I still see them going door to door these days!

We used to have Yakult Ladies in Singapore too — I remember my parents buying from them to please their kids (me) decades ago.Surprisingly enough, I just looked the scheme up for this comment, and it&#x27;s still active:- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yakult.com.sg&#x2F;yakult-lady-agent&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;yakult.com.sg&#x2F;yakult-lady-agent&#x2F;</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.news.yahoo.com&#x2F;memory-makers-singapores-first-yakult-lady-still-delivers-door-to-door-042843434.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sg.news.yahoo.com&#x2F;memory-makers-singapores-first-yak...</a>The Yahoo article could help explain some of the economics behind it.

Well, I&#x27;d go for a sharply dressed lady too, but ... what I get is very cheerful Tesco drivers in hiviz, who unpack my groceries and stash the chilled stuff in my fridge. It&#x27;s a great (UK) service, and they quite often ask if they can do anything else for me (I&#x27;m bed-bound) like make a cup of tea. Cannot recommend them highly enough.

How neat. I&#x27;d buy some Actimel too if a sharply dressed lady would show up at my door instead of a suicidal looking grocery delivery guy who carves the local word for &quot;tip&quot; in the elevator every time he doesn&#x27;t get any.

400 yen for a ten pack is more like $2.50 than $5Typical markup in the USA is 100% from wholesaler to retail. Running brick and mortar is very expensive. So if Walgreens were selling this, the wholesale price would be $1.25. I think it reasonable to expect the Yakult Ladies are pulling in the same $1.25 per package that walgreens gets.The key, I think, is &quot;Most of them are self-employed&quot;. Its a gig economy idea. You have to eat. If you&#x27;re walking home from the store anyway (or kids school or on the way home from work or whatever), you may as well deliver packages for $1.25 each on the way home. You&#x27;re walking home anyway, you may as well make free money on the walk.

The article says this has been running since 1963 though. The program would’ve been running through the post-war period of economic growth, as well as during the lost decades.It also mentions that it was done to drive sales.

I&#x27;m so glad I visit different countries to see what they are actually like so I don&#x27;t get brainwashed into thinking GDP is anywhere near of good measure as people think it is.

Low salaries&#x2F;wages. Decades of deflation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lost_Decades" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lost_Decades</a>

They don’t have just a few, they have 81,000 people doing it.

It&#x27;s very effective if you have just a few of these, but are able to get lots of press from doing so that causes many other consumers to go and buy yourself through normal grocery outlets.

The article didn&#x27;t answer my main question, which is how the economics work. How does it add up to have high-touch home delivery of $5 yogurt packages?

I heard about those from parents&#x2F;grandparents and it was interesting in contrast to MLM meetings I had people trying to con me into participating. I fell for one invite once and they are pure sleaze.

They existed well into the 80s in rural Missouri.

And the Avon cream products in the 90s!

I wonder how many suburban housewives in the 60&#x27;s combated loneliness through TupperWare® Parties?

Another variation on this is La Poste in France have a paid service &quot;Watch over my parents&quot; where you can get the postie to do a short regular visit to them (presumably alongside any deliveries) for distant children who can&#x27;t.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laposte.fr&#x2F;services-seniors&#x2F;visites-du-facteur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.laposte.fr&#x2F;services-seniors&#x2F;visites-du-facteur</a>

Lots of startup opportunities here. Instead solving the problem, just make a product that convinces people it’s not actually a problem.

I mean, the first part of their comment got my hopes up:&gt; Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the &#x27;loneliness epidemic&#x27; I can&#x27;t help but wonder if we&#x27;re not trying to solve the wrong problem.But then I realized we differed on what the root problem&#x2F;solution were.What economic&#x2F;social forces are making it so that the elderly get their emotional needs met through gig workers instead of their own families?Another point the article doesn&#x27;t mention is the emotional toll this likely has on the workers. Having once worked a role where I regularly helped the elderly and got to know the same individuals over some years, it was a constant churn of disappointment when they&#x27;d inevitably die.

