It's all been a bad joke that just ran out of control. I got into food for fun but the business got a mind of its own. Now - my good Lord - look where it has gotten me. My products are on supermarket shelves, in cinemas, in the theater. And they say show business is odd.

"From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps. It was like the slot machines wherein one dropped pennies, and, with a metallic whirl of machinery had delivered to him a stick of chewing-gum or a tablet of chocolate. It depended upon which slot one dropped the penny in, whether he got chocolate or gum. And so with the editorial machine. One slot brought checks and the other brought rejection slips. So far he had found only the latter slot.

Every appealing headline clicked or intriguing link tabbed is another metaphorical pull of the slot machine handle.

Anyone who believes the competitive spirit in America is dead has never been in a supermarket when the cashier opens another check-out line.

the dangerous practice of stockjobbing, and would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry. It would hold out a dangerous lure to decoy the unwary to their ruin, by making them part with the earnings of their labour for a prospect of imaginary wealth.

the dangerous practice of stock-jobbing, and would divert the genius of the nation from trade and industry. It would hold out a dangerous lure to decoy the unwary to their ruin, by making them part with the earnings of their labour for a prospect of imaginary wealth. The great principle of the project was an evil of first-rate magnitude; it was to raise artificially the value of the stock, by exciting and keeping up a general infatuation, and by promising dividends out of funds which could never be adequate to the purpose.

Patients are being crushed by the devil’s bargain. Between the 6 trillion dollar food industry which wants to make food cheap and addictive and the 4 trillion dollar health care industry which profits off interventions on sick patients and stays silent about the reasons they are getting sick.

Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.

Getting a second doctor’s opinion is kinda like switching slot machines.

The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale.

Power and profit structures're out of cahoots with current technology. Aware of new inventions, corporations put them aside, waiting for competitive reasons until they're obliged to use new gimmicks.

"The typical industry approach is [retailers] to treat vendors like the enemy... If vendors can't make a profit then they don't have money to invest in research and development, which in turn means that the products they bring to the market will be less inspiring to customers, which in turn detriments the retailer's business because customers aren't inspired to buy. People want to cut costs and negotiate aggressively because there's a limited amount of profit to be shared by both sides. As a result of this "death spiral", most retailers fail."

Finally, the stores’ design, so critical to atmosphere, seemed to lack the warm, cozy feeling of a neighborhood gathering place. Some people called our interior spaces cookie-cutter or sterile: Clearly we have had to streamline store design to gain efficiencies of scale . . . [but] one of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past. . . .

gambling our hard-earned money on labor, inventory, rent, marketing, etc., all with