Candy Japan total sales cross $1M
candyjapan.com
candyjapan.com
> Most of this money has been spent on product and shipping, meaning I haven't made anywhere close to a million dollars in profit with this.
> But the great thing is, I've been able to live off of the sales.
So, he's at least been able to live off the profit, which is great.
Curious to know - do you need any type of FDA or import-export license to ship things in US from a foreign country?
Nahh, nothing interesting to a bunch of hackers </sarc>
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at com.ycombinator.news.Comment.reply(Comment.java:480)Kudos to you, Bemmu, this is a very fun idea, and I hope you continue to see success from it.
Let subscribers pick their preferred categories and allow them to choose the amount of money they want to pay each month + shipping costs,
then you go out and buy random things from one or more of those categories (in order of user preference), and keep a record of which items you sent to each customer, to avoid duplicates.
Social fluff: Let users post on-site reviews of the items they receive from you.
Ideal outcome: People discover the uniqueness of Japan, share it with their friends and other users, and you help spread some joy and pocket the change.
But then he'd be competing with established players like http://shop.j-subculture.com/
Personally, what I don't like are the kits where you have to mix things with little cups of water and such. They're never satisfying, and I think they include too many of them.
Also I think it's an interesting case study of the growth and evolution of a business that started very, very small, that's been documented closely by the operator. He even wrote about dealing with cc fraud.
He makes items available you simply would not be able to easily obtain otherwise.
Not all geeky things are directly tech related, some of us are just geeks through and through :)
[1]https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/algorithmic-fit...
Slightly related, I worked in the sign printing industry for many years as well. There we also had fitting algorithms for ganging vector designs into runs for printing and cutting on large format printers. Those are a lot easier since it's 2D only, but they are still hard to get to perfection.
As a side note, nearly half this thread is talking about health insurance...really?
I found a minor bug, if you go to https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes/ (note the slash at the end), then the server gives 500. Perhaps just redirect the user to https://www.candyjapan.com/behind-the-scenes for a better UX.
Japan Crate has the Umai crate, which we (Tofugu) subscribed to for six months; majority of the contents were ramen :/ Was hoping for some chips and other goodies.
What was the cost analysis like to include a diverse selection of savory items? Filling an entire box with chips is definitely not cost effective, but including one with a mix of other goods seems plausible? Is there demand for a "snacks" box consisting of sweet and savory?
The problem I had with Umai crate was nearly every box was just ramen. Might as well call it the ramen box.
That's insane. That's roughly $10 worth of "snacks" per day.
something as simple as coffee and a sandwich in the morning and some beers and snack food after work could easily add up to a couple hundred a month, even though most of it isn't the kind of food traditionally associated with convenience store junk food
I think the thing missing from the picture is that convenience stores in Japan are a lot more convenient than they are in many other places in the world. The 7-11 store near me sells vegetables, sliced meat, bacon, eggs, milk, etc, etc. So while it is common to buy months and months of food items from a grocery story (or possibly a yearly supply of mayonnaise from Costco) in NA, people tend to buy small amounts of things from smaller stores in Japan.
1. Most prefer what they're familiar with. They grew up with the candies in their local stores so they might not be too eager to purchase foreign candies.
1. Candy is often a very impulsive purchase. You might grab a small bag or a bar at the checkout aisle. As a result, a monthly scheduled purchase might not be what people are looking for.
Don't they just. Convincing people who grew up eating ketchup that it's revolting is almost impossible.
It seems some candy and soda shops with a broad selection are doing really well with this nostalgia, maybe especially with the amount that people move around these days. ("Oh, I haven't had this in ages!")
There's a whole book on this topic: "Candy Freak" by Steve Almond.
Italy, Japan and China still very much value a wide variety flavors and textures in their sweet confections. Where italy focuses on expertly maintaining tradition, the Asian countries seem to aim for extreme novelty. I like all of them.
I don't know about Italy and Japan, but China doesn't really seem to go for sweet confections at all, and if you think cheap chocolate is bad in western countries, cheap Chinese chocolate is even worse.
#IdeaForHN: Someone could start a service where people sign up for receiving random goods from Japan, from their preferred categories (e.g. video games, figurines, sex toys, etc.)
Sounds like a bargain
But of course, in reality you have a bunch of other costs that VAT aren't charged on, and a number of essential goods such as most food are zero rated, and a number of additional goods are charged at reduced rates.
Last time I did the maths for myself (earning well beyond average), despite the headline VAT rate for the UK of 20%, I paid less than 4% of my salary towards VAT.
