Value Added: You’re Doing It Wrong

I had occasion to travel by air earlier this month, and I found myself staring in amazement at the array of services being offered for purchase aboard some of the aircraft I was on. Checked baggage fees have become the industry standard, of course, and everyone knows about the food-for-purchase schemes that have so many of us buying and packing our own meals, but my on my flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis the aircraft was outfitted with onboard Wi-Fi and also had video entertainment terminals set into each seat back. In both cases these are essentially sunk costs – meaning that there is effectively no difference between how much it costs to operate the airplane when these devices are in use and when they aren’t. Give this scenario, you might reasonably think that the airline would offer the use of these services at some minor level, in the hopes of making a lot of incremental income off a high volume of sales. Unless you are already familiar with the U.S. airline industry, of course – in which case you had already realized that the in-flight Wi-Fi was $15 and the handful of games and functions on the seatback unit was $5…

Now, if you travel for business, you may be able to get your employer to pay for your on-board Wi-Fi; you might even be able to justify it to the people in Accounting, assuming that you actually used to it work on something and not just to pass the time playing World of Warcraft. But most people wouldn’t shell out that kind of money on a short flight if they had to pay it out of pocket, and with most passengers already carrying a smart phone, a laptop computer, a tablet computer, a book reader, a hand-held video game system, or all of the above, it seems unlikely that anyone would give you the price equivalent of 5 iPhone games to use a crappy little seatback device for a couple of hours, either. It seemed to me that a better approach would be to use these options as a selling point, in order to sell more tickets and increase customer satisfaction with the service. After all, with passengers already being nickel-and-dimed with all manner of essential (and formerly free) services, there has to be a limit to how many optional fees they will want to deal with…

It wasn’t until I saw this story on MSNBC that the true idiocy of the concept really registered. According to the article, a recent survey showed that only about a quarter of the people flying these days are paying for food, while fewer than 15% of all passengers are paying for in-flight entertainment, onboard Internet services like these, or priority boarding rights. Moreover, each of the four flights I was on this month had to pull a large number of roller-board style carry-on bags and deposit them in the cargo hold, because the overhead compartments have become so clogged with by people trying to avoid the checked bag fees. I think we can reasonably conclude that while the checked bag fees may be making money, they’re definitely not making any friends for the carriers that use them; we can also conclude that if the airlines are pinning their hopes for remaining profitable on these supposedly value-added products (that do not add value because they offer too little and cost far too much) we should probably prepare ourselves for another round of mergers, bankruptcies, and pleas to the Federal government to bail them out of bankruptcy…

It’s all the more annoying, in my opinion, because most of the things you would need to do in order to improve customer relations with airline passengers is already common knowledge, not just in that industry but to the general public – but that’s a post for another day…

The Ethics of Freedom of Religion

In America, no one ever questions the right to religious freedom; we’re taught in school from an early age that some of the first colonies established on this continent were founded by religious dissidents looking for a place to worship as they saw fit. And while most of the mythology that has grown up around the Pilgrims is as factually incorrect as any other national mythos, it is hard to deny that freedom of religion belongs in the Constitution, right up there with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The real problems arise when people begin to apply religious beliefs to everyday life – that is, to make decisions on very mundane issues based on faith, which hasn’t traditionally worked any better than making decisions of faith based on law or social custom. Given that we’ve had several particularly troubling outbreaks of this complex in the last few weeks, I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look…

First off, it’s important to realize doomsday preachers and splinter sects that believe the end of the world is upon us are not a new concept, and neither are people who start behaving as if they’re going to heaven next Saturday as a consequence. History is full of examples, including some (such as the “Heaven’s Gate” cult in 1997 or the Jonestown mass murder/suicide in 1978) that don’t involve Christianity or the biblical end of the world at all. Most of the allegedly Christian versions avoid suicide pacts (since these don’t fit in well with the rest of Christian theology) and just claim that the world will end on its own, but even in those cases there have been exceptions, and many of the more do-it-yourself cults appear to have been based entirely on how the “leader” is feeling at the time he (or in a few cases she) decrees the end of the world. It’s also important to remember that in some cases, the cost of this religious freedom has been lives – and in some cases, hundreds of them…

In the most recent example (May 21, 2011) there were a indeterminate number of doomsday-related suicides, at least one murder-suicide involving a mother and her two children, and a number of cases where people maxed out their credit cards, quit their jobs, gave away everything they had, and generally destroyed their lives because they didn’t expect any of it would matter in a few days. If any other class of individual were to go around broadcasting claims that the end of the world was next week, and encouraging others to act accordingly, he or she would be arrested, charged with fraud (or possibly false advertising), and vigorously sued – assuming the FCC didn’t just shut them down in the first place. But religious speech is protected under the First Amendment, and thus can’t be shut down, no matter how many people it endangers or how many innocent lives it destroys. No one is saying that free speech should not be available to everyone, or that religious freedom isn’t integral to our way of life – but there have always been limits on speech (hate speech isn’t protected, and neither are threats or incitement to violence), and it may be that it is time to consider if there should be limits on freedom of religious speech as well…

Which brings me to the question: should someone who claims to have absolutely solid faith that the end of the world is imminent be allowed to broadcast that belief to the public? Especially since, this being a matter of faith, there is no way for anyone to judge how reliable that belief is? Does our answer change if we know for a fact that a non-zero number of people will kill themselves and murder their innocent children if such broadcasts are allowed? How about if the preacher making them is the head of a media empire, and has received over $109 million USD in donations from people who believe in his teachings? Or to put it another way, do we really want to give an industry that has become infamous for financially, mentally, emotionally, spiritually and sexually abusing its customers the freedom to operate with an impunity not granted to any other kind of organization? And if not, how do we restrict religious broadcasting in any way at all without violating the principles upon which this country was founded?

