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Supermarkets devote aisle-end displays to Spam and its familiar blue and yellow tin. A local Hormel subsidiary, CJ CheilJedang Corp., manufactures the product here, printing the logo on one side with characters from the Korean alphabet, known as Hangul.

It's relatively cheap, too: A 200-gram can costs about $3.

At that price, many Koreans view it as a tasty side dish, especially as processed foods go. "It's seen as a high-end luncheon meat," say Cho Hye-Jin, who works in Seoul. "Out of the variety of luncheon meats available in Korea, Spam is probably the best quality."

Cho and Park Jin-Hong, both construction consultants, say they most often see their peers consume Spam along with soju — a clear alcoholic beverage made with rice, potatoes or other starches. Park says Spam isn't a staple of his diet — "it's too salty" — but he does enjoy it.

Kim said he prefers a low-sodium version, one of two varieties (along with the original) sold in Korea. Customers here can also buy prepackaged Spam products, such as fried rice, in frozen-food aisles.

South Koreans aren't the only Asians who use Spam in traditional meals. In the Philippines, for example, it's sometime served in rellenong manok, a stuffed chicken dish. They're also not the first to adopt specialties introduced by the U.S. military.

Perhaps the most iconic Spam dish in South Korea is a spicy soup known as budae jjigae, or army stew. After the war, Koreans used U.S. Army rations — sometimes smuggled off military bases or donated by soldiers — to make the deep-red dish.

This concoction comes in many varieties. Restaurants use a mix of hot spices, noodles, Spam, sausage, beans, corn, green vegetables — even cheese. It's been called "pig stew," "soldier stew" and "Johnson's stew," the latter after our 36th president.

Chris Amoroso, an American, discovered budae jjigae a few years ago while teaching English here. He liked it so much that he created a video on YouTube explaining the dish's colorful history. "It's delicious," he tells viewers, sitting before a boiling pot.

"It is not a soup that one can eat often. It's so rich and probably not very healthy," he tells The Salt. "Americans should know that if they ever get a chance to go [to Korea], they should definitely try it."

While the soup is an ingrained part of the food culture here, seasonal gift boxes are still a big reason why Spam sales are so strong in South Korea. The gifts typically come in Spam-branded boxes, with as many as nine cans inside, along with other items, like cooking oil. Families exchange them during the traditional harvest holiday season, known as chuseok, in early fall, and the Lunar New Year. Bosses hand them out to employees.

These boxes represent more than half of Hormel's annual Spam sales on the peninsula, the company says — perhaps one reason for the slick advertisements promoting them in South Korea.

Later in the short video advertisement described above, the camera switches between enticing rice and noodle dishes, an elegant sandwich and multiple cans of Spam. One by one, the cans fill the gift box. The young woman returns and smiles into the camera. She later shyly tucks her hair behind an ear while looking down, as if pondering something special.

The music continues. "We have prepared the gift set with all our hearts," says the narrator. "Spam gift set — everyone knows what it's worth."

Gray, who lives in Seoul, believes he knows the product's value here, too.

"I always joke with guests who come to Korea, 'See, you could have packed a whole suitcase of Spam. You would have made a lot of friends."

Hae Ryun Kang contributed to this report.

Matt Stiles, who recently tried Spam in ramen noodles, is former data editor at NPR and currently a Seoul-based freelance journalist. You can share your Spam stories with @stiles or @NPRFood.

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Would you lead a more active lifestyle if it meant lower life insurance premiums? Insurer John Hancock and Vitality, a global wellness firm, are hoping the answer is yes. But there is a condition: They get to track your activity.

The practice is already employed in Australia, Europe, Singapore and South Africa, where Vitality is based.

The companies announced the new plan today, and posted a video on John Hancock's website.

Here's how the program works: Once you sign up, John Hancock sends you a Fitbit monitor as one way to track your fitness. You earn Vitality Points for your activities. As you accumulate points, your status rises – from Bronze to Silver to Gold to Platinum. The higher your status, the more you save each year on your life insurance premiums. The points also allow you benefits at stores like REI and Whole Foods as well as hotel chains like Hyatt.