This is the kind of detached from humanity viewpoint that I come to hacker news for. Keep it up.

Exactly. This need to be social is being used against us. Not just to sell yoghurt, it’s weaponized by the social media networks to manipulate entire countries.

&gt;Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the &#x27;loneliness epidemic...you&#x27;re reading the title wrong, they aren&#x27;t &quot;trying to solve the loneliness epidemic,&quot; they are trying to sell yogurt at a profit. In so doing, their sales force is ameliorating some of the loneliness their clients feel as a side effect. You could say that they are monetizing loneliness if that&#x27;s the reason people are buying their products, for the visits and not for the yogurt.

End goal: Asimov&#x27;s Solaria, where everything is done by robots and the mere thought of breathing the same air as another human becomes repulsive.

Yes, how do we optimize social interaction out of our lives, maybe we can all live in VR with simulated girlfriends and never have to interact with another human again.

I&#x27;d rather be a robot than a human, so from my perspective, the answer is clearly clearly none. I just don&#x27;t have the option of turning into a robot.

To learn, to create, to grow? None of these things necessarily involve other humans.

You would be free to decide, instead of having it being biologically required that you socialize.

Then, like, what&#x27;s the point of even being a human instead of a robot?

On some level I agree, but I don&#x27;t think most of my fellow humans would agree.Either way, editing away the need for social connections from humans seems to be quite a long way from our current level of technology, so it&#x27;s not really worth considering as something that can actually be done. There&#x27;s a philosophical discussion worth having despite that though.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fablesofaesop.com&#x2F;the-fox-who-lost-his-tail.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fablesofaesop.com&#x2F;the-fox-who-lost-his-tail.html</a>

The part of the brain that needs human contact could be chemically or surgically neutralized.

&gt; we can fix the human condition by removing humanitywild take.

The framing of human sociality as a flaw to be eliminated invites the dangerous notion that we can—or should—simply re-engineer ourselves. However, the ambitious project of &quot;rewiring&quot; human nature to eliminate our spontaneous connections and dependencies is not a path to liberation, but the ultimate goal of totalitarianism and oppressive social engineering.Hannah Arendt explicitly notes that the true aim of totalitarian ideologies is not merely to change political structures, but to achieve &quot;the transformation of human nature itself&quot;. When regimes seek total domination over a population, human spontaneity and the unpredictable nature of our social relationships become the greatest obstacles.To achieve total control, these systems attempt to fabricate a new kind of human species. Arendt observes that concentration camps functioned literally as &quot;laboratories&quot; to test these changes in human nature. The objective was to eliminate human spontaneity and transform the human personality into a mere &quot;thing,&quot; reducing individuals to a predictable &quot;bundle of reactions&quot;. Arendt compares the success of this psychological rewiring to Pavlov’s dog, noting that conditioning a creature to abandon its natural, spontaneous instincts creates a &quot;perverted animal&quot;.James C. Scott traces a similar impulse in &quot;high-modernist&quot; ideology, which champions the &quot;mastery of nature (including human nature)&quot; through the rational, scientific design of social order. This kind of extreme social engineering requires stripping people of their distinctive personalities, histories, and organic community ties, treating them instead as abstract, interchangeable &quot;generic subjects&quot;.When human beings are placed in environments designed to severely restrict their organic social interactions and enforce rigid functional control, they suffer. Such environments foster a kind of &quot;institutional neurosis&quot; characterized by apathy, withdrawal, and a loss of initiative.Paulo Freire similarly observes that the drive to completely control people—to &quot;in-animate&quot; them and transform them from living beings into inanimate &quot;things&quot;—is the essence of oppression. He argues that attempting to turn men and women into &quot;automatons&quot; directly negates our fundamental &quot;ontological vocation to be more fully human&quot;.If we were to successfully &quot;rewire&quot; ourselves to no longer need others, we would be executing the very project that authoritarian regimes have historically attempted through terror and indoctrination.Our &quot;flawed&quot; social dependency and spontaneous need for one another are exactly what guarantee our freedom. To engineer that vulnerability out of the human psyche would not solve the problem of loneliness; it would simply reduce us to isolated, predictable mechanisms, destroying our humanity in the process.