It’s worth thinking about…

Caught in the Middle

Earlier this week I ran across the story of a Best Buy store that had posted a sign by their front door stating up front that the price listed on their website may not be the same one offered in the store, and that if you want they will help you place the order online for delivery to your home. Needless to say, a lot of people (and bloggers) immediately started ragging on Best Buy for this remarkable bit of electronic ineptitude, saying that if you’re going to have one price for online purchases (and in-store pickups) you ought to be able to coordinate that price with the brick-and-mortar stores and have the same prices on the shelf tag. Which is true enough, I suppose, but rather misses the point behind a simple paper sign stuck to the front window – which is clearly local management’s effort to protect itself from being caught between corporate management and outraged customers…

You can pick up the story from The Consumerist if you want to; they should also have links to various news stories about this even by now, as well as a story of the offending sign. It’s worth noting that Best Buy is a regular target of consumer analysts and advocates nationwide, not just the nice folks on The Consumerist; it’s also worth pointing out that Best Buy has ended up on the wrong side of both civil and criminal actions for pricing fraud, and in one case was caught setting up an in-store intranet site that looked exactly like the company’s real web site, only with the higher prices as indicated on the shelves. But while all of these various crimes are real – and while Best Buy has consistently failed to behave in the manner we would expect from a national retail chain – the store in this particular story isn’t attempting to take advantage of anyone, much less defraud their customers. Local management has obviously gotten tired of explaining that the prices they are told to charge and the ones offered online won’t always be the same, and is acting to cut off people who will demand the lower price at check-out even though the store can’t offer it…

The unfortunate truth is that a company as large as Best Buy could easily have multiple departments in multiple locations (or even countries) setting prices for different stores in different regions, as well as the ones on the web site. It would be more professional (and rather more efficient) for the company to hire someone to coordinate all of those prices and make them at least somewhat consistent, but this isn’t a legal requirement; as long as the company complies with local laws about pricing policy (e.g. no “bait and switch” games, or the equivalent) they can charge whatever they want. You, as the consumer, don’t have to pay those prices, of course, but the people working at the various stores will still have to deal with all of the whining, carping, and complaining from the people who came in and didn’t find the price they wanted to pay – as well as all of the people who think they can get a special discount by claiming to have seen a much lower price on the web site and demanding that the store honor the price they just made up…

After a few weeks of that, it’s hardly surprising that local management got tired of having to explain things and just put a sign in the window. The lesson to take away here, I think, is that corporate management can do whatever it wants, but if they make things difficult for the people on the spot (in this case, the store’s management team) they can expect their local representatives to take matters into their own hands. If this sort of thing is going to be a problem for the company, then you need to pay more attention to what is going on in your local operations – before you find your company’s name being mocked by thousands of scruffy bloggers for their own amusement…

Death to Spam!

It is generally believed that the reason unsolicited email advertising messages are called spam can be linked to the famous Monty Python skit about spam, now nearly 40 years old, in which the group of Vikings in the back of the café (don’t ask me why there are Vikings in the back of the café; it works, all right?) keeps interrupting to sing the word “Spam” over and over again, until that’s all you can hear. Whether or not the name is appropriate depends on whom you ask; Spam (or SPAM®, to give it the official trademarked spelling) is considered a delicacy along much of the Pacific Rim, and is beloved by people native to the area around Austin, Minnesota (where most of the North American, South American and Australian supply is manufactured). Others will tell you that the acronym should stand for “stuff posing as meat” (although I also like “special product of Austin, Minnesota”), or that the substance is only marginally edible. Email advertising messages, on the other hand, is almost universally reviled. Which makes the revelation that there is a simple and straightforward way to destroy it all the more interesting…

A story published last week in the New York Times recounts the findings of two key studies about spam. Everyone knows that spam is hard to defeat, and that generations of spam filters have only resulted in more sophisticated spam, which requires better filters, in a never-ending cycle of measure and counter-measure. What you may not realize is the volume of messages involved: according to the University of California study cited in the article, it takes on average 12.5 million spam emails to sell $100 worth of Viagra – just to take the most common example. Or, if you like, the exchange rate is somewhere on the order of 125,000 spam messages for each dollar received. Even more remarkable, however, was the fact that 95 percent of the purchases investigated by the study were handled by just three companies (one in Azerbaijan, one in Denmark, and one in Nevis, in the West Indies) – and all of them were made using Visa cards…

Now, it’s hardly surprising that most of these Internet purchases are being made by credit card; most e-commerce is done that way, since there aren’t a lot of other options. But the degree to which these offers are being funneled through only a few companies – and only a few banks and credit card processors – is quite another matter. Normally it isn’t possible for local authorities to put pressure on people who distribute spam, since it comes from outside their jurisdiction (and quite literally from all over the world on any given day), but getting local banks to block credit-card payments to any institution known to be used by spammers wouldn’t take much, and getting them to block payments to specific companies that are used by known spammers wouldn’t be much harder. This wouldn’t keep anyone from transmitting spam messages, of course, but it could eliminate any profit to be made by doing so, which would rather defeat the purpose of doing so…

On the whole, I think the Times reporters are being overly optimistic in saying that this will be the death of spammers. Even assuming that you can get local financial institutions to play along, and assuming that they really can cut off payments to specific foreign banks faster than spammers can find new ones, that won’t keep people from making payments using Pay-Pal, pre-paid credit cards, electronic fund transfers (effectively on-line money orders) or other methods. I would also expect to see spammers using legitimate companies (or at least ones that don’t send spam) as a front to clear their orders. But if this method works, it might be able to lower the volume of spam being sent overall, not just the number of Viagra-related messages. It might even be possible to lower the total percentage of emails sent world-wide that consist entirely of spam down below the 90% level once again…

No Fury

I was wandering around on one of the news aggregation cites this week when I ran across this story about a woman who found out that her significant other was cheating on her, and decided to get revenge by selling all of his stuff on the Internet. Since it’s mostly stuff she bought for him during the time they were together – and since it was left at her place after she kicked him out – no one seems terribly worried about the legality of these sales; a much more interesting question is whether there is any truth to the story. It seems that every item offered for sale on the site is displayed in a picture of the alleged spurned woman holding it while in various states of undress – accompanied by the promise that the higher the auction prices go, the less she will be wearing in the next round of pictures…