The New York Times, which first reported on the announcement, notes that the most active customers can earn discounts of up to 15 percent on their premiums. The company in a news release says:

"For example, a 45 year old couple (of average health) buying Protection UL with Vitality life insurance policies of $500,000 each could potentially save more than $25,000 on their premiums by the time they reach 85, with additional savings if they live longer, assuming they reach gold status in all years."

But as The Times notes, if customers don't maintain their gold status for any reason, the premiums could increase by between 1.1 percent and 1.6 percent each year. Those who reach platinum status will see premiums fall by about 0.30 percent each year, the newspaper adds.

NPR's Chris Arnold tells our Newscast unit that privacy advocates worry that the plan will raise insurance costs for lower-income people juggling two jobs who don't have as much time to get to the gym.

John Hancock and Vitality say the information collected won't be sold – and would only be shared with those entities that administer the program, The Times reported, but some of it could be used to create new insurance products.

And for those uncomfortable with sharing some data, Michael Doughty, John Hancock's president, told The Times: "You do not have to send us any data you are not comfortable with. The trade-off is you won't get points for that."

The Times adds that the company hopes the program revitalizes life insurance sales in the U.S., which have stagnated for decades.

The concept of incentivizing behavior while new in life insurance in the U.S. is not new to other sectors of the insurance industry. As Julie Rovner, who is with our partner Kaiser Health News, reported last December, wellness programs already exist in many workplaces. And, she reported, "there's no real evidence as to whether these plans actually improve the health of employees." (You can see some of NPR's other coverage of wellness programs here and here.)

In the auto industry, Progressive offers its customers a mileage-based tracking device called Snapshot; those who opt-in case save up to 30 percent on their premiums. But as CNET notes "not just how many miles you drive but also how you're driving them could affect your insurance rates."

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They are not blue jeans. They are not slacks. They are not chinos or khakis.

"They're like a jogger," Lee Davis says of his pants, walking through an outdoor mall in Los Angeles called The Grove. He's wearing them with a professional black cardigan over a designer white tee, with a crisp fitted baseball cap and fancy tennis shoes. The pants stand out the most. They fit him impeccably, with clear, tapered lines, and a high-end, light-khaki material that flows luxuriously.

Davis is just one of several male customers at the mall walking through it in sweatpants. He says his cost $195, and that they are worth it.

"They're kind of in between a sweat pant and a dress pant," Davis says. "Denim sometimes can really be looked at as just casual. This makes it a little more dressy, because of the material."

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He and his nearly $200 sweatpants are perhaps the poster child for fashion's latest obsession.

What Is Athleisure?

Davis' sweats are part of a growing trend called "athleisure." Gym clothes are making their way out of the gym and becoming a larger part of people's everyday wardrobes, and becoming a bit fancier in the process. The NDP group says sales of athleisure apparel were more than $35 billion last year, and that athletic apparel now makes up 17 percent of the entire American clothing market.

H&M, Urban Outfitters, Aeropostale and TopShop have all launched athleisure lines. Certain collections have gotten endorsements from celebrities like Kanye West and Beyonce. Chanel even makes a couture sneaker now. The Wall Street Journal reports that some estimates predict the U.S. athletic apparel market will increase by nearly 50 percent by 2020, even as American's participate in fewer sports.

How did all of this happen? Will McKitterick, an analyst with IBIS World says there are two big factors at play in the rise of athleisure: yoga, and the cyclical nature of blue jean sales.

First, McKitterick says, there's been what he calls "a change in what's appropriate to wear." Think yoga pants. Over the last decade or so, women have led this charge, specifically in their embrace of yoga pants outside of yoga studios. Now yoga pants, tights and leggings have moved from the gym to just about everywhere. That only helped make room for men's sweatpants to leave the couch.

McKitterick says declining jean sales are part of the equation as well. Reports say sales of denim in the U.S. were down six percent last fiscal year. "Men, and people more generally, have a lot of jeans," he says. "Jean sales have done really well over the last 10 years, and we've gone through a number of different fads surrounding jeans, perhaps most recently skinny jeans.

