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Learning from the Price Club saga The Price Club saga has come to an end. Are we surprised? No, we are not. And will we learn from this sad event? It is clear that not all businessmen are what we imagine them to be. The ones that ran Price Club cannot be commended. If this is business acumen then we should be ashamed of ourselves. The management side of things left much to be desired. There is this taboo when it comes to businessmen not to trade comments or judicious opinions. This must change. What happened at Price Club is a shame. The attraction with Price Club was their pnce structures for products. The set up of the supermarkets was nothing to write home about, small lifts, steep ramps, very restricted parking and a not very user-friendly environment. Yet the customer and the creditors were overwhelmed by the novelty of such commerce and the Price Club became more and more popular. What happened to
the thousands of liri that were generated by the supermarket chain,
remains to be seen. The demise of the Price Club has provided an opportunity for the smaller retail outlets to regain some lost ground. The consumers have discovered the meaning of small is beautiful and the creditors have woken up to the fact (albeit too late in the day) that they too have committed errors by allowing too much credit. The lava from the Price Club explosion will spill into other sectors. Surely some will suffer more than others in terms of cash flow. But in a free market environment the pains on one side translate into gains for others. The consumer is not dead, nor is the demand, nor the thirst for consumer items. It is the supply chain that is having problems. We would welcome a business enterprise ~ (even foreign) with the expertise and organisation to inject a new dimension in this useful and essential service. Tackling problems rationally This Sunday’s front page story is shocking and revealing. As the silly billies from Greenpeace were hanging from an incinerator at St Luke’s Hospital, thousands of Maltese are living in constant danger from a man-made landfill and a vast uncontrolled incinerator at Maghtab. The incinerator at St Luke’s is a microscopic problem when compared to the flue gases and toxins that are emitted from so many other sources in Malta and neighbouring countries. But Greenpeace, as is usual for them, are populists, who search for the hysterical cases to justify the budgets that they receive on behalf of spoilt middle class Europeans. We do not agree with old age incinerators such as the one at St Luke’s but the solution is modemising with new incinerating technology. So, no amount of imperialist action by green yuppies will change the notion of this editorial, that the solution to the Maghtab question is a three tier approach. Landfill for solid waste, incineration for unrecyclable packaging and materials, and collection for export of recyclable material. We have to be reminded, just in case we have not been told by the GP folk, that we do not produce enough recyclable material to make it feasible for recycling, so our only solution is to export it. One should not be intimidated by Greenpeace. The solutions to our waste problem must be dictated by common sense. We also call for immediate action and we are in no mood to wait for more reports. The first steps that needs to be taken is to stop the burning at Maghtab. The second step is to seek alternative sites for solid construction waste, the third is to set up a safe depository for chemical waste and toxins and the fourth is to look into the viability of modern incineration and controlled feasible incineration. And finally, to outline a business plan for exporting recyclable waste. In the meantime,
the communities of the towns in the three kilometre diameter continue
to inhale the poisons that we talk about in this Sunday issue. |
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