You can pick up the original New York Post story if you want to, but the basic concept is simple enough. A man is caught by his significant other sleeping with other women, so she decides to both get revenge on him and recoup some of the money she spent on him during their time together by auctioning off his abandoned property while showing off the attributes he has lost access to with his philandering ways. The basic story turns up on eBay and most other Internet auction sites quite often, as people attempt to obtain higher prices for the goods they are selling by engaging the sympathies of their potential customers. This can be a jilted groom selling his runaway bride’s wedding dress (one guy gained brief Internet fame by actually modeling the gown himself for the pictures), a bereft girlfriend trying to erase painful memories while getting out of debt, or any number of other scenarios, but this is the first one I’ve encountered that is actually playing on the desires as well as the gullibility of the audience. Which, if the Post article is to be believed, is resulting in as much as 1,000% markups on what are, effectively, just used clothing items…

Now, there is no immediate reason to believe that the site isn’t legitimate. Certainly, there are many cases of unusually attractive women being cheated on, and there’s no reason that one such individual couldn’t either be an exceptional web designer herself or else have access to one. Nor does it seem like that much of a stretch to believe that a scorned woman might choose to take a course of action that would be both financially rewarding and humiliating to her faithless lover. It does seem a bit odd that the woman in this case is trying to accomplish these things by allowing anyone with an Internet connection to stare at her body, but she undoubtedly knows the man in our story better than we do; if she thinks this is this best way to get his goat, it probably is. There’s also the matter that she doesn’t seem to ever run out of new belongings to auction off, and the fact that this whole business model bears a considerable resemblance to the “pay for my plastic surgery” sites (men donate money toward a female participant’s cosmetic surgery, and in return she posts revealing or naked pictures of herself post-operative), but even so, it’s hard to see what about this operation is illegal – or how you could ever prove anything if it was…

In the long run, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter where the goods being sold by this site actually came from, or if the woman in the pictures is actually the same one whose significant other stepped out on her, or even if any of that happened in the first place. The Internet is full of pay services offering risqué pictures, and retail sites offering over-priced personal items, and if someone has found a way to make both businesses more successful by combining them, I can’t imagine why this should matter to anyone. I’m just pointing out that, as in almost every other aspect of life on the World Wide Web, you probably shouldn’t believe everything you read – and even if you do, you may want to consider if it’s really worth paying ten times as much to somebody who has a good story (and naked pictures of themselves) even so…

For-Profit Follow-Up

Last week I mentioned the recurring news stories about for-profit educational companies – many of which call themselves “colleges” or “universities” despite not being accredited or able to grant any college credit or confer any degree – landing in hot water for a variety of reasons. A few days after that a story surfaced about the next round of those investigations going forward in Massachusetts, and I thought I’d point it out to you, just in case anyone missed it the last time this happened. You can pick up the original story here if you want to, but the basic story is the same one: the state is investigating the Apollo Group, which owns University of Phoenix, the Washington Post Company, which owns the Kaplan Career Center in Boston, and Corinthian Colleges, which owns the Everest Institute campuses in Massachusetts, for suspected unfair or deceptive tactics in recruiting students and having them sign up for financial aid…

The basic idea is simple enough: the for-profit schools run advertisements extolling the virtues of their curriculum and boasting about the quality jobs that an applicant will be able to get once they complete the program. People sign up for these “colleges” and are given student loan applications to sign; the “schools” then take the money and provide worthless training classes that do nothing to make the student more employable. At the end of the program, the “student” is just as unemployable as ever, and is now also tens of thousands of dollars in debt, while the for-profit “school” walks off with the money. In extreme cases, the “schools” don’t even both to provide a full set of classes; they just tell the “students” that they have flunked out of the program and keep the remaining student loan funds. It’s simple, outrageous, and up until now does not appear to have been illegal; these companies could probably have continued doing business indefinitely if they hadn’t attempted to defraud the state Federal student loan systems…

What makes the situation fantastical to me, at least, is that for the most part these for-profit schools did not have to resort to fraud in the first place. At least some of these for-profit university classes are taught by real teachers and offer training that, while probably not up to the standards of an accredited university, are at least of some use. All these companies needed to do was say that upfront, and they could have continued harvesting a good living out of the gullible, the desperate, and the credulous. Instead, they appear to have given into greed and crossed that line; with investigations now running in Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona, it’s only a matter of time before more states (and possibly the Federal government as well) start chiming in. The best of these companies – or, at least, those ones playing it closest to the rules – might survive the resulting firestorm, particularly if they abandon anything questionable and keep their heads down, but the companies that are basically a scam with school books probably won’t…

I tell you all this not because I think that any of my readers (assuming I have readers) are likely to fall for a scam like this, or likely to start a scam college of their own, for that matter, but rather because it’s an excellent example of somebody pushing things too far – and eventually falling victim to their own greed. Most of these companies began as legitimate training organizations, with no intention of ever trying to defraud the state, the Federal government, or their customers – but that’s how they ended up. It’s something to keep in mind the next time you’re wondering if you can get away with something that’s ethically questionable, just this one time – because down that path lies madness, and the possibility of becoming even more foolish than the fools you are defrauding…

Choose Your Price – For Charity

Two concepts we’ve talked about in this space over the past couple of years have been the choose-your-own-price business model and non-traditional non-profit business models. For those joining us late, the choose-you-own model is exactly what it sounds like: instead of setting a price for the product or service, customers are encouraged to pay whatever they feel the product or service is worth. In most of the published cases to date this has resulted in a higher-than-expected revenue stream, indicating that while some people will take advantage of such setups, enough other people will pay more than retail price to make up the difference. By the same token, non-profit organizations have a hard time soliciting donations during an economic downturn, and have thus turned to a number of non-traditional fund-raising methods, including entrepreneurial businesses where all profits go to support the agency’s mission. It seemed obvious that sooner or later someone would combine these two ideas…

