St. Louis

"“Some people are innovators and some people borrow ideas from others. Stiritz is both (and that’s meant as a compliment).”8 He consciously carved out blocks of time in his schedule to wrestle with the key issues in the business alone, without distraction, whether on a Florida beach or in his home office in St. Louis."

"It’s easy to get lost in factory zones because so many of the buildings look the same. The iPhone turbocharged factory complexes to enormous scale: Foxconn’s manufacturing campus in the north of Shenzhen occupies five hundred acres. The site has factories, of course, and dormitories. It also has grocery stores, cafés, a fire brigade, a hospital, cinemas, swimming pools, and vendor-operated restaurants. The factory is the size of a city. The population peaks in early fall as production ramps up to meet demand for the Christmas season. Dormitories fill up then, with up to six men or women crammed into one room. Assembly lines operate for three eight-hour shifts a day; there is never a minute that factories aren’t producing iPhones. At the peak times, three hundred thousand people work at Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus, about as many as live in Pittsburgh or St. Louis. [A Chinese report from 2009](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor345) estimated that the campus each day consumed forty tons of rice, twenty tons of pork, ten tons of flour, and five hundred barrels of cooking oil."

"Part of the adventure of dining out, for many people, is venturing to new surroundings. A dynamic neighborhood would bestow a freshness that could rub off on the restaurant. As for the lease, my dad, now a restaurateur himself—he had opened a French bistro, Chez Louis, in St. Louis—had consistently pointed out that if my restaurant were to fail, the lease itself would be my only tangible asset."