"But, fashion denim is cyclical," says McKitterick. "So it seems we're in a downturn period right now, and that's not too surprising coming off the large amount of sales we've seen over the last 10 years."

Athleisure apparel helps fill that void. For what it's worth, McKitterick says jeans have faced competition before, from corduroys in the '70s, and khakis and chinos in the '90s. Jeans bounced back both times.

How Do You Wear Fancy Sweats?

As far as who wears fancy men's sweatpants, Tyler Kantor, store manager of Bonobo's Los Angeles establishment, says it's all types of guys.

"You're going have your fashion forward guy, specifically looking for the jogger type sweat," he says. "And then you have the customer who, it catches their eyes." Kantor says there's a third type of customer who "we get to really guide them towards the sweat and get them out of their comfort zone."

Bonobos sweatpants retail for $98. I tried on a pair at the store, and then bought some for myself. Then I went to an expert for some advice on how to wear them: Robin Ghivan, fashion critic for The Washington Post. She says the particular style of athleisure that gave birth to expensive men's sweats came from city streets.

"It really came out of the idea of streetwear, and the way that so many people who live in urban centers end up essentially carrying their entire day's worth of wardrobe and errand-running material, and half their closet with them sometimes," she said.

"What you often end up with is a guy who is perhaps on his way to the office, but he's gonna stop at the gym beforehand, so he's got on a pair of sweatpants, but maybe he's got blazer over his sweatpants, because he doesn't want to put the blazer in a gym bag. And he's got a parka over the blazer. And maybe instead of wearing his usual workout shoes, he's got on a pair of high-end sneakers. And so you ended up with this kind of [mix-match] of a wardrobe, simply out of necessity and convenience."

But Ghivan admits the look might not appeal to all men. "On the one hand, they are a bit irresistible because they are familiar and they are comfortable, and they represent all the things that we love about clothes," she said. "They make us feel warm and cozy. But there's also this voice in your head telling you, 'these are not appropriate to be worn to the office or in any professional situation.' And I also think there's a part of us that thinks, 'I cannot believe I should spend that much money on sweatpants.'"

Still, she says if men do choose to wear fancy sweats, they should dress them up, not down. "I would not wear them for instance, with a t-shirt. I would wear them with a sport jacket, and maybe a sweater underneath the sport jacket."

Done right, Ghivan says the look "feels very familiar and reassuring, but just makes men look like themselves, just better."

As for me, I wore those Bonobos sweats to work one day. My colleague Travis Larchuk said of my look, "It's like Monet clothes. From far away you look like a put together person. But then close up, you can you can see that you're really schlubbing it up at work."

And maybe, with all of athleisure apparel, that's the point.

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Ride-sharing services are changing the way Americans commute, but just how big their impact is can be gauged by a report released today.

In the first-quarter of 2015, Uber accounted for 46 percent of rides expensed by workers whose employers use Certify, the No. 2 provider of expense-reporting software in North America. Uber's market share in the first quarter of 2014 was 15 percent. Uber's rival Lyft accounted for 1 percent of rides in the first quarter of this year.

At the same time, Certify said, cab, limo and shuttle rides – collectively categorized as taxicab rides — were expensed 53 percent in the first quarter of the year. The figure for the same period in 2014 was 85 percent. Car rentals stayed almost steady in both years: 36 percent in 2015; 39 percent in 2014.

"The business community is looking for value and convenience, and at the same time this is a group that is interested in innovation," Robert Neveu, CEO of Certify, said in a statement. "Ridesharing services are making inroads into corporate budgets because they combine all of those things."

Certify also noted Uber's growth in several cities in the U.S.: In Los Angeles and Washington, it now accounts for nearly half the rides expensed by business travelers, Certify says. In Dallas, it's 56 percent, and in San Francisco, it's 71 percent. Taxis still dominate New York City, the company noted.

One reason could be cost. Certify noted that the average cost per ride of Uber was $31.24; the corresponding figure for taxis was $35.40.

Certify said its report was based on "user data from their cloud-based expense management system."

Uber