You can pick up the story from the local television news station here if you want to, but for the past year one of the Panera Bread locations in St. Louis has been operating on a name-your-price basis, with all of the profits going to charity. The company officials quoted in the story admit that there have been a few problems with people taking advantage of the program to scam free food off of the place, but there have also been cases of people leaving $500 for a $15 meal, which makes up for a lot of freeloaders. In general, the store only makes about 80% of the retail equivalent, but that’s still enough to generate a significant amount of profit – while feeding a significant number of people who actually can’t afford any food. I don’t know what Panera’s overall margin is like, but apparently there’s enough overall to absorb the difference between name-your-price and regular operations, while still offering opportunities to feed the hungry and train people without job skills. The company is now planning to open a new one of these every few months around the country…

Now, we should probably note that not all such operations are charity-related; nor do all of them work quite this way. In the famous Radiohead example, the band was selling an album for whatever visitors to their web site cared to pay, which did include nothing, and despite the fact that an estimated third of the visitors selected a price of zero, the average sale price was around $4. This is significantly cheaper than the $12 to $19 a CD copy would have cost in a record store, but was also much more than the $1.10 the band would have received from their record company per copy sold through conventional channels. It’s also worth noting that most entrepreneurial operations started by non-profits function on conventional business lines, and do not allow people to select their own prices. Still, you have to wonder how well either of these concepts would translate into other types of business…

The great thing about non-profit entrepreneurship is that it doesn’t rely upon the generosity of strangers; it generates money by earning it in exchange for goods or services, and can often be used for the purpose of providing jobs and job training to people who need those things. Over the years we have seen enough evidence to conclude that name-your-price operations can make even more money than the conventional approach, assuming they’re done right. And while it would be naïve to expect either type of operation to replace the more traditional types of business on a wide scale any time soon, they do serve as excellent reminders that the common way of doing things isn’t necessarily the best way…

The Latest Thing

There are times when I find myself reading an online story and reflecting that the goods or services being profiled are definitely not for me. Sometimes – as in the case of the $40 per bottle spring water or mattress sets that cost more than my car (actually, more than all of the cars I have ever owned put together) – it’s because I don’t have millions of dollars in disposable income, and sometimes – as in the case of underwater hotel rooms or body piercings – it’s because I can’t imagine enjoying the experience. However, there was a story on Bloomberg.com last week about a Russian company building private “survival bunkers” that I really think falls into both categories…

If you don’t feel like hitting the link, the company started building panic room installations for wealthy Russians who were afraid of terror attacks or home-invasion robberies (or occasionally both) and graduated to full-scale underground shelters which are described as being able to withstand a variety of natural and man-made disasters. They’ve been particularly busy lately, it seems, because of anxiety regarding the possible end of the world in 2012, although in fairness we should also acknowledge that the dramatic increase in terror attacks in Russia over the past ten years is probably also a factor. The article also profiles two American companies, who say they have been receiving a dramatic uptick in business since the tsunami and earthquake in Japan this spring, and are still receiving more inquiries that usual during the resulting nuclear meltdown crisis…

Now, I don’t mean to criticize the people who are buying these shelters for protection against floods, volcanoes, riots, civil wars, or acts of God. I wouldn’t want one myself, due mostly to a moderate case of claustrophobia, but I can certainly understand the appeal of having an armored fortress from which you could see off hoards of idiots with weapons or waves of floodwater in perfect safety. The people who are afraid of terrorists and thieves are missing the point, I think, which is that unless you plan to somehow fabricate everything you will ever need in your bunker, you’re going to have to open your door (either to accept deliveries or else to go shopping) – and when you do, you will be as vulnerable as any other citizen. If anything, you’re drawing more attention yourself by shelling out $400,000 for a private security bunker than you would by hiding in plain sight…

The people I find absurd are the ones who believe that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world next year, or that obscure Christian fundamentalist preachers have predicted the end of the world this Saturday, or that the ghost of their Aunt Sadie has told them that the world will end on May 1, 2066, and get a private bunker fitted out to prepare for the cataclysm. Even if we are willing to accept that the world will end in our lifetimes, I still fail to see what the point of having a private security bunker would be if the planet is crumbling into Rice Krispies around us. I also worry about anyone, regardless of race, creed, religion or gender, who starts telling me that he or she has a line directly to the deity or deities who rule this place, and that Something Bad is going to happen in a week or so. But by the same token, I have only admiration for the businesspeople who have realized that increasing popular belief about an approaching apocalypse is good for business, and have organized their firms to meet these basic needs…

Could your company help to fill some unmet need that people who believe the world is going to end in less than 100 hours could use? What about people who have some less spectacular security requirements that are not currently being met? Or just ordinary folks who need something that isn’t currently available in their market? Maybe you should think about this one…

Fresh Green Commerce

Sometimes a story comes along to which I really can’t add much; it may be so filled with snarky comments that mine aren’t needed, or so completely obvious that my commentary would consist entirely of the work “Duh!” repeated over and over again, or so infuriating that my commentary would consist entirely of the symbols found at the top of your keyboard. And then we have the story from last month that begins “Finding your desk covered in animal dung doesn’t have to be a bad thing…”

You can find the original story from AOL News here if you want to, but the basic concept is simple: a company in Thailand is recovering wood fibers from elephant dung and using those fibers to make paper products. Elephants, it seems, will eat almost any vegetation they come upon, but can’t digest a large percentage of the fiber from the plants they eat. So the entrepreneurs in the story gather up the elephant dung, separate out the fibers, and then process them the same way any other paper company does, eventually turning the product into stationary, greeting cards, notepads and boxes, photo albums, and a variety of other paper products. You can find the website here if you want to check out their story, or browse their unique items for sale…

The company claims that their method of obtaining wood fibers is both cheaper and more ecologically sensitive than any of the more traditional methods, and that the response to their initial operations has been so impressive that they are now using cow, horse and giant panda dung as well. A quick glance over their online store site suggests that their prices are reasonable, and their actual products are available in a wide range of attractive styles – all of which would be impressive in any start-up company using the Internet and featuring environmentally correct methods, but is truly staggering when we realize what the company’s primary raw material actually is…

