1) On 3^rd August, after a photo of a Breadtalk employee pouring Yeo’s packet soya bean milk into Breadtalk bottles labelled “freshly-prepared” was posted, social media caught fire. Waves of online criticism swarmed Breadtalk over its “unethical” practice.

2) Almost immediately, Breadtalk pulled the drink from its menu and said it will sell the drink again but this time out of Yeo’s labelled drink dispensers “to prevent misunderstanding”.

3) Like jilted lovers, some Singaporeans swore never to talk to Breadtalk again. Why are people so upset over Breadtalk?

4) Did Singaporeans really misunderstand that the soya bean drink repackaged in very down to earth looking bottles was indeed the real McCoy? Apparently many did. Now they feel betrayed and silly, upon learning that they could have bought 1 litre of the same for $1.50 rather than 350ml of it for $1.80.

5) Yeo’s must be secretly cheering that its pasteurized packet drink could so easily pass for a freshly prepared version. Hopefully its R&D team gets a well deserved SG50 bonus.

6) Such practices are not new to me. When I was in banking, I was exposed to companies that supplied cookies and cakes to F&B chains such as Starbucks,. Do people who pay high prices for those cookies and cakes really think Starbucks makes them? Perhaps some do. And because Starbuck beverages are premium priced, the prices for the cookies and cakes seems ‘normal’. Will people flame Starbucks if they one day see a Starbuck employee transferring cakes from an aluminum carton bearing another F&B brand onto the display shelves at a markup?

7) Are Singaporeans upset then, with the markup of the soya bean drink by Breadtalk?

8) Maybe. Maybe not. Singaporeans know that beverages sold at fast food chains like McDonald’s are marked up tremendously. They may not know the exact markup but they know they can get it cheaper at a supermarket anytime. Well here’s the spoiler. A soft drink at your regular fast food chain is typically marked up 800% and more. Astounding but true.  Similarly, we know we are overpaying at any coffeeshop for a can of soft drink. You’ll be charged about $1.30 for a can of soft drink with a complimentary ice filled cup. The mark up is 300% and above.

9) So why aren’t Singaporeans fuming and kicking up a fuss like they did over Breadtalk’s soya bean milk boo boo? After all, Breadtalk is not making a 800% profit on the soya bean drink.

10) Because nobody likes to be deceived, whether intentionally or unintentionally. You suggest to me your soya bean is freshly prepared when it could have been squatting in Yeo’s warehouse for weeks or months? I pay a premium thinking it’s fresh when it’s not? It is the same feeling of betrayal one gets when one pay top dollars for an expensive apartment only to be greeted by an extraordinary long list of defects. Or to pay crazy money for a seminar/course only to walk away feeling severely shortchanged.

11) Why couldn’t people differentiate freshly prepared soya bean drink from a pasteurized version? Even if they could and had lingering suspicion that it tasted like a packet pretender, why did some continue to buy? Perhaps, because they believed in the brand. Perhaps, they believed that if the sticker says freshly prepared, it must be so.

12) This whole saga will soon blow over. Like how some lovers get together as many times as they break up, customers who swear never to patronize Breadtalk again, may once more, queue up at its cashiers.

13) Nevertheless, don’t bet on F&B chains volunteering to disclose how many of their products you think is authentically made by them is not. They’ll probably be telling their operation staff to be more careful.

14) As for me, I’m sticking to water and traditional drinks from Hock Hua. Are herbal drinks from Hock Hua freshly brewed? I cannot be 100% sure even though they taste very authentic to me as I’ve been drinking such home brewed drinks from young thanks to my grandmother and mother. But one thing’s for sure. I can’t find anything that taste like Hock Hua’s in the supermarkets. If a good pretender can be found in supermarkets, it must have “preservatives” for a longer shelf life.  So if I can’t find such a pretender in the supermarkets, it’s highly likely that what Hock Hua sells is not from a shelf product and so it must be freshly brewed! I stand to be corrected, so if anyone can point out evidence that what Hock Hua sells is actually from shelf products, please let me know. My grandma would surely appear in my dream to chide, “Ah Kheong, how come you cannot differentiate after drinking for so many years. All my efforts wasted!!!”