Overall my tax level was comparable to e.g. California (and if factoring in health insurance etc., California would have been much more expensive if I wanted to ensure equivalent coverage). Your mileage will vary depending on what you spend your money on.
Now, if you spend a lot of your income on gasoline, you have a point - it will drive up the taxes you pay a lot. And also, there certainly are US states that would be cheaper.
But a comparison like that is pretty meaningless without factoring in cost of living and salary levels as well.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/23/heres-how-much-the-average-a...
We spend a little more than $10k USD on medical expenses or $13k CAD.
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/price-of...
Around $120k CAD is the tipping point where you spend more than the average person in the US which is about $95k USD.
It only starts becoming an extra cost if you live in an area of the USA with lower taxes than Canada, and you have to add a $9k credit for the Canadian side to account for the out of pocket healthcare expense they would be paying for in the USA.
Still the premium means relatively little, what matters is what kind of network coverage he/his family gets as well as the deductible and copay. As many have found especially with some of these fly by night insurance companies that initially popped up on the exchange in Florida and after two years are no longer in business, there is no point in claiming people are insured just because they are paying premiums, if the have relatively limited access to care and/or can't afford the deductible.
Why would you presume these things that are almost certainly false for the US.
But yeah, if we earn a lot. We pay a lot. No reason to be sarcastic about it. I've always had a job and I'm never ill and I hope it never happens. The system works though, even if we have the largest taxes in the world ( Belgium)
Thus, Americans also pay enough for a single payer system they just don't actually get it.
EDIT: I'd love anyone down-voting this comment to demonstrate how switching to single-payer in the USA would result in savings without shortages, rationing, or lower quality care. Maybe switching is the right thing to do, but it's best to be honest about the costs.
>There is no reason to believe that costs would go down without massive price controls (and thus, shortages/rationing)
He didn't say either of those things.
We can't just switch. It's not a realistic option. He's pointing something out, not saying "hey we should switch now and x would happen".
Oh it appears that now ERs are shutting down, but hey, free healthcare. Did I mention that you won't get a bill for dying on a waiting list if you use free healthcare in Canada? It's amazing and you can pay for it easily. Don't even have to leave your house to get free treatments.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/doctor-shorta...
That's why people get upset when we talk about this. Some wealthy people point out that their care is far better than Canada's (which is true) while other wealthy people who care about other humans point out that while their care is better than Canada, not everyone's is. And then of course the poor in America just want to not die of totally treatable diseases.
In Canada you still get really shitty outcomes for any chronic illness. Basically if any idiot can identify what problem you have heart failure, broken arm, profuse bleeding you get treated for free, and in a reasonably efficient manner.
If you have anything that requires tests, scans, diagnostics, a specialist, or isn't going to kill you in the next week plan on spending 5 to 10 years on a waiting list / various waiting lists. My friend has been waiting 4 years for knee surgery that prevents her from working.
One of the best things about having a private Dr in Canada is that they know how to work the system and will basically harass the list keepers to bump you up so that the keepers of the lists can go back to doing nothing. Also, most clinics have some sort of consult that you can opt for which makes the waiting list magically disappear. Get a out of pocket brain scan? Voila, brain specialist is available in 2 weeks instead of 2 years.
That's rural ERs in Canada in the article you link. Same problem is happening in the US, because many doctors want to live in a city, where there is potential job growth and a host of other benefits, rather then out in rural hospitals, which usually can't pay very much.
This is a systemic issue that affects all rural health care, not a problem with Canadian health care specifically.
Here's a couple of articles from just August about the issue in the US.
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/aug/26/rural-america-s... https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/new-program-aims-...
As for wait times, again, also a problem in America. Even if we moved to single payer, it would probably get worse before it got better, since it means more people with health insurance for the same number of doctors in the short term, but then the market would likely correct that. Heres an article on us wait times.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucejapsen/2017/03/19/doctor-w...
Demand for health care will continue to increase as baby boomers age, new techniques arrive etc. That will always drive up prices or other costs, regardless of if we go single payer or keep the current system here. And it's a big enough system no matter what you do that there will always be some waste and greed that can't be cut.
Currently though, what is waste/greed and what is actual increasing cost is very unclear because PBMs and other companies keep things like drug pricing confidential.
If conservatives want to fight single payer, they need to lay out an alternative strategy that will actually keep costs in line without sacrificing care.
