Café gratis, se paga el tiempo

En este restaurante todo es gratis, menos el tiempo

CURIOSIDAD

El café Ziferblat cobra por el tiempo que se permanezca en sus instalaciones y no por lo que se consuma.

No cobran por la comida pero a cambio las personas preparan las bebidas y lavan los platos.
Foto: Alex Lentati. www.standard.co.uk

Hay restaurantes típicos, otros que tienen sus ‘horas felices’ y hasta algunos en los que por un precio determinado se come lo que se desee. Sin embargo, un restaurante ruso tiene otra idea muy diferente y un poco extraña de cobrarle a sus clientes.

El café Ziferblat cobra por el tiempo que se permanezca en sus instalaciones y no por lo que se consuma. En este sitio todo es gratis, menos el tiempo.

Cada minuto que se pase en el café cuesta cinco centavos de dólar (aproximadamente 20 pesos).
En el lugar hay cientos de opciones, la especialidad son el té y las galletas. “Aquí se puede hacer lo que se quiera. Conocer gente, trabajar, descansar. Se puede comer y beber todo lo que se desee, y gratis”, ha dicho Ivan Meetin, dueño del café.

La pequeña trampa del lugar consiste en que es el cliente el que se tiene que preparar las bebidas y quien tiene que lavar lo que ensucie antes de abandonar el sitio. Este podría ser un elemento que disuada a algunas personas, pero otras, acostumbradas a un ritmo de vida agitado donde todo lo deben hacer por su cuenta, no le ven ningún problema.

El local funciona como una casa, hay libros, conexión para Wifi y hasta tocadiscos y rockolas.

El modelo de negocio ha funcionado en Rusia, donde hasta el momento hay 10 Ziferblat y acaban de abrir uno en Londres. A pesar de que se pueda pensar que no es un buen negocio dejar que el cliente coma sin pagar, por más de que le exijan preparar los alimentos y lavar, su dueño le ha dicho a CNN: “Es un buen negocio. Y si es rentable quiere decir que lo estamos haciendo bien".

Semana

Oro que me hiciste mal... y sin embargo te quiero

Gold just had its worst year since 1981
By Matt Phillips @MatthewPhillips 

Gold still makes a lovely helmet. Reuters/Bogdan Cristel

Alas, it seems like gold bugs have given up on the arrival of the long-awaited, Weimar-style hyper-inflation in US.

The dawning realization has sent futures prices for the precious metal down a bit more than 28% this year, to just above $1,200 per troy ounce. And that’s made itone of the worst assets to own this year. (Yes, some commodities such as corn (-39%) and silver (-35%) have done even worse.)

Barring a year-end rally of remarkable proportions tomorrow, this is going to be the worst year for gold since 1981, when the metal tumbled more than 30%.

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Of course, inflation was a real thing back in the early 1980s. And gold’s crash in 1981 coincided with maverick Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s effort to stamp it out. Volcker’s cure was costly. By jacking up the Federal Funds rate to a nose-bleeding 20%, he sank the economy into a deep recession.

The rationale behind the recent surge of gold prices was far more specious. Inflation-focused investors argued that the Federal Reserve’s recent effort to push new money into the economy by buying bonds—known as quantitative easing—would inevitably set off a spiral of inflation.

It hasn’t. In fact, inflation is only of concern right now because it is too low, consistently undershooting the US central bank’s stated goal of about 2% a year. Here’s a look at the Fed’s favorite inflation gauge:


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And now that the Fed has announced its plan to start trimming its bond purchases—the long-awaited taper—it seems like investors are finding an even tougher time justifying owning the metal.

On the other hand, don’t feel too bad for the gold bugs. This year will be the first time since 2000 that gold has actually had a down year. And between the end of 2008 and gold’s peak in August 2011, the metal had surged 113%. If gold bugs didn’t lighten up on their holdings then, they have no one to blame but themselves.

Quartz

El oro en el apocalipsis: ¿A cuanto cotizaría?

Why Gold Would Be Useless in an Economic Apocalypse

Seriously, stick with the canned goods. 

Reuters

Since November, financial advisor David Marotta has been publishing a series of blog posts on how to manage your money in the event of a financial apocalypse—as in a world of hyperinflation, governmental collapse, and anarachic mobs. You know, the standard stuff of a doomsday prepper's fever dreams. While Marotta admits he has some fears about the direction of the country (the man's not an Obamacare fan, to say the least) most of it seems to be fairly tongue-in-cheek material aimed at talking potential clients down from investing in some of the crazy, survivalist scams advertised on conservative talk radio. (Sadly, TheWashington Examiner seems to have missed the humor). 

And the first scam on his agenda? Plowing all your money into gold, of course. Here's his biblically inflected explanation of why toting around a suitcase of gold come the end times—and at today's prices, a $1 million in gold coins would fit in a suitcase—would be a suboptimal strategy: 

If there really is a collapse of the money supply it is difficult to believe that your briefcase of pretty coins will still have any purchasing power near $1 million. In the 1970s, Christian singer Larry Norman made popular the Apocalyptic song lyric, “A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold” based on Revelation 6:6. In The End, I’d rather not have bought as much gold as possible.

In other words, when an economy goes full-on Mad Max and we're all reduced to bartering, the survivors are going to be more interested in useful goods than in a soft metal useful mostly for ornamental purposes. Part of gold's value as a commodity is derived from the fact that it can easily be traded across borders. But if that were no longer an option, and you were reduced to using bullion to buy a baguette, it wouldn't really matter what people in China or India were willing to pay for your gold. 

I would also add that, in a truly Hobbesian state of nature, it might not be wise to keep all your wealth stored in a small, easily pilfered box. 

Now, in fairness to the goldbugs out there, I think Marotta is oversimplifying a bit. Let's say the United States has a bout of Zimbabwe-like inflation, but the international commodities markets stay up and running. Theoretically, if the collapse of the world's reserve currency hasn't shocked the entire global economy into paralysis, you might be able to trade your gold for Euros or Swiss Francs or whatever else the markets start denominating prices in and start a nice little import business.

The problem is that if doomsday doesn't arrive, you're probably stuck with a bum investment. As Marotta puts it: "Gold has a low expected return of just inflation and one of the highest volatilities as measured by standard deviation. That means that the optimum asset allocation to gold is always zero."

His bottom line? Keep the shiny stuff to less than 3 percent of your portfolio. And, if you're really convinced the end is nigh, I say stick with canned goods.

The Atlantic