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Korea - 9+ yearsKorea is a great place. Before I go into the dark side, let's look at a few outstanding goodies you get to have as a wide-eyed foreigner in exile from your own homeland.- People are basically friendly, even in big, crowded cities, unlike in many other places. And Koreans are often profoundly decent people. I’ve lost three phones in Korea, and misplaced my wallet twice. I got my wallet back, contents complete. both times; and twice I had my phones returned to me. I once left my phone on a counter at a store, and a clerk hunted me down through the telecom company, and sent it to my address - unasked. Other people have similar stories. It’s remarkable, and unheard of in other places. The underlying reasons for this and the attitudes they foster are part of the reason I love Korea, and Koreans.- People like foreigners. You’ll like Koreans, too, if you take the time and energy to actively engage them. You'll make friends that stick with you for life, and you won't ever regret it. If you put in serious effort, it doesn't go unrewarded.- Collaborative culture: Despite the claustrophobic conformity, the closeness and attention people give each other has definite advantages. I've never seen teams of people get together to complete group tasks as efficiently as I've seen in Korea. You want something complex done that requires lots of co-ordinated effort? Koreans are the people to ask. This goes for many group activities, too. But note that this is the upside to a coin with many downsides, as I later discuss).- It sounds trite, given the seriousness of the rest of these observations, but it's just so amazing it has to be mentioned: co-ordination and drive produce small miracles. For example, the transportation system is beyond comparison, and it's super cheap. The rest of the world needs to study Korea and its ability to marshal public resources. There are few cities in the world that are more convenient to get around in than Seoul; efficient and timely trains that go to the furthest corner of the country for tiny amounts of money from several well-planned central stations, and they build subway lines faster than you can say "You got a permit for this in how long?" The city boasts a continuously expanding network that already puts any other city on Earth to shame. You can travel crazy distances, conveniently, at high speeds, in relative comfort. The subways are beyond compare (except for line 1 and, occasionally, line 2; I’ll go out of my way to avoid having to go any distance on line 1). And more: an intricate network of four categories of super-useful buses, all of them fast (if sometimes feeling like roller coaster rides), so great that you eventually may want to give up on the amazing subways and just use the bus system. I pretty much just use the buses, now (it helps to read Korean). Nowhere on Earth have I seen a more comprehensive transit network, maybe not even a better public service of any kind.I suspect it's the cheapest, most effective, most extensive, most efficient public transit system not just anywhere today, but in human history. I use it all the time, and it never fails to astound me how much better it is than anywhere else I've ever been or even heard of. When I go “home” to the city I grew up in, I’m deeply ashamed of the obvious incompetence and lethargy of its planners and workers.- The food is fantastic. If you like meat and spicy foods and general yummy stuff, the place is great. It’s all fresh, with a (limited but) impressive cuisine. Korea is a foodies food-culture paradise, almost unlike anywhere else.However, all of these things come with downsides.DOWNSIDES: For You, as a Foreigner- Sameness: At first, you're astounded by the amazing windfall of neighbourhoods, places, hangouts, restaurants, and endroits with local colour. There's a thousand neighbourhoods to explore in Seoul and even the larger cities like Pusan, Taegu or Gwangju. However, you soon realize something: Every subway station and neighbourhood has the same outlet stores, the same chains, the same family restaurants, the same same sameness; soon, exploring neighbourhoods takes on less urgency, as the tendency for cultural and consumerist monotony sets in. Mainstream Korea is not the multicultural haven that many Western cities have become. Outside of a few core areas, there’s a great degree of homogeneity.But this isn't so much a dark side as it is a realization that Seoul is just like any other city - just moreso. It’s bigger, louder, vaster, more everything, more intense. The cities are amazingly well-built, for a country leveled to the ground 70 years ago, and don't let the run-down nature of some areas fool you - Koreans are A#1 at building infrastructure when they're not rushing to get a job done.But there are things left out in the mad rush to completion. For example, I offer up “the smell”: for some utterly incomprehensible reason, Seoul, especially, stinks to high heaven within vicinity of sewer grates, and by “near” I mean “anywhere within 100 metres”. I'm guessing - wild speculation - that it's got something to do with not bothering to fix a badly designed post-war sewage network that's just barely underground and out of sight, and that basically works, but that in all honesty really needs to be completely rebuilt. But this, along with the other issues you’re going to notice in short order, is something that you have to live with. Nobody is going to be completely rebuilding the sketchy sewage system or dealing with the other fundamentally irritating issues any time soon.SOCIAL DOWNSIDESAll places have their downsides. I could go on at immense length about the social negatives about my own country, my home city, my culture - there are so many, books could be written, volumes. These things called “newspapers” detail the many failings of my own home and the city I came from. Don't think I'm slagging Korea; I could write long pages about the wonders of Seoul and the amazing people who live there, and I definitely love this city and this country. I’m not exaggerating when I say that to me, it’s become a second homeland. I don't want to give the impression that Seoul is a kind of hell, but the original question asked here was about the dark side of living in Korea, and the purpose of this post was a discussion of the negative aspects of life in Korea, beyond the glitter and smileyfaces.Here are some of the dark parts of aspects of Korean life you’ll encounter as a foreigner. Depending on you and your own expectations and experiences, they may or may not apply to you.Life is CheapLow Cost: The relatively low cost of living in Seoul is great, if you have a good job. But this is backstopped by the horrible wages and living conditions for many: Taxi drivers make a tiny sum (in a culture with no tips), restaurant staff are minimum wage slaves, retail workers are required to be incredibly polite and effusively helpful but get paid a pittance, and the cops shuffle homeless people off. Street vendors - source of much colour and joy and hey they're just doing their thing - are often run out of areas when the government (!), in cahoots with locals, often hire thugs to beat the crap out of Granny and Grandpa Street Vendor to "clean up" a place or drive out competition. Things like that remind you of the corrupt, autocratic, top-down authoritarian past that Korea is growing out of, but that has not yet completely receded, and they sometimes really disappoint you.Fate and Decent JobsWhile life is good for foreigners with decent jobs, it's humiliating and awful if you don't have one. Ask a Sri Lankan labourer working 12 hours a day, 6 days a week for LG and see how good life in Korea is. People from the “West” or other rich countries call themselves "expats", while Sri Lankans or Indonesians are "migrant labourers". This delineates one of many naked class differentials in a society completely structured around class. The truth is that while every foreigner is migrant labour, some are treated well and others are treated like cattle. We participate in this game by emphasizing distinctions. It saddens me how “higher-class” migrants don't pressure the government to push companies into treating lower-class migrants better. This also applies to Koreans themselves, who are always judging foreigners based on where they fall in a complex matrix of class relations. This is a very, very dark stain on the Korean body politic. It's also true in many other places, but after so many bad examples, South Korea should know better. When you broach the topic with Koreans, they will often suck in their breath and nod, not knowing what to do about the people who do their "DDD" jobs. But the foreigners who are lucky enough to get good jobs also tend to forget that their foreign peers are often trapped in crappy jobs, and that they’re migrant labour as well.ConformismThis is a highly conformist culture. As a foreigner, you don't need to worry about the pressure, because you can't ever really fit in. The downside: You can't ever really fit in. But if you look hard enough, you can find Korean outcasts and rebels to hang out with, without any difficulty, if you can’t adapt easily. Seek out the colourful, funky arts or music scene or the underground cultures that exist just behind doors and in locales easily-missed by more conventional people. As your social network grows, you end up creating your own interlinked mini-societies.Choosing to be a ForeignerAt first, you say "I want to be Korean!", then you see how Koreans live, and then, when long work hours begin to drag you down and social quirks don’t click, you say, "Hey, treat me like a foreigner." And this is the point: that wonderfully conformist culture that gets group stuff done can crush people who don't fit in, and (let's be honest) it has to be said that lots of Koreans don't or won’t fit in. You get to watch this battle from a front-row seat. Women, men, children, old people: their lives are not easy. Life is hard, and rigid conformism doesn't make it easier. Older people can be rude and obnoxious, and you eventually learn why they often act like they've said "screw you all, I'm doing whatever the hell I want, you basterds". They do it because they can absolutely say they've earned the social right to defy social rules, after a long life of social scraping and kowtowing. This crushing conformism is cultural, not political, either, as South Korea is a very active democracy. It’s the social culture that often drives Koreans to leave the country or to prefer dealing with foreigners or speaking in a foreign language, because it frees them from soul-draining social niceties and obligations that make normal life almost like punishment much of the time.Hard KnocksLife is freaking hard for Koreans. There's a narrow path considered acceptable for Koreans to follow, and straying from it comes at serious social cost (note that many are willing to pay this cost, and you can meet them, too; they’re usually amazing and very cool people). As a foreigner your life may be so-so, but the lives of your Korean friends goes from pressure to pressure to pressure. Integrate as much as you want, but be glad you're not local. If Korea is a great place to be a culturally adaptable foreigner, but still difficult, it's a brutal place for Koreans. Many Koreans want to leave not because South Korea isn't a politically free place, or because they face hardship or hard times finding good jobs. It's because of the constricting social culture.You think you have it tough, the immigration office treats you badly, the government is hard to deal with? Your boss is a jerk, there's bad workplace politics and your boyfriend won't introduce you to his parents?If you're Korean, you need to deal with this, and far, far worse: Much more hierarchical workplace abuse; fewer options for redress than you (believe it or not), because defending yourself can stigmatize you; obnoxious "seniors" (work, family, school, government offices, even social circles) that use their social power over you to browbeat or abuse you; there’s often no way to complain about problems, and those higher up, or in many kinds of relationships with you, can more or less freely abuse you.And it’s not just hierarchical abuse. I’ve heard numberless stories of dodgy relatives who scam family for money and get away with it, and business partners who cheat or run off with cash or business. The point is that all of that wonderful conformity often means Koreans need to put up with abuse and not be the one who aired dirty laundry in public. Because of this, social problems tend to fester in the darkness, instead of being solved. This is a sharp contrast with where I come from, because people there tend to hang issues out in public for everyone to see. The advantage is that the problems can then be solved, but in Korea, sometimes even talking about them is impossible.Then there’s how class intersects with this low trust problem. I saw a case where a litigious rich snob sued a poor woman in a lineup because she accidentally spilled coffee on her expensive shirt, and it was entirely an issue of opportunist contempt, including the language and tone used. It was as if the rich snob was speaking to a servant or criminal. There was no sense of proportion or humility. This is very common.There’s the painful and embarrassing quest for a marriage partner at predetermined age, after which you're basically trash, even if this age has gone up from, say, 25-26 for women to 29-30 these days (try being a 40 year-old Korean woman and talk about how much trouble you have dating). But men have it hard, too. There are wives who expect husbands to be walking wallets and personal servants, and woe betide a man with the wrong or no family connections, as he ends up being treated with contempt by everyone, especially women, likely even his wife.And so much for confucian respect for the elderly. When you get old, there’s a very real chance you'll be discarded by relatives and children who see you as a useless piece of parental refuse. You’ll be lucky to see your kids and grandkids twice a year, somtimes. But to be fair, it could be that in the past, you were also imperfect - abusive, weak, over-compensating, or (insert social pathology here), and your kids now don’t want anything to do with you.So the whole hierarchical order thing can be pretty oppressive in social relationships, and perverse, because the relationships and obligations often reverse without warning. A parent who was domineering or abusive may find themselves abandoned without means of support, or on the other hand a doting and wonderful parent may find themselves abandoned anyway. Bizarrely, your abusive former boss may end up coming to you in a few years looking for job connections and that professor who took advantage of you may be sidling up to you for a “deal” a year from now. Now you need to navigate complex personal and political factions, too.Koreans have to navigate a byzantine web of complex, competing and contradictory social relationships that are often totally opaque to outsiders - or even insiders, for that matter, which is much of the problem. Before you get resentful about not being Korean and never being able to fit in, ask yourself very carefully if you want to fit in.The All-Seeing EyesAll the time, everywhere, people are watching and judging you. People are deciding whether you are Acceptable. Are you High-Value? Are you pretty or handsome? Are you rich? What’s your social status? Once they decide what social category to put you in, they ask "are you behaving in the Proper Manner for your social category"?This never stops. Everyone is always judging you. Even when you “win”, you still need to “maintain”.Many Koreans very desperately want to exit Korea to get away from the judgmental eyes of other Koreans. You may be exempt from it for a time, but only for a time. The longer you stay, the more you’re expected to perform. But your Korean friends and relatives live as if everywhere is a small village, and everyone always has their nose poked firmly into your business.Consumerism and StatusSocial status is everything. Even if you're not rich, you need to pretend to be rich. You need the Right Manners, the Right Attitude, the Right Look, the Right Disposition, the Right Response, the Right Interests. It's a lot like Hong Kong that way. Get used to it. Do you think they’re materialistic and status-obsessed where you come from? It’s nothing compared to Korea.South Korea is among the most intense, self-focused, bitterly status-consumerist places on Earth. New York City is anti-capitalist by comparison.Confucius what?You’re going to hear a lot about Confucian values and hierarchy and order and family. A lot of people resort to this kind of lazy talk. The truth is that there’s nothing particularly Confucian in any meaningful sense about life in Korea. Sure, there may be a few rituals and some superficial age/status talk hanging around in the air like the fading memories of old photographs, but their cultural context is so twisted out of shape that, in essence, talking about confucianism in any serious sense is just a distraction.I should be blunt: easily the laziest and most trite armchair-sociological analysis of Korean society is the lapse into talking about “confucianism”. It’s nonsense.Whenever I hear people talk about confucianism in modern Korea, I feel like Yoda:When it comes to old people, for example, in Korean society older people are generally discardable. Despite the statistics for wealth, younger people have abandoned most Korean traditions and older people now die alone and in aching poverty at staggering rates. Also, the traditional deference given to the old (also according to class) is slipping away in all but superficial ways. The aged often have no connection to modern Korea, and you can see them hanging out in community and neighbourhood centres or sitting in unkempt parks, as passersby fail to even see them, shuffling around aimlessly in semi-abandoned neighbourhoods where nobody would ever condescend to give them a head-nod. It’s sad and disheartening, the kind of modern alienation that accompanies intense city life.I feel genuinely awful, seeing these people frittering about and living on the psychological edges of a spasmodically changing world. A side story: There was an old guy outside my apartment building who fixed shoes, an ot-susan booth guy, he must have been eighty years old if he was a day. He sat there, day in, day out, in his ancient booth from a bygone economic period, perhaps the last lone straggler in a busy part of the city. I had him fix a few pairs of shoes when I discovered his charges were so low that it was almost a comedy - a handful of won to fix seriously damaged shoes. So I started to bring old broken shoes to him to fix, a couple of times not even my own, because we chatted when I did. He had little family and nobody to talk to. On my way home from work I’d occasionally stop to talk and we’d exchange a few sentences. It wasn’t much, and I wasn’t going out of my way, but he once said that he never knew foreigners were so friendly and one Christmas he asked if I wanted a pair of gloves he’d fixed and no longer needed. I shared a bag of mandarin oranges on a hot summer day when he wasn’t busy. I have no idea if he was rich or poor, decent or awful, or much else about him. But the first thing that occurs to me is this: the guy just wanted to be acknowledged as a human being, a member of our shared community, a human with value, and in Seoul, where social isolation is a real threat for many people, especially the elderly, this is a precious commodity. I was surprised and a sad when his booth closed up for a month, and then just disappeared. I have no idea what happened, but there again was yet another piece of Seoul passing into history. And this is often pretty anonymous, too. The people walking by were