflicting the American PhD system. I was skeptical at first (he presented some generalizations about advanced professional and liberal arts degrees with which I disagreed) but his arguments and use of educational data were ultimately quite convincing.

His thesis: The supply/demand equation for PhD students in the humanities and some social sciences fields has been thrown excessively out of whack since 1970 thanks to a number of factors, including a decreased need for specialists (not so many undergraduate English majors to teach now, compared to 40 years ago) and the near absence of demand for PhDs outside of academia in many fields.

Another problem highlighted by Menand is the huge amount of time that most graduate students in the humanities take to finish their degree requirements -- nine or ten is typical for an English major, compared to three years for a law degree. He writes:

"That it takes longer to get a Ph.D. in the humanities than it does in the social or natural sciences (although those fields also have longer times-to-degree than they once did) seems anomalous, since normally a dissertation in the humanities does not require extensive archival, field, or laboratory work. William Bowen and Neil Rudenstine, in their landmark study In Pursuit of the Ph.D., suggested that one reason for this might be that the paradigms for scholarship in the humanities have become less clear. People are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization. Inquiry in the humanities has become quite eclectic without becoming contentious. This makes it a challenge for entering scholars to know where to make their mark."

Menand's conclusions are ultimately quite logical: The processes governing the PhD system are inefficient, and society ultimately loses. Some of his quotes:

"... there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get."

And:

"The obstacles to entering the academic profession are now so well known that the students who brave them are already self-sorted before they apply to graduate school. A college student who has some interest in further education, but who is unsure whether she wants a career as a professor, is not going to risk investing eight or more years finding out. The result is a narrowing of the intellectual range and diversity of those entering the field, and a widening of the philosophical and attitudinal gap that separates academic from non-academic intellectuals. Students who go to graduate school already talk the talk, and they learn to walk the walk as well. There is less ferment from the bottom than is healthy in a field of intellectual inquiry. Liberalism needs conservatism, and orthodoxy needs heterodoxy, if only in order to keep on its toes."

Finally, the excerpt reads:

"It is important for research and teaching to be relevant, for the university to engage with the public culture and to design its investigative paradigms with actual social and cultural life in view. That is, in fact, what most professors try to do—even when they feel inhibited from saying so by the taboo against instrumentalist and presentist talk. Professors teach what they teach because they believe that it makes a difference. To continue to do this, academic inquiry, at least in some fields, may need to become less exclusionary and more holistic. That may be the road down which the debates I have been describing are taking higher education.

But at the end of this road there is a danger, which is that the culture of the university will become just an echo of the public culture. That would be a catastrophe. It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate. Academics need to look to the world to see what kind of teaching and research needs to be done, and how they might better train and organize themselves to do it. But they need to ignore the world’s demand that they reproduce its self-image."

Menand's concerns are valid. There absolutely is room for open thinking, improvement, and outright reform in graduate education, as well as in the dissemination and discussion of ideas and research.

At the same time, I have to wonder what sorts of marvelous research, insights and knowledge transfer would be stifled were the American PhD system mechanically aligned to the supply/demand curve. My bookshelves and hard drives contain some remarkable, thought-provoking works on the impact of printing on European society, the rise of virtual communities based on commercial videogames, and modern Chinese history that started out as obscure dissertations or post-doc research projects. Would such scholarship exist in a more rigid environment? I'm not so sure. While technology opens up many possibilities for independent research and publishing endeavors, the sheltering, supportive and serendipitous environments found in graduate school programs across the country are where the sparks of transformative ideas are more likely to be struck, fanned, and fed.

Some of my other education-related posts:

• More distance education commentary from Harry Lewis, ClueHQ, and yours truly
• Review: The Gates Unbarred: A History of University Extension at Harvard, 1910-2009
• A giant step for ALM thesis research
• Follow-up: My online education experience
• Thoughts on academic publishing, electronic archives, and Scribd
• A final farewell to Randy Pausch
• Gary North on the Ph.D. "Glut"  

The business of media: The newsosaur speaketh

What do you get when Harvard's Shorenstein Center holds a seminar entitled "How to Make Money in News: New Business Models for the 21st Century" for journalists, and the audience is (mostly) composed of people from the journalism establishment?

Depends who you talk with. The Wiki notes from the gathering touched on nonprofit models and Twitter and blogs, but the Newsosaur opined that it was pretty much the same old people talking about the same old things, and little in the way of new solutions were brought to the table. He said:

With all due respect to my dedicated and talented colleagues, we need to try something different. Next time, we need to hear from people we don’t know, exploring things we don’t know about and examining potentially useful solutions we have yet to consider.

I believe the newsosaur is right. Many media experts naturally turn to the old models and assumptions that they're most familiar with. They generally talk with each other, as opposed to developers, entrepreneurs, and business development people. It's hard for them to think outside the box unless they are actively looking, listening and experimenting on their own.

And when it comes to business models, they're usually not. Most journalists (and many publishers) refuse to stray too far from their comfort zones (see Boston Globe advertising: What's wrong with this picture?). They may try out new content-related tools (such as blogs and Twitter) but don't consider the revenue impact. In certain cases, they feel the new information order is a threat that must be litigated in order to protect their businesses (see An open letter to Gatehouse Media, editor Greg Reibman, and other Newton Tab staff). If they neglect to open up to new ways of thinking on the business side, they will almost certainly fail, no matter how dedicated they are to democracy, truth, and the standards of the print age.