Single payer or our current system, most of the health care dollar doesn't go to the insurer under obama care (obamacare mandated a minimum of 80% for smaller carriers or 85% for larger ones, previously it was 50 - 60% so we did get some savings there), so if you want to cut costs, we really need to cut it at the middle or at the provider/manufacturer level.
Now single payer could save something, because operating costs are still higher then in simpler systems (https://newsatjama.jama.com/2017/04/25/jama-forum-where-does...). But single payer has a lot of requirements to be cheaper like the govermnent being allowed to negotiate drug and provider prices. These are things that, except on the state level, most likely would be heavily opposed by medical providers.
Total costs for the health care procedures/devices/drugs/providers are higher to insurers, and that's where most of your money goes, and as any developer will tell you, if you want to optimize, you want to optimize where you are spending the most be it in dollars or in processor cycles. So we have to cut that. And that's what conservatives should be focusing on, cutting the underlying costs, and making the pbms and brokers in the middle be transparent, so that cost savings get to insurers which can then be regulated at the state level.
My first suggestion to that end is always going to be more transparency to allow for a better free market, but that means adding and enforcing regulations to provide transparency, something which conservatives have resisted, despite the success of regulated open markets like stock exchanges. Drug companies spend more of their money on marketing then R&D, ( http://www.randalolson.com/2015/03/01/design-critique-puttin... ) so there is plenty of fat to cut before you start affecting R&d expenditures, and drug companies are one of the biggest beneficiaries of US research grants and tax benefits. Even a congressional committee investigation would be a start. So it's still possible to keep private insurers, but conservatives need to step up.
http://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/searching-for-saving...
At the bottom it mentions saving billions of dollars by extending a Medicaid program to some Medicare drugs, but that is not negotiated, those discounts are required by law.
You're agreeing with the parent's original point. Salaries in healthcare are far higher in the US than they are in eg the UK or Germany. The US median income is significantly higher than all but a few nations. In the US we don't ration care nearly to the extent that they do in eg Canada, wait times are lower and Americans over-use (abuse) their healthcare and always have.
In France a radiologist will make $150,000. In the US it's closer to $450,000. Nurses in the US will typically make 40%-50% more than nurses in Germany. Good luck hammering all of those pay scales back down without causing huge strikes.
You have to remove a trillion dollars in cost from the system. Only about $100b can be removed from big pharma's cost share. You have to destroy a million jobs (eg the health insurance industry), and slash the pay for hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers by at least 20% to 30%. Even if some of those lost jobs can eventually be reclaimed, the upheaval will be epic.
Sure you do. Poor people don't get any health care, people with insurance get all the health care they want.
You ration based on income and geographic location, as opposed to making people queue for care.
But it's rationing both ways.
You just revealed that you don't know anything about the US healthcare system. Poor people have free healthcare in the US. It's the lower 20% to 40% income bracket that is getting particularly hammered. The top 50% have mostly good health coverage. The bottom 15%-20% is and has been covered by government healthcare for decades.
I'll repeat it again for emphasis: if you're at or below the poverty line, you get free healthcare in the US. See: Medicaid and several other connected programs that are built just for that and are very large. If you earn near minimum wage, you're going to qualify for free healthcare in pretty much every state. And it's actually decent healthcare.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/retirementspecial...
edit: and I should clarify that yes, this is Medicare and not Medicaid and while I do understand the US medical system I'm not a health policy expert so I sometimes get specific points confused. Sheesh. Why does it take a PhD to figure out how to get medical coverage in the US?
Aside: Poor people do get health care in the USA. My brother was unemployed and received over $1 million in healthcare for his son with cancer, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in care for his dialysis treatment and eventual kidney transplant.
But, as you say until we are post scarcity there is going to be cost benifit analysis. All I am saying is our current system is inefficient, I don't expect we are going to transition before the next revolution.
PS: A lot of government money ends up going to healthcare independent of patient care. Ex: HRSA Grants for Rural Heath systems add up to ~16 billion and are not counted as Medicare Medicare etc https://www.hrsa.gov/ruralhealth/
Not really. Take a look at drugs. Canada has an entire population of ~35M. United Healthcare (biggest US private insurer) has 40M lives. UHC pays a lot more for things than Canada does.
I would say the single payer benefit is that things can be done by fiat. When the gov't says you'll be paid $X for a procedure, there really isn't anything you can do about it.
Quality of care is not the only factor. Medicare spends a lot on end of life care without significant benifit. It's not a question of if there is rationing as we only have finite money, it's a question of what form it takes.
