Where’s The Beef?

Earlier this year a class-action lawsuit was filed in California which claimed that independent lab tests had concluded that Taco Bell’s various beef-filled products were not actually filled with beef – which is to say, that the beef mixture did not conform to USDA requirements for calling something “beef,” which requires that the product in question be at least 70% meat from an actual cow. Anyone who has ever made a taco – or, for that matter, any other form of seasoned-meat entre – already knows that there is no such thing as a 100% beef product; at the very least, the taco meat would have to contain salt, pepper extract, and a number of other ingredients that make it taste better. For that matter, most people who are familiar with the American fast-food industry would be able to guess that such products would probably include a certain amount of fillers, binders, and other substances that make the little individual crumbles of taco meat look and behave as expected – this is the reason the USDA has a minimum standard for “beef” in the first place. But in this case, the suit alleges that the Taco Bell product is less than 35% beef…

Now, there are a lot of ways that a company can react to this kind of legal action. First, they could throw money at it; offer the plaintiffs a much smaller amount of money (but enough to make it worth their while) to just drop the suit and go away. Second, they could counter-sue, claim that the whole thing is merely an attempt to screw money out of the corporation, and refuse to discuss matters any further until the case comes to trial. If neither of those options seemed appealing, they could hire public relations firms, hold focus groups or “taste test” events, or even offer special promotions or low-price deals to reward their loyal customers. According to the story that appeared on CNN Money a few days after the suit was filed, Taco Bell has decided on the most direct possibility: meeting their accusers head-on, both in court (where they are contesting the lawsuit) and in the mind of the public, by running full-page ads calling the allegations ridiculous and disclosing the contents of their products in detail…

It seems likely that the people behind the original lawsuit were not expecting this kind of counter-measure. They might still be able to get some traction with the general public, since most consumers already regard Taco Bell meat products as being relatively low in quality, but public opinion will not matter in a court of law, and if the company can produce evidence to support its claims their arguement will be difficult to dispute. If the plaintiffs have any hard evidence they may be able to at least to make their case, but this seems unlikely; unless they can establish than some neutral third-party took samples of Taco Bell products obtained directly in the field and found less than 35% (or less than 70%, anyway) of the “beef” filling was actually made up of beef, they have no case. And it’s hard to imagine how you would establish the neutrality of a testing company or facility that you have paid to run such a test…

To complicate things ever further, many of the Taco Bell restaurants are franchised, which means that even if the plaintiffs can prove that a specific outlet sold them food products that do not meet USDA standards for meat, the company itself may be able to disavow responsibility or knowledge, revoke the franchise, and leave the people actually responsible swinging in the wind – which will lead to arguments about how much responsibility a parent company has for the franchisee under these circumstances. I don’t know how all of this will shake out – and it’s important to remember not to take legal opinions from bloggers with legal training – but strategically, at least, the company appears to be making the right moves. At the end of the day, this case should come down to who has the evidence on their side. And on where the beef actually is, of course…

The Ethics of Online Nannies

Recently in this space I have written about scammers (and worse) lurking in online dating sites, and the possibility of people using a site dedicated to protecting you from such miscreants to steal a “safe” identity for exactly that purpose. As a capitalist I’m opposed to excessive interference and regulation of business enterprises, and as a supported of civil liberties and the Bill of Rights, I’m opposed to limitation of free speech or freedom of expression in any form – including limits placed on the speech of people of whom I don’t actually approve. Accordingly, I’m not particularly in favor of companies controlling what their customers can or can’t say online, and I’d be completely opposed to government-sanctioned limitations on the use of any public forum – but I still have to ask if companies have an ethical responsibility to protect their customers from online threats, assuming that’s even possible…

In the case of the dating sites, there’s no practical way for the company that runs them to determine if the people signing up are who them claim to be – even assuming it was practical in a financial sense for these sites to run background checks on their customers, it still would not be possible. It would be possible for them to delete all of the inactive accounts – the ones whose owners have stopped paying for them and left the service – and it would also be possible for them to compile and investigate accusations of scammers and spam senders (to the extent that there’s a difference). But it’s difficult to imagine what such a company could do about an otherwise unremarkable user who signed up for their service specifically to look for targets against whom to commit crimes, even assuming that they wanted to…

It’s important to remember here that all businesses assume a certain amount of risk simply by opening their doors, and while it is possible that a random customer will sue you for negligence and be awarded more than the total assets of your corporation, unless you are, in fact, negligent, this is not likely to happen. Similarly, while the number of people who use (or wish to use) online social networking services (including dating services) is evidently quite large, the number of serial killers using these same services in order to identify potential victims is relatively low. No online service can actually render its services 100% risk-free, any more than the city in which you live can promise you that you won’t be mugged walking down any given street. But as with law enforcement and personal freedom, the issue here becomes how much control you would be willing to give up in exchange for safer Internet dating…

Do online services have an ethical responsibility to patrol their own sites and active seek out (and destroy) accounts intended for illegal activity? Do they have a responsibility to their legitimate customers to attempt to detect potential criminals and turn those individuals over to the police? How exactly are online services supposed to tell the difference between a legitimate user, a potential threat, and a hardened criminal in the first place? For that matter, do the users of online dating or networking sites have any expectation of privacy or security when they sign up for such services, or should they be prepared to guard their own safety, watch out for themselves, and expect to see the company’s in-house cyber-security looking over their shoulders the whole time?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: The Day of the Quail

If you’ve never seen one before, the California Valley Quail (the official State Bird of California) might look like something out of a Japanese children’s cartoon come to life, with their bobbing topknot feathers and their scuttling, scurrying gait. They’ve very endearing creatures; not majestic, like the huge California condors, or deadly like the peregrine falcon, or shrouded in centuries of folklore and myth like the great horned owl, but they’re probably the most appealing of California’s wild birds. And they love to strut around on the wall behind the house in which we are staying…

We’re in Apple Valley, a growing community in the High Desert, north-east of Los Angeles. It’s called “High” because it’s a plane half a mile or more above sea level, and it’s a desert because it’s on the reverse slope of the modest costal range surrounding LA, which keeps all but a few inches of rain from getting here each year. Whether you would consider it a forsaken wasteland, home to Joshua trees, prickly pear cactus, and not much else, or a wondrous place of clear skies, open plains, majestic mountains, and a complex ecosystem depends mainly on your point of view. Although the season in which you visit is also a factor: you’re less likely to appreciate the place during its 110-degree summer months than in the clear, crisp fall and winter weather…

But love it or hate it, this is the community my wife’s mother and stepfather chose as their home base (between voyages all over the US and beyond, they’d always come back here), and it is here we have come to support my wife and her stepfather in whatever way we can while she attempts to put her mother’s affairs in order. You can accumulate a lot of stuff in 65 years, and my mother-in-law was the type who never threw ANYTHING away; my wife has been uncovering documents that pre-date her own birth, and photographs and artifacts that go back even longer. It’s a surreal time for all parties involved, I think. The High Desert teems with life, and the rapidly-expanding communities of Apple Valley and Victorville have brought a huge bustle and sprawl to this part of the world. But with its spirit gone, the house – and our perceived world – are eerily silent now; a stillness far more alien than the barren wastelands beyond…

And yet, as always, life goes on – this morning in the form of three fine quail, who hopped up onto the wall in the back garden. Two were males, and they treated us to some elaborate threat and dominance displays in a remarkably peaceful contest over the third quail, a splendid female. Eventually the larger and more impressive bird won, and his rival scurried off into the brush. The victor took off after the female bird, who fled the other way, down the wall and off into the vacant lot beyond, leaving me to laugh with wonder and reflect on the scene…

My late mother-in-law loved her quail as much as I love my cardinals (and chickadees and finches); and some day, long after I’ve gone, people in both cities will still be watching the great continuity of wild birds performing outside the window, and the Great Cycle of Life will go on. It’s hardly the most original thought I’ve ever had, nor the most profound; there’s a reason I study management and write (mostly) humor. But it’s certainly not the least comforting thought I’ve ever had, either. In the end, all of us are only short-term passengers on our Spaceship Earth, and someday we, too, will all have gone on to whatever destiny awaits us – but I like to think that the wild birds (or their descendants, at least) will still be here…

I would never have come to this place on my own – but had I never done so, I would not have gotten to meet the quail and see them march and strut. For that matter, in 43 years I’d never had any desire to go to Central Michigan, let alone live there, but had I not done so I would never have met a robin named Hood, a finch named Atticus, a squirrel named Rocky, or a cardinal named Friar Tuck…

Life is not always kind to us. But I think it’s only fair to say that sometimes it’s better if we don’t know where our journey is going to take us, or who we will meet along the way…

Counterstrike

Last week I wrote about the next volley in the ongoing Coffee Wars – the introduction of a new, larger size for iced beverages known as a Trenta , by Starbucks. I continue to wonder how much good a larger size is going to do, especially when you consider that it will also be more expensive, given that McDonald’s is already featuring $1 large and extra-large iced tea products in several markets (including this one). But apparently the Golden Arches aren’t planning to sit around and wait for it, since they’ve just fired their own next strike – and it looks like a good one…

