Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2011 October 18

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October 18

Lee Harvey Oswald

Seeing as today would have been Lee Harvey Oswald's 72nd birthday, I am curious as to whether he has a cult following anywhere in the world? Thanks.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 05:54, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

I hope not. There seems to be a memorabilia market and that's about it. Cults need leaders with charisma. Dualus (talk) 07:19, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

OK, it's Trivia Time. Oswald shares something unusual with:

* 3 other US presidents – Andrew Jackson, Rutherford B. Hayes and Bill Clinton, and

* JFK’s niece Rory Kennedy (Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter).

They were all born posthumously. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 09:18, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Sirhan Sirhan seems to have such a following -- all through the 1970's and 1980's in several hijacking incidents etc. a number of Arab terrorists included his release as part of their lists of demands... AnonMoos (talk) 17:06, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

For once I was happy I couldn't find a result for a search. μηδείς (talk) 05:46, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Business That Couldn't Possibly Be Surviving on Sales Alone

I sat in front of a McDonald's all day every day for a week in the shabby, low-population town in which I live and observed how many people went in and how many cars went through the drive-through and found that the average daily number of customers was 42.5. I did the same all-day-week-long data collection exercise six months later and got an average of 45.6, so I feel pretty confident that I didn't just observe them on some uncharacteristic weeks. Even if I generously estimate that the average purchase was $10.00 and round up, this McDonald's is bringing in about $460 in revenue per day, or $13,800 per month. But I think about the building lease, franchise costs (there's a picture of the franchise owner inside--it's not corporate-owned), water, electricity, supplies like buns, meat, fries, etc..., and of course employee pay (there's usually five or six people that I can see in there), I don't see how this place could not be negative as far as the bills go for $13,800 per 30-day month. But this McDonald's has been where it is for years. Just thinking about five employees at $7.25 per hour from 6AM to 10PM (already ignoring the manager who probably doesn't make minimum wage) you've spent $580, or $17,400 per 30-day month before you've even paid the rent, franchise costs, or utilities. What could be keeping this place alive? I want to know likely sources of supplemental revenue for franchises that couldn't possibly be surviving on sales income alone. Peter Michner (talk) 18:24, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Franchises must not only turn a simple profit. They must turn a profit above and beyond the normal costs and franchise fees. Further, companies like McDonalds put more rules on profits, requiring each franchise to exceed normal profits or be shut down (usually, that means that the corporate office has the option to close the restaurant or take it over until another person wants to purchase the franchise). So, your estimates are clearly wrong. McDonalds will not allow a restaurant to continually fail. Have you taken into account the number of people who are purchasing meals for their families (who are not with them) or coworkers (who are not with them)? -- kainaw™ 18:30, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Not able to survive on sales alone...? Sounds a bit like Microsoft! [1]--Aspro (talk) 18:44, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

You spent an entire 112-hour week monitoring a local McDonalds?

Taking your numbers as given,(And assuming that you didn't take them on a weird week, like a school vacation) a couple of thoughts occur to me. First, some places survive on events. Is it located so that it'll get a lot of traffic when local high-school football games let out, then that could be keeping it alive.

Also, some fast food franchisers will do the majority of their cooking at a single central location, and then ship it out to the other locations owned by the same franchiser. I'm not sure if that works for a McDonalds though, that strategy is more of a donut-shop strategy. APL (talk) 18:55, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

I think Kainaw is right. A fair number of those customers must be placing orders for coworkers or family members that you don't see. Another factor is that the staffing will probably vary by time of day. There might be 5 or 6 staff on hand at peak times but only 2 or 3 when it's slow. Marco polo (talk) 19:11, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Large corporations will very often have particular locations where the individual location isn't making a profit. So why locate there? Their goal is market share. They want to make sure that on the whole, in a particular region, a certain percentage of people are getting their (fill in blank -- for McD's it's food / for Starbucks it's coffee / for CVS it's sundry goods, etcetera) from THEM, not someone else. This is why (at least where I am) you ALWAYS see a CVS directly across the street from a Walgreens (and I mean ALWAYS). It doesn't matter that each will suffer from the other's presence, they do it anyway to maximize market share.Greg Bard (talk) 21:52, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Going to have to dispute that. We have four CVS's within 20 minutes, but the nearest Walgreens is 45 minutes away. We have five Rite-Aids and one might be less than a mile from a CVS. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 14:30, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