Over the years, I have encountered a number of different business models that make use of waste products and by-products from other businesses, the most noteworthy being a disposal company in California that gets paid to haul away garbage which they then pile into a huge composting operation, which produces top-quality compost, which they then sell at a huge profit. The paper company in today’s story has taken this one step further, using actual waste products as their primary raw ingredient – which could only be more perfect if they were actually paid to haul away the dung for disposal. I’m not sure if their product will ever find the sort of acceptance that good compost does (given that most companies sell compost by the ton, and there will never be any lack of customers who want to buy the stuff), but I can think of a dozens of uses for their stationary without even leaving the realm of humor (printing your letter of resignation on it; sending a letter or greeting card to someone you don’t especially like, etc.), and potentially thousands of mainstream paper applications as well…

Of course, some people will never accept the use of paper that began life as elephant dung. These individuals will insist on good, old-fashioned paper products that are obtained by clear-cutting old-growth forests, killing off thousands of animals, plants and birds that once lived there, pulping with dioxins and bleaches that will kill everything (including all of the humans) downwind or downstream from the paper mill, and a variety of wood processing stages that actually smell even worse that elephant dung does in the first place. In which case I believe that we are completely justified in asking who the joke in this story is actually on – or at least sending them a card…

Would You Buy a Used Condo From This Man?

A few posts back I brought you the curious case of Donald Trump’s for-profit educational enterprise, called Trump University, of course. If you’ve been following the news stories about these for-profit companies that claim to be colleges, universities, or at least something more than a complete waste of time and money, you probably already know that most of them are, in fact, a complete waste of time and money. What puzzled me at the time (and led to the rather snarky title of the piece) was the question of why people would pour thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into such an organization knowing that it was not accredited, could not grant any degree or college credit, and in fact was mostly just a profit center for Donald Trump. Even granted that I work in Education, and might therefore be expected to know or at least care more about the issue than some folks, the information about for-profit schools in general (and the Trump University lawsuit in particular) have been all over the news lately. Why would anyone invest their savings in such a thing?

Well, before you answer that, consider the cases currently pending on behalf of literally hundreds of people who purchased real estate (usually condominiums) in real estate development programs endorsed by Trump, but not otherwise affiliated with the Donald or his company. In most of the cases, the true relationship Trump had to the projects (basically getting paid a few million dollars at a time to put his name on them – and occasionally meet with potential buyers – but no other financial or managerial connection) was kept confidential, but that does not change the fact that with the Real Estate Bubble straining at every seam and all of the experts saying it was time to move to something else, these people still spent money they could not afford to lose on projects for no better reason than the Trump name on the prospectus…

You can pick up the MSNBC story here if you want to, which includes a link to the video about the situation from last April, but the facts are fairly straightforward. All of these investors claim that their only reason for committing to these dubious developments was Trump’s name on the project, and had they known how little he actually had to do with them, they would never have done so. I don’t think we can criticize them for wanting to ride Trump’s coattails into an easy fortune; certainly, a lot of people have made money on real estate in the U.S. over the past decade, and nobody has made more with less effort than Trump himself. The more important question is what made these people think that Trump wouldn’t screw them over in this fashion in the first place? And even more importantly, what made them think that just because Trump could make money on a project, so could they?

To do him all possible justice, Donald Trump has never claimed to be a philanthropist, or a champion of the common man, or anything other than a hard-nosed businessman in a cut-throat industry. He has made money fairly consistently over the years, and will do so in the future, at least in part because he has the resources to sink money into long-term projects, work through intermediate cash flow difficulties, and cut his losses and move on where absolutely necessary. The average small investor has none of those things; expecting to make money on real estate the way Trump does because you’re reading his notes or following him onto a project is like believing that you will be able to play basketball like Michael Jordan if you wear the same shoes. Except that it’s stupider than that; an average person has a very small chance of lobbing a ball at a basket and having it accidentally fall in, but the average person has no chance whatsoever of being able to suddenly raise $100 million using other investments for collateral…

Whether or not Trump’s masquerading as one of the developers on these projects is actually fraudulent is for the court to decide, but even if it was the investors had a responsibility to do their own due diligence and find out if those condo projects had any reasonable chance of being completed, let alone returning a profit. Not doing so and just assuming that anything Trump puts his name on MUST be a goldmine would be a lot like buying gold because some Fox News pundit who owns a gold brokerage tells you that the price of gold is going to rise – which is to say, stupid beyond all human reason…

Of course, people have done that recently, as well…

Don’t Touch That Dial!

A long time ago, if you wanted to catch someone’s attention on a television channel, you’d have an announcer with a deep voice intone (with as much urgency as he could manage) the phrase: “Wait! Don’t touch that dial!” In the same era, most of the news reporting was done in newspapers, which were all limited to dead-tree hardcopy editions (since the Internet was still no more than a glimmer in Al Gore’s eye), and if you wanted to get people to pay attention to a given story, you needed a headline. Not just large type or fancy typeface, since all big stories would have those, but something witty, intriguing, eye-catching, or funny. The sad part is that this long-vanished time was only twenty or so years back, and most of today’s kids have never seen a television with a dial, and have no idea where the expression came from in the first place. The rise of Internet news sources mean that most people do not read hardcopy papers anymore – which may or may not be a bad thing in itself, but is definitely leading to the death of headlines…

Ironically enough, I found the story in The Atlantic Online , where the author was decrying the rise of search-engine oriented reporting, which includes headlines that are search-engine friendly. When you’re searching for news online you’re only going to read articles that your search engine pulls up, and those will be based on keywords, not on wordplay. The example given in the linked article was about Conan O’Brien refusing to take a later time slot in order to return Jay Leno to the 11:35 pm Tonight Show. The hard-copy headline was “Better Never Than Late,” which is at least moderately funny; the online version of the story was headlined “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno...”

The question raised by the article (and by several of the experts who were interviewed for it) is whether or not this is a good thing. On the one hand, you can’t look for information online by searching for puns or clever wordplay; there will never be any consensus opinion about what is funny, or even what constitutes a “good” pun in the first place, and humor is both culture- and language-specific. Supposedly, some of the funniest jokes in the history of Mankind have been created in Finland, but since they don’t translate well (and not that many people speak Finnish), none of the rest of them will ever get to hear them.