surely trying their best never to notice, at all.Seoul doesn’t really exist in the present. It exists for the future. The present is just a staging ground for the future. If something passes out, then it’s forgotten almost immediately. This is true for people, too.Welcome to the Modern World, dialed up to maximum, with a booster rocket.People, People EverywherePopulation pressure. You can never escape from people. There are people everywhere, all the time, in every place you want to be. It's great, until you want to be alone or to relax. Good luck with that. Even smaller cities are just jam-packed.Bad AirTypical for most large Asian cities with a big industrial base, Seoul and most of Korea has chokingly bad air. Some Koreans will excuse this by literally any means - it’s from China, it’s not that bad, you’re just whining, it’s just the season or the wind or the desert dust from China or try going out in the evening, anyway who cares, etc. etc. etc., but the air can be toxic.There are times when I want to sit in my apartment and seal myself in, the air is so awful. It can have a metallic, disgusting “taste” that suffocates you deep in your lungs.And here’s the ugly truth. Some of the bad air wafts over from NW China, where the air is actually far worse (and this fact never ceases to amaze and terrify me - how do people live in China?). But the majority of the pollution, as endless studies show, doesn’t come from China. It comes from Korea, and Koreans are responsible for it, despite their deflection. Hating on China in Korea is a pretty easy thing to do. But South Korea has lots of coal-fired power plants, and an industrial history that traditionally put public welfare and concern for general health somewhere on the bottom of every list of stuff to worry about. Things are changing, but you still can’t part many Seoulites from their toxic gas-spewing cars, slammed into bumper-to-bumper traffic despite the best transit system ever devised, and everything from diesel buses to factories to, especially, coal-fired power plants do everything in their power to suffocate you.Let me tell you some tales.I’ve been in Seoul during Chuseok many a year, and at this time, by and large, the huge teeming city empties out (!); everything shuts down and people flood to the countryside to see relatives and, more oftentimes these days, get the hell out of Korea entirely, for vacations. It’s much like a Western Christmas for Koreans in terms of family/vacation holidays. I challenge you to try getting *any* kind of transportation service at this time. Anyway, when I’ve sometimes been stuck in Seoul (by choice or accident), I’ve experienced something miraculous: with no cars on the road, with power consumption way down, with no nothing at all operating, …The sky is blue.It’s not just “blue”, but rather the irridescent, magnificently pure blue of what seems like, after so long in Seoul, undreamed-of childhood memories. For the glorious week or so before people start to trickle back and the generators and cars begin to strangle the city again, Seoul is brilliantly illuminated by the most inspirational blue spasms of colour ever imagined. And then, slowly but surely, these fade and the sky goes back to the off-white kind-of hint-of-blue haze that we all try not to notice.Other parts of the country are better, but often not much. Add in summer heat (and the heat is no joke), or the doldrums of winter when the air ceases to move in the mountain valleys, and it feels like you’re being buried under an inescapable, relentlessly toxic blanket.Look. There’s a solid reason why it’s hard to get people to move to places like Beijing or Shanghai, sometimes, and air quality is a significant part of this. It’s also a big deal, if not on exactly at the same terror-emergency-level, for Seoul and much of South Korea. The truth is that it doesn’t matter that Beijing is worse, because, air-wise, places like Beijing and Seoul still sit squarely in the same province of Hell, even if Seoul is on the edge.In my home city, on another continent, a city which isn’t small and has lots of cars and real pollution, we often complain about the air. But I once remarked that when I got off the airplane for a visit back, the air at my home city’s airport - literally the worst and most disgustingly polluted air in my whole country - was like a good day in my residential neighbourhood in Seoul. I wasn’t exaggerating.It sounds bad, and if it sounds bad, it’s because it is. Of all the problems I’ve encountered in Seoul, this is easily the one I resent the most, and it’s the one for which no good workaround exists. Racism, rudeness, overcrowding, etc., these things you can, in the end, find ways to confront and adapt to. But the air?Around the world, we’re going to have to learn to deal with these problems. No people anywhere should inflict this kind of suffering on themselves, and preventing the kinds of airpocalypses that I’ve experienced in Seoul - and are utterly normal in Beijing or Shanghai or Bangkok - should be the very first order of priority for every authority, everywhere. When you’re getting tired of breathing, when you just can’t get that repugnant taste of the air out of your mouth, and lungs, and nose, and clothing, when you wipe the inside of your nose and the tissue comes out jet black after work, …There is nothing mitigating I can say about this. It’s not a joke. Koreans who go abroad notice it immediately, though they’re often so jaded that they’ve kind-of given up. Many apartments have “air cleaners” installed that filter out the toxic crap from the air the family is forced to breathe indoors. It really is a very serious problem, one that’s tacitly acknowledged but about which nobody seems able to do anything.There are days when “airpocalypse” really does describe attempting to breathe in Seoul and it’s not just a cute expression. You feel like it’s a real life-threatening impending nightmare. If anything would ever make me leave, would just push me out of this country, it’s the fact that breathing can be a dangerous pastime for months on end. How I wish and wish and wish that someone - anyone - could clean this air up, and keep it clean.And don’t tell me electric cars will do it. I mean, what about those coal-fired people-choking poison-belching power plants? We need to get the electricity for those cars from somewhere. There has just got to be a better way to run air conditioners, because this is total nonsense.Cultural, Racial and Ethnic ChauvinismThis is a less cute and far more serious issue, especially for foreigners who aren’t white, or even, for that matter, for white foreigners. It’s true for Asian foreigners, often especially so, and it’s definitely true for SE Asian, black, African or any other non-Korean foreigners. You know, sadly, thinking about it, it’s even true for actual foreign-Korean-foreigners; they get shit all the time, too.Korea has a tendency to be, not to put too fine a point on it, racist. There’s a lot of juvenile commentary on this, and it’s a complex sociological subject, but let’s just say that the “race-nation” is not a dead subject in Korea. Korean academics debate this endlessly: Racial nationalism’s roots may be deep, or may only be early 20th century, … it might often be odiously fascist in tone, or vital to the national fabric, but abandoning academic debates and before anyone gets all observational-wise when living there, note this: the study of this subject requires far more than armchair social commentary and familiarity with a few Wikipedia pages. The origin of Korean “Specificity” in cultural contexts is a hotly contested and deeply studied thing, perhaps one of the most intensely studied subjects in or about Korea, and requires nuance and lots of context to explore. Feel free to do your PhD in it. Your armchair observations are suitable for coming to the kinds of conclusions based only on your own personal experiences. Yes, there’s racism, but also yes, it’s incredibly complicated.Want to know how complicated? Even for Korean-origin foreigners, there’s a rigid social hierarchy into which they fit, which can be contradictory and impossible to navigate. Do you speak Korean? What kind of Korean? How well? Do you behave properly as a Korean, or are you poisoned by “Foreign Expectations” or behaviours? Is this difference only a problem, or is it sometimes also an advantage for you, or both a problem and an advantage at different times? What if you’re ethnically Korean from China (old Manchuria), or Kazakhstan? Where do you fit in, and can you fit in at all? What about “mixed” people, and what the hell does that even mean? And we haven’t even gotten to other Asians, South Asians, Arabs, Westerners, black Westerners, Africans, etc. Before we get to them, we can get utterly lost trying to work out the multilayered discrimination against various types of people who somehow vaguely fit into the word “Korean”. PS: as if it wasn’t bad enough, there’s discrimination, too, against actual in-South Korea born Koreans; people from, say, Jeolla-do often find people in, say, Seoul badmouthing them.So now that we’ve established that it’s hopelessly complex before we even step outside “racially Korean” Korean-ish types, we can move on to more clearly identifiable bona-fide “foreigners”.As the new internationalist-minded generations move into prominence, racism is receding slowly, but the instinct to paint foreigners as dirty, disease-ridden, socially toxic invaders of the holy body politic is still present. From time to time, you’ll see MBC-TV reports about the likely-misrepresented depraved antics of (insert predictably dirty, disgusting socially toxic foreigners here). Ignorant Koreans are numberless, just like there are ignorant, self-satisfied jerks anywhere. There’s no special genius with social harmony or cultural understanding in Korea, and Korea is as filled with stupid and arrogant idiots as anywhere else.But within the racialized social order, there’s a very clear hierarchy. The point for many foreigners is this: if you’re black, you’d better hope to God you’re American, because at least black Americans have the saving grace that they’re seen as “Western”. If you’re black and speak English and come from a reasonably well-respected country that’s wealthy and well-known, you’ll still suffer for being black, but you do get a few pluses for being, say, a Yankee. On the other hand, if you’re Nigerian, … (no) thanks for coming out.Racial insensitivity is everywhere. In the end, Black or Asian or white, you’re just not of the “Minjok”; you are not Korean. For westerners with their own social brands of racism, it’s weird to see this operate against SE Asians and Chinese, too. The class differential can be pretty harshly applied to people not “of the body” who still look like locals. It’s also usually pretty easy to spot, say, Chinese living in Korea: different modes of dress, different ways of walking, modes of speech (even in Korean), accents, etc. And you can believe that these people are made to feel their “otherness” acutely.Chinese will be treated as markedly inferior to Koreans and Westerners, perhaps one solid tier lower; this is actually a big drop and it’s highly noticeable. Some people love Japanese, some hate them unaccountably with a fervour that will shock you (and only peripherally has anything to do with the history of Japanese colonialism), and this anti-Japaneseness is the result of pretty intense social-cultural attitudes that still percolate pretty deeply in society, a kind of love-hate that can be hard to understand even if you’re Korean.Education is no guarantee of liberal attitudes. In fact, here’s something that will surprise some foreigners but be oddly familiar to many others, especially those born into lower-class foreign families: once you introduce yourself to non-elite types in Korea, you may find that the lower classes, even if they’re more prone to stereotypes, are often more open to personal interaction and mutual trust. They can be more pragmatic, more personal, and less locked into rigid social norms. If you get to know them, the apparently ignorant lower classes often make amazing friends and even family. The idea that the lower classes in any country are subhuman troglodytes with regressive views may or may not be true, but the elite often harbour far more nasty social surprises than the proles. It’s usually upwardly mobile, often highly-educated types who will show off the greatest difficulties with breaking ignorant stereotypes. By the way, this is equally true in most Western countries, a fact rarely admitted by the upper classes; Korea turns out to be the same as anywhere else, a place where the educated elite believe a lot of myths about themselves and their “enlightened” place in the pecking order.So it’s a good idea to, say, talk to local ajummas serving food or taxi drivers or to get to know the “proles”. They’re usually genuinely decent, law-abiding, charming and altogether good people, and even if they’re “racist”, like the lower classes anywhere else in the world, they may deal with you on a level of genuine interaction that the self-admiring, self-described “progressive” middle and upper classes won’t.Anyway, you should remember something vital. Wherever in the world it is you came from before you arrived at Incheon and settled in somewhere in Korea, Korea is filled with normal people and it inevitably has a different variety of the same problems you had at home.So suck it up and deal with it.As much as you want to forge new social justice victories in your newfound home, in the end, the inertia and momentum of Korean society will trundle on with or without you. If racism is a problem for you, and if all you’re going to do is whine about the (highly selective and often contradictory) racism of Korean society, you really need to just live elsewhere. I’m not saying it’s a virtue to put up with crap or that you need to just tolerate it. Feel free to point it out and construct resistance or social workarounds. But Korean society is in a constant state of flux and change, and is perhaps one of the most dynamic places in the world - or ever to have existed. Whatever you say about Korea today may not be true tomorrow morning. More and more Koreans are essentially international citizens, and the generation gaps in Korea are more like vast, uncharted chasms. If politically correct activism is your bailiwick, you need to stuff that in a bag and keep it stashed in some deep corner. Unlike elsewhere, the word “dynamic” really means something in Seoul. So feel free to be constructive, but if you’re going to sally forth to fight dragons, you should know that in Korea they’re big, well-fed and temperamental.Sometimes, the best thing is to absorb what abuse comes your way when you can and very carefully pick and choose your battles - or develop your own workarounds. Maybe you can play up your non-conformist weirdness; maybe your Korean boyfriend’s family will accept you more if you engage them differently. It sucks that you’re likely to experience some brand of racism, but, in all seriousness, welcome to the human race. Deal or leave. Maybe go back to the socially perfect place you came from.I would never say you need to respect racism in Korea, or anywhere else, but you really need to decide how long and hard you want to fight this war.You could pretend a certain detachment (even when racism impacts you), a kind of “win some, lose some” approach. The truth is that being able to see the human race for all its faults and joys, without the barrier of an officially-approved social-justice cultural/political dogma, is illuminating. Nothing moderates your own chauvinism or racism or classist assumptions better than seeing the irrationalities and ugliness of other racisms at play. You will most definitely get to see Korea’s racism and “irrationalities and ugliness” play out over time. be a survivor; the smart move is to resist where absolutely necessary and, otherwise, chalk it up to experience.One good thing to do is to respect the local culture. Do this, and impress Koreans by *learning Korean*. A black American or British or Canadian man / woman who speaks Korean and has a good job in Seoul can count on a huge novelty bonus - you could actually have certain perverse social advantages. Given the negatives, you should use those advantages as best you can.Also, when breaking down how racism affects you, try to distinguish between its different incarnations - cultural ignorance, chauvinism, racism and other forms of intellectual discrimination. These are related, they intersect, but they are not, in fact, the same things. In Korea, you have a great opportunity to parse them. The hard fact is that you’re going to have to do this if you’re going to navigate life here.And remember: *You* are the foreigner. Your commentary may be sharp or correct or both of these and even very clever, but ultimately, you’re the observer, even when you’re participating and suffering. When you choose to participate, be smart about what you say. That absolutely doesn’t mean not challenging the status quo - by all means, do it, judiciously. But you need to try as hard as possible to understand what’s actually going on - really going on - before you dismiss the entire society. Yes, there’s racism, but what you think is racism may be another kind of “ism” (classism, selfish-ism, rude-ism, pissed-off-end-of-day-ism, crowded-ism, insecurity-ism, old-crotchety-person-ism, fetish-ism, etc. etc. etc). It takes energy to think about this and observe carefully.My experience has been that Koreans welcome honestly meant, even deeply felt and harsh criticism, but only if it’s based on genuine interest and real observation. If you approach it tactfully and intelligently, they may engage you about it even if they find it uncomfortable. What won’t be welcome are crude, lazy criticisms that miss their mark, or empty generalizations and crude bitterness.I know a black man from NYC who got by famously in Seoul, but did experience substantial racism, far worse than he’d ever experienced at home. On the other hand, he spoke excellent Korean, and at one point had a discussion with his boss; instead of being angry, he gently showed his boss why he had an issue, and believe it or not, the boss understood and changed his approach to the workplace. It can happen. Not everyone will be understanding, but many people will, if you don’t treat them like they’re diseased or the enemy.Korea is a unique place, but it’s also a cauldron of living micro-societies with real people. Treat it and its people and even its very real problems with the respect and seriousness they deserve. As an outsider, this is the only approach that will get you traction when dealing with things like racism directed against you.PS: I haven’t mentioned the racisms practiced by foreigners against other foreigners and Koreans; there’s a boatload of this, too. People from other countries don’t forget where they came from. But this is about Korea, not the incestuous society of foreigners and “expats”.These are a few of the negatives that will hit you after living there for about a decade. There are a lot more, just as with every other country in the world. And if you get outside of Seoul, you’ll have different experiences. Pusan has a very different energy, and is both more inwardly and outwardly focused, in different ways; Gwangju and its environs are slower and more laid-back, with beautiful countryside and a very different social environment, its people perhaps more congenial if more small-town. Taegu is a bit isolated within Korea, culturally (it’s not Seoul, and it’s not Pusan, and it’s not small, but not big - kind of in the middle zone of not having anything remarkable about it). Take a trip to Geoje-do or Mokpo or Sunchang or Jeju or Jeonju or, for a treat, the quaint town of Naju, and you enter into oddly parallel worlds that barely resemble big city life - or