This is an interesting point. I'll mention Hotelling's law, as I believe it is relevant to the situations you describe. It's worth noting as well that McDonald's operates a number of non-franchised locations that are directly owned and operated by the parent company; I suspect that among these are both high-profile locations and locations that are maintained purely to maintain brand presence and recognition in unprofitable markets. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:23, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

McDonald's average spending per visit and customer is much lower than $10. It's something like $3.6. See source [2]. Did you made any pause at possible peak times (including late at night)? How were you counting the cars, BTW? Could you see how many people were inside the cars? Why would they have 5-6 staff members, for less than 50 clients/day anyway? 88.8.75.87 (talk) 13:57, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Presumably they expect franchisees to adhere strictly to a minimum number of staff covering any time when open. Itsmejudith (talk) 14:00, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Leaving aside the likely flaws in the original poster's methodology and data (we're – I think rightly – skeptical that he spent two full 112-hour weeks doing nothing but collecting a precise and accurate count of customers) we should be careful not to assume that average values obtained for the entire restaurant chain are necessarily accurate for a given specific location. If there are a few local businesses which regularly send a clerk over to pick up lunch for the office/warehouse, that's going to heavily skew the number of meals served and average buy per customer at a low-traffic franchise. Locations which rely heavily on the purchase of inexpensive breakfast coffee-and-muffin deals will see a very different per-customer income from locations which sell a lot of Big Mac combos. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:23, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

But these 5-6 employees won't all be earning $7.25. An individual, who is under the age of 20, would get a wage of $4.25 an hour for the first 90 consecutive days of employment. Afterwards, a wage of $5.25 an hour until they reach the age of 20 years. McDonald's employees are notorious for being young and only employed for a short while. Anyway, if the OP really spent every day from 6AM to 10PM (that's16 hours), and did not count cars as 1 client, then I don't know how this business could be making money. 88.8.75.87 (talk) 14:35, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I think Peter Michner gave the $7.25 number because that is the minimum wage in his location (presumably the US). So all the employees would be making $7.25 or more. —Akrabbim^talk 16:46, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Right, we would need more information to know how much the McDonald's is paying, which is probably the legal local minimum, but not the federal minimum of ]$7.25. 88.8.75.87 (talk) 18:29, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

You need to sample repeatedly over an entire year. It's quite possible that the McDonalds survives off of seasonal traffic. I know one restaurant that does just that: it loses money every fall, winter, and spring, but makes it up with enormous profits in the summer. The key is that it's one meal's driving distance outside of a major city, so people going on vacation tend to stop there. --Carnildo (talk) 01:27, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

Historical Gini coefficients

Is there any standard place to look up historical Gini coefficients (wealth inequality) for arbitrary countries? I'm just curious if there is an correlation between Gini coefficients and social unrest/revolutions. I'd be curious in particular about Cuba and Russia just before their revolutions, Weimar Germany, Vietnam before their revolution against the French, and the Soviet Union just before its collapse, among other cases. I'd also be interested in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the same period, just as counter-examples to Cuba. --Mr.98 (talk) 20:24, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=INEQUALITY has some, but I'm not sure if you can coax what you want out of it. Gapminder has very sparse Gini index data and I don't know why. Increases in inequality are correlated with riots, and dozens of other things described at http://equalitytrust.org. Dualus (talk) 21:00, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Last time I checked the standard theories of mass social unrest near me, they emphasised a combination of large scale economic growth putting power in the hands of the proletariat, combined with perceived inequalities (ie, our old friends class formation and class consciousness). This is especially true regarding late war unrest (Petrograd strikes, German shop stewards, US Coal and Rail 1945-1946). This is true of the late 1960s. Gini might explain perceived inequalities—firstly class, and secondly within classes sectional advantage from growth. Fifelfoo (talk) 22:58, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Mr.98 -- About 50 years ago, there were some semi-classic studies of the French, Russian, etc. revolutions, which concluded that the time of maximum oppression was not the likeliest moment for a revolution to occur. Rather, it was when the lower classes experienced some glimmer of improvement in their conditions and expectation of further improved conditions, and felt their collective importance to society and potential power, but then felt that their possibility of a better life was being thwarted or blocked -- THAT was the point of maximum danger. AnonMoos (talk) 00:13, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