On the other hand, even if humor would translate to the Internet, you still can’t use it to search for data, exactly because the artfully written headline doesn’t contain enough information. If there are millions of online references to Conan O’Brien on any given day (and there are, especially during times like the Jay Leno replacement controversy) you have to be very precise in your search terms to find anything useful – and you don’t want to hear about the problems that a colleague of mine who researches teen pregnancy prevention programs has in trying to get relevant information off of the Internet…

The thing is that while most new technologies must offer some advantage (either practical social, medical, economic or all of the above) in order to be adopted in the first place, many of them have a counter-balancing dark side, as well. There’s no way any sane person would want to return to the days of print-only data searches; the library research that would have taken a grad student like me weeks can now be accomplished in minutes without leaving my desk, and the advantages to doctors, bio-medical researchers and related fields have almost certainly saved a few lives just during the time you have been reading this blog post. But just as automobiles lead to air pollution and Freon for air conditioners leads to holes in the ozone layer, the die-off of headlines (and retirement of the people who write them) is inevitably making all of us less literate and less funny…

The Grad School Diaries: The Summer School Paradox

When you’re a college student showing up for the first day of class, there’s an anticipation you feel showing up for class on the first day; a very human anxiety in the face of the unknown. At lower levels of your education you don’t get a feeling like this; most of the teachers are known to you, by reputation if not in person, and even if a specific class is just a disaster waiting for a place to happen, you probably didn’t have much choice about taking it in the first place. But as a college student, you’re assumed to be an adult, and you probably selected the section and the instructor (if not the actual class); you may even have selected which building in which your section of the class will be taught. If failure comes to you here, it’s entirely your own fault – and the price of failure will almost certainly be higher than just being left back for a year and having to try again. What they don’t tell you is that it’s exactly the same from the other side of the podium…

For summer of 2010 I had volunteered to take any class the Department needed covered, which sounds a lot like shameless toadying until you realize that we get paid more if we work in the summer – and there are people in line ahead of me for the Management Strategy class I normally teach. I’d also prefer the challenge of getting ready for a class I’ve never taught before to sitting idle, and there’s also the fact that if I end up looking for work at a teaching college somewhere (and I might have to; I’m not exactly one of the fair-haired children of this discipline) it would be helpful to have experience in multiple courses on my vita, but I didn’t mention any of that when I threw my hat in the ring. In the event, it turns out they had an overage of people who wanted to teach strategy, but a shortage of people for Management 325 (Human Resources), which is how I wound up teaching a subject that isn’t from my specialty or even my side of the Department. Which, in turn, is how I wound up here, in a classroom on the first level of the business complex, with one week to learn a whole class worth of material, adjust to working in a windowless classroom with state-of-the-art audio/visual systems and miserably bad ventilation, and absorb an entire semester worth of unfamiliar class content…

Fortunately, public speaking isn’t exactly a new thing for me; I’ve taught three previous classes here at MSU, plus all of the seminars I did for the Santa Monica College SBDC program (over a hundred two-hour programs in all) and the three-day grant-writing programs I taught back in the consulting firm days. But the truth is, no matter how many times I do this, it’s always the same: I’m always a bundle of nerves until it’s time to go on – and then I step up to the lectern and switch on the microphone, and I know exactly what I’m going to do. At least this time I’ve got the slides and materials for the class ready to go – courtesy of one of my colleagues who normally teaches 325 (and gets much higher teacher evaluations than I do). Now all I have to do is find the balance of when to speak from the podium, when to wander into the class, when to cue the slides and when to start the videos, and get a feel for the content I’m trying to get across…

Because the truth is, I may not know much about Human Resources in the sense of being to quote chapter and verse from management textbooks or the foundational articles in the field – but I know a lot about managing and leading people. It’s possible that I’ll never amount to much in academia, just as I never amounted to much in business. But every time I see that light go on behind somebody’s eyes; every time one of the people listening to me out there in the class suddenly grasps the concept I’m trying to explain, and realizes what it might mean to them as a working manager; every time one of my students learns something he or she never knew was even a real thing, I realize that it doesn’t matter about all of the things I’m not. I am a teacher – and it will do fine…

When is a career screw-up and lightly-regarded doctoral student not a failure? When he’s making both business and academia just slightly better than they would be without him. I’ve traveled a long way to learn this Summer School Paradox – but I think I’m glad I did…

Guy Walks Into a Coffee House…

I don’t actually have a joke to go with this line, but I’m starting to think I might have to write one, since recent developments in the coffee house industry and the quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry are starting to make it clear that something very strange is going on. First, Starbucks started offering sandwiches and salads at lunch time; then they added breakfast fare for people who want a fast meal but want something better to drink than mass-produced fast-food restaurant coffee. McDonald’s fought back with their highly successful “McCafe” line of coffee products, offering coffee house quality at reduced prices and improved production times. Starbucks introduced a larger sized iced tea beverage, and McDonald’s retaliated by lowering their large drink size to $1 indefinitely. Now McDonald’s is striking at the heart of the coffee house business model, and it remains to be seen if it will work – or what Starbuck’s can do to reply…

There have been a number of stories about this in the press, but you can catch the USA Today Online story if you want to. Basically, the idea is that McDonald’s is refitting all of its 14,000 U.S. locations to be more comfortable, and to include a separate counter area and seating area for people who just want to order coffee products – effectively, a coffee house within a McDonald’s. It’s an intriguing idea all by itself, but when you add in the recent changes to their menu (to include “healthier” options, although hardly anyone would call them “healthy”) this practically constitutes a repositioning of the entire company and its brand. For decades, the knock against McDonald’s was that they valued neither the health (considering the menu) nor the comfort (given the steel and hard plastic furniture) of their customers; with all aspects of the operation designed to process as many people (and as much money) as possible in the smallest amount of time. If this story is correct, however, this may no longer be the case…