15) As a parting note, sugary drinks, especially soda based ones are no friends of us. Weight gain, fatty liver, diabetes, insulin resistance. The scary list runs on. Life is short enough. Let’s not hasten it. If you can’t wean yourself off it, do junior a favour and don’t start him/her on it.

16) Happy long weekends, all! Get yourself a Hockhua herbal drink, especially if you’re gonna karaoke SG50 songs all day long. And no, I don’t get paid for saying this. I just want you to be healthy and happy so you can celebrate many, many more National Days!

My Best Always,

Douglas Chow

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“At Empower Coaching, we believe that our Clients are unique, and responsible people who delight in moving their lives forward. Together, we can!”

By now, after the unhappiness over the too-narrow-for-comfort corridors of Pasir Ris One DBSS, many of you now know that the corridor width of 1.2 m meets the minimum width required by the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) to prevent obstruction to common corridors and fire fighting equipment, which may endanger lives during emergency evacuation.

Having previously served in the Ministry of Trade and Industry in the area of regulations (The only non-financial stint in my mainly finance career), I would like to share how our government think  about regulations and enforcement.

How does one strike a balance between enforcement and regulation? Everybody knows it is not possible to catch every single person who runs foul of a regulation. Is the National Environment Agency able to catch everyone who litters? No. Can the police catch every single loanshark or vice operator using a HDB flat? Again, no, as much as the government wish it possible.

Enforcement is a very labour intensive activity. Imagine checking every HDB unit for vice activity (assuming no reliance on tip offs). There are about 1,000,000 HDB units in Singapore versus about 40,000 people in the entire police force . Just covering all HDB units will take everyone in the police force one full day assuming each personnel is assigned to 25 different HDB unit inspection a day. What about the other duties of the police? Will they be neglected? Yet, a HDB unit that passes an inspection today could house a vice den the very next day. Do we then have to check every HDB unit every day? What about non-HDB units?

The question our government ask internally all the time, is how best to influence and shape the conduct of the regulated –through enforcement, regulation, guidelines or by doing nothing and hope that people behave in a a scocially responsible way?

Nobody likes being regulated. Yet by allowing them to go about inhibited, will everyone behave sensibly?

Most officers do not like enforcement work. It involves a degree of controntation and can get pretty ugly. An officer trying to enforce a regulation or guideline may be scolded or even attacked. Checking for a breach as previously mentioned is labour intensive. In reality, spot checks are made, supplemented by tip offs.

By building narrow corridors that meet the bare minimum width required by SCDF, the Pasir Ris One DBSS developer has makes the job of enforcement officers much easier. Do not misunderstand that SCDF regulates the width of the corridors in HDB estates. The corridor can be of any width and residents can clutter the corridor all they want, as long as a minimum escape passage of 1.2 m clearance is maintained.

Can you imagine if residents clutter the corridors in different degree such that at some streches it is 1.1 m and at others, it is 1.6 m depending on what flower racks, shoe cabinets, bicycles etc are placed along the corridor? The enforcement officer would have to measure the width at different length. It would be a very labourious inspection. If there are about 1,000,000 HDB flats, can you imagine the number of corridors to be inspected for measurement? Any enforcement officer would go crazy and resign the next day.

Now, imagine having to inspect only 1.2 m wide corridors. An enforcement officer woud need just a quick glance to see if the corridor is free of clutter such as flower pots or shoe racks. If the corridor is clear and empty, pass. If there are obstructions on one or both sides, fail. 100% inspection efficiency.

Of course, there are easier ways to go about it too for a  wide corridor.  Just make sure a line is drawn at one side so that residents know the limit that they can place their plants and shoe racks. This would also allow for a quick visual inspection.

The good news is that, as per the latest building code guidelines in Singapore, the minimum corridor width will be set to 1.5 m as shown in the Building and Constrution Authority slides below. Narrow corridors will be a thing of the past!

My Best Always,

Douglas Chow

1) It’s been an eventful, fulfulling and wonderful two years for Empower Advisory.