The problem is, even if we somehow could do that, it&#x27;s not possible to predict the consequences. Being social is exactly the one specific trait that gave humans massive advantage over other species, and was the backbone of our evolution.

There are plenty of things to live for, but that’s not even the point. There is a difference between choosing to be social and having to be social because you will get depressed if you aren’t.I think this need for social interaction is harmful. We did see this in action during the COVID pandemic. So many people who weren’t able to abide by a short lockdown. Lives were lost due to our pathological need for social interaction.Imagine how many communicable deceases we could eliminate by simply having a 3 month lockdown every other year.

It would be up to you. These people who are lonely otherwise have lives.

You live for others? As in remove those others and you lose whole purpose of life? I am not trying to be rude, seems like retirement homes house plenty of such people but it doesn&#x27;t make sense for younger folks... although this is hardly a choice, is it. But - I believe one can work on this and move themselves quite a bit if wanted.My 2 cents - mountains and nature and activities in them are always beautiful, as in it doesn&#x27;t get boring or mundane, not for anybody I know. Working out on oneself, experiencing various adventures, backpacking around the world, sports, adrenaline&#x2F;risky activities that make you feel alive, seeing cultures and history and food... those are done for oneself and they are absolutely 100% fulfilling that no career could ever deliver.Saying above as one such person, and also father of 2 amazing kids (and a pretty decent wife to complement) whom I love more than anything. But I don&#x27;t live for them despite doing various hard sacrifices for them, I live for me and do those things for me, to be happy, content, recharged, better father and husband and when looking back at my life being fine with various choices made.

What’s there to live for otherwise? Can you flesh this idea out more?

Daily AI conversations for seniors: (there are a few of these products...)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;intouch.family&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;intouch.family&#x2F;en</a>

Techbros are thinking: &quot;Don&#x27;t eliminate their need! They need a subscription AI app!&quot;

Haha! I really like your comment though I couldn&#x27;t disagree more[1]! I think I understand a little of the view and I think it&#x27;s not all wrong. Here&#x27;s the part where I think you&#x27;re right: not all kinds of social contact is useful. One thing I have found very useful for discussion is Opus 4.6. You have to apply the usual tricks (&quot;a somewhat foolish friend of mine said&quot; &#x2F; &quot;a junior intern who&#x27;s not doing so well thinks&quot; &#x2F; etc.) but it&#x27;s pretty good at engaging with a variety of ideas and disagreeing and so on. It still has the LLM glazing but it is possible to drag ideas out of it.By contrast, many humans can&#x27;t even understand the thrust of an argument and so discussion is wasted on them. There&#x27;s nothing more frustrating than making an argument of some meaning and having someone misunderstand it entirely. Avoiding that requires some degree of rhetorical skill and communication and a sufficiently receptive audience. I have no problem talking to my friends like this, but there is a time-subject-partner matching problem. I want to discuss Analects 13.18 now, and my friend who can give me context is putting his son to sleep[0]. So I talk to Opus 4.6 and DeepSeek about what I think it is and I get quite far in understanding why my (seemingly novel) interpretation is unlikely to be correct.So machines are very useful in discussion and so on. However, I don&#x27;t think they serve much of a purpose in assuaging loneliness. The reality of life is that it is most successful when it can organize into larger blocks: the cell, the organ, the body, the community, the state. And so I think our eusocial nature is strongly adaptive[1]. Perhaps with sufficiently advanced AI, a single person could exert sufficient power. Nothing in theory stopping that but I have other opposition to that (monocultures are non-adaptive, etc.). So removing our dependence on social connections will probably weaken us.So given that that is the case, I think people over-prescribe solutions in a way that is razor-targeted to themselves[2]. As someone who is not lonely and quite socially fulfilled, I find that a lot of these prescriptions turn out to come from some other axioms which I feel are unnecessary. For instance, one trend is &quot;why do they have to get their needs met from delivery man?&quot; and I think that&#x27;s silly. When I was a child, we kids &quot;had a relationship with&quot; or &quot;had some of our needs met&quot; by the school guard in that he was a civic ally of ours. He was usually opposed to our actions tactically but ultimately aligned. Our final exams in India are very important and one day one of my classmates, who was particularly scatterbrained, was late for one and he took him to the exam hall on his bike.I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s any reason to proscribe that social interactions should be within one&#x27;s own immediate sphere. Our apartment building in San Francisco has social interactions that I think are normal in a civil society[3] - for the most part I interact there with strangers. Some I have helped or been helped by without ever having seen their faces. I think there is a joy I get from my direct family, and then my extended family and friends, and my communities, and my society, and as someone whose life is fairly joyful I&#x27;d say that looking around, (and with apologies to Tolstoy), &quot;Happy people are all alike; each unhappy person is unhappy in their own way&quot;.0: He did respond in the morning and it was very helpful. Turns out I misread the relationship Shen Zhuliang and Confucius had.1: In fact, I&#x27;m of the opinion that pro-sociality is probably The Adaptive Trait. I recently picked up Darwin&#x27;s Cathedral and am approximately 3 pages in and I already feel a kindred spirit behind that book.2: Can we help it? Almost everyone has heard an expert or professor go &quot;I believe that X is the most important thing that everyone should learn&quot; and X always happens to be what they&#x27;re studying - well obviously they believe that, otherwise they wouldn&#x27;t be studying it.3: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.roshangeorge.dev&#x2F;w&#x2F;Blog&#x2F;2025-10-09&#x2F;Community" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.roshangeorge.dev&#x2F;w&#x2F;Blog&#x2F;2025-10-09&#x2F;Community</a>