even each other. Some of these places will sit with you the rest of your life.The islands in the south, off the coast, are stunningly beautiful. The mountains in the centre of the country and the north are green and hide picturesque valleys with waterfalls and meandering streams. There are temples on the crests and sides of mountains that look like they’re out of a traditional painting, and mist-drenched slopes flow majestically between rolling peaks covered in green, accompanied by the sound of bubbling streams trickling over rocks and cascades. Needless to say, the country as a whole is a remarkable place. It’s one of the gems of Asia, poorly explored and underappreciated. If you bring your attention span and some patience, this country will reward you with a kind of subtle sumptuosity you’re rarely going to find anywhere else.But while its people are great and the culture one of the great chapters in the human mosaic, like many places involving actual humans, its social order leaves much to be desired. Some people love Korea, and will never hear a bad word said about it, as if they’d converted to a new religion, and it gets tiresome to hear them in their Korea-Boo!!!!!!! “Hoo-Rah!” phase aggressively defend every wart and blemish as if their lives depended on it. Some people hate Korea and life here and grumble constantly, and listeners get tired of wondering why they’re here; just leave, then, already, and go back to wherever the hell you came from.If you want to see Korea for what it truly is - and appreciate it on that level - it makes sense to be neither blindly exuberant nor negative. Try to see Korea as another place with real people. See its good features for what they are, and yet, at the same time, be open to understanding the things that make it a tough place to be. See Korea in all its glorious triumphs and failures and understand it as a living world with a reality of its own.Understand the people. Understand the place. Don’t spend too much time passing judgment, and make a place within it for yourself as best you can.It’s a remarkable country, but in the end, it’s a place like any other. Koreans bleed red, just like you and me. We are united by the virtues and vices of our common humanity.When thinking about potential negatives, I always try to remember this: no matter how bad a particular day might seem, Koreans are, by and large, wonderful people on their good days, and that’s true for everyone in the world.We need to remember that.C Yun asked a question below, and I decided to put it and my response in the original post, because it was interesting to put this down and I’m sure many people will disagree with me, so I wanted to draw attention to it.C Yun: “My point was that you described several facets of life in Korea from the point of view of (someone whom I assume to be) a white Canadian expatriate who has settled in Korea. While you’re a foreigner, you’ve certain been extremely observant and your post described in much detail many uncomfortable but inevitable truths about life in Korea.You mentioned even ethnic Koreans from abroad face hardships there. You’re not wrong - a lot of Korean-Americans would never live in Korea, and not because they hate Korea or hate themselves, but because life is too difficult there. Having been born/raised in the U.S., it’s just too different. If you would be so kind, what difficulties do/did “actual foreign-Korean-foreigners” face based on what you witnessed?My very imperfect and personal response:I know a good number of foreign-born Koreans, from a few countries. By and large, here’s a brief and not comprehensive list of the sorts of things that hit home, based on the experiences of people I knew, and stories I heard, interestingly sometimes from both sides of the complaint. Note that there are a lot of stereotypes, stereotypes of how people stereotype, and assumptions about stereotpyes in this. I’m going to preface this with the qualifier that this is my own experience, what I’m remembering, what I saw and see, and this is possibly just me or the people I know; that it’s not comprehensive and countervailing info might be possible, because Korea and Seoul are horribly complex places with many strata and layers and social cliques, which could very well be different, and that even among foreigners, there’s huge disagreement about more or less everything. I know a lot of Koreans who are model international citizens, others who aren’t international at all but are weirdly accommodating, still more people who should be understanding and accommodating but are rigid, sneering nativist jerks, Koreans who are utterly unconcerned with your status, accent, or whatever, and don’t care to think about it, and others who find it endlessly fascinating and want to help you / learn English / introduce you to their daughter/son/granddaughter/grandson / ask your opinion about their business marketing plan / watch you eat some weird food they think is uniquely Korean as they tell you about how uniquely Korean it is, or occasionally sell you something (like car insurance, …. no joke, believe me). Very possibly invite you to their church / temple, and have you accepted Jesus into your life yet? there’s a pretty half Korean girl from Utah about your age in our church you should meet, etc.Then there are the street musician crowds where some non-Korean speaking foreigner just shows up and starts jamming with Hongdae locals he doesn’t know and strikes up friendships, in spite of his foreignness, or perhaps because of it. And the funky arts crowd, with their ultra-cool super-chill Korean artists who just date tall German girls. Or the Spanish artist guy whose Korean is better than a Korean linguistics PhD and who seems to have dated every artsy girl for 50 km and knows literally everyone. Or the haughty Korean painter who has spent half her life abroad in a dozen countries and knows every bar worth being seen in, in Chelsea and Kreutzberg and Soho anyway, and speaks English with a Franco-Korean accent. Or the 65 year-old foreigner who spent 40 years in Korea and has a huge clutch of doting Korean relatives (the older ones now dying, mostly) and is more or less some version of a Korean ajossi, talking to (other?) foreigners in a native language he only half remembers from half a century ago. And the pensive Indian guy who married a Korean woman, has two kids, who struggles with Korean because his brain is likely filled to bursting with the 72 Indian subcontinent languages he speaks, but who nevertheless won’t hear a bad word about Korea, and is addicted to Korean food and - and I mean, exclusively - wants to eat one of only three specific Korean meals at all times. And last, but not least, the Orthodox priest from the monastery in the Sinai in Egypt (!!!) who has a burgeoning tiny flock of various sorts and who invites you to come by and check out his church’s program. In all seriousness, I kid not one jot. Life in Seoul, supposedly the capital of “the hermit kingdom”, is very often like being in an Asian version of New York, and this gets more and more true every week.Seoul is an utterly vast place, and this cannot possibly be overstated. It’s also a very international city, despite what its appearance may be. Its people, Korean and otherwise, are intimately connected into a fractal-like series of networks that span the globe.The same Koreans who bitch and whine about Sri Lankan workers or Chinese Koreans committing fraud or dirty foreigners go on vacation to, …. Mauritius, China, Paris, London, Berlin. They date foreigners, or did before, or went to school in some foreign country, often multiple times, or themselves overstayed a visa by X years in Y country and had a completely alternate life far from Korea. Push buttons and the same contradictions and weird ideas will pour out that you find at your own “home”, because opinions live together in people’s brains in frozen conflict.None of these people will fit any stereotype of behaviour, and before you dismiss them as some weird minority, a city like Seoul is often made up of whole subcultures of weird minorities. So, with that in mind, you operate on assumptions and stereotypes, and stereotypes of stereotyping, at your peril. Be prepared for a continuous self-generating list of exceptions. So with that cowardly qualifier thrown out there, I’m going to claw it back a bit and say that there are, indeed, patterns that are visible, even if they can’t be assumed to be “accurate” in a granular way.Thus:Korean gyopos and others from abroad dating Korean-born-in-Korea women: the men have a weird kind of “other” status. They’re acceptable, culturally, but therefore too close to often be allowed to make mistakes that Korean-born-in-Korea men are also not allowed to make, but that obvious foreigners are often forgiven for. Ghosting a dating partner: Koreans also do this to each other, by and large, and it’s very common. Foreign born Korean women dating Korean men: often great difficulty dealing with far, far more conservative Korean values, especially for Gyopo women raised in liberal societies.Note that this is weird and often idiosyncratic, though there are patterns you’ll see if you watch. For example, overseas Korean communities tend to have an ossified, older version of Korean culture; it’s often true that overseas-born Koreans have a very 1970’s or 80’s kind of social values set, and in some ways can be inflexible, come with outdated expectations, or can make unwarranted assumptions about other party’s motivations or whatever, because SK has more or less culturally moved on, especially the big cities. But in other ways, Korean born men are often very conservative in ways that involve face, or family, in ways that foreign-born Korean women find achingly hard to deal with. Also, the in-laws can be awful. But to be completely fair, they’re often awful to Korean-born-Korean women, too.Work: Gyopos occupy this uncomfortable space where they’re not truly “uri”, but but sort-of are; if they’re not careful, they come to be expected to integrate as Koreans, without being given the social space and grace to make mistakes as a foreigner. Also, the emotional and personal lives of gyopos and other Koreans born elsewhere will be under particular scrutiny, and though this is also true for Korean-born Koreans, it can be far more judgmental. A Korean born Korean having an affair with a co-worker might be interesting or a source of gossip, but there’s often going to be a shrugging of shoulders, a kind of “yeah, well, so this happened. Another day at the office.” But if one of them is a foreign-born Korean, there is likely to be a greater degree of judgment and a harshness to it. It goes for lots of issues at work, of every conceivable kind. Speak back to your boss? Gyopos may not get the leeway a “genuine” foreigner would.The failing for a Korean is seen as a failing, at that moment. For the foreign-born Korean, it’s seen as either a sign of ongoing moral failing or a demonstration of the fundamental non-Uri-ness of the foreign-born Korean. For a gyopo, it can be a kind of cultural/moral failing that justifies greater punitive action, or, sometimes, less, depending on what it is.In any case, it’s a kind of dismissing of the person or the issue. “Oh, he’s not really Korean, see, obviously”, and thus X, Y, Z, etc.Expectations: Because they come from abroad, there are a set of expectations of foreign-born Koreans. They vary and are complexly intertwined; a discussion about what they are is best had over beer and deep into the night outside, in some park or a pojang macha or etc. But it’s a good discussion.In any case, the upshot is always that the expectations will rub the foreign born Korean the wrong way, most of the time. There will also be unsaid assumptions that need to be analyzed, and it will be extremely hard for Koreans born in Korea to generally question these assumptions.Anger at judgment: When Koreans treat a foreign born Korean as integrated or “uri”, with the right degree of “nunshi”, it will shock them when the person seems to fit into stereotypes of foreigners. It’s because, …. the gyopos are, in fact, foreigners. This is a kind of intermediate space that’s hard to get a grip on.For example, if a girl comes from LA, which has the largest Korean community outside of Korea, China and Japan, and she shows mostly modern Korean behaviour in Seoul, but is also a certified LA girl, it will go over with some shock with a few people, especially in places where there’s some specific institutional decorum required.Remember, many of these “rules” are not society-wide, but specific - often to even one institution, or an age group, or a particular environment. The Latin dancing community has a set of rules, often shifting. A sports or mountain hiking group may have another set of social expectations and rules, etc. This can cover things you say, don’t say, even the use of fake names (ie for dancers). At work, some places are button-down and others loose; some very formal even though they look cool, or sometimes very relaxed, even if they look formal. The thing is, in all of these situations, the person will be expected to kind of understand the environment and have a base repertoire of adaptation skills to be able to move through these different social environments. A foreigner will have different sets of these skills.The thing is, a foreign born Korean may understand the specific rules of a few of these, but the actual social rules vary by situation and group. Just knowing the surface requirements doesn’t help you with the root equations that underlie these things. So a foreign-born Korean can see all the surface stuff and mimic it, but the native born Korean can generate all of these behaviours without having to mimic a standard protocol in a rigid way. Also, note that if he or she desires, dissent is common, and a native born Korean will understand when, how, and what to dissent about. It’s this last thing I was getting to just now that matters a lot. When disputes arise, as they inevitably do, with mates, in workplaces, with family, even, this is where the differences between foreign born Koreans really come through.Because they’ve integrated more than other foreigners, they’ll be expected to either take shit or deal with it in ways suitable for a Korean. A foreigner (like me) will be excused, to some extent, from this rule, because he/she is expected to be “quirky”.But a dispute is a place where power is expressed. Where power is expressed, often any advantage will be exploited. It now becomes convenient to presume the foreign Korean is Korean-Korean because their behaviour can now be more harshly judged without the EscapefromJail-ForeignerBehaviour card. Even if this makes no sense - a foreign-born Korean who barely speaks Korean dating some Korean girl, or working in some office, or dealing with some government bureaucrat, who has no more “nunshi” than any other foreigner and should also this be given some line of social credit for straying - the Korean Korean side may just “decide” all of a sudden to judge the foreign Korean as a Korean Korean, to get an edge in the dispute. In other words, Koreans can use acceptance or aliennness as weapons in a power struggle.They can’t do this with the foreign foreigner. But they can do this with a “korean” foreigner. They will often deny the foreign Korean the benefits of “nunshi”, but when it comes to doling out punishment or extracting concessions, suddenly the foreign Korean is a full-blooded Korean who has Mightily Transgressed and must be held to account.Isolation and depression: This will afflict foreign born Koreans often as much as foreigners, but expect little sympathy. Ironically, gyopos often end up hanging out mostly with other foreigners, because the little personal ticks that align in a public culture are often shared with foreigners and not locals. You find this among foreigners, too. Canadians, Brits, Aussies and New Zealanders often find it easier to hang out with each other than with Americans, who usually stick with each other. It’s a tendency, not a rule.And this gets weirder and more complex for foreign Koreans from different places. Joseonjok (from the old Manchuria) are said to be often the source of crime, problems, etc., especially breaking government rules, like visa rules. They tend to be judged pretty harshly and mistrusted. Discrimination against them is relatively fierce and consequntial, for them. It’s not a lie that some of them are like most people from communist countries - treating rules like bothers or obstacles to be overcome, rather than anything meaningful, not having a huge amount of respect for agreements or contracts, buggering off without paying bills, getting involved in petty schemes, corruption, etc. - but this is mostly pretty typical Chinese behaviour, too, and they come from a country where there’s really no rule of law with a dog-eat-dog culture of “get what you can, now!”. How can you expect Chinese Koreans to get by in China if they’re not, basically, Chinese people on the make? It’s a tough place. Do you really expect them to blend into Korean society seamlessly just because they speak (a version of) the language? Come on.There’s some stereotyping there. But this is the public perception, and it affects the ability to rent housing, get jobs, make friends and date, even. A lot of unfair assumptions about Joseonjok are often made, and many try to change their accept and keep their passport/citizenship or other details secret.Zainichi Koreans are, it has to be said, mostly basically Japanese people. In mannerisms, behaviour, outlook and social life, they tend to act indistinguishably, as a group, from Japanese. However, there’s no real hostility there, and they’re often seen as kind of “cute”, and interesting, not bad, and the Korean blood thing means that, say, marrying one is fine, especially if they’re female. But, … they’re basically Japanese. Japan has an utterly different, I mean incomprehensibly totally different, social and public culture compared to Korea. It might as well be Mars, it’s so different. A Japanese person can be angry at you and you have no idea, for example; if a Korean is pissed off at you, you damned well know about it, right now, and loudly. You have to love Koreans, because they own their emotions without guile, both North and South, and in this, they’re much like Westerners, only moreso. If they love you, and you have a high enough EQ, you know it and can rely on it. If they hate you, it bubbles out of them like water under pressure. But Japanese people? Good luck figuring that out. You need a cultural PhD and a chart-topping EQ to pick up the signals, and this is, at the very least, not me.Zainichi Koreans are basically just nice, perfectly acceptable, interesting …. Japanese people. I know this might anger some people, but it’s just true. Go see for yourself.Koreans from Kazakhstan: I’ve met a couple. They tend not to speak Korean well, but have half a dozen other languages, usually including Russian, and they tend to learn languages pretty damned fast, because they come from a part of the world where it’s assumed you can speak a whole bunch. The ones who make it to Korea are often well-educated, but in the “I’m from a sad, poor, autocratic state” kind of way, as in what would be a salutary thing elsewhere (education and status) is drained away because of their looked-down-upon passports. The issue is that, while ethnically “Korean” in Kazakhstan or Russia, in South Korea, they’re more or less totally Russian or ex-Soviet. I met one woman whose grandmother spoke Korean, and none of her parents’ or her own generation had an idea. I’m told there are more and more of these Koreans in South Korea, but how they’re getting on I don’t know. One couple I met were having a genuinely hard time, though this was about 5 years ago, and both were very, very highly educated. Highly educated, … in Russian. If I said they were