The McDonald’s location nearest to campus is now selling oatmeal (for years a mainstay of the Starbuck’s morning offerings) as part of its regular breakfast menu. Now personally, I’ve always felt that oatmeal tastes too much like wallpaper paste, and thus avoid both products, but people who know tell me that the McDonald’s product is superior to the competition in flavor and price. If this is correct – or even if a significant percentage of the market feels that it is – this could make things even worse for the coffee chain, which already trails the burger stand in categories like variety/menu options and price. I think the real question here is how much overlap there actually is in the customer demographics for the two companies – and how much of it can be persuaded to change sides in return for new products…

Starbuck’s can boost revenue by offering drive-through windows and meal convenience, but it’s never going to be an all-up restaurant, and probably shouldn’t be; the core of their customer base is coffeehouse patrons, who want a destination and even inclusion as part of the service. People go to a coffee house to sit, read, socialize, transact business, do homework, and generally feel as if they are part of a community and that they matter to the company, even though they know that Starbuck’s only loves them for their money. By the same token, nobody over the age of six ever felt included by a McDonald’s franchise; even the ones with clean and well-lighted dining areas are clearly oriented around a “get your food and get out” mentality. I’ve used each chain to fill the opposite need – camped out in a McDonald’s when that was all we had available for the afternoon, and obtained quick, portable food from a Starbuck’s when that was the only think open – but it doesn’t seem possible for either company to fill the niche the other one occupies…

Clearly, McDonald’s gets that – their efforts have all been directed towards other products their customers can use within the existing framework, like cheap drinks and expanded types of portable food. Whether Starbuck’s does or not is a little murkier; it’s hard to say how a larger iced tea product enhances their social or entertainment roles, and it’s hard to imagine that adding two or three new products is going to have much impact on the bottom line, no matter how profitable those products might be. If Starbuck’s were to add entertainment, or shopping, or any other destination-based products or services to its repertory, that might be more helpful in expanding their customer base. On the other hand, they’re an insanely profitable multi-national company, and I’m a doctoral student earning less than an apprentice plumber, so maybe they’re right. All I know for sure is that McDonald’s has won the last few rounds, and eventually that’s going to be a problem…

Getting Burned

There was a story this week in the New York Times Travel section that I had to dig up and show to my readers (assuming I have readers) because I think it’s such a perfect emblem of our changing times. It’s a column by the Times’ “budget travel” correspondent about finding a good (but not outrageously good) offer for a room to rent for a few days in London, ignoring all of the warning signs that would make a regular Internet user laugh, sneer, and possibly sic the nice people from Scambaiters on the scam artist, and the columnist’s feelings on finding out he had been scammed. He admits it’s one of the most common stories (and types of story) of the day, and even deals with the difficulty that otherwise smart people have with accepting their failure to detect this sort of fraud, but the historian in me thinks that even so he may be missing the point…

Consider, if you will, the simple crime of mail fraud. There was a time – not that long ago – when most of the cybercrime we hear about today could not have existed, because there was no Internet. Most of the telephone scams that we’ve all learned not to fall for didn’t exist either, and identity theft wouldn’t have been possible. Mail fraud still existed, of course; there is good reason to believe that every civilization that has ever had a postal service has also had crime based around it, but none of the other communications fraud we find ourselves plagued with today did. Many people did not have credit cards; some didn’t have checking accounts, and the ATM hadn’t been invented yet, so no one had an ATM card. Even basic things like software piracy, theft of sound files, or electronic copyright violations didn’t even exist. Got the picture? Now consider that this time wasn’t the Colonial era, or the Civil War, or even the Industrial Revolution; the conditions I’ve just described were pretty much the way things stood when I was a child – a mere 40 years ago…

You still hear the occasional news item about elderly people falling for phone scams, but the dementia patients aside, no one under the age of 70 is ever likely to do that. The unusually ignorant still fall for the various “Nigerian” scams, but there’s no way anyone currently under the age of 20 ever will, and most people between 20 and 60 probably know better too. People have suggested that the scammers on Craig’s list (and dozens of similar places) will eventually die off, or that Craig’s List itself will, but I doubt it; people have been scrawling business propositions of dubious reliability on restroom walls since the Roman Empire was still a republic, and that hasn’t prevented people from doing exactly the same thing this very morning. The difference is that while nobody would ever believe the things you find written on the Men’s room wall, people still believe some of the things they see online on even weaker evidence. But I don’t believe that will be the case for much longer…

It seems probable to me, both as a professional business analyst and an amateur historian, that one day in the very near future the early days of the Internet will seem just as distant – and just as quaint – as life in the 1960s seems now, or as life in the 1920s seemed to us then. Measures will be invented to verify business transactions online, and scammers will invent ways to circumvent them, just as has happened with hackers, credit card fraud, and counterfeiting, and the cycle will go on as it always has. The average person may be a little more jaded than they were in 1930 or even 1970, but they will not be living their lives in fear of con artists anymore than they have in any other historical era. Life will go on, as Life is wont to do, until only the very confused, very foolish, very young and very old, or completely demented believe any unverified claims they see online, and taking a classified post on Craig’s List at face value becomes an early symptom of the onset of senility…

Heaven only knows what new types of fraud will be common by then, of course. Personally, I can wait…

The March of Commerce

When Phillip K. Dick wrote “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” the idea of display advertising invading public (and occasionally private) spaces at random was still science fiction, but by the time the movie based on the novel (“Blade Runner”) was made it was already starting to happen, and by this point most people will have encountered display ads in some very odd places. Ads on shopping carts make sense, in a way, since the advertiser can try to convince the person pushing the cart to buy their product, but we’ve also seen ads projected or even painted onto the sides of buildings, towed through the air by airplanes, painted onto the sides of cars, trucks and buses, carried on billboards mounted on the back of trucks that don’t carry anything else, transmitted from the screens of giant television sets mounted on buildings, billboards and trucks, and stuck to the walls of public restrooms and the insides of toilet stalls. But there’s a new Clear Channel project that will take all of this to a new level…

According to a story which broke last week , Clear Channel Outdoor is hiring a company called Mirrus to create a new kind of bathroom mirror which is actually a screen for display ads. When somebody approaches the sink, the ad being displayed shrinks to one-quarter size and moves into the upper corner, leaving the rest of the surface to display your reflection; when you step away from the sink, the ad snaps back to full size, covering the space. The system can also keep track of how often the mirror (and sink, one assumes) were used, basic characteristics about who used it and so on; the ads can also be changed, rotated, updated, or whatever remotely. In theory, this should be more interesting and more engaging than a conventional above-the-urinal ad, and also generate useful data about the number of times an ad was seen close-up. In practice, there are a number of questions that remain to be answered…

First of all, how accurate is the information that these smart mirrors can gather? If they’re as reliable as the hands-free sensors you usually find in public restrooms it seems likely that they’ll ignore the user half the time (thus disabling the mirror function altogether), and switch on randomly half the time (thus generating records of thousands of people using an unused sink over the course of a single hour). Then there’s the issue of targeted content. The company that is developing these things claims that they will be able to deliver gender-specific advertisements, which is fine as long as you don’t send the wrong content to the wrong mirror address. However, the comedy potentials of gender-inappropriate ads turning up in the wrong restroom (imagine how some female travelers would react to the sight of strip-club ads, to take the obvious example) alone make this sort of failure a near-certainty. Attempts to target the ads by other demographic categories would create even more opportunities for unwanted mirth, and the question of how they would determine which ads to present has not been addressed…

Now, I don’t have a problem with advertising as such; I’m able to just ignore most of it, and the spread of advertising over every available space doesn’t offend me the way it does a lot of consumers. In business, nothing happens until somebody makes a sale, and it’s much harder to do that if people aren’t aware of your product, its applications, or where to buy it. But I don’t think I’m alone when I say that there are some places which the March of Commerce should really think twice about marching into, and some kinds of void that I’m really not comfortable having stare back at me when I look into them…

The Ethics of Overhead

We’ve talked about the concept of overhead in education and non-profit organizations in this space before; the fact remains that no matter how hard you try, it isn’t generally possible to run an organization of any real size entirely on volunteer effort and donated supplies. It is possible for a non-profit to earn more money than it spends in a given year (through the use of investments, fund-raising business ventures, donated income properties, or what have you) but eventually the agency is going to grow large enough that operating out of donated space will no longer be possible, and you’re going to have to pay to keep the lights on and the postage meter running. Of course, all of this is easier if your operations are limited to raising money for other organizations of which you approve (such as an anti-cancer charity raising money to fund cancer research); agencies that actually fund programs of their own will usually end up paying the people who provide those services, develop the materials, transport the goods, or whatever. But regardless of your operating model, eventually you’re going to have to come to grips with the concept of overhead, and the controversy over how much is too much…

