Imponderables Page 8
The nice thing about deciding which shampoo to use and how often to use it is that the decision is almost entirely inconsequential. Regardless of what your hairdresser tells you (or tries to sell you), no over-the-counter shampoo is going to wreck your hair. And none will make it beautiful. Even Consumer Reports can't get too worked up about differences among shampoos. In its September 1984, issue, CR had a panel rate 61 different shampoos. The result: no consistently strong preferences, and a pronounced tendency for women to like different shampoos than men. As an experiment, Consumer Reports added Octagon Dishwashing Liquid to its blind testing (dishwashing liquid can cost as much as ten times less than shampoos). The result: The dishwashing liquid fell a little below average in the panelists' preferences. Consumer Reports, as well as several marketers Imponderables spoke to, believes that the fragrance might be the most important ingredient in determining the success of a shampoo.
Some consumers are reticent about shampooing their hair twice a day and then using a conditioner. They notice some extra hairs gravitating toward their bathtub drain and wonder whether their shampoo and/or conditioner is to blame. A few more stray hairs may exit toward the drain, but shampooing doesn't do any permanent damage to your scalp. The average person sheds 50-100 hairs a day, and each of them will be replaced by the follicles. On any given day, 90 percent of your hair is growing (in what is called its anagen phase). The anagen phase lasts approximately three years. Some 10 percent of your hair is in its telogen or resting phase, which lasts approximately 100 days. In the resting phase, the hair follicle weakens and eventually the hair shaft comes out. Hormonal changes in the body are more likely to create shedding than is overshampooing. The reason our hair thins as we get older is that some follicles simply stop growing, not because we have abused our hair.
Scientists still cannot always pinpoint the exact cause, but many factors can create severe hair loss. In his book, Everything You Need to Know to Have Great Looking Hair, Louis Gignac lists the main causes of hair loss: “toxic amounts of Vitamin A; post-partum alopecia (hair loss after pregnancy, due to a shift in the hormonal balance); chemotherapy; stress and tension; certain hormone-altering drugs; thyroid imbalance; anemia; high fever; and diabetes.” Local infections, some antibiotics, and cortisone can also precipitate hair loss.
Dandruff is a collection of scales of dead skin on the scalp. These dead skin cells, known as the keratin layer, peel off from other parts of the body as well and rise from the epidermis to the surface of the scalp so that newer, healthier cells can be regenerated. The keratin layer is most noticeable on the scalp because of the tendency of dandruff to shed on clothes and to contrast in color with dark-colored hair. Dandruff is a problem of the scalp, not of the hair, and as you might guess from its formal medical term, seborrheic dermatitis, is usually the product of overactive sebaceous glands rather than poor maintenance of the hair.
Many medicated shampoos, designed to help dandruff problems, direct shampooers to leave the lather on the hair for up to five minutes before rinsing. Although this instruction might seem like voodoo, there is a logical basis for the request. Dandruff shampoos contain active ingredients that need time to work. Salicylic acid, one of the most popular active ingredients in dandruff shampoos, promotes the peeling of dandruff. Zinc, another popular active ingredient (the active ingredient in Head and Shoulders), and sulfur also are effective against dandruff even though nobody knows why they work. For most people, regular shampooing with any product will help eliminate excess dandruff; although Head and Shoulders received higher than average marks from the Consumer Reports panel, many non-dandruff formulations fared as well or better.
When any shampoo eliminates dandruff, it does not eliminate the condition that caused the dandruff. Most dandruff shampoos work by having the active ingredient promote the peeling of flakes. By letting dandruff flakes fall freely into your bathtub drain, you keep them from falling all over your navy-blue blazer.
Why is June the most popular month for weddings?
Yes, June is the month when most schools break for vacation and when weather is appropriate for outdoor weddings, but these truths don't explain why June has been, since ancient times, a popular month for weddings. Like many contemporary customs, the popularity of June weddings has mythological origins.
The month of June is named after Juno, the Roman goddess of marriage and young people. Juno was reputed to take a proprietary interest in couples married during “her” month. An ancient Roman proverb counseled: “Prosperity to the man and happiness to the maid when married in June.”
There is a more compelling reason why so many weddings are performed in June: May has been long considered the unluckiest month to marry. The sentiments expressed in the superstitious couplet “Marry in May, and rue the day” probably date back to Roman times. The month of May honors Maia, a Roman earth goddess, the consort of Vulcan and, most damaging to her month's wedding public relations, the patroness of old people.
Evidence indicates that the main reason June weddings proliferated in modern times was that the superstition about May marriages enabled June to fill its own quota plus some of May's postponed weddings as well.
By the twentieth century, the fear of May nuptials subsided considerably in the United States, but the glamour of June weddings remains. Juno has no reason to be complacent, however. For while June still attracts a disproportionate quantity of weddings, June brides and grooms have the same divorce rate as those poor unfortunates who marry in the month of Maia.