Worse a lot of unnecessary procedures and medication degrade quality of life.
Citation needed. Just looking up health insurance profits ($13B) vs. total healthcare spend ($2T) shows that profit for insurance companies is only 0.65% of the total healthcare spend.
"Conclusions:
A simplified financing system in the U.S. could result in cost savings exceeding $350 billion annually, nearly 15% of health care spending."
It also says "Morra and colleagues estimated annual BIR costs in physicians’ practices at $82,975 per physician in the U.S. versus $22,205 in Ontario, Canada [5], i.e., 73% lower."
PS: I would say 100% of the insurance industry excluding doctor payments is medical billing and "Insurance carriers and related activities contributed $450.3 billion, or 2.6 percent, of U.S. gross domestic product in 2014, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis." http://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/industry-overview
Probably traces back to this which is just hospital costs but I think maybe even worse for smaller practices:
A 1999 report found that after exclusions, administration accounted for 31.0% of healthcare expenditures in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_healthcare_s...
The study:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa022033
> Just looking up health insurance profits
It wouldn't show up in profits as sibling mentions.
I've seen slightly lower but more recent numbers for hospital admin in the US. Not all of this is 'medical billing' but the majority is (look at the Canadian numbers) and you also have to account for the portion that shows up in the insurer's admin as well (~12% US vs ~3% Canada). There are also substantial admin costs soaked by employers and the subscribers in the US as well although technically not 'medical billing' either.
I like the idea of a county based single payer systems where counties manage healthcare and they are incentivized to promote healthy lifestyles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_hea...
The system in Canada isn't even close to the most efficient in the world. Many european countries manage to pay even less and produce even better outcomes.
It also depends on how you measure outcomes. The US exceeds other countries when it comes to things like cancer outcomes. It does poorly in things like life expectancy which is a terrible way to measure outcomes since so many other things other than medical care impact it.
Want the best, experimental treatment for your cancer? A lot (not all) US insurance companies will pay for it. Canada? You need to wait until the gov't does it's review and says "yes". They often say no.
Now, rationing is not all that bad, as obviously healthcare outcomes in the US aren't X% better (X% being the extra amount we pay for healthcare).
The best analysis I've seen as to why healthcare is more expensive in the US is the McKinsey report.[1] It's a huge report, but what they did was breakdown spending in the US by category and compared it to the average across developing nations.
Interesting findings:
- 2/3rds of the excess spending are out-patient care (i.e. stuff that doesn't happen in the hospital). In other words, Americans get a lot more out-patient things done than in other countries
- In-patient care is barely 10% higher than comparable countries
- Health administration and insurance is ~50% higher, but it's not a big piece over the overall spending pie (~7%)
- The US spends about ~20% less on long term care and 50% less on durables (this is shocking to me)
- Finally, the US spends about 300% of other nations on healthcare investment (you'd need to look at the report to see what that means)
[1]http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-se...
Some of it is due to how a country measures a "live" birth. Some countries say if the child dies within 24 hours of being born, it was never "alive". That certainly helps improve child mortality measures!
You can get cheaper or more expensive plans depending on the amount of value you pay yourself (known as the "eigen risico" or "own risk"), but the cheapest I could find was around €80 / month.
That there's an "own risk" is not stupid, insurance that protects you from every little thing is necessarily more expensive than insurance that only protects you from an unlikely catastrophe.
I save €17.50/month by setting the "own risk" to €885 instead of €385, a difference of €500. This means that if I don't use the health insurance for around 2.5 years I make up that difference and then get a "free" €17.50/month.
I would set it even higher than €885 if I could, but at least with CZ that's the maximum they seem to offer.
The difference in premiums is probably artificially low in The Netherlands since the market is so heavily regulated. I.e. if I expect to get "sick" I can just adjust the premiums yearly, e.g. women expecting to be pregnant do that, so it distorts the market. The insurer needs to eat the cost of your premium adjustment, even if you adjusted it because of a pre-existing condition or expected future medical cost.
Also, you should be careful when bragging about the price of health insurance in The Netherlands. It's a hybrid privately paid & publicly paid system, so most of what you're paying for it is probably coming out of your taxes, not the premiums you pay to the insurer.
At the time I too went to the Dr approx once a year for something routine and of course in the UK there is a completely free at the point of access healthcare i pocketed the fee.
Luckily, my employer picks up half of that tab.
Even with that amount of expense we still have a $2000 deductible each!