scraping by, both economically and socially, would be an accurate statement. I found them both refreshingly Russian in temperament and behaviour, but this is just me, so who knows. I recall they both had a deep fondness for Korea as a kind of not-quite-lost homeland, of distant family memory, ie also of a Korea that ceased to exist a hundred years ago, and might predate even the Japanese occupation. Going to Korea is like an “Irish American” going to live in Dublin, or a “Scottish Canadian” living in Edinburgh. These people were the closest to truly foreign “foreign Koreans” I had ever met. They were perhaps (partly) “racially” Korean, and they had a taste for some Korean foods (which they may have eaten at home), but even if they had preserved their identity perfectly, the Korea their great great grandparents left is 3 or 4 Koreas lost in time; there have been multiple versions of Korea on the peninsula since their families relocated to central Asia.Some specific countries:Korean Canadians: Mixed bag. Canada seems to have sucked down the children of immigrants more effectively than those in other places, and assimilated them relatively quickly. Canadian Koreans living in Seoul tend to behave more like Canadians than, say, the bulk of LA Koreans behave like Americans (though this could be for other reasons, see below).And now for a new category: American KoreansLos Angles Koreans: Many are “very Korean”, whatever that means, especially if their parents immigrated in the 1990’s. They’re usually tapped into modern Korean popular culture in ways even Koreans in Korea aren’t. They tend to get on famously with people in Seoul, less so the countryside, because the countryside is resolutely Old Korea, as is the area in the provinces outside the downtown cores of Pusan / Taegu / Gwangju. Lots can be said about them. There are tens of thousands of them in Korea, and a million in the greater LA area. Ultimately, most are Americans, and are mostly American, which is consequential for their interactions with Korean-born-Koreans. I love LA - I used to live there, and I know lots of Americans from southern California - but California has a habit of Californicating people. You could write volumes about LA Korean culture. Too much for here.Other American Koreans: These tend to be more American in a sense. Brash, bold, assertive (especially the women, by Korean standards), unafraid to be correct in public and to assert their opinions, strong. This is of course a gross stereotype, but I’ve known a lot of Korean-ish women and men from places like Chicago, Florida, NYC, Seattle, um, …. Louisiana, let’s see, …. indeed, Utah, Hawaii - and they by and large tend to be more “American” in a stereotypical sense than LA Koreans, but this is possibly due to the huge community of Koreans in LA and its constant renewal through immigration, there. These non-LA Korean Americans tend to get on well in Korea, because they do something many LA Koreans don’t: they don’t even bother to try to blend in, and be Korean-Korean. One guy from Chicago I spoke with a lot repairs cellphones, and at almost 50, he’s a sharp tack. And by sharp, I mean sharp and spiky, too - he’s utterly Chicago through and through, like an irascible grenade of tough mid-west city guy. He loves Korea, but has utterly no problem whatsoever being a “foreigner”, even one running a business.Like this guy, Koreans tend to be WAY more enterprising than others. It might be self-selection: those among this group who go “back” to Korea are often not the lazy, “okay it kinda makes sense for me to go” types. They have goals, purposes, and often don’t suffer from cultural delusions, and if they do, they bug out right away. I knew a Korean-background guy from Wyoming, of all places, who was running a business in Seoul. Divorced more than once, he was dating an Indian-background woman from Australia. Politically incorrect in the extreme, he didn’t let his disappointments with life in Korea get him down: he was goal-oriented and hard. His goal was to get his shit done, and he had no time to waste with cultural misunderstandings or local nobs.Because these people tend to be tougher, they tend not to give a wet rat’s dropping what other people think, and as a result, all of them that I know have done spankingly well, thank you very much, and if people don’t like it they can etc. etc. etc. There’s something to be said for this kind of attitude. A lot of Americans are like this, and it makes them enterprising - if, er, also spiky.AdopteesThis is a tough category to talk about, because in Politically Correct land, there are a lot of zealots with axes to grind. But I’ll attempt it, here, at some risk.Note that most adoptees are well-balanced, normal people.But some come with a bizarre assortment of expectations and desires, and some treat Korea like a kind of quest-resolution-machine, which it definitely isn’t. For a handful, Korea seems to offer some kind of cultural or social absolution, and it almost always fails to deliver, because, …. WTF? It’s just a country with people who don’t really think much about a bunch of babies who were purchased out of the country decades ago - and whose parents, incidentally, had no problem with the discarded children being removed in the first place. Korea was a shitty place to be if you were an orphan, and to a large extent, still is. These people are returning as adults to a country that got rid of them unceremoniously in the first place, and even today has a sketchy attitude towards orphans and single mothers.You have to guess this is going to be a really mixed experience for many such people, especially if they’re actually expecting anything emotionally inspiring or illuminating.A majority of adoptees are just curious about their “home” country. Those from Europe, for example, that I’ve met, are often fascinating and chill people. Like most Europeans they usually speak several languages, and are almost always (insert various European country) in their outlooks and expectations. They’re basically not looking to “be” Korean, at least those I’ve met, and they thus get on, to their level of expectations, relatively well. There is a surprisingly large number of European Korean adoptees in Seoul; just myself, I’ve met Swiss, French, Danish, Dutch, many British, German, Czech (!), and Spanish adoptees. The thing is, I met them in different circumstances, not together, the same for Canadians and the one Australian adoptee I’ve met. It means they don’t just hang out with each other.They’re all doing their own thing, on their own, often interesting (the Aussie guy was a very successful businessman at home in Australia). They tend to be just people, not part of anything in particular.Specifically American adoptees: Given how many there were, and how large a number make the trek to Korea, by and large they turn out to be culturally Americans of Korean descent who are in Korea to see what’s up. Most are well-adjusted and many treat Korea as a personal reservoir of cool stuff they can absorb and make part of themselves. It’s in addition to their being American, so no stress, right?They tend to get on well enough as Americans in a foreign land. It’s complicated in that they often track down their birth mothers and families, and can have mixed feelings about a Korea that is both a place of origin /culture and a place of family (which might not be entirely happy). Sometimes they separate these things, and sometimes they get conflated. I’ve known a couple of people who did both. They both still liked Korea, but more or less as foreigners. Koreans tend to treat them with some reserve, because there’s this weird sense of shame about this - and there’s an uncertainty. Are they foreign, Korean, Korean without families and thus orphans, so therefore no status? How do I think about them? Mostly, they just get by as foreigners.The Broken ZealotsThere’s a hard-core, identity-obsessed minority of adoptees who are on a crusade, or a jihad, either/or or both, or quite possibly something more obsessive and harsh for which I have no word. Ideologically driven by a soul-crushing weight of identity issues, mostly internal, my experience is that it’s important to identify this sort of person right away, and understand where the lines are drawn. In the end, I’ve decided that it’s impossible to meaningfully discuss cultural issues with them because they have so many unannounced, hidden tripwires, it’s like dealing with emotional landmines. They’re often riddled with hatreds, for example loathing for “white” people (though have often never traveled beyond one or two states in the USA), with only a comic-book understanding of Korea. They tend to have internalized a kind of racial-cultural essentialism, and have also magnified basic resentments of a bewildering number of things out of all conceivable proportion. Everything is seen as the result of other people’s vicious insensitivity, or racism, or classism, or ism-ism-ism, and this anger is directed not just at the typical arrogant colonialist oppressor white American male, but just as often at Korean-American women from LA who don’t understand their privilege at being culturally informed or balanced, Korean men who are insensitive to the specific cultural demands of the woman-seeking-cultural-and-racial-purity or social or cultural redemption, or the other foreigner who refuses to understand that seamless and sanctified racialist inclusivity is the single most important thing in the whole world and JUSTICE JUSTICE! or etc.I’m going to say it: What’s weird is that this particular kind of returning adoptee tends to be cosmically more actually racist and discriminatory in any meaningful sense than every small-town Korean Ajumma who doesn’t like the sound of foreign languages. A misogynistic old-school Korean businessman who thinks foreign values are poisoning Korea will be both more reasonable and easier to deal with than this broken ideological identity zealot from the US. I don’t know why, but among the American adoptees who come to Korea, there seems to be a loud, screeching minority who have a lot of bones to pick, and they may attempt to extract them from those they interact with. I’ve met a few, and they tend to conglomerate together in formal groups. Sadly, a Korean American friend said to me once that she mostly avoided social interactions with adoptees entirely, because this aggressive and ideological minority is salted into the mix of adoptees and, in her words, they “go off” unexpectedly and often with hard social consequences. A couple of other Korean-Americans have said much the same thing to me. I know a few adoptees, and they’re fine, but even they talk about the sad cases of what appear to be a version of race-identity-social-justice bible-thumpers from the US who cause a lot of noise, especially online. God help you if you say something they dislike, and have the wrong skin colour, age, privileged background or whatever they pull out of their grab-bags of hate.Note that the people who mention this and have a problem with the extremes are very often Korean Americans themselves, and Koreans, because they have the most contact with this kind of deranged identity seeker. I knew a Korean-Korean guy who dated a returning adoptee. He was just a normal job-working office Korean guy. The woman was so hard to deal with, with so many hair-trigger problems with so many things, trying to apparently cope with her own internal assumptions, expectations and disappointments, that this wasn’t even a problem of a cultural gap. His Korean-American friend had no explanation for her painful explosivity and sensitivity. So the result was that they broke up and he never understood how he could have done anything differently. He was broken up about it for some time, viewing it as his failure, which was (I thought) unfair.Sadly, this group seems to entirely self-segregate and self-police. They’re aggressive online, and have been known to make adoptee communities politically fractious.The thing is, while I’ve heard this and seen some limited amount of it, I’m not an adoptee nor do I move in these circles normally. But you hear stories on the periphery and Korean Americans are sometimes aware of this kind of thing.I know all groups can have their nutcases, but in this case, the stories seem too consistent to me and my limited exposure seems too consistent to easily dismiss this core group as a real thing.Upshot: These people do not do well in Korea. By and large, they’re going to find everything difficult and ultimately a disappointment, as well as all the people they meet, who won’t be capable of treating them in the way they want to be treated, or whose own behaviour will stray from what they expect. And the adoptees will never, ever be “local” enough to be fully included, which seems to be the real trigger. While most get on with their lives, some seem to be stuck on this identity agenda and can’t escape from it while they’re in Korea. I only knew a couple, but it was sad to see.So that was the hardest and most controversial topic in this list.OthersUnmentioned are South American Koreans, of whom there are a lot, Koreans from parts of SE Asia, of whom there’s a growing number, and I said nothing because in these cases, I know not just very little but actually absolutely nothing at all. I know there’s a substantial Korean community in Argentina, for example, and have met some people, who get on well, but was never close enough to any of them to get any information on how they were really doing.Another group of serious importance are North Koreans who have settled in the south, who generally get shit on by everyone on all sides. Their lives are filled with overt discrimination, often sneering contempt, and general social distrust - from conservative and nativist and lefty North-friendly and everyone. Welfare cases, often poorly educated, they get called useless and criminal and family-abandoners by some, and traitors to their nation (North Korea) by others. Some resent their special privileges (education breaks, subsidies for various things) and others think they’re all a bunch of criminals. Pro- and anti-North South Koreans can be as bad as each other.It’s my opinion that North Korean refugees are better off not settling in South Korea, but going to third countries, where they may not speak the language, but assuming they can learn, at least start from zero. This is better than starting from behind the line.That’s what I think about this very large and hard to summarize group of “Foreign Koreans in South Korea.”Jaeun Oh comments on Minjok and nationalism, etc.I responded, and wanted to keep the answer (in case the comments are deleted). This is really just for recording it. Feel free to ignore.You’re picking up on one feature of ethnic ultra-nationalism. The root is still the same: The idea that there’s a “club” which is defined by a mixture of cultural (changeable), physical (non-changeable) and social (attitudinal/training) attributes which define who can and can’t be “in the group”. In other societies, it can have elements of these - civic nationalism, for example, has an “ultra” form, as well. But ethnic ultra-nationalisn of the Minjok/Minzoku/Minguo form, in other words, the Bismarckian Volkisch nationalism that underpins it, deliberately conflates these.So you need to be racially a member, and this is non-optional (ie, you can’t perform racial membership, if you’re not a racial member; and you can’t deny it, if you are). You also need to be a cultural member (you must perform the elements culturally ascribed), and you must socially perform, as well (you need to replicate the official attitudes associates with the identity).Mix all three of these, and you get the Minjok.This is a highly curated identity: someone who strays from the accepted forms of performance, for example, can be said to have betrayed the identity, betrayed the collective or the minjok, and someone who refuses to embody some part of this 3-way prescription can also be said to be practicing a betrayal and/or to have been a pretender who isn’t worthy of membership.North Korea uses this version of nationalism, explicitly, tied to a social reality (worship of a god-deity). Its iconography is even similar to Imperial Japan.South Korea is kind of split - it has the idea of the Minjok, which you can see on the left. This is why the left is the priimary source of ambivalence to “multiculturalism” or “internationalism”. It’s also why the left is the main source of confusion on human rights - it denies universality and instead argues for some kind of “Korean human rights”, and thus seeks to limit criticism of North Korea’s regime on human rights issues. This is a pretty common left-wing position in SK/American - based NK studies. This is in essential sympathy with Minjokkism.While the South may not practice isolation camps, Great Leaderism, and whatnot, it has other elements that mark it as a Minjok state. There are racial requirements for membership: Someone invests their life into SK can struggle to become a citizen, while someone who speaks no Korean but who is *racially* Korean, a Joseonsaram, for example, can just go to SK and claim a residency visa; this is based exclusively on hereditary or racial terms, and is much like the German Blutrecht. It’s also relatively easy for them to become citizens. They can physically perform the racial membership, which takes precedence over the cultural and social signifiers .This is a dead giveaway.As for cultural signifiers, this is also true: some things are “Korean”, while others aren’t. A liberal membership would imagine anything done by a Korean to be fundamentally “Korean”; if some Korean does avant-garde art, than that art is Korean by definition of being done by a Korean in a Korean context. This is also something that exists in SK, but for much of SK’s history, this “Koreanness” was both highly curated and intensively policed. This action is “Korean”, that action is “not Korean” - etc. So Korean people themselves are told by others that X is “Not Korean” - “We don’t do that”. That policing is a part of the 3-way Minjokkism.Lastly, the social cues - attitudes you’re supposed to have to be a proper member of the collective. This is most obviously the case in NK, but in SK, too - the thing is, this is true for everyone, but if you want to see this super clearly, the best way is to see how NKeans function in SK. Exiles have their own Minjokkist social expectations, and in SK, they need to abandon these and adopt the SK ones. This is why the SK disappointment with North Korean exiles: They pass the racial test; they can perform (if not perfectly pass) the cultural test; but the social test they tend to fail.This means that North Koreans in SK are often seen to be failing the Minjok by not being “properly Korean”. In this case, it’s the social aspect of the Minjok ideology they’re failing, the specific one South Korea practices. They behave in an incorrect manner.Without the Minjok, they would just be seen as a different kind of member, but a member nonetheless. Canadian membership, at least ideally, for example, requires no specific social attitude. A thief is a thief; a thief can still be Canadian. A lazy worker is still a Canadian, though officially you’re supposed to be hard-working. But in SK, when North Koreans fail and are arrested for any reason, or are deemed to be insufficiently hard-working (or not hard-working in the right way), … they’re not just judged, but ** the appropriateness of their membership in the Minjok is questioned **. In other societies, one with a purely civic nationalism, this wouldn’t happen. Sure, they would be questioned, but nobody would ask if they were “truly Argentinian” for being a socialist or some other attitudinal thing.