Why do other people hear our voices differently than we do?
We have probably all had this experience. We listen to a tape recording of ourselves talking with some friends. We insist that the tape doesn't sound at all like our voice, but everyone else's sounds reasonably accurate. “Au contraire,” the friend retorts. “Yours sounds right, but I don't sound like that.” According to speech therapist Dr. Mike D'Asaro, there is a universal pattern of rejection of one's own voice. Is there a medical explanation?
Yes. Speech begins at the larynx, where the vibration emanates. Part of the vibration is conducted through the air—this is what your friends (and the tape recorder) hear when you speak. Another part of the vibration is directed through the fluids and solids of the head. Our inner and middle ears are parts of caverns hollowed out by bone—the hardest bone of the skull. The inner ear contains fluid; the middle ear contains air; and the two are constantly pressing against each other. The larynx is also surrounded by soft tissue full of liquid. Sound transmits differently through the air than through solids and liquids, and this difference accounts for almost all of the tonal differences we hear when reacting negatively to our own voice on a tape recorder.
When we listen to our own voice while we speak, we are not hearing solely with our ears, but also through internal hearing, a mostly liquid transmission through a series of bodily organs. During an electric guitar solo, who hears the “real” sound? The audience, listening to amplified, distorted sound? The guitarist, hearing a combination of the distortion and the predistorted sound? Or would a tape recorder located inside the guitar itself hear the “real” music? The question is moot. There are three different sounds being made by the guitarist at any one time, and the principle is the same for the human voice. We can't say that either the tape recorder or the speaker hears the “right” voice, only that the voices are indeed different.
Dr. D'Asaro points out that we have an internal memory of our voice in our brain, and the memory is invariably richer than what we hear in a tape recorder playback. Although there seems to be no consistent pattern in whether folks hear their voices as lower or higher pitched than other listeners, there is no doubt that internal hearing is of much higher fidelity than external hearing. Listening to our own voice on a tape recorder is like listening to a favorite symphony on a bad transistor radio—the sound is recognizable but a pale imitation of the real thing.
Why do so many old people eat at cafeterias?
Enter almos
t any cafeteria in an urban area. Chances are you will see a disproportionately high number of elderly customers. The reasons for this phenomenon are many and date back almost a hundred years.
The cafeteria is an American invention. The first was opened in 1895 by Ernest Kimball, in Chicago. In 1899, he moved his cafeteria to the basement of the New York Life Building, where it was located until 1925. The period of the greatest growth of cafeterias was the 1920s and 1930s, noncoincidentally, perhaps, when today's seniors were young.
Cafeterias during the 1920s and 1930s were decidedly nofrills affairs. They were usually huge, with high ceilings, high noise levels, no decor, virtually no service, and huge menus. Customers were not encouraged to dally, and the unpleasantness of the ambience prodded customers to vacate their tables rapidly. The bare-bones wage scale paid by cafeteria owners ensured that whatever service provided was not old world elegance.
Cafeteria operators are faced with many challenges that did not beset their counterparts fifty years ago. There are many more options for low-cost eating now, and the particularly tough competition comes from fast-food outlets and employee cafeterias in large factories and office buildings.
Yet there is now more excitement and growth in the cafeteria industry than at any time since World War II. The new cafeteria chains are attracting a large share of young families, potential customers who might have been written off to McDonald's in the past. Their most loyal patrons, however, are still older, retired persons. According to National Restaurant Association statistics, a person over sixty years old is 50 percent more likely to eat at a cafeteria than the population as a whole.
Cafeterias have suffered from a severe image problem. Downtown cafeterias changed little over the years; they were dinosaurs, remnants of a time when both rents and labor were cheap. If cafeterias were to survive, they would have to move where their middle-class customers moved, the suburbs, and near where they played, in malls and shopping centers. Most of the cafeterias that survived realized they had to market food as well as serve food, so they redecorated their dining rooms, carpeted floors, adorned their walls, upholstered their seating, and softened the lighting—ambience became a selling point for the cafeteria, for it appealed to people disenchanted with the manic and garish fast-food environments.
Not only have these facelifts worked, but there are several successful cafeteria chains, all based in the Sunbelt, that comprise one of the fastest growing segments of the restaurant industry. Such companies as Morrison's, Luby's, and Piccadilly's have prospered by keeping down their labor costs (one of the biggest reasons they are located in the South is the relative ease in using non-union help), and by placing themselves in shopping malls and free-standing suburban locations, avoiding outlandish inner city rents. Cafeterias now represent about 4 percent of all restaurant units in the U.S., but almost 6 percent of all commercial food and drink sales.
Throughout all of these changes in cafeterias, old people remained their most steadfast customers. Sure, some of their partisanship for cafeterias can be explained by a certain nostalgia for the type of restaurant that was a craze in their youth, but there are many more powerful reasons:
Demographics
1. Cafeterias are located where old people are located. Older cafeterias tend to be in downtown areas, where seniors are disproportionately represented. Newer cafeterias tend to be in middle-class suburbs and the South, where there is also a greater than average concentration of the elderly.
