PS - Nice Chart!

sigh..... I know I've gotten old when I can't remember the last time I remarked "nice legs", but "nice chart" is the closest I've been in quite a while ;(

There are a lotta good stories in that chart. Here is just one - Dole.

A few years back I had the good fortune to visit Hawaii a few times over several months. The first time around I spent a day or two doing the traditinally-touristy things, like walking up and down the strip in Honolulu just gawking in general..... but then I graduated to a rented mo-ped so I could take my gawking mobile ;).... only to have a local confide in me during a pitt stop that afternoon that went something to the effect of "oloha, dude, you look like a nice fellow.... do you realize that to the locals around here, people such as yourself with rented mopeds have become somewhat of an endangered species?" It seems many of the locals occasionally revolt against the tourists by accidentally picking them off, while they are on mo-peds......in a "oops, I never saw him occifer, honest" while rounding corners kind of way.

The second time round I took a mini-junket skipper boat flight from Oahu to Maui where upon there was a tour bus that drove us around a large circuit of that island. The bus driver did double duty as tour-guide, replete with pa/walkie-talkie.....but he was a far site more refined than Cramer a la Cramerica .... and we stopped for a real meal... not muffin bottom stubs ;) Anyway, we eventually got to that part of the island where the bus driver guide guy pointed out some of the pineapple crops and he gave us a little bit of the past history of the plantations, which of course led to talk about Dole. He kept referring to the Cannery, which is located back on Oahu. Bottom line - today, the pineapple business is not as thriving as it once was, but Dole is still somewhat prominent. They manage many acres of the fruit, grown and picked in Hawaii, but it's then shippped to Asia whole (Taiwan, China, somewhere there abouts) where it is processed, canned, then shipped back to the U.S. for retail sales..... and they can pull this off more profitably than they can the old way. The old way was when they paid workers in Hawaii to do it all - grown, harvest, process and can. On a subsequent mini-trollery tour of Oahu, "the old cannery" was one of the highlighted stops.... it's within a stone's throw of the old concrete office buildign with the sigen Hawaii Five O at the top. Basically, these days, the Old Cannery is the massive ghost-like monstrosity of a warehouse looking building by the docks..... nothing much happens there anymore except gulls and various birds hanging out, the old cannery has been boarded up and defunt for years...... but it's still there, at least until it falls or burns down, to remind of a past time.

Sheeesh, I can't figure it out. Perhaps Dole is getting a corporate rate, but last time I checked, it was pretty expensive for me to ship something one way over seas.....next time you pop open a can of Doles, realize that the fruit you are consuming may be more world-travelled than you could ever hope to be :)..... and somehow this is more profitable for them. Tweet