—————-So this is what I mean by Minjokkism.SK has a a nascent civic nationalism, but Minjokkism is still relatively strong. While it doesn’t have the same superficial features that NKean Minjokkism has, this minjokkism is still the same three-way membership-based performative nationalism that animated Imperial Japan, currently animates China, and also works in North Korea.The space for a civic nationalism in South Korea is growing. Increasingly, with multi-racial children and immigrants (including foreigners marrying into South Korean families, and a huge number of people culturally adapting to life in SK), the strength of the Minjok is weakening. There have been TV shows about the novelty of foreigners speaking Korean for decades; they’re kind of routine now, because * so many * foreigners speak Korean. Foreign woman AND men are marrying Koreans and having kids. In fact, if you take in foreign Asian women marrying Korean men, and add them to the foreigners in this generation marrying Koreans, the rate of intermarriage is shockingly high. The supposed purity of the Korean bloodline is being rapidly diminished. It was always an illusion - interbreeding with Chinese, Japanese, even Indians has been common for centuries, though always mentioned in hushed tones. Hamel, for example, and his other rescued-captees, all had lots of kids in Korea, and where did they go when the captees escaped? That’s one famous case. Those dozens of half-European kids just merged seamlessly into 17th century Korean society. Indian traders were all over the peninsula, as were Southeast Asians; I know people who were surprised to get 23andMe results back saying they were, for example, 3 or 6% Indian/South Asian. They had no idea this could be true. Others found out they were 5% Northern Asian (Manchu?) or some other thing that isn’t “100% Korean”.And then there are the kids of black American soldiers, very obvious; some became famous two generations ago.And where do we count the Korean diaspora into this? There are, in fact, several diasporas, at least 3: 1) The Joseonjok; 2) the earlier Kazakh and Russian Koreans; 3) The post-WWII South Korean diaspora.Each of these is very different. Yet where do they fit into the Minjok?In NK, this is clear: Your membership is racial, and you must perform Korean culture and atittudes. It’s not a question that this is the Minjokkism that Korea inherited from Japanese imperialism.This was ALSO true for South Korea, but this has begun to break up with the advent of different realities.The truth is, South Korea is being internationalized.The current popularity of SK culture abroad will only accelerate this process. This includes everything from food (LA-style Galbi now appears in and is popular in SK, and there’s also the cultural contortionism of Korean-style Mexican food, which is a mix of NW Mexican/diasporic Mexican food, a la America, and American-ized, essentialized Korean-style food), to music (there’s a whole industry talking about Korean music and its cultural nature), to art (few Koreans are as tapped into an integrated international culture as Korean artists), to literature (translation is now a huge source for Korean literature, in *both* diretions). I could keep naming things.This means that now, there are formal rules for becoming a Korean citizen made available to foreigners long resident in SK that were either informal or unattainable before. Many people are taking them up. A huge number of people go to SK to study in universities, in Korean, in subjects not based on Korean language.Korea is becoming a node on the international social and cultural system. This process can seem incomplete, because it is. The thing is, what’s driving it isn’t obvious to those who want to protect the Minjok from contamination (mostly on the left, but also on the hard right). But the process is fundamentally a result of success: because SK culture is so successful abroad, when it “comes back home”, it kind of brings things (and people) with it and also jams the door open.This is now likely unstoppable.One of the things you get when you talk to north Koreans or read what North Korea officially says is that South Korea as a whole has betrayed the Korean minjok with its new internationalism. It says it in exactly these terms: the race/nation has been betrayed. This won’t get translated into English as much, because the typical leftie types that want to excuse NK or apologize for it realize that this sounds really, really, really bad to outsiders, and ultimately paints NK as some kind of Nazi-like state (which, to be fair, it is).That “betrayal” is far from complete. But it’s definitely going on.So in a way, yes, you’re partly right; South Korea has an evolving, but still often just nascent, national identity more in line with international “civic identities” than Minjok-racial identities. To the degree this has happened, this is a good thing. But traces of the old three-way racialist-ethnic nationalism still remain. My guess it that it will take a couple of generations to fade away.But the hard reality of internationalism in SK, with everyone integrating themselves into one or another aspect of internationalism, whether they like it or not, is inescapable. Within a very few generations, “Korean-ness” will not be unattainable for foreigners; and the number of “Koreans” not practicing “Korean-ness” and even unable to perform it will likely outnumber the number of racially-Korean Koreans who can.Korea will still exist, but it will be more open and inclusive. And there will be a huge number of “lost sheep” who are basically just Canadian or Brazilian or whatever, likely more than Koreans in Korea, and culturally, what it is to be “Korean” will radically change. This has already started in earnest.The more successful Korean culture is, the more likely this is to accelerate.But as of RIGHT NOW, we’re just one / 1.5 generations out of a phase in SK where the Minjok was the rule. The “unification” dreams of Moon et al still predicate themselves on the unity of the pure Minjok, whether it’s openly discussed in those terms or not.If NK were to fall apart tomorrow and be incorporated into SK, it would set this back slightly, but the hard-wired dynamism of SK culture and its relentless integration into global culture and economics will just pause for a moment, burp that NK Minjok out and keep steamrollering.Everything pushes this: the rapidly expanding and increasingly influential diaspora in the West, the “return of the native” as this jams the Korean door open when they return (or their culture does), the rapid increase in political, social and cultural interchange, the hopelessly interdependent economy, etc.BUTWe can imagine in 3 generations a redefined “Koreanness” which people previously considered outsiders can be included in.That only exists in partial form right now. The old Minjok still exists.Weirdly, though not so weirdly, yhe Minjok is more popular among a certain set of Koreans ABROAD than it is in SK. In Sk, because this is the source of “Koreanness”, there’s no fear of its loss. But for some Koreans sensitive to this in the US or Australia, there’s a desperate need to identify with the Minjok and with Korea. These identity-politics warriors are seeking something, and are often deeply disappointed when they arrive in SK: they often perceive what they see as two betrayals.The first betrayal of the “return of the native” is the lack of acceptance they have, the way the “Home Country” uses the Minjok against “returnees”: you’re just an American; you aren’t sufficiently Korean; you’re contaminated and don’t behave properly, etc. - though note that this can sometimes be valuable, ie when a Gyopo is dating a local, or damaging, in the same situation - it can work both for and against you, often simultaneously.The second betrayal, and this is MUCH harder to deal with, is the betrayal of the idea of the Minjok by South Korea itself. Many returnees want to experience “pure” culture. Instead, they find a culture in a state of near-constant, churning, rapid change, morphing from one thing to another, like a state of being in a permanent chrysalis. Far from the unaffected, root-home motherland, they find a city (Seoul) and a country (SK) locked into the process they were seeking to escape. And worse, the locals don’t worry about it, because as the motherland, they have less to worry about with this change. Meanwhile, this betrayal can hit home really hard. This is the deepest betrayal. Let’s say the Motherland accepts you (betrayal 1 never happens to you). In effect, you need to turn around and reject the motherland, for not being sufficiently “pure”.I personally know many people very bitter about both of these betrayals. Many others also write about this. Much commentary about Korea itself revolves around these self-tortures that Koreans living abroad (or raised abroad) put themselves through. Whole schools of identity politics in the US, for example, are based on the contortions this puts foreign-born-and-raised Koreans through. They often rail against the compromises and the self-generated changes SK society experiences. In a way, what they want is a walled-off South Korea “true” to the identity they themselves are desperate to perform. Some of these people need SK to be a kind of reservoir or refuge of Koreanness, which they can draw on. Others reject this entirely, and want Sk to be more international, so they can integrate into it without compromising their own mixed feelings. There’s a range of responses. But I’ve noticed in academia that the identity-obsessives seem to have loud voices, and they speak from a sense of deep and burning betrayal at their welcome in host societies; when they get back to SK, either literally or metaphorically, they become even more bitter and enraged or despondent, crying about capitalism or imperialism or some other such thing, because SK refuses to be that “refuge” of pure Minjok that they desperately need. A very, very small number of very loud people then go over to NK, idealizing it as some refuge of the Pure Minjok - there are academic papers written by them, and they try to make noise, though they’re usually drowned out. (Of course, NK betrays the Minjok in its own exciting and dramatic ways, too, so this route would ultimately disappoint them, too).At some point, Koreanness will become just another world culture which anyone can identity with, and which many tens of millions of people will have some racial claim on- making the racial claim meaningless. When that leg of the 3-legged stool is broken, then the other two will readjust. It will be harder to police what is and isn’t Korean when a 1/8th Korean person from Camden, NJ owns, say, the world’s largest Kimchi and fermented foods operation, run in several countries with branches in SK, and just by gravity becomes a defining force in the marketing and interpretation of Korean foods.Sriracha is an American food, designed for American palates, made in the US. It has gone back to SE Asia and is now a staple there from Vietnam to Malaysia, after having been a minor regional thing. Is it seen as American or SE Asian? Are we sure? Is it neither, or both?This will happen with Korean culture. As the process of internationalization accelerates, it will be denatured of its intense localization and specificity and become a chapter in the human story accessible to anyone.I would note, however, that even Germans still struggle with this. The Volk is strong; it has divided Germany politically and socially. Incorporating the DDR is a barely begun project, really, and the resurgence of Volkisch nationalism is a real thing.However, …Korea is doing this on the basis of its own agency and authority. It’s the result not of defeat in war, but of its own profound cultural and economic success. This makes it different. When you’re succeeding, there’s no urge to guard the home front and keep it from contamination; the contamination is actually a sign of your success, something to celebrate.In a very real sense, Korea is internationalizing itself. In fact, from all sides, this seems like a desperate rush to internationalize itself. Korean TV can’t get enough multiculturalism. As a sign of success, a Korean woman or man marrying an Egyptian, Russian or Belgian and having mixed kids is seen less as a novelty and more as an affirmation of Koreanness and its values, of its international status and power. And thus, while this perception of agency increases, the “purity” of the Minjok rapidly declines.You don’t need a huge amount of this to break this Minjokkism. Whats’ the social estimate - in most of these situations (from Jihadism and radical militarism to successful integration and multiculturalism), 5% of a population not adhering to some social norm, or some such thing? And note that that 5% will be achieved pretty soon. All of those 5% will also be in superior positions of influence, too.So I would agree with you that SK different, but I would qualify that - it’s different, … but *not quite yet*.I can already see where it’s going, though. I can see some potential bumps on the road, but because the process is obvious and why it’s happening is clear, I don’t see the destination being different.As an ideology, the Minjok may see some reactionary resurgence, but it’s up against money, demographics, the global economy and even Korean success. At some point, it will become a call for “village-ism”, like a reactionary white nationalism, a retreat into some imagined purist idyll, and will be restricted to places like Hahaemaul in Andong or some town outside Seogwipo or Mokpo. Like going to Sunchangmaul today, to pick up your traditionally made dubu, for almost all Koreans it will be a ritualized or touristic activity. Those Koreans locked in this tiny and shrinking world will be resentful, but they will also be irrelevant, except as a reservoir or refuge of “Koreanness” from a past age. Sort of like what Andong tries to do now, with its “nobles culture” and its focus on staring resolutely backwards.The writing was on the wall for “pure Koreanness” - and every element of the Minjok - when Koreans abroad became successful and integrated, and started producing culture on their own, and when Korea itself became successful and integrated, and not incidentally a destination.When some future-world council of Earth is created, likely populated by representatives of the influential “nations” of the time, I fully expect Koreans to be well represented there. Those nations will share policies and attitudes and cultures and these will surely cross over a lot. They will be international. They’ll blend with each other.The Minjok is doomed, because “Korea” can no longer be easily contained behind a wall. The more successful it is, the more influence it will have on the world, and the more it will come to resemble the rest of the world.But for people on the ground in Seoul or Pusan, *not quite yet*.

WELCOME TO THE HUNGRY GAMES (or how to keep me away from the grocery store and happy at home in my jammies)Note: This answer is probably going to be too exhaustively detailed for casual readers, but I hope it will be meaningful to people seeking to transform this industry. Ultimately, if it brings us all one step closer to a truly viable business model for home meal delivery kits, that would be worth way more to me than a $250 USD cash prize.Hi, I’m Annika. I think I want to subscribe to your service. Problem is, your service doesn’t exist.I am exactly the sort of person who would subscribe quite eagerly to a meal kit delivery system, and I believe very strongly that meal delivery kits could disrupt and fully supplant supermarkets on the near side of a decade if done well. That said, I’ve never purchased or tasted a kit meal, and have no plans to do so until the “right” one comes along.This is so gonna happen. It’s just a matter of time. And I’m getting impatient.Remember compact discs? Remember CD players? Remember music coming in albums? Remember paperback books? Remember bookshelves?Subscription meals are gonna be like that, mark my word, but for Harris Teeter and Albertson’s instead of Tower Records and Crown Books. Say goodbye to buying milk by the gallon, bread by the loaf, and bananas by the bunch, say goodbye to automatic self-scanning checkout that doesn’t really work. It’s all going away. It’s going to be supplanted by something that we all want much more than that, and lives will be meaningfully improved.The reason why the big supermarkets haven’t gone away yet is because nobody has figured out how to get the market what it actually wants better than they have. Which really isn’t saying a lot. Margins at supermarkets (I used to work at a supermarket) are super low. It’s tough to make ends meet because the systems in place are so extremely inefficient. All this could change, but it’s going to take some heavy lifting at first.First and foremost, this is a marketing problem. But it’s not a soft, bite-size “you just need to work on your social media personality” marketing problem like the kind that the parody Prof. Jeff Jarviss account on Twitter likes to joke about. This is a big, chewy, stringy marketing problem that has to be solved all at once. It’s at least a three-part problem, and as such is not easily detangled. Whoever does solve it will dominate the market—and it’s a big market, and worth doing.The bad news: it’s going to take a huge amount of upfront capital and logistical muscle like you have never seen before. But, mark my words, it’ll happen. And likely sooner, rather than later. The technology already exists. We know (sorta) how to get from point A to point B. If we solve the basic marketing problem, we can also figure out what sort of company might be able to pull all those levers. I have a few ideas on that, too.Three (or more) parts to the problem of getting the market (customer) what it wants:Who is the customer?(bonus) How do you get more customers?What does the customer want?(bonus) Can you get them to want something more than the basic “deal” and thus pay more money (i.e. can you upsell them)?How do you get it to them?(bonus) How do you get it to them without losing money hand-over-fist.(double bonus) How do you get it to them AND make money?Part 1: Who is the customer? — Hint: it’s me!Figure out how to get my dollars and loyalty, and your problems are solved.There are probably many other kinds of customers out there, but the pleasures and struggles I face in the kitchen are far from unique, and knowing a lot about me and how I shop for food and spend my time in the kitchen will help you to understand some big problems your industry could solve.Here’s a rough pie chart of my spending:As you can see, a huge amount of my planned monthly budget goes to online purchasing. I am very (very, very) frugal when it comes to cash purchases at points-of-sale, and I have concluded years ago that buying things online is the best use of my time and money when all is said and done. In making this calculation, I consider things like savings on gas used for comparison shopping, savings in opportunity cost driving from store to store looking for the best deal, competitive pricing between brick-and-mortar and online purchases, availability and variety of goods (branded vs. non-branded). If I could find out how to shift my food purchases to a digital platform and not have to supplement with brick-and-mortar shopping, I’d do it in an instant.I am one of Amazon Prime’s first customers, and I have spent, easily, 100k USD on Amazon purchases since 2007. I made the shift from shopping at Target and Walmart to Amazon on the day I went to Prime, and I never looked back.Despite my dogged loyalty to Prime, I have only rarely purchased groceries from Amazon in the past. Some reasons for this:Amazon does not (yet) have a competitive means to deliver loaves of bread, or milk by the gallon (more on this later)Amazon Pantry requires me to buy a whole boxful of dry goods and pay a (small) shipping fee. My box never gets filled so I never push the “buy” button.Amazon Prime is only cost-effective for buying a whole bunch of things at once. (Who needs 8 bottles of ketchup?)Food storage is an issue when buying in bulk. My kitchen is not that big.I don’t always know 2–7 days in advance what I want to eat. I could be watching The Great British Baking Show and decide that if I don’t get profiteroles within the next 24 hours, I’m never eating again.