2. Next to baby boomers, the 65+ age group was the fastest rising between 1970 and 1980, and the trend promises to accelerate.
3. Contrary to popular belief, seniors dine out slightly more than the population at large—almost two times a week.
4. Although the distribution of wealth is wildly uneven among older people (with more than their share of the very rich and the very poor), the median income for seniors is rising faster than that of the population as a whole. Seniors have more discretionary money to spend, despite the problem of inflation for people with fixed incomes.
5. Retired people do not eat at cafeterias at work or, as young people often do, at school.
Price
1. A full meal can be assembled at a cafeteria for much less than most full-service restaurants and for not too much more than a fast-food establishment. In all surveys, seniors mentioned price as the number one reason they liked cafeterias. The average lunch ticket at a cafeteria is about $3, and dinner around $5. The eating preferences of seniors (see below) also help make a cafeteria a particular bargain. In most cafeterias, tipping is not necessary, another saving for the consumer over coffee shops and diners.
Eating Preferences
1. Seniors eat less food than any age group but small children. Many complain that portions are too large in full-service restaurants. Older people overwhelmingly prefer ordering à la carte for this reason. Morrison's has been particularly strong in recognizing this desire for flexibility in ordering. They offer a Savor Plate, which offers smaller portions of a full meal, with a choice of entree, two vegetables or a vegetable and potato, for one price. The cafeteria is the one type of restaurant that doesn't financially punish people with small appetites.
2. Older people generally prefer “home cooking” to “prefab” food. Many cafeterias cook virtually everything from scratch and even bake on-premise.
3. Seniors tend to stay longer than younger patrons. At cafeterias, there aren't sulking waiters intimidating customers into hurrying along. The slower, unpressured atmosphere at the cafeteria is a major part of the appeal of cafeterias to seniors. Although the turnover of tables is crucial to restaurateurs, older patrons compensate for staying longer by their predilection for eating earlier than young people. Old folks often eat dinner two hours before the dinner rush, and since most cafeterias stay open continuously from breakfast or lunch through supper, they are occupying tables that might otherwise be vacant.
4. Cafeterias tend to have a larger selection of food than full-service restaurants in the same price range. Many cafeterias offer a hundred or more items every day. Restaurateurs told Imponderables that although not quite at Morris the Cat level, older customers tended to be more finicky about the quality and selection of their food.
5. Cafeterias feature foods that are only afterthoughts at other types of restaurants in the same price range. There are four foods that seniors order in restaurants at a much higher proportion than the population as a whole: coffee, vegetables, fish, and salad, in that order. All but coffee receive perfunctory treatment at most coffee shops but are staples at cafeterias. Seniors also order more dessert than average. Whereas younger people might go to a separate establishment to buy ice cream or pie, seniors tend to order dessert at the cafeteria, and this is one of the main reasons seniors tend to spend 5-10 cents more per capita at cafeterias. The one item that seniors seldom order is soft drinks—they buy only one-third as many as the average customer. The three popular food items that the elderly eat in the smallest proportion—(in order) pizza, hamburgers, and ice cream—are all foods that are not popular in cafeterias and that tend to be served by speciality restaurants catering to younger customers.
6. As a group, the elderly tend not to be adventurous eaters. One rarely encounters barbecued alligator at a cafeteria.
Psychological Factors
1. Many elderly people are widowed or alone for some reason. Some may not have a close network of friends. For people of any age, dining alone is not the most pleasant experience, particularly in full-service restaurants, where management and service personnel sometimes make single patrons seem like interlopers. To folks alienated from fast-food establishments, cafeterias are congenial places. Several sources indicated that although older patrons tend to be fussy eaters, quality of food was not as important to them as the quality of the dining experience. For many people, eating out represents a vital and enriching form of social contact. There is something homelike about the personal contact a customer has with personnel who have actually
prepared or served their food. Unrelated seniors can eat according to their individual dietary and economic desires. Single seniors find new friends at cafeterias without any pressure to do so. Patrons can commune or merely consume, depending on their preference.
2. While the stereotype is that old people are rigid, in fact old people are loyal. If a cafeteria, or any restaurant, does a good job, older customers tend to reward the establishment with steady patronage. Since many cafeterias have catered to older people for a long time, they have been rewarded with steady patronage.
If trailer parks didn't exist, would tornadoes exist?
Only if there were local TV newscasts to shoot pictures of them.
Where do they get that awful music for ice skating?
There are few things quite so disconcerting in sports as watching a pair of graceful and athletic skaters putting their hearts, souls, and bodies into interpreting music that sounds like common garden sludge. But, honest: Skaters and their coaches don't deliberately go out and select the worst arrangements of songs to showcase their prowess. There are logical explanations for why the music in free skating and ice dancing is often so unsatisfactory.