2) We have been threatened with lawsuits (that never materialised) from scammers and dodgy investment gurus and operators that we have warned the public about.

3) We are the ONLY private platform in Singapore that continues to steer the public away from hurtful scams through self funded outreaches.

4) We are the ONLY provider of the the most affordable and cost-effective personalised investment bootcamps in Singapore.

5) With Profits never our focus, we are the ONLY investment bootcamp provider that sacrifice profits by capping investment bootcamp participants to only 6 per session. Why? Because we can and want to put our bootcamp graduates’ interest first.

6) All these would not be possible without supporters of Empower Advisory and our investment bootcamp graduates who chose Empower Advisory over smoke and mirrors operators out there. We are nowhere as big as these other operators but we continue with our small class approach because we are foolish enough to believe it’s the right thing to do. No other operators can and want to do what we do because it’s not a lucrative way to go about it.

7) We rather our bootcamp participants pay much less for our investment bootcamps and use the savings to start investing profitably rightaway!

8) To all our equally foolish supporters and friends (existing and future) of Empower Advisory, this will not be possible without you. Thank you. And to celebrate two years (and many more) of Empower Advisory, we are giving away a pair of Innovatio Suckies to all those who believed and continue to believe in us. (Limited to 300 pieces in all). These Suckies are immensely useful with lots of fun application. They remind all of us at Empower Advisory that value NEED NOT always be expensive.

9) Just email your residential/office address to dave@empoweradvisory.com and we’ll get it dispatched via Singpost. (Fingers crossed, no lost mail). We look forward to your email in our inbox!

Empower Advisory Team

LTA has acknowledged that third-party taxi booking services facilitate more efficient matching of taxis with commuters and have become popular and beneficial. A basic regulatory framework is expected to be rolled out soon.

We take you through the debate that has been going on. The points raised are not exhaustive. But utimately, Transport App Providers have become popular over the past year or so because they seem to finally solve the long standing woe of not being able to secure a taxi when one needs a ride, especially during peak hours. Playing hide and seek with taxis is a game nobody enjoys.

As a supporter of Smart Regulation, I welcome the disruption of these transport app providers to the frustrating status quo and am confident LTA will be sensible about regulating these new solution providers.

LTA? Over to you!

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1) The passing of Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister and a titan in Singapore’s nation building history throws up questions about Singapore’s future. What are the challenges ahead? There are many I have identified but would put pen to paper for just two.

Wining the Hearts of the People.

2) Extraordinary men do not need extraordinary pay to do extraordinary work. Just look at the Old Guards. Their salary then, for that era, was modest to say the least. The working class could relate to them. These Old Guards were not leaders out to make a comfortable living. Some already came from well to do or middle class families. Lim Kim San was one such man. Already a self-made millionaire, he volunteered to work in the civil service and for three years, did not draw a salary. He first served in the Housing and Development Board where he oversaw the construction of high-rise, affordable apartments for the masses. Later, due to his capability he was tasked to helm other important ministries and statutory boards such as the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Interior and Defence, the Public Utilities Board and the Port of Singapore Authority. The Old Guards were a bunch of people who came together to bring Singapore forward.  That they were in the nation building mission to make their personal fotune hardly crossed the people’s mind.

3) Today, many working class Singaporeans opine that the high salaries drawn by ministers and top civil servants have made them elitist, and unable to relate to their hopes and fears.

4) Typically, a minister’s salary is benchmarked against the median income of the top 1,000 earners among Singapore citizens, but with a 40 per cent discount to signal the sacrifice in public service. Yet this median is easily distorted by newly minted Singaporean citizens who can easily draw millions in income.  Currently, an entry level minister start at about S$935,000 in annual salary, which is more than 20 times the median salary drawn by Singaporeans.

5) While the very attractive salary has no doubt helped to attract good people into leadership positions within the government, it has the unfortunate effect of eroding the moral currency of leadership. And that is worrying.