Naturally, there are going to be complications in pulling off such a rebranding. McDonald’s key demographic is still families with small children, and while the sort of young adults who hang out in coffee house operations is a strong market for them, you can’t really have a coffee house environment in a setting where there are large numbers of small children running around, jumping off of things, bouncing off of things, and shrieking in that way they do. It’s certainly true that if this image change works it could enable McDonald’s to not only do better against Starbucks, but also to engage all of the higher-level QSR operations (the authors linked above suggest Chipotle and Panera Bread, but anything else in that class would also possible) for a larger share of a more lucrative market than they have traditionally controlled. At the very least, it would give them a clear selling point over Burger King and Wendy’s, and might help to cement their leadership in their original segment; it’s also an awful risk…

All of these actions are expensive (the authors estimate the project at $1 billion), and there is no guarantee that it will improve their market share or per-unit income in the slightest. Past experience with McDonald’s attempting to put more attractive-looking stores in more upscale areas suggests that people have some difficulty taking an upscale McDonald’s that seriously, and there’s certainly no indication that people will start hanging out in one the way they do in coffee houses, even if the McDonald’s location does offer Wi-Fi, comfortable seating, or coffee house style beverages. And while it is unlikely that Starbuck’s will start selling burgers, it’s certainly possible that they will attempt their own changes in format or product – and the other QSR burger stands almost certainly will…

It’s possible that none of these things will happen, of course; that the latest development in the burger wars will never be more than a passing fad. But I’m going to go ahead and write that joke anyway. Let’s see: “A guy walks into a coffee house and says ‘Give me three double cheeseburgers with everything…’”

I’m Shocked, Shocked I Tell You!

I really hope that no one who reads this blog (assuming that anyone does read this blog) is taken in by the headline, since in fact this story is about an event that should come as no surprise to anyone with the intelligence of compost: several disgruntled former students are suing Trump University, claiming that the high-priced online program is a scam. It was one of those occasions when mere sarcasm failed me, as I stared at the San Francisco Chronicle story about people who signed up for the course believing that the material would have been written by (or at least read and approved by) Donald Trump himself and that their $1,500 investment would bloom into millions, only to find out that the course has no useful information whatsoever and is mostly just a high-pressure sales pitch for the company’s $35,000 “Gold Elite” course on the same subject…

Of course, if any of these folks had bothered to research Trump University, they would have quickly realized that it has no accreditations of any kind, can not offer any degrees at any level, and in fact does not bother trying to issue college credits, since no known institutions would accept them. They might also have encountered dozens of online comments about the complete lack of value these programs have, the almost total non-involvement of Trump himself, or the previous times the “university” has taken flack from various critics for being nothing more than a publicity stunt, not teaching anything of consequence, or not actually being a school (let alone a university) in the first place. It’s one of those times when even a little due diligence might have saved the plaintiffs in these cases $35,000 (or at least $1,500), although we must acknowledge that it would also have cost them some very lucrative opportunities to sue a public figure just before he declares his intention to run for President…

It’s another one of those cases where I have trouble figuring out exactly who is scamming whom. On the one hand, the idea that there are any grown adults in this country who could actually believe that something called “Trump University” wasn’t just another attempt by The Donald to make money trading on his celebrity is so absurd that it’s getting dozens of comments on Fark.com even as we speak. On the other hand, even if making money off of the credulous, the naïve and the stupid isn’t technically illegal, it’s also not very ethical – and during the current economic crisis many Americans who wouldn’t otherwise fall for this sort of malarkey are responding to the Trump University ads, on the grounds that it’s got to be better than whatever it is they’re pinning their hopes on currently…

It will be interesting to follow the progress of the court cases. I won’t offer any predictions – and I must caution my readers (assuming I have readers) once again in the strongest possible terms NOT to take the word of bloggers without legal degrees or licenses to practice law about legal matters – but I think that a lot of this may come down to how serious Trump himself is about running for office. If he’s serious, then he needs to either be exonerated by the courts (by winning the lawsuit) or play the generous white knight (by buying off a few of the plaintiffs and then having them record glowing testimonials or some such thing). On the other hand, if all he wants is more public attention, then there are two grand old American truisms that come into use here: “There is no such thing as bad publicity” and, of course, “There’s a sucker born every minute – and two to take him…”

Apparently, sometimes the two are billionaire real estate moguls and their websites – but the principle is otherwise the same…

The Ethics of Extra-Credit

I’ll admit to you upfront that I like a sure thing as much as the next guy; it makes me an annoying opponent in a card game or a tactical simulation, but it comes in handy every time I take on the chief operations officer or executive officer position, and it has saved a few of my consulting clients from the fruits of their own folly on occasion. So, as you might imagine, I’ve offered my own students the opportunity for extra-credit assignments ever since I became a teacher myself. Looking over the stack of them on my desk today, however, I’ve realized that what I only intended as a way for some of my students who are unlucky, over-committed, or possessed of more work ethic than intellect to do better in my class has gotten a bit murky on several dimensions, and I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at the concept…

First off, you have the obvious problem that my extra-credit assignments have to involve actual work, or they won’t be fair to any of the students who didn’t bother about doing one. Unfortunately, they’re also enormously popular with that class of student who is all about gaming the system – which in this case means getting the highest grades possible while doing the smallest possible amount of work. Consequently, I get examples every year where someone has filled out the required number of pages by repeating the question, restating their summary information four or five times, or using double or triple spacing and margins that take up a third of the available space. I don’t award the full number of points for these, and the authors will almost inevitably end up whining on my email about “But I did the assignment! I should get all of the points!” when, in fact, they gave me two pages of writing and seven pages of nonsense…

Then there’s the fact that these assignments offer an advantage to those individuals who have the best writing and research skills (I usually do research papers). I try to get around that by having a wide range of topics – and by awarding the same number of points for a really interesting 5-page paper that a routine 10-page paper would get (and more than a boring 12-pager would receive). I will also try to give some leeway to my non-native speakers (typically 10 to 20 percent of the class), since, in fairness, their knowledge of English is far superior to what my understanding of Korean, Chinese, Farsi, or any other language is ever going to be. But the truth is, a lot of my students are also accounting, finance or marketing majors, who are better at mathematics than I’m ever going to be, but don’t regard a ten-page paper as being an easy afternoon’s work the way I do. Native speaker or not, this assignment is difficult for them – and I still have to mark them off for poor grammar, colloquial diction, or sub-standard formatting, or (as noted above) the assignment will not be fair to the others…