Not everybody is wired in same way. Some have &#x27;pathological&#x27; need, some see it as beneficial but optional item. Same folks definitely don&#x27;t enjoy loud parties or bars full of strangers yelling on each other, and find a bit of lonely time healing&#x2F;recharging.I am one such person, and there are others. I consider it a personality strength, although of course it comes with side effects. Minority but not tiny.

&gt; The thinking child is not antisocial (he is, in fact, the only type of child fit for social relationships). When he develops his first values and conscious convictions, particularly as he approaches adolescence, he feels an intense desire to share them with a friend who would understand him; if frustrated, he feels an acute sense of loneliness. (Loneliness is specifically the experience of this type of child—or adult; it is the experience of those who have something to offer. The emotion that drives conformists to &quot;belong,&quot; is not loneliness, but fear—the fear of intellectual independence and responsibility. The thinking child seeks equals; the conformist seeks protectors.)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aynrandlexicon.com&#x2F;lexicon&#x2F;loneliness.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aynrandlexicon.com&#x2F;lexicon&#x2F;loneliness.html</a>

Every time I read an article about people trying to solve the &#x27;loneliness epidemic&#x27; I can&#x27;t help but wonder if we&#x27;re not trying to solve the wrong problem.Maybe the solution should not be sought in trying to increase social connections but in eliminating our need for social contact. This dependence on other humans has always felt like a flaw to me.Note that I&#x27;m not saying that human contact is bad, just that our pathological dependency on it is.

From the BBC no less. We were just discussing how uncommercial they are.

The BBC is not state funded, it&#x27;s a public broadcaster primarily funded by the general public, via the (admittedly outdated) TV licence fee system. Although the media output for the UK is non-commercial, it does have commercial operations and interactions though and they are mostly centred around the content produced for overseas consumption. As this post is on the .com domain where the international content exists (and which runs ads), I presume it is part of the paid content side of things.

From the footer:&gt; This website is produced by BBC Global News Ltd, a commercial company that is part of BBC Studios, owned by the BBC (and just the BBC). No money from the licence fee was used to create this website. The money we make from it is re-invested to help fund the BBC’s international journalism.

