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Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

asia.nikkei.com

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Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#41

Post by Mvandenbergh »

impendia wrote: post #29
ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US demand and overseas markets can't cancel out Supply and Demand and market forces. - Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. Each year there will be less customers and less profit world wide. - He could have sold the machine to another entreprenuer? Their company makes 45 MILLION sticks of chalk. They're getting their materials at a high bulk discount. Another company can never match the price po…

> Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. I am a math professor. Most of us prefer chalk, and have no desire to go to whiteboards, smart boards, Powerpoints, what have you. I think that there is a fairly durable market for chalk. Moreover, over the last five years I think that awareness of Hagoromo (and more generally, of high-end chalk) has been growing. You see it for the first time when visiting…

Unfortunately there simply aren't very many math professors. An average American school district has 200 teachers, all of whom would have used chalk until recently, that's a lot more than there are professors in a university math department and there are many more school districts than universities.

I agree that there is a durable market for chalk, but not at this kind of volume.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#42

Post by drzaiusapelord »

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #16
kriro wrote: post #12

This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much…

It seems the preference is shifting towards dry-erase boards.

Which themselves are being, albeit slowly, replaced by mobile technology, surface-type screens, computers attached to projectors, etc. I imagine the market for chalk are all die-hards, like say, vinyl record enthusiasts today. If you were to use internet outrage as your own metric you'd think it was a huge market. Its not.

Chalk is two generations behind at this point. Its probably not too great to be breathing in all day either, at least for some of the population:

The study, published in the journal Indoor and Built Environment, ruefully concludes: "Though real-time airborne chalk dust generation was found to be low in this study … and did not contain toxic materials, chalk dust could be harmful to allergic persons and may cause lacrimation and breathing troubles in the long run and certainly is a constant nuisance in classrooms as it may soil clothes, body parts, audiovisual aids and study materials."

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/nov/28/chalk-dust-...

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#43

Post by rmc »

creshal wrote: post #14
kriro wrote: post #12

This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much…

> It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. I have no idea why, but with Japanese companies it's a common theme. Most don't even care about overseas expansion, and if they do, it's poorly executed (say, Daihatsu, who dicked around on the European market for decades without ever listening to even trivial customer wishes, and then wrote the whole business off because it "obviously…

It's common amoung US companies as well. How many tech companies aren't available in !USA? How much "streaming TV shows" aren't available in !USA?

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#44

Post by sevensor »

polymatter wrote: post #23
pmr_ wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That much should be clear, my (unfortunately) implicit question is: how can we instruct a machine to optimize for the very intangible things everybody seems to love so much about this chalk? What about the more subtle economic things (like signals of economic climate and value of quality).

optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.

Regardless of what metric you choose, Arrow's Paradox will bite you. Single-objective optimization will always force you to ignore good alternatives.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#45

Post by phkahler »

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #16
kriro wrote: post #12

This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much…

It seems the preference is shifting towards dry-erase boards.

>> It seems the preference is shifting towards dry-erase boards.

I'm not letting my daughter write on the driveway with markers ;-)

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#46

Post by gcb0 »

ansible wrote: post #40
wlesieutre wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention I've never had a piece of chalk dry out. Seems whenever I try to use a whiteboard, the first 5 markers I try don't write and I have to spend 15 minutes hunting for spares. And if you have a "sort of working" marker, which is what I'd usually end up with, it won't write very dark and the whiteboard text has worse contrast than a chalkboard.

What drives me up a wall is when people find a non-working marker... and then put it back! No! Throw it away! It is better to have no markers than have non-working ones. That is an easy and clear signal that it is time to find / buy more markers.

can't you just drip alcohol into the dry ones to get them back to working condition?

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#47

Post by gcb0 »

pmr_ wrote: post #10
fsloth wrote: post #8

The main reason, apparently: "These days, local governments focus on bid prices rather than quality." High quality commodities are considered nowadays luxury and not bare minimum. Quite sad, really.

I think the statement following this is much more important and interesting to HN: > The tendency has become more and more prevalent under electronic auction systems. While incidents like this are often used as examples of the failures of technocracy, I think the problem is elsewhere. A decision process has been out-sourced to a machine that is not smart enough yet to make a good decision. The decision might be good…

i bet on the other side there are teachers complaining about the quality of chalk they end up getting. this is nothing but a case of the employee responsible for inputting the auction parameters being a lazy bastard and not talking to the people that used the product he is buying in great quantities.

it's all a matter of doing your job right. despite the fact that a machine will help you with some portion of it.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#48

Post by fweespeech »

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #41
impendia wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. I am a math professor. Most of us prefer chalk, and have no desire to go to whiteboards, smart boards, Powerpoints, what have you. I think that there is a fairly durable market for chalk. Moreover, over the last five years I think that awareness of Hagoromo (and more generally, of high-end chalk) has been growing. You see it for the first time when visiting…

Unfortunately there simply aren't very many math professors. An average American school district has 200 teachers, all of whom would have used chalk until recently, that's a lot more than there are professors in a university math department and there are many more school districts than universities. I agree that there is a durable market for chalk, but not at this kind of volume.

It'd qualify as a lifestyle business if you were just looking to make $50-60k USD/year.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#49

Post by Giorgi »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #25
kriro wrote: post #12

This whole saga pretty much has to inspire someone to build and reverse engineer the machine/recipe. The overlap of people who like to tinker with this stuff and people who love the chalk seems big enough. It's also interesting that they seem to be somewhat oblivious of the US demand. At least it seemed like that. My guess is that they could have sold one of the machines to a US based entrepreneur. I can pretty much…

US demand and overseas markets can't cancel out Supply and Demand and market forces. - Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. Each year there will be less customers and less profit world wide. - He could have sold the machine to another entreprenuer? Their company makes 45 MILLION sticks of chalk. They're getting their materials at a high bulk discount. Another company can never match the price po…

Oh yeah? try drawing 3D painting on the street with marker.

Re: Hagoromo president explains why he closed down his beloved chalk business

#50

Post by tokenizerrr »

fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #27
polymatter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

optimise by a score. score is calculated as a function of price and some quality metric. unfortunately this can get complex.

Right, a specification for chalk is for chalk, uncolored, and or colored. There is no way to specify for quality.

Sure there is. Sadly you'll need humans for that part, though. You could get several humans who all get a sample of each supplyers chalk, and then ask them to rate the quality of each on one (or several) scales. The computer can then integrate this rating with the rest of its metrics.
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