Marc-André Parizeau

An ice cream company president in Japan stood in a dark suit in front of a hundred factory workers and bowed on national television over nine cents. His company makes the blue soda popsicle that every kid in Japan buys with pocket change after baseball practice on a hot summer afternoon. For a quarter of a century, the company fought inflation to keep the price at roughly forty cents—because everyone in the factory knew little kids were counting coins in front of the freezer case. When soaring ingredient costs finally forced them to raise the price by nine cents, the executives refused to shrink the popsicle behind the scenes or hide the increase in fine print. Instead, the president and a hundred employees lined up outside company headquarters, stood still for sixty seconds on prime-time television, and bowed in silent apology to the children of Japan. Nobody was angry. Sales jumped ten percent the very next month because parents wanted to support a company that treated a child's allowance like a sacred contract. A nation's integrity is not measured by the size of its corporations, but by how honestly they treat a child holding a handful of coins.