Steps to prosperity

These insoles are meant to preserve the insides of wearer's shoes. They also bear messages: 

Right: "to have surplus"
Left: "Riches & Honor" / "wealth and rank"

The idea that a physical step propels you not just along a linear journey, or through time, but that the traveler has agency over their broader fate. Also, that you must swap out insoles on a regular basis both for sanitary and luck/health/wealth reasons. If you are in the midst of a particularly lucky streak, would you delay swapping out a pair of well-worn fortune-bringing insoles such as these for fear it could end it? Conversely, would you discard a recently purchased pair were they not sufficiently satisfying your demands for bringing good fortune?

The relationship between being able to dictate both your micro and macro progress along a "path" through  interventions (the insertion of footbeds into one's shoes, in this case). 

The customizability of insole messages - consider for a moment what goal you would "walk towards".

The culturally-subjective concept of foot-related taboos , and the attraction to the culturally (nearly-) universal desires of wealth, honor, and power overrides aversions towards touching something certain cultures condemn as "dirty".

Fairness vs. toughness

An intriguing marketing and price display system recycles the discarded paper arms included in these "instant tattoos". 500 kyat (roughly U$ .60) gets you a pair of tattoo-covered arms. While some consumers may see the main purpose of these wraps as showing off their tattoos, this vendor markets them for their supposed skin protecting qualities (literally, "skin covering gloves").

Whether it is more valuable to show your toughness through fierce-looking body art, or to keep your skin covered (and therefore lighter-toned and more "attractive" vis a vis local norms of beauty) depends upon the context the potential consumer comes from.

Note also the symbiotic relationship between the purse and tattoo-sleeve vendor and the adjacent fried snack vendor, with the prior using the latter's cart as a means of illuminating his goods. Potentially mutually beneficial in that the longer the time spent mulling over goods, the more tempting the smells from the barbecue stand may become to the user. The constraints and subtleties of olfactory-based marketing.

Generator protection

 

Here, a guard from the inside of a travel agency has been temporarily reassigned to one of the generators that is undergoing routine maintenance.  

The generators that keep hotels and businesses running when the electrical grid goes down are highly valued. Used in cinemas and large spaces, with a capacity of 90KVA to 500KVA, industrial-scale generators start at $18,000 and can run to more than $50,000. With such prices, no expense is spared for their maintenance, storage, and protection.

As generators increase in size (and therefore in cost and power capacity) they are more shielded both from the monsoon elements and from potentially prying hands. In the case of hotels and service businesses, shielding is also employed to muffle sound.

Plastic wrap resizing

This vendor's turf consists of the markets dotting downtown where households still shop for daily necessities. The one combination of product and service he sells enables the gap to be bridged between wholesalers and retailers, a critical link. His carry is basic: 

1) one industrial-sized spool of plastic wrap (what American's would call "Saran wrap")
2) one spool upon which to mount the industrial-sized plastic wrap spool
3) one spool with a spike in the middle, around which may be wrapped unfurled plastic wrap
4) one scale
5) several dozen rubber bands
6) a ricebag (now repurposed as his seating) in which to carry it all

With these tools, he wanders markets offering to cut more manageably sized rolls of plastic wrap off of his large roll in order to sell to vendors who repackage wholesale-purchased goods in order to resell them to consumers. As for his work method, he places the large spool on his left side, mounts the industrial-sized spool of plastic wrap on to it, "threads" the plastic wrap around the central spike of the other spool, and then spins/kicks the smaller spool continually, causing it to spin quickly and create smaller rolls of plastic wrap out of the industrial-sized wrap. These smaller wraps are then tied off with rubber bands, weighed, paid for by the vendors, and eventually used to repackage bulk-purchased/wholesale-bought goods into more consumer-appropriate servings/quantities, such as this soap here. I'm interested in the process of how a retail vendor decides what a fair price is for a given amount of a good - as in, why three bars of soap? Why not two or four bars of soap?

Test talisman

The visible, tangible evidence of "testing", the assuaging of doubt for both the manufacturer and the customer - despite how little is revealed about the precise nature of the test. How does the battery of tests carried out on a car built for local use reflect what customers value most in cars - and that which is valued will be most often (and most severely) tested? By not removing such a sticker, is the user claiming it as a sort of insurance? A ward against malfunction, effective as long as the sticker remains in place? Would a user go through additional effort to ensure the sticker remains attached?

Hard to see in this picture, but this user also had all the plastic sheeting covering the seats still in place from when it was put on in the factory. In a culture such as this where cars are so highly valued and extensive customization and protection are the norm, it is entirely possible that a new cars will, for its entire lifespan, constantly have a protective buffer in areas of predictable wear, never experiencing any human-induced wear whatsoever. When the factory's plastic is finally deemed inadequately protective, one the smorgasbord of options for matching "3-in-1" seat cover+steering wheel grip+tissue box holder combo package will have likely been purchased well in advance.

Phone covers

In Myanmar, display and usage behavior around landline phones is that
for both privacy purposes and to spread awareness of the service the
usual practice is to keep phones on a separate table outside of the
managing retail space, creating a separate "phone area." As with other
electronic instruments in this rainy and resource constrained
environment, phones come with their own standards of protection for
the object from the elements.

This particular desk sits in front of an internet cafe, a space with
which the phones on top of it share a communication function with the
computers within the store. With the advent of Skype, Google Phone,
and other VoIP services, acoustic intrusion from one set of users to
the other seems unlikely. Whether on the phone or using the computer
as a phone, you will always be in earshot of a possibly private
conversation, although computers are superior to phones for
conversations of this nature as the more sensitive elements can be
communicated through text in the chat windows accompanying some of
these calling applications.

When I first noticed these phones, I was interested mostly in the
approach this net cafe has taken to protection of their hardware
through the use of particularly colorful and attention-grabbing means.
While another shop chose to repurpose a transparent document storage
envelope to protect their phones (the other photograph) - perhaps more
securely than cloth - the nature of the protective cloth itself has
the potential to draw the attention of passerby in a way that the shop
using transparent covers does not. Do phone (and other object)
protection solutions in this resource-constrained context sit along a
continuum of functionality at one end and attention
grabbing/attractive at the other? How do standards for protection and
display differ between an object whose service is being advertised to
passerby versus one where use is reserved for employees?