6) This is not an argument on salary. Singapore is wealthy enough to pay its ministers and civil service leaders $10 million a year each if she wanted to. This is an argument for any government of the day to reclaim the high moral ground ethos; that its ministers and top ranking public officers regard public service as a higher calling and not as a calculative “to the last decimal place analysis” of lost opportunity cost; that their decisions are always for the greater good of the nation and not for personal gains.

7) My view is that if there is one person who will refuse an important government job for $1 million a year, there will be many others, willing to take on the responsibility for perhaps $500,000 a year or $42,000 a month. Not because he is less capable, but because he has no need for the extra $500,000.

8) Ministers and top public officers do not live and perish by KPIs. It is a more forgiving environment that they operate in and rightly so, as it sometimes take policies longer than expected to show the intended results. Even if they do not deliver, they are easily rotated elsewhere where the job scope is better calibrated for their abilities and temperament. However, when their remunerations are compared to corporate CEOs who often get dumped unceremoniously when KPIs are not met, the general consensus is that ministers or senior public officers who do not perform should also be let go. When they are allowed to remain, conspiracy theories take a life of their own. Accountability is questioned and trust takes a beating.

9) I do not believe that a less than hefty compensation package belittles the work of a minister and top civil servants. I do not believe that a less than hefty compensation package give them less clout when having to deal with corporate honchos with fatter paychecks.  Mr Lee and his team of Old Guards were drawing way less than the world leaders and corporate honchos of their generation when they successfully convinced them to invest in Singapore and set up companies and factories.

10) The moral authority bestowed by the willingness to decline world class pay to serve Singapore cannot be belittled. On the contrary, it boost one’s moral standing and gives leaders more conviction when they say that they can relate to the angst of common Singaporeans’ struggle with the costs of living or empathize with concerns of overcrowdedness and CPF withdrawal restrictions among many other issues.

11) If you lose the moral currency of leadership, you run the risk of losing the hearts of the people who will then begin to assess you like cold calculative shareholders. And what do such shareholders do? They will vote in a new CEO and team if results are not delivered by the incumbent leadership, in time or up to expectations.  Such leadership changes can be very disruptive to long-term plans where results can be uncertain or take longer to achieve. Is this good for Singapore? To have the people go through thick and thin with you, for the good of the country, the leadership needs a large reserve of moral currency and not eroding this intangible asset is something all leaderships have to consider.

Recruiting  enough talented people to run the Government.

12) Do we have enough good people to fill important government positions? Yes, if the criteria is that they need not be affiliated to the ruling political party of the day. But is this realistic? Is it possible for a party outsider to run an important ministerial position inside government? Sadly, the answer is No. Would any incumbent political party allow that and risk that the non-party individual leak “vital information” and cause the incumbent political party’s downfall at the next general election?

13) And that explains what I think debunks the lament so often repeated – that we have a shortage of talent to serve in Government. There is not a shortage of dedicated and talented Singaporeans to serve. There is just a shortage of them who also co-incidentally have to be affiliated to the incumbent political party. This is the part where politics plays a destructive part in choosing the best man for the job. And this is something where the current political governance structure needs to be re-examined to assess if it is making the best use of available Singaporean talents in the country, willing to serve with heart and ability.

Conclusion.

14) As a Singaporean, I have known only one home as mine and have no plans to migrate. It’s in every Singaporean’s interest that Singapore continues to thrive and the leadership retains the support of the people, especially during trying times. Tough questions need to be asked and even if there are no immediate responses, the intent is to provoke constructive debate and honest reflection if things need to be done differently.

Douglas Chow

* Douglas is an ex-public officer who served in the Ministry of Trade and Industry from 2010 to 2013 before founding Empower Advisory.

“At Empower Coaching, we believe that our Clients are unique, and responsible people who delight in moving their lives forward. Together, we can!”

To find out more about life-coaching click here

Empower Advisory in yet another community outreach, raised awareness of the need to engage the Pioneer Generation meaningfully and at the same time delight members of the public. A bonus that it was picked up by Stomp, resulting in more than 17,000 views.

More tables will be distributed over the next few weeks! Where? It’s anyone guess…

Our Best!

Empower Advisory Team

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