Sublime

Grasse was busy, crowded, and workmanlike. It fell into the perfume business through a combination of luck, sheep, buffalo, and Catherine de Médici. In the Middle Ages, Grasse was a tanning town, treating sheepskins from Provence and buffalo hides from Italy. Part of the process required the use of aromatic herbs (and if you’ve ever smelt a tannery

The people in the stores were long-tenured, partly because most of our full-timers had risen from the ranks of the part-timers; and partly because of the slow growth of the number of stores, so there weren’t scads of promotion opportunities.

Our goals at that time were pretty modest: we wanted to have enough cash to go down to Wawa and get a quarter pound of honey-roasted turkey, a quarter pound of pepper-jack cheese, iced tea or lemonade, and a roll.

With most of our basic needs taken care of, businesses increasingly try to create needs, feeding the illusion that more stuff we don’t really need—more possessions, the latest fashion, a more youthful body—will make us happy and whole.

How ingenious that Dieter Schwarz who had made it possible to buy granola for a quarter of the price you could get it for in Japan.