^^^Photo of Profiterole By Stu Spivack 2006 (Flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (Creative Commons - Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic - CC BY-SA 2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons^^^I like to buy local, in-season vegetables and support local farmers (more on this later).Even where dry goods are concerned, Amazon does not stock all the niche brands I like at an acceptable price. I am a brand loyalist when it comes to condiments , and I think this is true for many people.^^^ Duke’s mayonnaise (my brand of choice) selling at 5x what I can buy it for at the corner shop—WTAF, Amazon???^^^I’m a bit of an ethnic foods snob. When I buy Indian jarred chutney, I like the kinds I used to eat in India. I like the fish sauce brands I used to buy in Vietnam. A key lime, to me, will never equal a calamansi. A tom yum soup is not worth eating if it doesn’t include fresh kaffir lime leaves.A week of grocery shopping for me could involve going to 5 different shops. One shop for Greek yogurt (I like the full fat kind, which is hard to find), another shop for bread, another shop for beer (I like really cheap beer), another shop for meat and veggies, another for (expensive) paper towels and (cheap) detergent.I buy a huge amount of frozen food because it tastes fairly fresh and is not quick to perish. Amazon does not currently support my frozen food habit.I am reclusive by nature: there is nothing about shopping trips that I particularly enjoy. If not for these strongly held beliefs listed above, I would gladly hang up my Harris Teeter loyalty card and never go shopping again.The second best thing (existing now) to digital/home-delivery shopping, is ordering curbside service at local shops. I do my shopping online, pay by ACH, and schedule a time for pickup. Not including the leisurely online process of filling my online cart, this process takes about 1/2 hour (ten minutes to drive to the supermarket, 10 minutes of waiting for them to roll out the cart and fill up my trunk, 10 minutes of driving home). Not optimal, but OK.All this being said, Amazon home delivery has several major potential advantages over the local supermarket curbside service: they have my payment and shipping information on file, they have sophisticated AI that knows what I like, and everything else I want to buy is there (hose adapters, shrink tubes, geranium seeds, board games, label makers, TENS units, auxiliary phone chargers), and (most importantly) I never have to leave the house or change out of my jammies to buy any of this stuff.This classic infographic from The Oatmeal on choosing movies is very similar to how I choose food, given any choice at all. Not having to put on pants is a big deal:It's time for a Netflix of food to save us from the travails of going outside and let us chill comfortably at home.Marketers, good ones, are always anthropologists. They look at how people live and figure out how to make products fit. I’m reminded of the household tours that P&G did around the time that Febreze was launched. Looking at user behavior teaches a lot about assumptions.I’m an actual marketing geek and an armchair anthropologist, and I’m gonna help you as best I can, by showing you what I’d be looking for in someone’s kitchen if I wanted to sell them (and people like them) a food product. Let’s do an anthropological, stream-of-consciousness tour, using my kitchen as an example, starting with my fridge, and see what we find:A bit about me, my house, and what we end up eating, and why:In our house, we cook a lot, we eat a lot, and we spend a long time thinking about what our next meal is going to be. We like food to be “special”.Oh my, that’s a tiny fridge.Freezer is packed. Overflowing. Mostly frozen fish and meats, packaged veggies, and 10 different kinds of really good chinese dumplings. Also an “emergency” pizza. I’m really worried about how much food I throw away, and having a well-stocked freezer is my best strategy (so far) to mitigate that problem. I’m very enthusiastic to find a better solution that involves a just-in-time supply chain and fresher foods. Meal kits seem made-to-order for that purpose.Refrigerator has a disproportionate number of condiments.Lots of condiments. Holy crow, that’s a lot of condiments. Why do I have so many condiments????Lookie here. More condiments!The big steel thing on the bottom shelf is some sad leftovers kept in a big pot that can’t be used for cooking because it’s not being used to its highest and best purpose.Ohhh, look. It’s a pot of homemade local ramps, bacon, and rigatoni. It looks gross and smells a bit like farts today, even though I just cooked it like 2 days ago and it was legit delicious at the time.Annnndddd…Down the drain it goes. I hate doing this. I really hate this. It had to be done. Nobody was going to eat it.Oh wow. there’s like 4 containers of lasagne on the top shelf of my fridge. It tastes really good but I honestly can’t bear to eat another morsel. I made enough lasagne to fit the cooking pan, and the pan was enough to feed an army. This was a half recipe! A quarter recipe woulda been better. I’ve been eating lasagne for days and if I never saw another casserole again, I’d be just as happy. I really ought to throw this away, but it seems wasteful so instead I’ll wait for it to become a science experiment and then I’ll toss it, container and all, because it’ll be too gross to do anything else.Some fresh veggies from the farmer’s market.My pantry in a constant state of semi-organized chaos. I try to keep things partitioned neatly in sterilite containers. It kinda works….OK, let’s be honest. It hardly works at all. I have no idea what’s in this pantry on any given day. I hate that all the products I buy come in different sizes and shapes and can’t be stored neatly. I’d buy everything from a single brand if it meant all my drygoods could be stocked neatly. I want them to look like this:….And that’s never gonna happen.My roll-out drawers for canned goods. Another good idea that only kinda works. I have no idea what’s lurking in here, but I do know that cans are never the “right” size for storage.I honestly have no idea what the eff is going on in this cabinet. Let’s close it and walk away slowly. Yikes.I’m very proud of my blue and white crockery and dishes. So pretty!!! I love serving things nicely and having my kitchen look neat. So hard to do, though.I have a ridiculously expensive professional model 6-quart Kitchenaid that I got as a gift and literally never use. I keep it around as a status symbol. It takes up usable space, but, hey, Kitchenaid! One of these days I’ll use it!My countertop herb garden, which is not just for decoration. I use this pretty much every day. If the herbs die, I put new ones in. The garlic races (sprouted garlic greens) are life-changing. I use aquabeads and fertilizer spikes to keep it growing, instead of soil. Works really well for the purpose, so I always have a few fresh herbs on hand.This is one day’s worth of dishes. I hate doing dishes. I hate doing dishes so much.In addition to my surfeit of condiments in oversized packages, I have a huge spice rack. I find my spice storage situation intensely frustrating. Again, why can’t everything come in an easily-stored package that has a reasonable amount, hermetically sealed? To wit: I have a container of cinnamon I bought 3 years ago and there’s still like half a thing left of it, but it’s old and tastes like sawdust. I can’t bring myself to throw it out, so it just sits there, taunting me.A small part of my cookbook collection. I don’t use it to cook with (all my recipes are from online these days), but I do use it for looking at pictures and reading descriptions of things I might want to cook and eat (using an online recipe).Where I make coffee and tea. This is one corner of the kitchen that really works as advertised. Most other parts of my kitchen are sources of unpleasant labor, wasters of time, and causes of frustration.Part 2: What does the customer (i.e., me) want?Here’s some things that would make me happy.Never having to do dishes again.Never having to go to the store again.Attractive serving containers that double as storage containers and cooking vessels.I buy this kind of tea at the Asian market because the can matches my dishes. There’s better tasting teas, but the can matches my effing dishes!!Storing less food, more efficiently.E.g., Spices should be blister packed into single-gram portions, like salt at McDonalds.Never having to throw away old produce (I counted three half-heads of different kinds of lettuce while doing my fridge inventory today; they’ll probably all end up in the trash).Getting fresh vegetables, milk, and cheese in the portions I need, the same day I order them.Preferably local.The “service” knows my billing and shipping information and knows what I like to eat (and when), and is able to recommend meals to my taste.Hint: When the first cold day of October comes, freakin’ EVERY DANG THING had better be tasting like pumpkin spice for the next two weeks.I never want to leave the house or get out of my jammies for any reason related to food.Instead of a stockpile of canned goods, I want smaller portions in clearly-labeled storage packs that can be stored neatly in smaller spaces. Preferably, these packs should be reusable and/or recyclable.I want my “service” to know what foods I have on hand, so I don’t double up on ingredients.Individuality/specialness: when I cook meals, I want to be able to add “personal” flare, while still keeping time/labor/waste to a minimum. I do want to be able to claim authorship over recipes and dishes, same as I claim authorship over pies made from refrigerated crusts.I would sometimes like to put some of my kitchen’s “professional” features to use (e.g. Kitchenaid mixer).I should not have to have the “right” size of pot or pan or tray to make a dish. Equipment provided by me should be either voluntary (Kitchenaid) or minimal.I would like my total monthly spending on make-at-home food for 2 people to not exceed 400 USD. I could be persuaded to pay a little more if it meant I was eating better food, shopping fewer hours, doing less clean-up, eating fewer leftovers, and wasting less. Let’s say 500 USD/month tops.There are certain basic-yet-time-consuming foods/ingredients that I believe should be available pre-cooked/pre-prepped unless specified otherwise. These include:Caramelized onions — or any kind of onion, for that matterRiceBechamel/beurre manieHand-pulled noodlesPie crustsMoleMirepoixPomegranates (seeded)Pineapples (peeled)BeansGarlic (peeled)Food should be packed for reasonable longevity and low-cost delivery, but the goal is fresh (local-oriented) food, every day.I’m equal parts lazy and ambitious when it comes to food. It should be interesting and (sometimes) challenging to prepare, but no effort to store or clean up after.Condiments should be brand name and authentic. Asian condiments should legit come from Asia. Mexican condiments should legit come from Mexico (or at the very least, from Bakersfield CA, where the best Mexican condiments come from, I’m told).Optimally, a modular food storage system should come with the plan, where I can see at a glance what my resources are, and what I need to buy more of. Think like K-cups, but for food that’s waiting to be cooked.A bit about my town (Asheville, NC) and how we live and eat:Eating, and eating well, is a big deal, a big part of our culture.A wealth of local food choices.Very few ethnic options. Even Italian food is hit-or-miss in restaurants.Food trucks are readily available and good.Many people are underemployed, casual economy.Logistical challenges: city is not particularly well served by distribution infrastructure (bike delivery is not an option).Why I’m not currently buying from one of the many food kit suppliers (Peach Dish, Purple Carrot, HelloFresh, Plated.com, BlueApron.com, Terra’s Kitchen, Marley Spoon, etc).Cost. I cannot afford to pay more than 500 USD/month for food for two people. That is my absolute red line, beyond which no purveyor of fine foods can pass. All meal kit plans I surveyed looked to be hovering a little above $10 USD/meal. For daily lunch and dinner for two, that adds up to over $1200 USD/month. Way too spendy.A really good local pork chop and a side of fresh vegetables runs about 5 dollars a plate here in NC. That’s what you’re trying to beat.Not local enough. When it’s ramps season here in AVL, I wanna eat some dang ramps. I want to support people here as best I can. Making ends meet is hard.Not truly labor-saving. For me, cooking is fun. It’s all the other stuff that’s awful. Buying things, driving around town, carrying groceries up stairs, bagging/eating leftovers, doing dishes, putting things away, storing things, throwing out old food.Nobody has truly saved me a trip to the grocery store. I’m still gonna have to buy stuff like laundry detergent, so why not pick up some groceries while I’m there.There doesn’t seem to be a clear (marketing) demarcation between a gourmet meal kit and something non-descript and starvation-inducing like (sorry) Nutrisystem. I want to be assured that my food is going to taste really good and be sufficiently satisfying, if I’m going to spend that much money.I’ve never tasted a kit meal. I’m going to need to taste a forkful of someone’s lunch before I commit.A “send a kit to a friend” promotion seems like a great way to solve this particular problem.I look at the weekly menus these websites have, and maybe I want to eat one or two of the things being offered, but I never want to eat all of them. It’s sort of like going to a restaurant and being at their total mercy—ordering one of everything on the menu and hoping for the best.Part 3: How do you get the product to me?The meal kit problem is a big, complicated problem. Many garage-oriented businesses have tried this and failed, right here in Asheville. They just don’t have the muscle to get off the ground. I suspect that all of the recent comers to this marketplace will either die on the vine, or get bought by someone much bigger and more powerful. The natural answer is to be a really well-developed logistical specialist with excellent data on my shopping habits and strong artificial intelligence capabilities.In rank order from most-likely to least-likely contenders for this space:You could be Amazon: You’re my first stop for online shopping. You already have my buying information and you know exactly what I like. Your distribution platform is highly-developed and coordinates multiple vendors, including cottage industries, seamlessly. Your negotiating power with delivery specialists is legendary. Localization is getting very granular with contract drivers and drone experiments.You could be Google: You have maps, self-driving cars, and my entire search history at your disposal. You know when I’m jonesing for a dang profiterole, and you probably guessed it ahead of time, by virtue of the fact that you knew I was streaming food shows on my computer. You have Youtube, and you could easily tie in a “buy this meal kit” button with youtube vlogger demos. Your “shopping” capabilities seem to be on a back burner for now, but I don’t see you leaving it there forever.You could be Uber or Lyft: You have an army of local drivers who can drop things off, piece by piece, over the course of a day, so everything’s staged and ready by dinnertime. You’re getting into self-driving cars, just like Google is. You know how to do surge/locality/availability-based pricing on the fly, which could come in handy. This is a weird brand expansion, but it could really work.You could be Blue Apron or HelloFresh: You’ve spent some time on getting name recognition (S-town anyone?), and you have an army of happy customers who tried and can presumably vouch for your product. You (hopefully, at this point) have some packaging/portioning automation infrastructure in place. What I’m recommending in logistics, though, is going to require a lot of capital up front. If you can get a very strong venture round in the near future, it’s not wholly unbelievable that you could expand into other stuff later on based on proprietary logistics knowledge, same as Amazon expanded away from books based on its extreme logistics prowess.That being said, y’all’s most likely exit strategy would be to sell yourself to one of the big guys eventually. But after you proved yourself, so your price could be pretty dang high.You could be Elon Musk: You’re worried about environmental degradation, and you think that automating the whole system of delivering meals in a zero-waste enclosed system is the answer. You have self-driving cars in your bullpen, and you are a genius with plenty of cash to throw at the problem, provided the ROI looks good. Risk doesn’t scare you—it excites you. You are well-seasoned in getting big heavy things off the ground in an efficient way.You could be Walmart: You’re an old dog, but you can learn new tricks. You are famous for being affordable (food stamps, government nutrition programs are obvious partnership avenues) and your website has everything under the sun that a person could want to buy. Your logistics are still the best in the world, and you are getting a little desperate to find a way to stop Amazon from overtaking your market share. This could be it. This could really be it!You could be Facebook: I mean you could be facebook. I don’t know why you’d do this, but I do know that y’all have way too much cash lying around, and you keep buying companies to get rid of some of it. I’m also pretty sure y’all know what I’m planning to eat for dinner on any given night, so that helps.You could be Apple: Same deal as Facebook. Too much cash on hand, decent AI, Steve Jobs would probably have approved, if his hypothetical meal kit had included sufficient wheat grass.You could be the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, interested in a low-cost way to combat “food deserts” in low-income urban and rural areas, and nutrition programs for kids and seniors. Meal kits might sound like a really good way of fixing an intractable problem with a flexible, scalable solution. Oh right. Tom Price. Never mind.Whoever decides to do this, you need to leverage a lot of things all at once, and be prepared to spend money to make money.You need to have a way to deliver food and retrieve/clean reusable food containers.You need a way to figure out what I want to eat, without me spending a lot of time figuring it out for you.You need to have a way to portion out foodstuffs that is efficient and not ridiculous. I read an article about how Blue Apron was doing this a couple years ago, and it was alarmingly inefficient and stressful:All told, interviews with 14 former employees describe a chaotic, stressful environment where employees work long days for wages starting at $12 an hour bagging cilantro or assembling boxes in a warehouse kept at a temperature below 40 degrees.“You put honey in a small container. We would put small peppers in little small bags,” said Glenn Lovely, who worked as a temp in the Richmond facility for three months. “And it was cold — cold as hell.”…Those ingredients are prepped by kitchen associates, who weigh out and perfectly portion bulk ingredients from Blue Apron’s suppliers into small plastic bottles and bags: tablespoons of soy sauce poured into tiny bottles, for example, or carefully counted fingerling potatoes put into boxes. And after the boxes are assembled, the shipping department loads them onto pallets and, ultimately, trucks.