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Samsung Sets New Guidelines For Alcoholic Beverages
jones_supa writes "To tame the vigorous drinking habits of the Koreans, the parent company, Samsung Group, implemented a strict code of conduct for staff dinners at Samsung. Deeply ingrained in South Korean business culture, hoesik is a hierarchical bonding experience which usually involves free-flowing alcohol, often forced upon lower-ranked staff who are expected to serve and entertain their superiors. The new rules banned rituals like beolju, or forcing drinks on others, and sabalju — the mixing of several different beverages to make a potent punch. An employee of nine years, said the company had implemented a rule known as '1-1-9', which restricts hoesik to one sitting, one type of alcohol and a cut-off point of 9pm in order to prevent excessive drinking. Samsung's move comes as South Korea has more broadly made some steps towards tackling excessive alcohol consumption and drink-induced violence. South Koreans are by far the heaviest drinkers in Asia and the biggest consumers of spirits in the world, according to the World Health Organization."
You are, obviously, forgetting North Korea. North Korea, number 1, even in spirits.
PS: The above comment is not supposed to be taken as fact, for any reason.
As a nerdy engineer, I have to travel to South Korea for product support. Those guys can match me with Johnny Walker when I'm drinking beer. It's astounding - I don't know how they are alive.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
"They don't like anyone who isn't Korean, and they don't like each other all that much, either. They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards, 'the Irish of Asia.'"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"They're hardheaded, hard-drinking, tough little bastards. 'The Irish of Asia.'" -- P. J. O'Rourke
Mind you, P. J. is of Irish extraction, so he meant that as a mix of compliment and self-deprecation.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
When word of this new policy came down, there was one common response among the young employees: Toga! Toga! Toga!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I went and visited a 55 year old Chinese investor. When I'd last studied business-in-Asia in the late 1980s, this /. article describes what it was like in every Asian city. I asked my host if that's what I was going to have to prepare for. No, he said, it's not like that anymore. He explained: " I mean, it used to be like that. But those guys are all dead."
Gently reply
This isn't the kind of anecdote you bring math to.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Login, click on "Recent" and start moderating. As AC you have no right to bitch what so ever.
Tomorrow is another day...
Now I understand why that "Gangnam Style" video is hilarious when drunk, but incomprehensible when sober.
No sig for the moment.
Not to be out done Apple has replaced the water in their water coolers with Everclear.
For Asians, the Koreans can out drink them all, but as a big white guy trying to wash down god knows what food was put in front of me, I literally drank them under the table. You see, its impolite to pour your own drink, if you want some, you fill some other persons glass and they fill yours. The food was terrible, and I did not want to be impolite and not eat it, so with every bite came a sip. It got to the point there some of the people at the business dinner could not get up out of their chairs.
I was told at the end of the night, "You drink very well!"
A double of Johnny Walker has about the same alcohol content as a pint of beer (i.e. 500ml at 5% has the same alcohol as 50ml at 50%) - if that makes you feel better :-)
Just remember:
1. Don't ask your Korean friends for drinking contest.
2. When they give dinner at 6pm eat it. That's the last meal you'll get for the day. The rest of the evening would be liquid.
3. Don't wasted on your first bar. That's just the beginning of your "evening" tour.
4. When they offer you "nuclear-bear", just say no.
5. The same if they offer you orange juice at the end. Ask what inside those juice other than the orange.
Prepare a headache pill for the next morning, cause you still have 3 days more for your training seasons. Don't fall for "farewell party", you'll miss your plane the next day... (that's all that i remember. I think.)
You don't understand, they were matching by _volume_ ;)
Soju can be made with many things, just as vodka is. Some retain their taste more than others and can be found in strengths as high as any moonshine. I brought some back from one trip that was 60% ABV, found it completely undrinkable, but gave it to some Korean guys I knew who immediately became my bestest buddies until the alcohol ran out. I found it rather disturbing when I noticed that the alcohol was dissolving the Styrofoam cups they were drinking out of! To say the least, like with erguotou in China, at that level it is an acquired taste which few people that don't grow up with it will develop.
Modern day soju has commonly been made from sweet potatoes and then saccharin added to make it even sweeter (more than a few military personnel would find out antifreeze had been added to kick up the sweetness even higher, resulting in horrible headaches if they were lucky, blindness or death if they weren't). This makes it work very well in cocktails where the sweetness blends in. Koreans generally just mix it with fruit juice or lemonade if with someone who doesn't like the taste, or drink it straight with someone who does or when eating food, at least in my experience. For something with less of an overt taste and with no sweetness added, try Iichiko shochu from Japan- made from barley, served with a twist of lemon, quite nice and dry, so to speak, but significantly pricier than a similar amount of Jinro.
Soju also comes in a variety of strengths, with Jinro adding water to the 21 or 22% version mostly popular in Korea to bring it down to 19.5% or 20% (some places do allow higher, this was first done for California, IIRC) allowing it to be sold at beer and wine-only licensed establishments in the USA. The establishments love it because they can charge a premium for it as a call-brand, the customers can buy more because they don't get drunk as easily, and the soju is cheap (perhaps not compared to Gilbeys, granted, but a lot cheaper than Absolut or Finlandia).
I'm a native Korean, Samsung Electronics employee for the last couple of years, although the following text does not represent my employer.
Actually the reason behind this seems to be twofold - health (you can't expect somebody who drunk heavily to perform adequately next day), cultural (Samsung isn't simply a Korean company anymore), and probably legal (the company is liable if drinking was part of the routine job, and it didn't do anything about it).
Decades ago, the only people working for Samsung (and probably most Korean companies) were mostly male Koreans aged somewhere around 30 to 50. (In the eighties, Korean women had a difficult time getting jobs on large corporates (except as secretaries or factory production workers) and were routinely fired for getting married) The only thing that they could do in common was drinking. Considering that Asian people have a blurry boundary between personal and professional issues, drinking (and for executives, playing glof) was a very essential task for successful working. Actually, companies even had "drinking VP"s who's job was to drink with business contacts every night, and nothing else.
Fast forward to 2012. Samsung now has some 300k employees, and more than half of those people are non-Koreans. Many employees have their spouse also working, which means somebody has to take care of their kids if they have to drink late. There are many non-Korean people everywhere, even on the Korean campuses. Business contacts are no longer limited to Asian countries. Suddenly, it doesn't make much sense to socialize by drinking heavily. You can't expect to be able to socialize with other people if they don't drink much, or don't drink at all.
The problem was that this "heavy drinking" thing was a sort of a "tradition". Many people, especially junior/senior management people who were working for Korean companies for decades, found themselves uncomfortable to socialize with other people without excessive soju or whisky or whatever. So, corporate policy kicks in, and tries to change the culture. Not only by simply banning "drinking", but by trying to suggest alternative methods (e.g., sports activities or doing charity work).