Some people insist that this whole issue is a slippery slope, and that any amount of money spent on anything other than direct service to whoever your agency provides services to is wrong, but I’d have to argue that it’s actually more of a continuum. On one end of the spectrum you have things that are obviously wrong, like the case we had in LA County a few years back where a non-profit agency bought company cars for all of its management personnel – that year’s top-of-the-line BMW sedans, as it turned out – because their duties included driving to and from City Council meetings. On the other end of the spectrum you have cases of non-profit agencies that will not consider spending money on development or grant writing services, and go out of business because their landlord doesn’t share their belief that non-profit agencies should not have to pay rent. Contrary to popular belief, most people can’t get tax credits for working pro bono the way lawyers do (and even in the case of the lawyers, there are very strict regulations about how they go about this type of service), and thus they can’t devote all of their time to volunteer service; one has to eat, after all…

So how much is too much – or, if you prefer, at what point does overhead become inappropriate? I would argue that an agency that raises $10 and spends $9 of it on whatever services they provide is still doing more good than an agency that raises $5 and spends 100% of it on programs and services; I would also point out that (as noted in my post earlier this month) all of this information is available to the public, and you can always just refuse to support any agency that you feel is spending too much on cell phones, party hats or stationary, if that’s your issue. But when I used to teach grant writing I would always tell my students that you can request funds for any expense – if you can explain why spending that money will contribute to the goal you are trying to reach…

So should your agency operate with the strictest possible budget? Should you limit your charitable giving to agencies that conform to this sort of cost-containment policy? Or should you focus on trying to provide the best possible services and programs, knowing that somebody, somewhere, will inevitably be waiting for you to spend money on something of which they do not approve, just so they can write blog posts and comments calling you a pack of greedy bastards and trying to get you shut down? At what point does frugality in the name of public relations (and donor relations, where applicable) become detrimental to the optimal fulfillment of your agency’s mission, and who gets to decide?
It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: Airports, Part II

Over the past forty years or so I’ve been on at least three dozen types of airplane, ranging in size from an ultralight aircraft that weighs less than I do to a C-5 Galaxy capable of shipping an Abrams tank (or a squadron of helicopters), and in speed from a hot-air balloon (top speed: how fast is the wind blowing?) to a 747-SP with a cruising speed of 620 knots and a top speed it can’t actually reach without burning up. I’ve traveled on one, two, three and four engines; piston, turbine, turbojet and lawnmower power plants; avgas, jet-A, kerosene and regular unleaded. I’ve been to three continents, a dozen or so islands, nine foreign countries and thirty-five of the United States, and more airports, airfields and airstrips than I can actually keep track of anymore. But I’ve never had seats with this much leg room before…

My stepdaughter and I are on the second leg of a five-part voyage from East Lansing, Michigan to Apple Valley, California, aboard a relatively new Airbus 319 variant I’ve never seen before. For the most part it resembles other Airbus products I have ridden – which is to say, cleanly designed, easily-maintained, and a bit cramped if you’re over 6 feet tall – but this one has a curious exit row, placed between the first class and economy sections. There’s literally six feet of space between the row of seats we’re in and the bulkhead, or a greater distance than I could reach if I wanted to. I’m not sure what we did to rate such prime seats, but perhaps word has filtered down from the reservations people to the ramp agents that we’re flying in a family emergency. Or perhaps it’s the twenty I slipped the people at the gate; you never know. It’s certainly the most comfortable seat I’ve had since the last time I flew first class – and we could definitely use it under the circumstances…

Normally, it wouldn’t be possible for a doctoral student to just pick up and bolt during the middle of a semester – which is to say, one could, but he or she wouldn’t still be a doctoral student afterwards. Fortunately, I’ve been able to find someone to guest lecture for my class on Monday, and someone else to proctor the midterm I’m giving on Wednesday. I’ve had to drop one of the classes I’m taking and skip a week of the other, but there will be time to make both of them up later, assuming there is a later. I’m still not sure how much trouble I’m going to end up in with my department over this, and frankly, I don’t care; I’m already a week later than I really should have been, and I’ve been cursing these circumstance essentially non-stop since Sunday morning. Under any other conditions I’d have told my employers where they could put their expectations of me and bolted for California last Friday – which would have meant that my wife would not have had to deal with the loss of her mother alone…

It’s not the first loss she has faced; it’s not even the first parent she’s lost. But it’s the first such event I couldn’t be with her for, and even if she can forgive me for this (which also remains to be seen) I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive myself for it. I don’t know how you can make all of the right choices, do all of the logical and reasonable things, cover all of your responsibilities, and still have things come out this wrong, but then that’s the point: it’s all of my responsibilities except for the biggest one. A great lady has left us, and we are all the poorer for it; and I have failed in the greatest challenge of my life, and I don’t know how to make things right again – or even if I can…

So, for the moment, let’s just stay here, in the belly of this great bird, as it makes its way across the darkening sky. Listening to good music on iPods, drinking all of the free soft drinks, munching on the snacks I packed along for the occasion, and enjoying the company of old friends. Soon enough we’ll arrive in Phoenix and change planes for the trip to LAX; two car rides later and we’ll find ourselves in the High Desert, northeast of Los Angeles, and whatever additional trials await us…

Thesaurus Rex

From time to time discussions about the amazing changes in technology over the past few decades will come up, and people will ask me which ones I think are the most important. I will frequently joke with them and say that as a life-long poor speller, I think that Spell Check is the greatest invention since the wheel, but the truth is, the built-in electronic thesaurus is probably a bigger boon to humanity. With this handy device you can look up synonyms to words you don’t know the meanings of in the first place, and I can find dozens or even hundreds of synonyms for the word “stupid” – without which these posts would probably make very monotonous reading. Especially on days like today, when word came in about the Pepsi Refresh Project rescinding a $50,000 grant on the grounds of voter/contest fraud…

If you’re not familiar with the Pepsi Refresh Project (and I wasn’t, despite consulting on grant writing AND drinking more Pepsi products than some entire third-world countries do), it’s less of a corporate giving program and more of a public relations gesture. Instead of using some sensible method to select grant recipients (such as hiring experts on grants, corporate philanthropy, or the social problems the grants are intended to improve), what the company apparently does is select a few possible choices and then open the selection up to Internet voting. In the case which surfaced today , the company awarded $50,000 to an elderly woman in Chicago so that she could go from just having 26 stray cats as pets to actually running a cat rescue operation out of her garage, only to find out that most of the “votes” came from a single server located overseas…

It would be difficult to enumerate all of the ways this actions was unwise, dim-witted, obtuse, foolish, silly and ludicrous, but let me point out that the use of software expert systems (spam-bots and the like) to generate Internet responses of whatever type is desired are not exactly new, and anyone who has spent any time whatsoever online in the last decade should have been expecting such a result. Almost as laughable, daft, ill-advised and brainless was the project they selected, however; I can think of a lot of things that a large corporation like Pepsi could do to improve their public relations, but allowing a neighborhood “cat lady” to give out $100 PetSmart gift cards to all of her friends isn’t really one of them; nor do I expect that enabling someone to take her cats to the vet or build living spaces for the cats in her garage is going to have much traction, since most people know of homeless shelters, programs attempting to cure cancer or dozens of other diseases, impoverished schools, environmental causes, or REAL cat and dog rescue organizations that could have made better use of a $50,000 grant. However, none of this compares to the complete idiocy of rescinding the grant and demanding repayment…

When the cat lady in our story says that she has spend all of the grant money on vet services, buying things for her cats, and giving away pet-related merchandise, I think we have to believe her. Certainly, any person who is even marginally sane would have done so at once, especially if they knew there was a chance the grant would be rescinded. The best that PepsiCo can hope for in this action is to end up in court suing an older woman for assets that she clearly does not have and can not obtain in order to correct a mistake than any ordinary six-year-old with an Internet connection could have told them never to make in the first place. I realize that the company almost has to pursue this, if only to avoid attracting thousands of scammers who realize that they can game the system and not be prosecuted, but there’s a better (which is to say less foolhardy) way: take some of the funds you were going to put into the next crackpot charity scheme and invest in some people to actually screen out frauds, wingnuts, and idiots…

So as you go about your business today, you might want to raise a toast to Peter Mark Roget, inventor of the first modern thesaurus, and all of the hard-working people who spend their lives helping to make our language a little less repetitive. Without them, this post (and many others) would just consist of the word “Duh!” and a series of characters from the top row of your keyboard…

The Void Looks Back

I noted with great interest an article on from Salon.com the other day about a woman who tracked down the thief who broke into her car using ordinary Internet resources. It’s partly that this is a great story, with both a “good-guys-win” ending and a revenge of the common person theme; it’s also got a very uplifting message about all of the ordinary people who went out of their way to help the author recover her scattered belongings. But it also points up something I’ve been saying for a while now about the ways in which our brave new world is changing, and in the process, changing us. I’d have to call it a cautionary tale for all of us, not just for really bloody stupid petty thieves…

If you don’t want to hit the link, here’s the basic scenario: After a thief broke into her car and stole her wallet, the plug-in GPS receiver, and several other things, the author went looking for the GPS on Craig’s List, and found it. She then ran the thief’s email address and online nickname through one of those reverse email finder services (usually about $15) and found him on a dating site, which led to his Facebook account, his real-world nickname, and his real name, date of birth, hometown, last known address, description and work history. With this information the police were able to tie him to surveillance footage taken when he attempted to use the author’s stolen credit card, and put him away for a two-year stretch – which hardly seems worth it, considering how little he actually got away with in the commission of the crime…

