Discussion of various articles from MACLEAN'S magazine

My classmates and I have exchanged point of views and opinions on various articles published in the September 1st 2008 edition of MACLEAN'S magazine. We first discussed the article on page 13 "The West mad at China for being fake: that's rich", we all agreed that China had gone too far and used the olympics as a propaganda tool to improve their image amongst the international community but most importantly amongst their own people. We all agreed that even though China admitted trying to fool the spectators by using the voice of a different girl than the one who was actually signing during the opening ceremony they still managed to impress and maintain a positive image. 

Secondly, we discussed the article on page 29 entitled "What's a Mouseketeer with no gun". We were surprised to read that fatal shootings at work is the leading cause of occupational death in the U.S. We all agreed that having guns or any other weapons in your vehicle does not improve security but gives a false sense of security. We even believe that permitting to have weapons in vehicles could actually have an adverse effect as criminals would aim for cars in order to obtain weapons to commit criminal acts. 

Thirdly, we discussed the article of page 33 entitled "Looking for help in all the wrong places". the article speaks about the financial problem in the airline industry. Problems that are too often blamed on the increasing oil prices but we believe that the problems in the airline industry are caused by much more than de-regulation and increasing oil prices, throughout our group discussion we agreed that companies should look at their organizational structures to reduces their operating costs and improve their efficiency.

The other article that we discussed was "Groceries go under the shrink ray". The article speaks about companies shrinking packages while maintaining the price of the larger package. Surprisingly a few group members had never realized that this cost saving strategy was used by companies. We did not come to a consensus on this article, some group members preferred to pay higher prices for the usual container size and others preferred that the price be maintained low and the size diminished.  

Finally, the last article that we discussed was the page 34 article entitled "Evian for kids: it's all about image". We unanimously agreed that the company's intention is more than just providing healthy options for kids lunches. We believe they are simply trying to sell the same product as they usually sell but at a higher price with a more child attractive package. We believe they use the "Nag factor" to their advantage to try to have parents purchase their new environmentally   damaging package.