…“I would get sent to Whole Foods and buy things if we really needed an ingredient and we didn’t have it in the building,” said the former team lead. Blue Apron told BuzzFeed News that while during early days it sourced some of its product from local stores, the company’s shipments have been too large to make grocery store shopping feasible “for years now.”I mean holy crap, y’all. That sounds awful. A lot of things that clearly need to be done upstream by robots, are being done by low-wage employees whose fingers are freezing off. Buying stuff at retail at the last minute?? This is not sustainable! AI should at the very least have been used to predict “lumps” in ordering/preparation changes so nobody has to go to the store on short notice, if not to predict what an individual customer might buy on any given day. Reading this account of the struggles of Blue Apron circa 2015 reminds me very much of the (Root) Beer supply chain management game we played in B school. With a very large measure of Murphy’s Law applied. That’s no way to run a business!Any of the big logistics/AI/self-driving powerhouses I mentioned above could overcome these problems, and one of them really should.Conclusion—Here’s what it should look like from a supply side standpoint:AI-driven, simplified ordering, possibly app-based, informed by my other online activities.Kit “components” not necessarily being assembled at a single location. Can be dropped at my house throughout the day. Can be sourced locally and delivered either by humans (uber) or self-driving cars, or drones, or some combination thereof. I’ll keep a branded cooler by my front door so y’all can leave the meats and veggies there. Maybe ask Yeti to partner with you guys?I’m a big fan of hardware-plus-subscription services from an operational standpoint, not only because it simplifies shipping logistics (a lot), but because hardware-based contracts are often stickier and harder to break. I’m thinking about how many times I pondered changing my cable box service or cell phone carrier and decided it just wasn’t worth the time to turn in the equipment…Very well-thought-out packaging and storage. Food should be able to be cooked, stored, and served using supplied packaging. Packaging can be returned for washing/reuse when the next delivery comes (see hardware comment, above). My fridge should not be overrun with condiments, yet I should have condiments handy for anything I want to use them for, and they should be brand-name.Also do my laundry. (Just kidding) ((No, on second thought, actually maybe not really kidding.))Keep track of what I do and don’t have sitting around in my kitchen already.Bonus points if you can suggest things to make with things I have in my kitchen.Make sure I know the value of your product (labor-saving, satisfying meals, I don’t have to get out of my jammies, I can still cook and be unique and original, but no dishes).Recipes should be tailored for me and my tastes! An “Annika Schauer meal delivery kit” should not be identical to a “Michael Peacock meal delivery kit”. Maybe get recipes from IBM Chef Watson, so our individual styles remain individual, and stylish. At the very least, get our brands of mayo right (I like Duke’s, Michael likes Best Foods).Branding should be focused on visible collateral (food packaging), not on specific recipes (which should be tailored to individual tastes/seasons/dietary restrictions, and should not ever be limited to a weekly “menu” of only seven options, no matter how delicious those options might be.)Get busy with partnerships on all levels. Include brand-name items in kits (like Tabasco in MREs) and market directly through sponsorships on how-to cooking sites. Make kits for every recipe on ChowHound and Food.com. You get the picture.Get an “app” style marketplace for recipes, instantly translated into orderable products. An IFTTT-type dingus could easily be used for this purpose. Give recipe authors a small cut of profits on foods ordered, possibly in redeemable meal-kit credits.Get me a profiterole, or the means to make one quickly, whenever I see one on TV and get a random craving. :) Possible ad text: “Annika, you could be eating a profiterole like this one, in the comfort of your own home, by 8:00PM tonight, if you order now!”Put my food delivery order in the same online marketplace as other convenience items I’m going to need, like detergent, Ziplock bags, deodorant, etc.If I get a meal kit and I tell you I like it, give me an easy way to order that exact same meal kit again.Not all meal kits need to be delivered the same day I order them, but some same-day options should exist (replacing the “emergency pizza” from my freezer).Best case scenario, kits should include sourcing for hard-to-find ingredients, so I can make an authentic pecan pie from cane syrup at home and not have to act like corn syrup is the same thing.Special “group buys” could be a way to both source hard-to-find ingredients, and recruit new users. The “bus” leaves the station when enough passengers get on board to make an order affordable.Deliver all of the above for a price comparable to my current actual food/sundries spend. (If you get the packaging logistics sorted, you should be able to match this price based on volume and still make a reasonable profit, since you have no customer-facing brick-and-mortar retail space to maintain, no parking issues, minimal spoilage, and no shoplifters to chase away.)The business case for this plan:It’s clearly not a small project, but whoever grabs the reins on this endeavor gets, in addition to any marginal returns from the business itself, a treasure trove of demographic data more personal than even Google and Facebook can see right now. The kind of data that can target and sell things to people on a very granular level that’s not been seen heretofore. You also get a sticky customer base that will not likely drift to other sellers, and a huge window of opportunity to upsell.Like Amazon was never really just a bookseller, whoever picks up this one will not be just a purveyor of dinner. They’ll be a logistics and data collection company that sells food as a means to an end. Probably a large and impressive end. The more skin you’re willing to put into the game up front, the more impressive the end will be.All of this is doable, y’all. All of this is doable in my small town of Asheville, population <100k, tucked in a hidden corner of Western North Carolina. All of this is doable anywhere with internet, food retailers within driving distance, casual-economy workers, and cold chain. Which means pretty much the entirety of the continental United States, to start.All of this is worth doing, and worth doing well.Look at me: I’m a hillbilly. If you can get me to stick a “dash” button next to my dishwasher and a virtual “dash” button on my phone, if you can get a pair of pliers to my house on a Sunday afternoon when I order them on a Saturday morning, for a price that is comparable to what I’d pay at the Ace, if you can get me a seat in a car to anywhere in the city from my front door in less than 2 minutes, if you can sell all of my personal data, at a nice premium, to third parties, I think you’ll find it worth your while to save me the headache of shopping and doing dishes. And for that I thank you, from the bottom of my heart, in advance. Hopefully not too much advance, because I can’t wait!!!…And may the odds be ever in your favor.Edit: I found this article today, which sort of hints at some of what I’m talking about. McDonald's and Uber Just Made a Huge Announcement, and It's Going to Be a Game-Changer

The list is not exhaustive but I believed you can pick an interest in one or two of the businesses listedCONSULTANCY SERVICES: - This is the foremost of the small businesses one could ever think of; one can basically consult on almost anything and everything. Just think of any special skill in your possession and pronto, you can make a reasonable income from it. E.g. marriage counseling, business consult, legal consult, property consultancy, educational consulting, media consultant, etc. One do not have to possess any capital to start consulting, just some contacts on your phone, email addresses and referrals from family and friends, you are good to go.RESTAURANT: - No matter how poor people may be, food still remains the number one basic necessities of life before clothing and shelter. If you can do it right, it’s one of the surest way to crossing the poverty line. If you are still in doubt, please visit Equal Right in Somolu, Amala Sonola in ogba Aguda, Ewa-Agonyin(Beans) palace in Unilag etc. With a capital between N10K – N50k, you should be making a residual income from it.FASHION AND TAILORING SERVICES: - From time immemorial fashion business has been dynamic and ever present. From Paris to New-York, Milan to Lagos, Beijing to Joburg, fashion statements defies national/ethnic boundaries. Different occasions demand special outfits, one can easily take advantage of the trend in fashion consciousness of the people to earn a decent living. You can start with as little as N30K-N100K.REAL ESTATE AGENCY: - By finding properties for prospective clients, you perform a valuable service to both owner of properties and prospective tenants. Advertise that you have listings available for houses, apartments, flats, rooms, offices, etc. You can either charge a one-time fee for finding accommodations or work on a commission. In this line of business, capital or professional qualification is not really required as a start-up, you can belong to groups in the real estate NICHE or get briefs from family and friends, just have the right information and you will always smile to the bank. In addition, you can also be a property manager to your clients and earn steady income from management fees.RENTAL BUSINESS: This has mushroomed into an attractive new business opportunity. People like to borrow, do-it-yourself rent professional equipment. Many people are doing well these days by acting as rental agents for all manner of things - power tools, trucks, cars, electric generators, etc. Just look around your environment and conduct a research on items that could be of rental value to your community. For example, if you live in an area where property development is just springing up, you can decide to venture into giving out building tools such as, wheel-barrow, head-pan, shovel, trowels, drums, ladders, scaffolding, sledge hammers, pick-up trucks, etc.LAUNDRY/IRONING SERVICE /CLOTHES CLEANING: Everyone has dirty clothes for laundry and ironing, but many working class and career individuals do not have the time to tend to their laundry themselves because of the busy schedule of work or business, this is where you would come in and make money by doing a professional laundry service, especially in areas where power supply is erratic. If your backyard/compound is spacious enough to accommodate washer-men and pressers who will do justice to the clothes, hire them and start making money, This business could just be for you if you have a knack for cleanliness and corporate cleaning services. With a capital between N20K – N100K this business could turn you to a millionaire over a period of time.HOUSE CLEANING SERVICE: Many home-owners and apartment dwellers will welcome help at "house cleaning'. Charge a flat fee for the amount of work that must be done. Make arrangements with firms that provide labour for tidying up office environment , cleaning carpets, dusting the furnitures, polishing, etc. and collect a commission from them. Tell your friends and family who are moving to a new house or changing offices, with the help of fliers or handbills you could reach out to a large audience.MAKE AND SELL CUSTOMIZED JEWELLERIES AND BEADS: Homemade costume jewellery sells, sell directly to jewellery outlets, gift shops, hairdressers shops, clothes boutiques, and by selling on e-commerce shops such as Jumia, Konga, Payporte, OLX, Facebook Shopify, Gtbank smemarkethub, etc. It is possible to start with limited capital of N5K- N20k.GAME CENTERS: The game center concept is good, both for those who have jobs and those who want full time involvement. A game center is a place where people mostly young come to play computer basic games like play station, Nintendo, Atari, etc. You can also provide space for refreshments like ice cream, snacks, soft drinks etc. Gaming centers charge customers who come to their outlet between N100.00 – N500.00 depending on the area, and the type of customers you are dealing with. If you start small, you can make between N5k – N20k per day. There is a classical game center at Mende by Maryland, it is built with a portal cabin and looks beautiful as well. You can as well provide a MOBILE GAME cabin for birthdays and get-together parties, this arrangement can fetch you good money if you get high-end clients in areas such Ikoyi,V.I, Lekki, Ikeja G.R.A, etc.FISH FARMING: If you have been contemplating on a small business and haven’t heard about fish farming, then you are missing something. Over the years, quite a few people have made fortunes from fish farming; as the population is swelling and protein needs are far outstripping the available supply, fish meal is always a winner if done well. Fish farming is a sure bet business if you put the right structures in place. More and more people like fish due to its low cholesterol protein, All you need do is to get a space, buy or construct tanks, buy finger lings for between N10 to N20 and feed them for 4 to 6 months, then sell from between N1500 to N2000 depending on weight and size. But you need to have a basic knowledge of fish farming to start this.WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT: Experience, training or licensing may be needed. Many courses exist (many of which, logically, are offered online) where you can learn the language of website creation and can learn about the details, like how to set up shopping cart systems, security concerns, etc. But lately we have seen ready tools on some hosting site like Godaddy, Bluehost, Wordpress, ipage, simplesite and so on; many of these hosting sites have ready tools for even the newbie in web design. You will, of course, need to learn about each company you want to design for. What is the atmosphere of the company that you need to reflect in the website design--is it wild and contemporary, meaning brilliant colors and fun graphics? Or will more classic colors like black, navy blue and maroon be more appropriate? Many small businesses in Nigeria does not have a web presence, even the bigger corporations only possess a web banner or billboard, you can propose an interactive website to small businesses at a cheaper rate of say N10k or more and start building your client lists from there. This business requires little or no capital to start.DAY CARE: If you are the type that naturally loves kids around, this is an opportunity for you to tap into. Perhaps you have children of your own and the idea of taking care of a few more for part of the day appeals to you. Child-care needs continue to soar in this part of the world as the task of professional career seems to be more demanding. Many people prefer the option of their child being cared for in a home environment while they are at work, opposed to a more institutional-like setting. These things mean that a home based childcare business can get off and running immediately. If you are living in at least a 3bedroom apartment and there is an extra room unoccupied, please don’t let rat and cockroach take advantage of the extra rooms in your house, talk to friends in the neighborhood who might need such services, with a simple handbills and short message advert it will surely pay to have kids around.GIFT BASKET/PACKAGING SERVICE: Finding a niche is the best way to start out in the gift basket business. If you had flare for gifts and souvenirs why don’t you look for clients who you could put together baskets that hold the things that people with this interest would like too! You can create a product that a gift basket could be built around, I saw a fruit basket designed by First Bank Plc presented to a customer at Alausa secretariat Ikeja Lagos, it was a piece of creativity as everybody was taking snapshot of it. With a capital of N50k-N100k, you can start this business. Marketing your gift basket service is not an arduous task, just talk to friends, families, congregational friends and colleagues, and if you have a little budget for advert and proposal it’s all well and good for publicity.BEAUTY SALON/HAIRSTYLIST: Hairstyling is a popular business that can be quite lucrative. Generally, with the trend in fashion statements nowadays, hairstylists are usually busy. If you already have your apprenticeship training and experience, and loads of friends especially ladies under your belt, you probably have prospects that will follow you right home without any hesitation. You can have a unisex salon under one roof, get some boys and girls from cotonou, they are very good in weaving and braids, place them on salary or commission and your life will not remain the same!MUSIC LESSONS: Some people are naturally gifted in music and sound instruments, either as a result of being in the choir, or family background or personal interest in music and sound could be an inspiration. You want to stick to the instrument(s) you know, but you may be skilled enough a musician to offer lessons on different instruments, or those in a particular class, e.g., stringed or woodwind. You can decide to take on individuals or classes, depending on space and availability of instruments. Public/private schools are continually reducing their commitment to art and music classes for students, so you can try to work with the public school system to supplement their efforts in those areas. I have a friend, Adeshina, he has been taking advantage of his deep knowledge of the musical instruments to make extra income way back school days, even as a comfortable person today, he still plays organ for his church AVM in GRA and private personalities when occasion demands. Here, your hidden talent could be your buried treasure.PHOTOGRAPHER: Previous experience and formal training may not be needed to venture into this line of business as there are ready tools available in the market to perform different operations such as editing, printing, framing, styling, Photoshop software, etc. Making money as a photographer can be done in a number of different ways. You can specialize in one area, the most common being weddings and social functions. All you require is a professional camera, a mobile printing device and your call cards, visit any social function dressed as corporate as possible so as not to be bounced by the security guys, take one or two snapshot of guests most especially ladies, quickly find a safe place to plug your printer and extra batteries for charging, before the show wound up, look for people you have snapped and give to them at N100 or more, you can make as much as N20K-N50K at a particular event. There are other niches you can explore for photography: portraits of people and their pets, families and homes; photographs of holiday events, birthday parties or model photo shoots, film makers, students, religious gatherings, etc. The possibilities are endless and the capital to invest is not a cut-throat.WEDDING PLANNER: Before I got married I visited a wedding planner shop on Aromire street Ikeja and I was impressed at how much people pay for the services of a wedding planner, anyway I didn’t make use of their service but I learn one or two thing from them which helped in making my wedding event a success. However, the rich and busy type of people in the society doesn’t really have all the time going to the market to shop for this and that, they prefer to give the service to a wedding planner. You will need to be up-to-date on wedding trends and fads, dress styles, color trends--almost everything under the sun! Offer your customers an ala carte menu of services, from helping