Now, I’m not saying that all of us can – or even should – attempt to bust our own criminal offenders at home using ordinary Internet tools. People still get away with stealing things, and there are some thieves who will have the sense not to try to sell things in places that leave a trail or use stolen credit cards in places that have the best surveillance equipment in their industry. In fact, even as a crime of opportunity, the individual in this case acted stupidly and was remarkably sloppy in getting caught on camera. I’m also not saying that the average person has done anything they would be attempting to hide, or that anyone out there should ever feel the need to look over his or her shoulder and wonder who is watching. What I am saying is that even if you’ve never committed an illegal act in your life, somebody already IS watching you – and it’s getting increasingly easy to gain access to that information…

Most people already realize that there is no true privacy online; your motions and actions on the Web can be traced, and your identity can be discovered. Most of us are protected, at least for the moment, not by privacy laws or firewalls but by the simple fact that no one really cares about us. The majority of us don’t have anything worth taking, and if you’re careful about what you do online you can lower your vulnerability to where you’re no more vulnerable to identity theft or fraud than anyone else – but you can’t eliminate that vulnerability entirely. The protection afforded by keeping a low profile is more like that of being one of a school of fish (predators have no way to pick you out individually, and no particular reason to try) than being tough, stealthy, or hard to prey on. If somebody happens to go after you, they will – even if you don’t ever leave anything valuable in an unlocked car…

So as you go about your online business today, just keep in mind that the Internet is not just a faceless, boundless void that we use for our own purposes. If you look too long upon the void, eventually the void looks back upon you – and it might just track you down using your social networking presence or fast-food store surveillance footage…

The Next Round

We’ve been following the ongoing Coffee Wars for some time now; both in the sense of making posts about them in this space, and in the sense that members of my household are coffee consumers and take note of the changes. Just last week we obtained some McFood on the way to work, and my wife commented that the new McCafe products were very convenient for people who want cheap breakfast food and don’t feel like going to Starbucks. I’ve also noted in passing that McDonald’s offering of a $1 32-ounce iced tea product has been playing havoc with Starbuck’s iced tea drinks, most of which are both smaller than 32 ounces and cost more than a dollar. Now it would appear that the Starbuck’s strategy team has noticed this too, because they’re taking action about it…

A story available from Reuters by way of MSNBC notes the introduction of a new Starbuck’s size, which will be available only for iced coffee, iced tea and iced lemonade drinks. Called a “Trenta” in an effort to retain the company’s commitment to made-up words for things, it’s expected to be 7 ounces larger than the current largest size, and cost about 50 cents more. Early trials indicate that the new size will be popular, especially during the summer months and in states that do not experience cold weather as such, and that customers who want larger portions will probably buy it. The question not being addressed, either by the article or by the new product offering itself, would appear to be how this will help Starbucks to compete with either a $1 iced tea or the opportunity to obtain junk food along with your coffee and tea products…

Given the specialization of the Starbucks product line, which is built around coffee and tea drinks and a smattering of food items appropriate to eat with them, the company has always been more vulnerable to attacks by fast-food companies than the food-generating competition has been to their incursions. They also have to deal with the ongoing threat from convenience stores, which had been offering 32-ounce iced tea and even 32-ounce coffee products at much lower prices than a Starbucks outlet for years now. The company has had some success with strategies like infiltrating the fast-food market directly (using their low-cost “Seattle’s Best” brand) or co-locating in bookstores and the like, but the key innovations for Starbuck’s will probably have to come from non-coffee products, like the Starbuck’s Music operation, and value-added tactics like attempting to position their outlets as neighborhood coffee houses (offering meeting and work space, and social opportunities in addition to food and drink), since the company can’t expect to compete on a low-cost strategy and win…

In many ways, it’s a classic case of mixed strategies in competition, with Starbucks attempting to differentiate its product as being better (and offering more value), and McDonalds and the other fast-food companies attempting to provide parity at a much lower cost – the traditional low-cost strategy. It seems unlikely that the larger product will make that much of a difference in a strategy where the size of the product or cost per ounce isn’t really the focus to begin with; the people who want a very large cup of iced tea for cheap will probably still go to McDonalds – or to the Circle K up the street. But if the new product helps Starbucks to sell a more profitable product to their existing customer base it should improve their bottom line even without drawing in any new customers. And, of course, there’s no telling what their next move is going to be…

Public Safety Announcement 2011

Every year around this time I try to post a warning – purely as a public service – to all of the men and the occasional woman who have lost track of the date, and fail to realize that Valentine’s Day is four weeks off. Four weeks from today, the whole world turns red (or in some cases bright pink) and all of us who have significant others are expected to conform to social custom by exchanging gifts in commemoration of how much we love each other. Meanwhile, all of the single, divorced, widowed, or otherwise alone individuals are expected to be desperately seeking new dates, reviewing platonic relationships that could be converted into romantic ones with sufficient quantities of alcohol, forming groups with which to sit around and loudly complain about a holiday specifically intended to make their lifestyle seem worse than it really is, or making plans to spend the night of the 14th softly weeping into their beer…

I kid, of course, but it often seemed to me (even when I was single) that people were making this whole occasion harder than it needs to be. Consider, for example, people who can’t remember the date. V-day is the same date every year, and has been for all of your life; it doesn’t change dates the way the Super Bowl, the World Series, March Madness, the NBA Finals, the Stanley Cup or even the Olympics do. And unlike your significant other’s birthday or your anniversary, V-day is marked by every retail store in the world putting up pink decorations, plus articles and ads in the newspaper, banner ads on the Internet, special television programming, and decorations around your office. Even if you happen to be really absent-minded, the harbingers of the day are hard to miss…

Then there’s the issue of cards and gifts. Most people will be perfectly alright with a card you made yourself, assuming you exerted some effort on it, but if you don’t have the time there are retailers all over most cities which will happily sell you one. You might even consider keeping a few extras in the back of your file cabinet, in case you forget. I’ve written extensively in this space about gifts, but I will reiterate that they’re not that complicated either, provided you remember a few simple rules . I’ve also posted a set of counterpoint rules for women shopping for men on these occasions, and while I won’t bother repeating those lists here (you can hit the links if you want to) it’s probably worth repeating Rule 2 on the original list (“Never purchase anything that is actually for you”) and Rule Three on the counterpoint list (“Never purchase lifestyle or wardrobe accessories that he doesn’t use but you think he ought to. For example, if doesn’t already carry a ‘man-purse’ you probably shouldn’t get him his first one”). It’s probably also worth pointing out that lingerie is usually more of a gift for you than it is for the recipient, and that a man who habitually despises fine dining is already making a special lifestyle change if he takes you out for a fancy dinner…

Over the years it has occurred to me that the people who use Valentine’s Day as a test of their significant other are going about things the wrong way. Let me suggest to all of my readers (assuming I have readers) that if your significant other thinks this holiday is a bigger deal that you do, your best strategy is to try to take it a little more seriously (or at least try and do something that they would like), and if your significant other regards the day as much less important that you do, ask yourself if it is worth destroying the entire relationship over that disdain for a minor holiday. I write about business, not relationships, but I’ve rarely gone wrong keeping in mind that things aren’t always about me – and I don’t expect you will, either…

The Ethics of Checkout

Here’s an example of a problem you will see a lot in retail, if you are ever unfortunately enough to work in the lower end of that industry. Imagine that you’ve completed all of your shopping, reached the checkout counter, and unloaded all of your items onto the belt. There’s only one person in front of you, and she doesn’t have all that much in her basket, so you figure that this shouldn’t be too bad. Then the person in front of you pulls out the ad circular for this week and starts disputing every price that gets rung up, despite the fact that the items she’s buying are not the same ones being advertised (the ad circular has the 15 ounce size, and she’s picked up the 25 ounce size, for example) and the price differences are trivial anyway ($2.19 as opposed to $2.39, for example). The customer then complicates the check-out itself as much as possible, asking to have this many dollars taken from her gift card and paying the rest in cash, which requires a Manager with a key to over-ride and soaks up even more of your time…

Now imagine that just at this point, the customer “remembers” that she also has something to return, and wants to apply the credit to this purchase, so she needs to run over to the Customer Service desk and wait for the seven people already in line there to be helped so she can complete her order. If you wish to imagine that your purchases are three times more expensive than hers, or that yours include food items that you need to take home and refrigerate before they spoil (or in some cases, melt), go ahead – that was the case for me when I encountered this precise scenario a few weeks back. Which, naturally enough, leads me to not one but two questions regarding what to do about this situation…

First of all, if you’re the checker involved, what are you supposed to do about customers like this? In many companies, your pay depends on the number of items scanned and the number of customers processed in any given hour, and even if it doesn’t you’ve still got customers backing up behind this twit while she carries on as if she’s the only person in the world (and the only customer your store will ever have). At the same time, you’ve undoubtedly got a set of customer service rules to follow, and they probably include taking care of every customers needs and making every customer as happy as possible, things which make telling a specific customer to take her return and insert it rectally a bit difficult. How do you keep this one specific customer from getting upset when her preposterous demands are not met, but simultaneously keep the dozen or so additional customers she is inconveniencing from having a meltdown in front of you?