On the subject of getting a little and then demanding a lot, I always thought Czar Alexander the II was a telling case — he abolishes serfdom, implements various reforms, starts Russia on a liberalizing path... and what does he get for his trouble? Blown up... twice! (A fate narrowly avoided by Gorbachev as well. One senses that a "liberal czar" is just too oxymoronic for history to tolerate.) --Mr.98 (talk) 01:43, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Gini isn't a great proxy for a sense of labouring class improvement. Peasants are often quite happy to reproduce existing proportionate distributions of social wealth if they have person access to "acceptable" objective levels of wealth: the settlement of the forests in the 10th–12th centuries in England for example. Similarly, proletarians are often willing to accept declining proportions of social production (1978–current, total wage growth versus productivity growth); whereas they'll blanch when certain kinds of commodity become unavailable (housing in the US at the moment). Gini, as a measure of the exchange values in a capitalist economy, would tell a similar story in the US between 1995 and 2010. But the use value of the perceived mass access to housing isn't so very well covered. Fifelfoo (talk) 00:50, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think AnonMoos was implying that Gini was everything, or even a proxy for class improvement. I think he/she was just sensing the sort of thing I was interested in and presenting a slightly different aspect of it. I don't think that Gini is everything; I was just curious if one could see interesting trends there or not. --Mr.98 (talk) 01:39, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Fifelfoo, could you spell out what you mean about the settlement of the forests in England? With a source if you have one. Thanks. Itsmejudith (talk) 12:27, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I've stuffed up a bit here... I meant, of course, deserts, most deserts being woodlands in Europe. I know in the 12–13th century that high medieval Western european society was expanding economically through growth into lower yield lands, ie: people turning wastes into manorial production units with associated villages; or even free villages. But there was an economic crisis in that this was quantitative not qualitative expansion, and the areas were marginal under the prevailing productivity standards. I'm pretty sure this occurred with Royal land in England, Forest article; Our main article starts here; and, here's some references I gleaned from it: Cantor, Leonard (ed). (1982) "Introduction" in The English Medieval Landscape. London: Croom Helm. ISBN 9780709907077. at p19. Now I'm pretty bloody sure I read the same evidence in Annales stuff too. The guts of the matter is that there was legal and illegal expansion onto "waste" land, which improved peasant life quality (access to land, instead of waiting for 4 people to die to get a 1/4 share); but, that the relations of production didn't change. Yet when the Black Death comes along a little bit later, the relations change but land appears less accessable due to the farming system replacing the manorial system and so a peasants revolt. (I'm slightly tired, does this make sense?). Fifelfoo (talk) 15:15, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

I think Fifelfoo is suggesting that, while there might be a weak correlation between high Gini coefficients and revolutions, there is not a direct causal relationship. I think his attention instead to class consciousness is spot on. Up until recently, working-class people in the United States have generally shown little discomfort with dramatically rising Gini coefficients because 1) they have entertained the hope that they might attain greater wealth and 2) they have felt that the system was fair and that the rich had "earned" their position. (Note that I am using "working class" in the structural sense of people who derive most of their income from salaries and wages directly linked to their labor rather than from investments or positions (such as those of CEOs) involving a large degree of economic rent.) That is to say, in the United States the structural working class (as opposed to the smaller subset that is organized labor) has lacked much class consciousness. That may be starting to change, as working-class people who considered themselves "middle class" find themselves just as vulnerable to layoffs, outsourcing, permanent unemployment, and poverty as blue collar manual workers and begin to find common cause. Marco polo (talk) 14:40, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

My problem with saying, "it's not X, it's class consciousness" is that "class consciousness" seems to me rather empty as an explanatory phrase — it raises more questions than it answers. But that's another discussion for another day. --Mr.98 (talk) 12:25, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

World Income Inequality Database. Jørgen (talk) 17:48, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

On the side topic, maybe a better way to describe what happened than "settlement of the forests" is deforestation, or clearance of forests for agricultural expansion. This paper sheds some light. Marco polo (talk) 18:02, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

Jason Vale

I'm having trouble determining if the subject of the biography Jason Vale is the same as the individual mentioned in the results of this Google search. Any assistance would be appreciated. If it is the same person, is this appropriate material to add to the article? (complying with WP:BLP, of course) Gnome de plume (talk) 21:22, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Two Separate Jason Vales, see [3] for details of this one from his publisher and [4] for the other Jason Vale 15:40, 21 October 2011 (UTC)