pick flowers, the wedding gown and bridesmaid dresses to picking the venue and hiring the caterer. Before you open your business, shop at all the wedding shops, and even pretend you are a bride-to-be to see what kind of service the wedding gown shop provides and how they treat potential customers. You need to know every detail of the business to give the accurate impression that you are the go-to person for anyone planning a wedding. For you to succeed in this line of business, I advise you to just do one perfect wedding job and others will keep coming like a virus.COMPUTER TRAINING: If you have a basic knowledge in computer training and applications you are on your way to becoming a teacher to many people. It will amaze you to know that only about 20% of Nigerian population is actually computer literate. My brother once offered to train people for free on Sundays after lecture at NASFAT in Ipaja Lagos; he confessed that there was a large turnout, even the working class people attended. You can offer training in desktop computers and mini computers such as laptops, palmtops, I-pad and tablets. You could probably make a living helping seniors learn how to use the internet and e-mail to keep in touch with their loved ones, send applications, online exams/TEST, etc. Make the training as much fun as possible; people do not want to know all the details about what makes a computer work. If you overload them with information from the beginning by explaining bits, bytes, and megapixels, they will stick to their paper and pencil forever. You can start this venture with fairly used computers which you will find scattered all over Computer village in Ikeja Lagos. Talk to people in your neighborhood by printing an advert for a free computer lesson, get their database and give those basic trainings afterward and introduce more complex ones.ELECTRIC FENCE WIRE INSTALLATIONS: Fences are everywhere and they also add beauty to the structures and buildings in the society. The quest to protect from external invasion, burglary, theft and encroachment has necessitated the need for a more technical way of protection. The electric fence wire is really the vogue now, and the training is not hard to comprehend. Just undergo the training first and the materials for executing your job abound everywhere with installation guide and manuals. The start-up cost is basically the training fee and tools like cutting tools, hand gloves, measuring tapes, plum, etc.GRAPHIC DESIGN: One major landmark about the computer is, you could probably become a professional in any field by accident. Graphic design is one of the “Experts by Accident” job am talking about. At least with the little time I have spent on the computer in the last 2 years, I can create a simple design for anything I want to do. Despite the proliferation of the internet, print media is still relevant to the foreseeable future! Fliers, newsletters, magazines, information sheets, letters and advertisements are just a few of the type of print media that business outfit hires Graphic Artist to create for them. Websites and online advertising need graphic design services as well. Even if your expertise is only in design, offer the works for potential clients, friends, and small businesses. So many softwares abound in the market to help you through. I know of a guy who designed my wedding invitation cards, his business name is KUKUGRAFIX, as a student, he does good graphic jobs using just his laptop and pay-as-you-go internet connection.INTERIOR DECORATION: Market your talents to building contractors. People purchasing new homes can often be overwhelmed with the choices and possibilities in home decoration. Design some questionnaires for each major element and each major room in the house. Find out how the homeowner will use the home--are there children? Pets? How will each room be used? Suggest color separations for the painting of the rooms, try and explore the use of wallpapers in room areas where traffic is high. Get hold of catalogs showing architectural masterpiece, develop an interior model that suits your clients' budget, give them options and freedom to express their views on what you intend to do. Referral will definitely come your way if you get it right. This business does not really requires much capital, with a good marketing skill and creativity you will succeed.RECHARGE CARD PRINTING: If you have not heard of recharge card business before, perhaps you are still living in the cave of KUVUKI land. A recent study shows that the average monthly money spent on voice and data in Nigeria amounts to N445Billion. Even the GSM companies attest to the fact that Nigeria is a Goldmine when it comes to Telecoms business. You can actually start with capital as low as N10k and make a profit of N2k if you do your networking well. There are 3 categories of recharge card business anyway, you could either be a Retailer, wholesaler or Dealer. Whichever category you chose, it’s a good venture because as long as people still keeps subscribing and making phone calls you will never be out of business, also it is not a seasonal business.BUSINESS PLAN SERVICES: Just this month alone I have received an Offer to develop a business plan for five clients in the areas of NYLON BUSINESS, ICE BLOCK MAKING, CAR WASH BUSINESS; EVENT CENTER and TRAVELS AND TOUR PACKAGES. At least, I receive an incentive of N100K alone on the NYLON BUSINESS PLAN. Choose an area of business you have expertise on, include a market research on it, and write the business plan narrative and the financial statements. Plan your fee around the main one which the client will want, and offer the others as add-on services. You can give clients an electronic file and allow them to take it from there, or you can keep the business plan on file and offer the service of fine-tuning it whenever necessary. Have business plan samples to show clients--and make sure to include your own!.You can also start with little or no capital as Google is always your friend on research.A CYBER CAFE/BUSINESS CENTER: Prior to the era of deregulating the telecommunication sector, the cybercafé cafe or business centers used to be the only place ordinary people could visit to carry out some task such as checking/sending emails, Fax, Internet calls(VOIP),Typing of documents, scanning, binding, graphic works, etc. But now, most of these tasks could be done in the comfort of your house, however, due to the economic growth and the competitive nature of modern day business the Cybercafé/business center had refused to go into oblivion. The fact remains that in a business center outfit, you could basically perform all I.T related functions at a glance and with precision. Therefore, it is not going to be a wild goose chase venturing into this line of business as it can be undertaken by anyone. I have a complete business plan for anyone who wishes to go into this line of business. You can start with as little as N200K-N500K.FOOTBALL VIEWING CENTER: In the contemporary African setting, having a satellite dish system at home used to be a luxury but with the emergence of DSTV, GOTV, STARTIMES, MYTV and other free-to air satellite stations, watching foreign Television programs has never eluded the Nigerian viewers again. Soccer being a unifying sport has created an avenue for prospect in viewing centers, people love to watch football where they could shout, argue and make fun or jests of other club supporters. Although it is not an everyday business but the weekly income from viewing center could take care of the basic necessities required in the family, all you need is space that can accommodate up to 50 viewers, get a DSTV Dish and decoder, set of TVs and speaker unit for public attention. You can add refreshments such as biscuits, gala, soft drinks to balance the equation. You can start with as low as N200K-N500K capital.SECOND HAND MATERIALS : Second-hand materials either from abroad or locally sourced can often be bought cheaply at private sale, from markets and side-street secondhand market like GATA NKOWA in Abule-Egba Lagos, Lawanson, Computer Village, Vespa market, Alaba Market, ASPAMDA, etc. and through classified advertisements in E-commerce website such as OLX, TRADESTABLE, NAIRALAND, etc. The goods/items can be displayed on free advert platforms, it could also be displayed in a Vehicle whether stationary or moving-across-town, the goods usually comes with lower price value compared to brand new ones. You can start this business with a little capital such as N10,000 or less.PROOFREADING: A lot of publishing houses, independent writers seek the service of proof readers; some of them will prefer the service of part-time proofreaders since they cannot afford to pay the monthly salary of full-time proof readers. Make sure you have lists of script-writers, Article writers, story-book writers for children in your database, and get in touch with publishing houses; it is important that you advertise your service in a local newspaper, on social media, in an electronic medium, etc. All you need to get started is your skill in proofreading scripts.A SMALL POULTRY: Poultry is a business you can start from your backyard with 50 to 500 bird, which cost between N10, 000, to N100,000 depending on cash at hand, these amounts include cost of bird, the pen, feed and medication, Get somebody who is experienced to help you set up the pen. You can source woods directly from sawmill to lower the cost. Waste management in poultry is very vital, if not properly handled it will affect the growth, production, and bird performance whatever aspect of poultry you intend to go into is profitable. A single bird can give you an average of 730 eggs within 2years before you sell it off for say N500 or N600. Target your harvest towards the festive periods such as Easter, EID-il-Kabir, Eid-il-Fitri, and Christmas and New Year celebrations.CANDLE STICKS PRODUCTION: With erratic power supply in the country, there is no doubt that production of candlestick is a money-spinner. A sizable group of Nigerians still relies solely on candle sticks to battle the erratic power supply. With N10, 000 you can have a candle mold, which produces 16 candle sticks at a time and go about 50 times a day translating into 800 per day. This is a situation when you are starting with N20, 000-25,000, to produce the 16 pieces does not take you more than 10 minutes; throw in another wax, which you must have melted. While the previous one congeals and go on and on. So instead of starting with N100,000 - N200, 000, you can actually start with N25, 000.The startup requirements are mold, which cost N10,000, wax N1,000, Thread N1,000, heart source N600, Packaging Nylons N1,500, Ceiling Machine N2,000 and logistics.SNAIL FARMING: Snail meat has been generally affirmed as a very safe and nutritious delicacy. In these days of increased coronary implications and other health issues, snail –producers are certain to hit it big because many people are shunning away from beef or red meat. It is also pleasing to note that snail production venture could be kick-started with a little initial capital of N15,000K. The best period to commence snail rearing is the raining season however if you have access to borehole or nearness to swampy environment, snail can be reared anytime of the year. You can get these snails from the market throughout the country, or from snail farmers. Snails prices depends on the sizes, the bigger ones are sold for between N1, 500-N3, 500 per bunch. It is better to buy the big ones because they can hatch after about 35- 45 days. About N15, 000 should get a new entrant started in the businesses. Visit Hotels, eateries, bukkateria, corporate offices, schools, catering schools, Government offices, etc and advertise your produce through pamphlets,handbills,fliers,etc.ESATE MANAGER: Owners of apartments and houses are most often willing to pay 5% of the rent as commission to agent who will collect monthly rents, place income in the bank, superintend maintenance and show people over vacant flats. Some people make good income from this arrangement, managing several blocks of serviced apartments/flats in private and commercial areas such as Ikoyi, Lekki, Victoria-Island, Ikeja GRA, Abuja, Port-Harcourt, Lagos-Island,etc. You can leverage on referrals, family and friends who have properties but doesn't have the time managing the estate themselves. You also do not need to have any capital to start this venture.PLANTAIN CHIPS: Plantain chips are probably the fastest moving consumer goods in Nigeria after Bottle water and Sachet pure-water. After removing the skin/peels, the unripe or ripe plantain fruit can be sliced/diced (1 or 2 mm thick) and fried in oil to produce chips, packed in polythene and bagged for distribution. If the chips are made from sweeter fruits, they are cut vertically to create a variation know as plantain strips. Just make sure you put your label which will have your contact address, phone numbers, name of your venture. The more you produce the more money you make, because majority of Nigerians love plantain chips. This business can be kick-started with N10,000.START AN AQUARIUM BUSINESS: An aquarium business is a great backyard-based business idea. Two common directions taken by people here are fish breeding and aquarium maintenance services. An aquarium business is not just a skill-based business. It requires a decent investment in equipment because most people who want to buy an aquarium will want choices. You need to present to the client various options such as a small, round or rectangular aquarium that has a corner of a room or a small aquarium that can be fitted into the wall, and others. You can charge as much as N20, 000 to N100, 000. Pick an idea now, execute your plan, and earn money with a business you love. You can liaise with furniture showrooms, horticulturists, landscapers, Interior Decorators, Building contractors, etc about your service. With an initial set-up cost of N100,000K, you will never regret venturing into an Aquarium business.SPECIAL EVENTS/PARTY ORGANIZER: Pubs are more frequently offering entertainment these days, but the Owners don’t always have the time or inclination to organize it. So, your business idea is this. Find an attractive pub or event arena, and offer to organize a weekly party or live shows such as comedy, Talent hunt, Exhibitions, etc. The arrangement would be that you organize the show and charge admission/gate fee. The Owner of the outlet rents you the space/hall/ground/facilities for either a fee or for free, but he keeps all the profits from the extra food and drink sold. Once the agreement is made, the work is easy. Provide music, etc, perhaps by a good DJ. Promote the event as much as you have the capacity and have tickets sold. The facility owner would, no doubt, be happy with the extra takings. A friend of mine once packaged a VALENTINE GROOVE in Feb 2015 already, the facility owner agreed to give out his Hall out for free, my friend also arranged all upcoming artiste in the environ to come showcase their talents, different service provider like ASUN BERBEQUE,FISH BERBEQUE, SMALL CHOPS, SHAWARMA, POPCORN, ICE-CREAM Vendors volunteered to take part in the publicity for the show. It therefore means that my friend was able to organize this show with next to nothing in terms of capital. This event could be a regular show or seasonal, and it could also be a one-off at very little risk to see how it goes. It undoubtedly works because it is merely a way of sub-contracting something out to the mutual benefit of all stakeholders.CAMPUS/SCHOOL PHOTOGRAPHY: This is a good idea for anyone with an interest in photography, or someone who knows someone interested in photography. Quite simply, campus/school photographers are still very popular till date. As a part time business, you can offer to do it cheaper than the regular Professional photographers reason being that many students will want to keep memories of their campus activities. Contact schools, both private and Government owned in your area of proximity and put your proposition to the Directorate of Student Affairs. Once you registered with the School management with an intent to operate in the school, you will be required to pay some fees and complete an application form as an operator of such business in the school premises. Usually students enjoy as much as 50% discount as against what is obtainable outside campus. Through repeated sales and turnover, you can graduate to real professional photographer whereby you apply for bigger jobs outside. You can equally apply to private Crèche, Nursery, Primary and Secondary schools for an arrangement to be their school photographer once there is need for such. Luckily, if you have the knack for photography, this is a sure bet business, even without capital to invest in professional cameras you can rent or borrow.VIDEO COVERAGE SERVICE: Offering a video coverage for special occasions is a profitable venture. Many young brides lately want a living memento of their wedding-day. N100k-N250k can be realized for 1-6 hours work if you get packaging right. Get acquainted with the latest Video graphic programs and technologically-advanced ways of creating a 'movie like' video service. You can borrow a Camera for a fee of between N10K – N25K depending on how latest its technology is. Just start with family and friends at the initial stage of the business then gradually progress to the big market using your previous experience.TOY MAKING: The local toy industry is becoming keenly interested, gone were the days when 99% of toys are imported from overseas market, recent study has shown the strong initiative in developing local contents in toy productions, our local toys are also in high demand both locally and abroad, the humor in African folks and tricks favors this genre of technology, games, game boards, masks, educational toys, models, puppets and other types are fancifully created to serve as income earner. Visit the beach side, amusement parks, Stadium complex, Trade-Fairs, Swimming pool side, etc. and see many attractive toys produced locally. With little capital of about N20K you can venture into this business.GSM PHONE REPAIRS SERVICES: This is another highly profitable small business. Some I.T firms even offer to train people on GSM repairs for free. Also there are different software on how to repair, fix and troubleshoot any phone, your ability to handle simple working tools is all its needed to excel in this field of endeavor. As GSM is widely used in Nigeria with almost 100million GSM phone users across the country, so is the income potential is unlimited. Alternatively, GSM repairing course is offered by some professional engineers, why not enroll for the training and start making steady income daily.HOUSEHOLD ELECTRONIC REPAIRS SERVICE: Hardly would you come by a household in Nigeria which does not possess an electronic gadget. Electronic Items such as T.V, Radio, Electric cooker, Fan, blenders, microwave oven, mower, vacuum cleaner, etc abound everywhere. As a matter of fact, many of these items will develop a fault at one point or the other, if you are the type that always derive passion in repairing gadgets like these it is a good spare-time business as there are useful manuals on the subject or enroll for the training under a trained electrician.INSURANCE BROKERAGE AGENT/SELLING INSURANCE POLICIES: This is growing enormously and the future market is very great. Most insurance companies have training facilities for agents who are mostly paid on commissions. Men and Women act as sole proprietor, operating their own business in their own time, the opportunity to earn is limitless as long as the policy is still active and the premium is paid you will continually receive your commission as agent. Many Insurance firms are willing to put you through their working operations in order for you to succeed as the arrangement is a mutually benefiting one.