Which brings me to the second question: if you are the floor manager entrusted with the smooth operation of this store, how do you keep the dozen or so increasingly angry customers from rioting – or even worse, walking out of your store and never returning? Clearly, the tactic of just ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away is not going to work; you could open another check stand nearby and divert your angry customers to it; if you have enough of them, you could probably defuse the entire situation, but unless you’ve got extra checkers on call, you’re probably going to end up running that register yourself – and that isn’t a good choice either, since you can’t attend to any of your (literally hundreds) of other duties on the sales floor if you’re stuck on a register…

So how are you going to handle this? Are you going to risk having your problem customer call Corporate and complain because you wouldn’t let her take 25 minutes to check out? Are you going to risk having the dozen or so other customers she’s inconveniencing call corporate and complain about the situation? Are you going to try throwing money, or person-hours, or free food, or some other perk (it all comes back to money anyway) at the problem? Or are you just going to go and hide in the back room and hope everything goes away before something happens that will get you fired…

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: The House Ruth Didn’t Build

We hop off the train and make our way across the platform, down the metal stairs, and around the corner, and there it is: the grand white building that other authors have called a “cathedral of baseball history.” It looks somewhat more modern and rather less permanent that the original Yankee Stadium across the street, despite being built with a larger (proportional) budget, using modern materials and a generally superior design. The new ballpark is just as beautiful, but it lacks the decades of history (good and bad) and hundreds of quirks (also both good and bad) that made the original version a landmark of the sport. For the moment this is just another new state-of-the-art baseball venue. But wait a minute; I’m a Dodgers Fan! Born and raised in Southern California, I bleed blue and my heart belongs in Chavez Ravine! What the heck am I doing in the Bronx?

It began almost 18 months ago, with a present I got my father for his 70th birthday. One of my earliest memories (certainly the earliest involving professional sports) is walking into Dodger Stadium with my father in 1970 or so; if I’ve got the year right I was five years old at the time, and about to start the first grade. It was an afternoon game, the weather was perfect, and we were close enough to the field that I could smell the newly-cut grass; I recall being awed by both the size and the beauty of the place. Even today, in my mind at least, that’s what summer is supposed to smell like, and that’s what a baseball venue is supposed to look like, and I don’t suppose that will ever change. And while I’m sure that period in our lives wasn’t as happy as I’d like to imagine it, the memories that have stayed with me from that time still involve baseball games and trying to learn how to hit and throw a ball in our backyard…

For father’s 70th birthday, my wife and I found a picture of me from that era, holding my first real baseball bat in our back yard with a look of fierce determination. Clearly, the five-year-old me is GOING to hit that ball, if it’s the last thing I ever do; a behavior pattern that I retain to this day, even if I still can’t hit a baseball. We gave him a framed copy of the picture, and a card in which I invited him to go back with me to Dodger Stadium and see another game – any game before we left LA, as it turned out. But when the big day arrived my father had the flu, and was could barely stand up, let alone go to a ballgame. My wife and I wound up using those tickets, and I promised to take my father to a game the next time we were both in a city with a major league team during baseball season to replace them, but this has proven difficult to accomplish with us living in East Lansing Michigan (a fair distance away from anywhere) and my father and stepmother dividing time between Los Angeles and New York…

Eventually we settled on a Yankees game in New York, since it’s closer to East Lansing and my folks were going to be there for more of the 2009 season, which led to the passage through three airports in four hours referenced in our last Grad School Diaries post, and then through this morning’s passage through the New York subway system. It still seems strange to me; a visit to the ballpark in my home town involves a two-hour car trip/parking expedition/hike, not a five-minute walk and a twenty-eight minute train ride. For that matter, it’s alien to me to be in a ballpark in the middle of town, when everybody knows they’re supposed to be in a suburb nearby; or for that matter, a ballpark where the Yankees are the beloved home team, and not the historical arch-enemy. But ultimately, none of that matters. For this afternoon, at least, we’ve gone back to the ballpark to watch another game together, and it will do fine…

Signs Point To…

The other day as I was walking from the parking structure (they call them “ramps” here in Michigan) to our office building, I noticed a sign that said “Warning: Snow Dumping Area! Do Not Enter!” next to the giant heap of snow that the maintenance people had scooped off the top of the structure and dumped onto the ground. One might have expected that the yellow “caution” safety tape might have been a clue, or perhaps that the sound of bulldozers working and huge clumps of snow plummeting to the ground might have tipped someone off, but even if it didn’t, you might still think the addition of “Do Not Enter” at the bottom was superfluous. Unless, of course, you are familiar with the way people behave around warning signs…

Case in point: Many years ago I had travelled to Yosemite National Park, and climbed the steep and narrow trail (it’s actually a staircase in places) to the top of Yosemite Falls, a 3-section drop of over half a mile total. At the top of the falls was a warning sign that read “Danger: Waterfall. Do not enter stream or moving water.” Since the only way to see the sign at all was to hike up one of the steepest trails in the Western Hemisphere, the warning may have seemed a little redundant, but some people need things spelled out explicitly. I paid the sign no further attention, but a year or two later I made the climb again, and found that the sign had been changed; it now read “Danger: Waterfall. Do not enter stream or moving water, you may be swept over the falls.” Again, somewhat redundant, but perhaps it was better to say explicitly what the connections between the rapidly flowing stream and the 3,000 foot fall actually was…

Several years later I made a third visit to the top of the waterfall, only to find that the sign had been replaced with a new version which read: “Danger: Waterfall. Do not enter the stream or moving water, you will die if you are swept over the falls.” Again, it didn’t seem like you would need to tell people this if they had just spent several hours climbing up a narrow trail next to a bloody great waterfall, but perhaps it’s best to be clear about these things. It’s always possible that there were people reading the sign who could actually be dim enough not to realize that a 3,000 fall down the side of a granite mountain would be catastrophic for your health. But on my fourth and final visit to the top of the falls, I discovered that the sign had been changed yet again; it now read “Danger: Waterfall. Do not enter stream or moving water; you will be swept over the falls and die. YOU DO NOT GET A SECOND CHANCE!” (emphasis theirs)…

I’m not sure if this implies that people are dumb enough to think that, as they are being swept over the falls they will be able to grab hold of a vine (which don’t grow in pine forests 8,000 feet above sea level) and swing to safety like Tarzan, or whip out a safety line and grapple something like Batman, or perhaps that if you die by massive impact trauma after being swept over one of the world’s tallest waterfalls you would then re-spawn, like in a video game. Possibly they just believe that since Yosemite is a national park, and the national government would be responsible for their deaths, that someone has put up a net, a safety rail, or perhaps a giant airbag at the bottom of the falls. But on the way down I stopped off at the Park Ranger station and confirmed that, sign or no sign, multiple foreign languages (and pictograms) or not, several people each year leave the trail, jump the fence, squeeze under the safety railing, get into the stream, and are swept over the falls, where they subsequently die…

So the next time you’re about to introduce a new product and you’re wondering if you should put an additional safety warning on the package, even though it seems redundant with the seven other warnings you’ve already got… I’d say go ahead and put it on there. Signs point to the general public being even dumber (and even more likely to harm themselves in creative new ways) than you think…

Keep the Receipt

This afternoon I was feeling a bit peckish, so I wandered down to the main floor of the Business School complex and bought some junk food (without social, esthetic, or nutritional redeeming values) from a vending machine. What made the experience unusual enough to bother putting on the blog is the way the machine made change: it gave me back $1 bills. We’ve been seeing an increased use of $1 coins lately; several of the centralized parking payment machines give the so-called “gold dollars” in change for amounts over $1, and a number of vending machines on campus take them, but this is the first one I’ve ever seen that can break a ten without giving you back handfuls of either silver- or gold-colored coins. It’s enough to make you wonder what is coming next…

When we were kids – which, in fairness, is not all that long ago – there would hardly have been any need for such things; candy bars were a dime, sodas were a quarter, and even ice cream was rarely more than that. The loose candy machines that today are usually a quarter (sometimes two) were mostly a penny, and rarely more than a nickel, and I remember them as dispensing more candy per turn of the know – although it must be conceded that my hands were smaller back then, and it may just be that the product looks smaller in contrast. But despite increases in the cost of machine-vended products on the order of 800% higher (or even more), there have been very few changes in the technology, and only in the addition of the aforementioned gold dollars has the available currency changed. It would appear that most manufacturers were counting on credit card and smart card readers instead – and that technology remains problematic…

To have either a credit card or smart card reader controlling a vending machine you also need a secure connection to the network that controls the cards or the Internet (in the case of the credit cards). This isn’t always possible, and even when it is, it’s not always reliable; a simple software glitch can put your machines out of action entirely until someone can get to them and reboot their onboard computers (which are no more reliable than any other Internet-based system). This isn’t a big problem in an environment like a University campus, where people are around 24/7 and you’ll need to restock the machines every day or two anyway, but it’s a real sticking point in most vending operations, which are intended to be self-contained. And even granted that you can use the credit card option to sell much larger and more expensive merchandise, this may not always be a good idea, either…

