Spend, Spend, Spend (2011-04-02)
For those who can't go to the evacuation centers to volunteer help for tsunami victims, on top of donating money, we can help the economy by spending!
Last Saturday was a beautiful sunny day (although cold and windy),
KL
and I went to Kichijoji (
) for lunch, afternoon tea and some shopping.
What better restaurant to eat at than Rikyu which uses beef
tongue from Sendai, one of the quake-damaged cities? After a
thoroughly enjoyable meal, we walked around and looked for one of the
items on our shopping list: batteries.
Not that we needed batteries for our flashlight because we don't
have power cuts in our suburb, nor were we panic buying emergency
supplies like so many others. But our stove just happened to pick
last week to signal for new batteries (for ignition)!
D and C size batteries are still in extremely short supply and were
sold out in all the shops we looked. So we got gas canisters for
our portable stove as a backup plan. And as the way the cosmic world
would have it: right after we bought our canisters, we saw two people
selling batteries on the street, hawker style!
True to the news I watched last week about how many Japanese rushed
to Seoul to stock up on water, flashlights and batteries, those two
people were selling Korea-made batteries. The amazing thing is
their prices were the same as in the stores. But I heard that
Korean batteries are a lot cheaper than Japanese batteries, maybe even
without price gouging, those two people would still make a handy profit.
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