File under: Man Bites Dog. Numskull CEO loses her job.

Remember the 450,000 I wrote about a couple of weeks ago?  I neglected to mention that what started the whole social protest thing was a consumer revolt against the high price of dairy products as symbolized by the small fortunes that families everywhere had to shell out for a small tub of cottage cheese.

In most of the world cottage cheese is nothing special.  Something that gets eaten once in a while, a staple of athletes and those that still harbor the delusion that dieting will make them thinner.  In Israel though cottage cheese is big business.  It is widely consumed and its price over the last few years simply sky rocketed.  And so, at some point early this summer people simply decided to boycott the cheese.  

The rest of that story is easily told: Consumer boycott - cheese companies ignore it - boycott grows bigger - cheese companies act even more arrogantly - boycott reaches crazy big proportions - cheese companies suddenly realize that maybe, just maybe, they should be paying attention - boycott becomes a total blackout on cottage cheese purchases - everyone involved in the production of cottage cheese blames someone else for the high prices.  And then everyone involved in the cottage cheese industry gets hammered to a pulp by the angry public, supermarkets are avoided, the cash cow of cottage cheese suddenly runs dry, PANIC, recriminations, special offers on cottage cheese.  Yada, yada, nada.

And in the middle of all of this is the Tnuva Dairy Company.  Originally a farmers' cooperative it grew and metastasized over the decades into a too-large, too-similar-to-a-monopoly company owned by foreign investors that recognized a good deal some time ago and bought it. To say that Tnuva and its head, Zehavit Cohen, acted arrogantly during the whole deal would be like saying the moon is made of cheese (of course the moon is not made of cheese, if it were Tnuva would have mined it by now).  Really, it would be difficult to convey how aloof, how disconnected, how creepy this numskull acted through this whole thing.  Think "let them eat (cheese) cake" and then multiply it by the number of udders in a rather large herd of cattle and you'll get some idea of how bad it was.  

So anyway, this morning the papers reported that Ms Cohen quit her job at Tnuva.  She's got other jobs at the investment firm that owns Tnuva, so don't feel too bad for her.  Still, she's out and that certainly counts as a victory.


(Note: Numskull blogger got Ms Cohen's name wrong in the original posting and corrected it.  Apologies to Ms Cohen for getting her name wrong in the first place.)