A case in point would be the specialized vending machines called Zoom Stores, which I first encountered about five years ago in Fox Hills. These are actually less hype than a large storage container with a couple of robotic arms that can fetch product off of various shelves and out of different bins, which is hooked up to a computerized inventory and point-of-sale system. I’ve used them a number of times without incident, to purchase antacids at a conference, or a notebook when I ran out of legal pads. But the only substantial purchase I’ve ever made from one of these locations (an iPod I obtained from the machine at the Detroit airport in 2009) turned into a huge hassle when the product proved to be defective, the machine’s printer wasn’t working (hence, no receipt), and the Zoom Store’s return policy turned out to involve a web address and a UPS Store…

It remains to be seen how this will play out; with the rise of wireless Internet communications and the growing sophistication and reliability of printers (and computerized point-of-sale systems in general), maybe things like the Zoom Store really are the wave of the future. Maybe one day you’ll go to the mall, pick up whatever you want, swipe your card, and walk off with it. Or, perhaps, people will continue to demand that a living person take responsibility for their money, guard their credit information, and pay attention to them as customers. All I know for sure is that whoever has the vending machine concession for the business school got my business today because their machines know how to make change for a ten – and they might again tomorrow…

Truth in Advertising

I don’t do a lot of follow-up posts in this space, mostly because this isn’t really a newspaper column, and even if it was, I’d be making quick notes about the developments of the day and moving on, not tracking developing stories as they evolve. But a few weeks ago on this site I was speculating about the use of false online reviews by business concerns in order to increase sales of their product (or of their clients’ products, in the case of advertising or public relations firms), and whether this would be legal. I don’t believe it’s an ethical business practice in any event; unless you disclosed to people upfront that you are being employed to make a positive review (which would rather defeat the point of “user” reviews) you are deliberately misrepresenting yourself and misleading the customer. But the question remained of whether this would actually be considered fraudulent business practice. Today I found a notice that should settle that part of the question one and for all…

A press release from the Federal Trade Commission office site details a settlement between the Commission and Reverb Communications – a public relations firm employed to promote the Guitar Hero line of video games (among other things). According to the release, the FTC has ruled that this use of paid professional “reviews” is a deceptive business practice under the Truth in Advertising statutes. In exchange for avoiding further criminal prosecution, Reverb is agreeing to take down all of the fake reviews they put up on iTunes (and similar locations) promoting their clients’ games, and discontinue the practice in the future. The agency hasn’t issued any statements about going after other firms engaging in this practice that I’ve found so far, but it’s a big Federal Internet nexus and my time is limited at the moment. If they’ve done this once they almost certainly will do it again; whether or not local law enforcement will get in on the act remains to be seen…

What is not clear – yet – is how this will affect non-profit and political organizations, such as the far-right groups referenced in my earlier post. You can’t really have a deceptive business practice if you aren’t, in fact, a business, and it’s hard to imagine what criminal charges you could possibly advance against people who are opposed to your product on philosophical or religious grounds. If there is an organized group involved you could probably sue them under civil statute for restraint of trade, but I’ve no idea if you could win such a case, or what damages you might recover if you did. The fact is, this is a relatively new area of case law, and it may be a while before it catches up with conditions in the business world – although I will caution you all once again not to take legal advice from bloggers without a license to practice law…

The thing is, no matter what laws you pass, it still won’t be possible to be certain of which reviews are legitimate, and which ones were left for some ulterior reason. So until such time as it becomes possible to identify people on the Internet, it will probably remain in everyone’s best interests to take anything you read in the comments and review sections with a grain of salt, and only accept the opinions of people you already know and trust…

Whether or not THAT will happen remains to be seen, of course…

When to Donate

Since my last post about non-profit activity there have been a number of other rumblings from the industry turning up in the news online. A brief firestorm broke out last week because the American Cancer Society’s listing on Charity Navigator is only 3 stars and not 4; several people were also raising cane about their overhead levels and the amount of money they devote to awareness, counseling, support groups, education and even political efforts instead of spending every dime on research. Here again, it sounds very upsetting, but the fact is that the Navigator doesn’t award all that many 4-star ratings (and has a surprising number of 1-star and no-star charities listed), and without the Society’s support (especially in education and awareness) many of the pure-research anti-cancer groups would be far less successful. This doesn’t even consider the number of outright trolls who were posting that the ACS had two stars and not three…

The point here is that non-profits and charity donations are a good deal more complicated that most people would like. Even if you can find a charity whose mission and methods you completely agree with, they still may not act in ways you find acceptable, and your recourse to demand that they do may be limited. Consider the case of a man in Texas who donated $40,000 to the Jesuit prep school he had attended 37 years earlier on the understanding that the school would find a place for his own son when the boy was of age to attend. You can find the account from his local ABC station here if you want to, but the upshot is that the school took his money and then refused to admit the kid. This sort of quid pro quo arrangement is considered ethically dubious, but is not generally illegal as such (and apparently there’s no law against such things in Texas). Refusing to honor a contract is another matter, however…

In this particular case, the school hasn’t denied that there was such an arrangement, or that a written document confirming it exists. If this is the case, then taking their graduate’s money and rejecting his son because the boy “wouldn’t be happy here” is completely asinine, and if the school’s defense is the usual “Oh, we’re a nonprofit! Nobody would sue US!” then they’re about to be in serious trouble. Statements like the one they’ve issued about keeping fund-raising and admissions activities separate won’t help either; their only options may be returning the money (which they say they’ve already spent) or declaring bankruptcy – which will be tricky, since technically they’re owned by an arm of the Catholic Church…

All of this raises a number of ethical questions which I will probably address in a later post. For today, I just want to consider if it makes sense to donate money to a non-profit organization with the intent to get them to do something in particular in the business sense. On the one hand, as with any other corporation, the specific goals and activities of a non-profit agency are probably beyond the ability or resources of any single “investor,” which is why we band together to concentrate our capital into a larger company in the first place. So if there is specific social change you want to accomplish, and you can’t just write a check to do it, a donation makes sense. At the same time, if you invest money in Apple, Inc. that will not allow you, personally, to determine what new projects they fund; you need to be clear that the same situation will occur with a non-profit. You can exert some influence on them, particularly by offering or withholding future donations, but just as the stockholders can’t directly control a company, so you will not be able to direct the non-profit unless you become its director…

So when should you give money to a specific charity? As with any other investment decision, I’d have to say that would depend on what goal you are trying to accomplish – and how much risk you are willing to accept…

The Ethics of Credit Checks

If you’ve ever applied for a loan, a credit card or even certain membership programs, attempted to rent an apartment or finance a car, you’re probably already familiar with credit reports and the multitude of ways yours can be altered to reflect a greater credit risk than you actually are. If you’ve ever applied for a job involving security clearances, sensitive information, access to money or securities, or law enforcement, you’ve probably also encountered the concept of a criminal background check, and the possibility of being mistaken for a career criminal who has the same given name and family name as you, especially if your family name is “Smith.” There’s nothing particularly controversial about either one; assuming nothing fraudulent has appeared on your credit history, a credit check is probably the most cost-effective way for a lender to determine if you’re a credit risk or not, and there are any number of jobs where certain types of criminal background could be problematic. Unfortunately, as with any other tool, these investigations are not always used honestly…

There’s a test case currently in the courts where the Kaplan Higher Education Corporation was cited by the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for using credit histories to eliminate a disproportionate number of job applicants of African ancestry from hiring consideration. The company is denying the charges, saying that their company supports diversity in the workplace and excludes anyone, regardless of ethnic background, from hiring consideration if they have poor credit; apparently, the need to offer counseling on student loans and financial aid issues would make people with dodgy credit scores problematic. You can read the Los Angeles Times article about the case if you want to, but as usual I can’t help wondering if there isn’t a larger ethical issue involved here…

Members of traditionally underserved communities are much more likely to have had credit issues in their past than majority groups, although it must be conceded that how much more likely depends on whom you ask. Thus, any such qualification, no matter how even-handedly applied, is going to exclude more people from various minority groups from hiring consideration than it will members of whoever is the majority (or best served by the credit industry) group in the relevant community. The real question isn’t whether or not this is going to happen (it clearly will) or even if this is truly a discriminatory hiring practice (simply because it excludes minorities) but rather whether the exclusion is a reasonable business practice in the first place. If the goal here is to provide good financial advice that your customers/students will listen to, then why do you need people with spotless credit to do that? Wouldn’t people who have run afoul of the system and recovered their credit-worthy status be a better choice? More to the point, wouldn’t people who have demonstrated that they can do this be a better choice than innocents who have just had the good fortune to avoid such problems so far?