BBC.com is a commercial service aimed at people outside of the UK

They probably aren’t even getting paid for it, they’re just falling for shill posts for free.

I thought the BBC was state funded and didn&#x27;t have to rely on undisclosed sponsorships.

&gt; Yakult (ヤクルト, Yakuruto) is a Japanese sweetened probiotic milk beverage fermented with the bacteria strain Lacticaseibacillus casei Shirota. It is sold by Yakult Honsha based in Tokyo.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yakult" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Yakult</a>

The plaid trim on the official uniform definitely gives it a Scottish aesthetic.

Yakult is a Japanese company? I always assumed from the name it came from mainland Europe somewhere. They did a Häagen-Dazs on me. Especially as the Japanese often come up with Western names like this that aren&#x27;t even spellable in kana.

Yoghurt delivery women is the subject of the sentence and it&#x27;s about women who deliver yoghurts.

English is not my main language but this title confuses me

I think most feedback I&#x27;ve seen regarding automation of customer service labour has been along the lines of &quot;no! Get it away from me! I want to speak to the human!&quot;. With approximately that level of frustration.I thought it was well established that interacting with an actual human was generally preferred to whatever we have to use now.The automation exists to save money on labour, not to make our lives more convenient

With the automation of some customer service labor in japan, maybe this shows people value at least a bit of customer service interaction as a customer

Is this a PR piece, with product placement clearly front and center?

Referencing this PG article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html</a>

Completely unclear what &quot;submarine article&quot; could mean.

This seems to be a submarine article - all the images and quotes seem to be directly sourced from Yakult Honsha&#x27;s strategic comms department.Edit: yep, appears Yakult has just kicked off an ad campaign putting Yakult Ladies front and center [0][0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u8HNY7Ta4dA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=u8HNY7Ta4dA</a>

That trope only applies if the non-Japanese version of the thing exists. Which, if you live in the US, it doesn&#x27;t. I would be just as interested in an article about Minnesota yogurt delivery women, but they don&#x27;t exist, so...

“The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Minnesota”HN’s interest in this article is so “thing vs Japanese thing”

HN is the breeding ground of the Thing Japan meme <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;thing-japan" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowyourmeme.com&#x2F;memes&#x2F;thing-japan</a>

I also find it odd that there’s daily top ranked Japan related articles on HN.

Japan is a very interesting country for Western people (US and Canada, Western Europe) because it is by far the most developed country that is not Western. In this regard, it is unique and intriguing.

Sometimes news like this is upvoted, because it involves Japan, towards each a lot of Western techies have an unhealthy obsession on, but the moment when those techies are advised to not use the self-service thing at the super-market they start going bananas.

The annual consumption of ice cream in Japan was 6.7 litres per person in 2021 (compared to 10 litres&#x2F;person in Canada and 20 litres&#x2F;person in the U.S.). For all dairy, Japanese people each ate 94 kg in 2022.They eat less dairy, but hardly none. I have heard people say that a scoop of ice cream or a glass of milk each day is not a problem, but more can be. Intolerance also seems to increase with age, so younger people can consume more dairy.A 1975 study in Japan puts intolerance (unable to drink 200ml of milk comfortably) at 19% of the population. I would suspect that massive exposure over the past 50 years has lowered that percentage significantly.

So does Thailand but we also have Yakult ladies here, they just sell the drinks though.

A video on how it’s possible for lactose intolerant peoples to still eat lots of dairy.Case in video: Chinese and milk tea<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=At_WjGosTNM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=At_WjGosTNM</a>

How come Yakult is a nearly 100 years old Japanese company?Most yogurt cultures reduces lactose content of the milk base during fermentation. Some cultures like the one Yakult uses supports increased lactose digestion in humans. At the same time lactose intolerance is not binary but a spectrum.

The first line is true, the second line is false.Lactose intolerance is not absolute.

Japanese have lactose intolerance, almost universally.They don&#x27;t eat yogurt or dairy in general.

The yoghurt delivery women combatting loneliness in Japan