Of course, if the goal is to avoid either propagating credit fraud or being defrauded yourself, then a criminal background check would be more relevant than a credit check, and someone with an actual history of credit fraud would be more problematic than someone who was jailed for vandalism or drunken driving. But at the same time, I have to question whether individuals who are at risk for commission of such crimes are more likely to listen to someone who had, for example, been caught and punished – or some wide-eyed innocent who has never had a single impure thought. One could legitimately argue that someone who has been through the system has a better idea of not only how to avoid trouble but also why you should want to avoid trouble than someone who hasn’t. So the question is, if people with less than perfect records can provide better service, and if hiring based on ability rather than past credit history is a superior moral position anyway, do we have an ethical responsibility, to society or to our employers, to hire such people? Or do we have a responsibility to cover the company’s metaphorical behind by only hiring people whose records indicate that they are absolutely beyond reproach?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: Airports, Part I

It has been said that human existence is only bearable because we do not, in fact, know what the future holds for us, and my experience during Year Two would prove to be a first-rate example of this principle, but on one particular morning in August I found myself sitting in the Lansing Capital City Airport, reflecting on how much small airports start to look alike once you’ve been in more than, say, five of them. Of course, what you consider a “small” airport depends very much on your point of view; at this point in my life I had been through several of the world’s largest and busiest airfields (including LAX, JFK, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix Sky Harbor, Chicago O’Hare, Washington Dulles and National, Heathrow, Gatwick, Orly, Narita, Rome, Boston Logan, Atlanta Hartsfield, and Miami) and for the most part they’re all distinctively different, although not always in good ways. Still, there’s almost no chance you’d ever mistake a concourse at O’Hare with one in Dallas, and neither one looks anything like Heathrow…

By contrast, the small but thoroughly modern airfield here in Lansing looks remarkably like the one in Columbus, and quite a bit like the ones in Des Moines, Albany, El Paso, and Salt Lake City (although that last one is larger). Perhaps small airports make use of generic architecture and equipment, rather than paying premiums for something unique and decorative; or perhaps as I’m getting older and seeing more and more of the world my memory is fading and all of these small airports are running together in my mind. But the Capital Cities Airport is certainly clean and nice, and this early in the morning it’s remarkably uncrowded; I had no trouble finding a table in the snack bar and settling in to read the paper while I consider my breakfast, the view outside, and the voyage on which I find myself…

I’m on my way to Detroit, a 22-minute flight, where I will change planes for the two-hour hop to New York City’s La Guardia Airport; a (hopefully) short cab ride will take me from there to my stepmother’s place in the Village. I’ll be in town for a couple of days to see my father and stepmother and take in a baseball game, and possibly a few other activities that can’t be accomplished in East Lansing, Michigan or its surroundings. Outside the rain is pouring down in such torrents that you’d half expect to see a guy with a long white beard walking past with two of each kind of animal, and the forecast for tomorrow’s game in New York is iffy; I’m also less than thrilled to be embarking on this trip without my favorite travelling and baseball companion. But the game (and to a lesser extent, the visit itself) are supposed to be quality father-and-son time, and that’s hard to come by when the parties involved are 44 and 71, respectively, and live hundreds (or thousands; it depends on the week) of miles apart, so my wife has elected not to come along for this one…

When I was a child there really wasn’t anything I enjoyed more than flying; I’d clamor for a window seat and watch every second of the takeoff and landing with rapt concentration. Later (once I had learned to read and write) I took to recording my impressions of the trip, including a minute-by-minute log of the flight and a critique of the landing – a habit I continued until government regulations and encroaching middle age finally eliminated my enjoyment of air travel. There’s still a certain satisfaction to be had in getting somewhere quickly and efficiently, and I still get some enjoyment out of breezing through an airport, travelling light, and having everything I need tucked away in my briefcase (despite the best efforts of TSA and the airlines themselves). But the truth is that most of the time I don’t particularly want to go anywhere; I’d rather just find a comfortable spot somewhere out of the rain, and watch the world go by…

Which is Worse?

For years now, single people from all over the world have suspected that the online dating sites were using ringers – very attractive people employed by the company to make their service look valuable – and leaving old profiles up long after their owners had quit paying for membership in order to make their pool of potential dates look larger. Everyone knows that there are going to be cheaters on such sites – people who will send you a headshot of a breathtaking (but obscure) actress and claim it’s their own picture, or cut out a picture of a rugged pro athlete (like in the Simpsons episode) and represent that as their true image – but that sort of thing went on before there were dating sites or an Internet to put them on. Everyone also knows that membership in online dating sites is going to skew heavily toward males, just as video dating and matchmaking services did; women are much more worried about the consequences of meeting a total stranger over the Internet, and rightly so. But given the class action lawsuit that has been filed against Match.com this week, I have to wonder what they thought they were doing – and what they were actually charging for…

You can pick up the Yahoo News story about it if you want to, but the gist of it is that the plaintiffs are claiming that as many as 60% of all Match profiles were either inactive or populated by scammers attempting to get money out of them; they also claim that they were initially contacted in order to get them to sign up for the service, but that once they did all of the profiles that had contacted them suddenly disappeared. If these allegations are proven in court the plaintiffs should be able to recover every dollar they spent and punitive damages besides; the practices described are clearly fraudulent, and there is no way the owners of the company could possible defend their actions as legitimate parts of such a business. The real question, at least to my mind, is what they thought they were going to accomplish in the first place…

Running such an enterprise on the basis of matching subscribers according to a simple personality test (of which dozens are available at reasonable cost) would allow the operators of such a site to actually provide contacts to anyone in their system who could reasonably be paired off; they could tell anyone left over (as some people inevitably would be) that there was no match for them in the system at this time, and to keep checking back. If your customers cancel the service and leave after a month or two (or whatever you want the minimum subscription to be) don’t worry about it; the supply of lonely Internet users is not likely to decrease anytime soon, and your only variable cost is whatever the personality test license cost you (assuming you paid for it fair and square, like you should have); a profile in a database doesn’t cost anything to maintain. You’ll need a few hours of programmer time each week (to send out the contact or lack-of-contact emails), but that’s only a few hours of employee time for thousands or millions of messages…

The key to a high-turnover business model (which this would be, if the company was dealing honestly with its customers) is to keep bringing in enough new subscribers each month that you don’t have to worry about the ones who keep leaving. If your price is affordable, your advertising is convincing, and you do occasionally pair somebody off, this should not prove difficult. Conning people with fake messages (if they really were) won’t improve your retention rate that much, since people will get wind of it and there are lots of alternative sites – and other online resources used to meet people. And even if it does work for you, there is still the unpleasant possibility of civil lawsuits, criminal charges, and hundreds of scruffy bloggers mocking you all over the Internet…

I can’t decide which is worse – if these people were criminals all along, or if they’re just too stupid and/or greedy to see that this type of business can be sustained indefinitely (albeit possibly at a less lucrative level) without defrauding anyone or breaking any civil or criminal statute. I’ll keep you posted on how the trial goes…

After-market Onstar

You may already have ignored the announcements, but at a news conference this week General Motors announced that they are expanding their highly successful Onstar service by making an after-market version of the hands-free system available to buyers at Best Buy and eventually other retailers. I thought it was an interesting strategy and a good example of both partially repurposing something and expanding your existing customer base, which makes it worth taking a closer look…

For those of you who have never owned a GM vehicle, Onstar is less hype than it is a cell phone system built into your review mirror. It makes use of GPS technology to pinpoint your car’s location, and can be used to summon assistance from emergency services, get turn-by-turn navigation, diagnose engine issues, unlock your doors (if you lock yourself out of the car), track the people who have stolen your car (if it gets stolen), and in newer models even deactivate the engine so the police can arrest whoever has stolen your car. The hardware is built into most GM products, and the support service is usually free for the first year and then a moderate monthly fee from then on. Just exactly how much safer this makes any given car remains somewhat in dispute; it’s easy to believe that having a system that alerts Onstar operators (and eventually emergency response services) whenever one of your airbags deploys could be useful, and there have certainly been cases where the system enabled police to apprehend car thieves. But since most of these same functions can be obtained through other products, up to this point the Onstar system has served mostly as a selling point for GM vehicles…

What struck me about this new offering is that for all practical purposes, GM is making money without spending any. They already have the three Onstar monitoring centers set up, and even if these new customers start producing a heavy increase in calls it shouldn’t be that hard to increase the capacity of the system. Meanwhile, every Onstar user represents a regular monthly income, and if you want the really snazzy services like turn-by-turn navigation there’s a small additional fee each month. You can also use the Onstar system like a cell phone, assuming you’re willing to purchase the minutes. None of these are particularly big-ticket purchases, but with over 5 million active Onstar subscribers it does add up (somewhere on the order of $95 million per month at the base package price alone, and somewhere around $140 million per month if they all bought the expanded service). Now imagine if you doubled those numbers…

Even before the financial panic and bailout a few years back there were already stories about General Motors making more on car loans through its GMAC subsidiary and licensing the rights to various designs, logos and brands than it did from selling cars. With the company now planning on expansion into new markets in Asia and expanding Onstar coverage to anyone who wants it, it seems entirely possible that the service might become the next major profit center for the company. Making additional profit from sales of the equipment needed to use Onstar would just be a nice bonus; the real goldmine would be in convincing millions of people to sign up for extended service each month…

It’s not a bad showing for something that was originally created just to provide value added for people buying GM vehicles, and it leads me to wonder how many other companies could repurpose some of their value-added services to a wider market. Is there something your company does that people who aren’t even your customers might be willing to pay for on a regular basis? You might want to look into it…

The Horror, The Horror…

I was very amused to read the story online this week about the new Oprah Winfrey network, and the minor storm of protest brewing about it because a number of cable systems are planning to carry it as part of their premium package – which is to say, viewers who want it will have to pay more than the cost of their basic cable package. It’s always hard to say how many of the people spewing about this sort of topic are really that upset, and how many are trolls having a good time at the expense of people who don’t really understand economics or cable television operations, but as I was enjoying a quiet chuckle over the issue it occurred to me that MOST people don’t really understand how cable works, and we should probably take a closer look…

To begin with, it’s important to understand that most cable systems have a hardware limit on the number of channels they can bring you, whether it’s the amount of copper wire they have buried under your street or the amount of fiber-optic cable they’ve been able to install or the bandwidth their satellites can beam down to your DSS dish. Back when your only cable option was the local cable company this didn’t matter so much, but most major population centers now offer at least two or three options for getting your television content, and that means that every channel a given provider is offering is a selling point that they can use to attract your business. On the other hand, your cable provider also has to pay a certain amount (it ranges anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars) for each customer who receives each channel. These factors combine to make the provider want to bring you any channels that they think might make you more likely to engage their services, but want to avoid any channels that most people wouldn’t care about…

Tiers of cable channels work like any other bundled product – you are offered a group of products for a single price, partly because the product you actually want is going to vary a bit from one customer to the next, and partly because that way you’re paying extra for products you don’t really want and will never use in order to get the one you do want. So putting the new OWN network on a higher tier means that, in theory, the people who want it can pay a small additional monthly charge to get it, while the people who don’t want it do not have to pay a higher cable bill. Cable companies often claim that they can’t add or delete a single channel from your cable service because of hardware limitations – and a decade or so ago this was frequently true – but these days it’s more often because the effort of keeping track of millions of individual cable bills, all for differing amounts, would require a lot more effort (and drive their costs up)…

In the case of the OWN network, the channel they’re taking over in most cable systems was previously held by the Discovery Health Network, which was generally a premium service already. The real problem would appear to be that Oprah’s show was broadcast over the air for twenty-five years, and even people who have been paying to receive it (on basic cable) seem to be convinced that it was free the whole time. Asking that your cable company provide you with something they have to pay for at no additional cost to you is just as asinine as asking any other business to give you products or services for free, and even asking that they create a new tier (the “Oprah” tier, presumably) which will drive up their expenses and raise everyone’s cable bill isn’t much better. The bottom line is that your cable company is in business to make a living, and if you want to watch the OWN network programming you should expect to pay for it…

Although I can’t help adding that, to paraphrase the late Sam Kinnison, if this is the biggest issue that is disturbing you, you, my friend, do not yet have a problem…

Of Trademarks and Charities

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the non-profit sector (including some time as the in-house grant writer for a non-profit and a lot of consulting work in the early 2000s), and I’ve also got what you might consider a personal stake in the search for a cure for cancer – I’m the son of a three-time cancer survivor (it got her on the fourth try) and I carry the genes that will give any female offspring I ever have a dramatically increased risk for the disease. So I was a bit taken aback this week when I saw an article on Huffington Post ranting and raving about The Susan G. Komen Foundation entering into legal action over the use of the word “cure” by other non-profit organizations. Certainly, the idea of one of the nation’s leading fundraisers squandering funds on legal actions is not a pleasant one. But, as usual, when you actually read the article, the scenario is a bit murkier than you might expect from the headline…

To begin with, the language in the article is intentionally inflammatory, stating that the Foundation “patrols the waters” looking for agencies using the word “cure” so that it can sue them; it then goes on to indicate that the Komen Foundation has already filed more than a hundred of these allegedly cruel and heartless legal actions, presumably just to eliminate the competition and retain its position of importance, or some such thing. Certainly, the people who are commenting on the original story seem to think so, carrying on at great length about how this allegedly wealthy and powerful organization is more concerned with crushing the competition than it is with doing its job. All of which sounds very nefarious indeed, until you consider what is actually at stake in these proceedings…

First, consider that the Komen Foundation has, in fact, spent a great deal of money and effort establishing its “brand” – which, in the case of a non-profit, means establishing that it is an efficient and effective way for you to contribute towards a cause you believe in. Like all non-profit corporations, you can read the Komen Foundation’s Annual Report and decide for yourself if they are spending money in ways and proportions of which you approve, and if you don’t approve of them, you can always give money to the American Cancer Society , or the Concern Foundation , or any number of other groups that raise money for cancer research. Now consider that not all of the agencies out there using the phrase “for the cure” are actually raising money for cancer research, or indeed actually raising money for any charitable cause. If people start getting the idea that anyone who says they are doing something “for the cure” is a scam artist, this will cut into the Komen Foundation’s support, lower their effectiveness, and work against their actual cause (which as noted above, I’m actually in favor of). But that isn’t even the worst of it…

The other fact that is being overlooked here is that the Komen Foundation isn’t suing any of these “mom and pop” charities for money; they’re simply telling them to stop using the phrase “for the cure” in their fundraising. The author (and many of the people interviewed for the article) makes a big deal about these small agencies being “forced” to spend money on lawyers to defend themselves, but the truth is they don’t have to spend anything; they just need to call their fundraising programs something else. And the argument that the Komen Foundation could just ignore these little charity groups is even more ridiculous; as noted in other posts, if you don’t defend a trademark even one time you probably can’t ever defend it again, and as noted above here, if the Foundation loses this trademark there will be genuine consequences, not only for them but for anyone who currently has or ever will have cancer…

I haven’t audited the Komen Foundation’s spending profile, so I can’t actually tell you if the amount they are spending on legal fees is appropriate in percentage terms. But if the amount offends you in absolute terms, you have the same recourse you have with any other non-profit: write to them and ask them to return your donation, and they will. Just as the American Red Cross did after 9/11, and just as any other non-profit group is obliged to do if you ask…

The Astroturf Rebellion

Over the past few weeks I’ve been wondering about counters, online reviews, and cheating – which is to say, I’ve been wondering how many bloggers click on their own blog multiple times each day in order to make their counters rise, how many teachers (and other professionals) go onto online rating sites to improve their general rating, how many people leave positive reviews about books they’ve written or restaurants they own, or other businesses they have an interest in, and whether or not this is gaming the system. Certainly there’s no law against such tactics, anymore than there would be for getting all of your friends and relatives to send in letters of support for you on a job or praise for your performance in a play, for example. But it’s hard to deny that this is using a comments system (or even an entire feedback and rating site) for your own purposes; it’s even harder to deny that people are already doing this…

Some years ago word leaked out that the Chinese national government was making use of paid Internet operatives to sing the praises of its agencies and policies – and shout down anyone who was in any way critical of their government. The story goes that the People’s Ministry of Culture was paying a small sum for each review, comment or blog post that served one of these two purposes; it was nicknamed the “Fifty-Cent Party” because the fee for doing so was said to be 50 Mao, or half a Yuan (the standard unit of Chinese currency). The question of just how many such operatives actually exist remains in dispute, but interestingly enough, so does the question of just how aggressive these people actually are, and just how wrong such a campaign would actually be. On one level, this tactic isn’t that different from communities in the US employing boosters to promote their civic virtues; it’s only if they’re trying to mislead people about true conditions or drown out voices of dissent that things get ugly. And before you tell me that such things could never happen in a culture with freedom of speech and freedom of the press, I regret to inform you that apparently they already are…

A story reported last week in The Daily Kos claims that some of our home-grown Tea Party groups have been recruiting teams of “activists” to go onto Amazon and other sites and issue hundreds of negative reviews of books they consider to be excessively “Liberal” (whatever that might mean nowadays), regardless of whether said volunteers had actually read the books or not. The same article claims that this tactic is being used to promote anything by any of the Tea Party’s favorite commentators, regardless of quality (or indeed, sanity) – which may explain why certain right-wing authors have been selling so well over the past few years. The Daily Kos may not be the most moderate (or Moderate) news source going, but their information appears to check out; a much bigger question from where I’m sitting is whether this really compares to the Chinese example – and if such tactics are or should be illegal in the first place…

This isn’t an ethics post, mostly because there’s no real grey area here to discuss. Issuing fraudulent reviews (of anything, for any reason) is morally indefensible, and if this is true it plays up the moral bankruptcy of people who would claim to be social conservatives in order to further their own wealth and power. From a business standpoint, however, I have to wonder if a retailer like Amazon should attempt to restrict such reviews, or how they could possibly do so if they wanted to. How to you prove which reviews are fraudulent (such as ones where the “reviewer” has never read the book and is only criticizing it to forward a political agenda), and how do you prevent users from making reviews of this type? Can you even try to do so without violating your customers’ right to free speech? How about if you’re the publisher or publicity agent of one of the authors being slandered in this fashion? Do you have a responsibility to help them fight off such attacks, or would you be better off staying out of it?

The practice is called “astroturfing” in reference to the artificial grass used for some sports stadia; the fake reviews and so on are said to be “artificial grass roots” movements, created for the occasion. The degree to which such things are really happening, in the US or overseas, will probably always remain in dispute, but it’s worth remembering the next time you check out the online ratings of a product, person, movement, event or idea: you can’t believe everything you read – especially on the Internet…