Of course, I also get people who are lifting entire passages of their paper from other sources – both papers written by other students in other universities, and (in the more extreme cases) even parts of the scholarly papers they are supposed to be reviewing for me. Dealing with the plagiarism itself isn’t a big problem – there are official rules for that, and I have no more choice in enforcing them than any other instructor does – but I always worry about the ones I haven’t caught: have I just given an “A” to someone whose family had more money to give them? There’s also the issue of busting people who are only trying to get a passing grade and graduate instead of failing and being sent home in disgrace, of course, but that will come up whether or not I offer extra credit assignments. Am I just leaving myself open to being swindled by students with more money than ethics by doing this?

Of course, whining, cheating, and an unfair/uneven playing field are issues I have to deal with regardless; basic issues like inconsistent education levels within the U.S. (and sometimes within individual states) would insure that no matter what I did. But the question remains: am I giving the unlucky but hard-working a second chance by offering extra-credit assignments? Or am I merely giving the lazy, the dishonest, and the very persuasive an advantage not available to my more honest students this way?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: Some Days You Get the Bear…

When I was younger, I was heavily into wilderness activities, on the grounds that I enjoy natural settings and new experiences and you don’t have to interact with people all that much when you’re walking through an old-growth forest in the middle of nowhere. Rafting is fun if you like getting wet every few hours and don’t mind staying close to the river. Rock-climbing is strenuous, but the sense of accomplishment you get after going up a rock face without benefit of stairs or a ladder is amazing, provided you’re not afraid of heights. Mountain biking wasn’t really a thing, yet; there were BMX types available, but those were for closed-course rides similar to the “motocross” tracks for motorcycles. I think I would have enjoyed a proper mountain bike track, but by the time I could have afforded such a vehicle I had neither the time nor the appropriate mountain on which to ride one. And while I’m a passable horseman, I’ve never had the money (or the inclination) to rent, let alone buy, horses…

Consequently, I spent most of my time hiking and backpacking. I wasn’t a particularly fast walker, even then, but when I was in shape I could easily keep going long after many of the faster people had to stop for the day, and I’d maintain the same pace with a five-pound day pack or a fifty-pound fame pack; when you’re already overcoming the inertia involved in moving a body as big as mine, the additional mass isn’t that big a deal. I really enjoyed being out in the woods alone, or hiking along a ridge with a view of dozens of miles with no other humans in sight, and I’d cheerfully put up with the disadvantages of freeze-dried food, lack of bathroom facilities, or various animals (ranging from ants to bears) attempting to make off with your food. It’s interesting to note, however, that despite all of the time I’ve spent in wilderness areas, I had never seen a bear in the wild as of 2010. I’d been close enough to bears to hear (and in one or two cases, smell) them, and I’d had my food stolen by one on occasion, but all I had ever seen were tracks, claw marks, and the occasional dropping…

I had just finished recounting this point to my long-suffering spouse (who has known me for the better part of three decades at this point, and knows all of my stories by heart) when a large brown animal broke from the underbrush to the right side of the rural highway we were driving long, and sprinted directly across our path. For a split-second, I thought it might be a large dog, a stray cow, or at most an errant deer, but as we came closer there was no mistaking the gait, the shaggy coat or the small ears; it was a North American black bear. I’d estimate its mass at a little less than mine, which would make it about half-grown; a juvenile, not a cub. Assuming it got enough to eat that summer and filled out properly, it would be a fine, 400-pound specimen by the following winter. I stared at it, as it ran off the road and vanished into the brush on the left side of the highway. Then I cleared my throat, and added, “I stand corrected…”

As it happened, my wife had been reading the map and ignoring me when the bear appeared, as any reasonable person will when hearing one of my stories for the forty-eleventh time, and I had to point out the (still just visible) rump of the animal vanishing into the space between the trees. It’s too bad she couldn’t have seen the whole bear, but that view settles what it was; neither a cow nor a deer has a tail like that, and no dog has hindquarters that size. If you believe in synchronicity, I suppose it would make sense that I’d finally see a bear running free just after telling someone that I never had. If you’ve been reading these posts, however, you already know that wildly synchronistic events just happen in my life. It’s possible that these things happen to everyone, and my child-like sense of wonder is the reason I keep noticing them, but I prefer to think it’s the other way around: that the on-going “audio-visual weirdness” that is my life has helped me to retain my child-like sense of wonder in an increasingly unpleasant adult existence. Either way, though, the world is a strange place – and I haven’t seen even the half of it yet…

Is This a Great Country, or What?

One of the funniest stories I’ve read in the past decade hit this week, when the New York Daily News ran a feature about the merchandise commemorating the death of Osama bin Laden the day before. Most of the commentary about this – including the comments section at the bottom of this news story – has been highly negative, dwelling on how such commercial transactions (including the attempts to market them) are trivializing a momentous even in World History, or how these gleeful offerings are making light of the taking of a human life, or even that these ventures prove whatever the observer’s personal beliefs about crass commercialism happen to be. I agree with every one of these points in their entirety, and I also ignore them in favor of the subtle point these merchandising efforts make about people in general and Americans in particular…

Contrary to popular belief, the average person has no more desire to be personally involved in violent upheaval, trouble and danger (commonly known as “adventure”) than they do to being eaten by slugs; the fact is that most people would not seek a career with the Navy’s legendary SEAL teams or their Army or CIA counterparts even if they were physically able to do so. Most of us just want to survive, to be sure of living beyond the next day or so, to belong to part of a community or group that accepts us for ourselves, and (if possible) to be recognized for the things we do well. If these goals can be achieved by slapping custom lettering or graphics onto hats, t-shirts or commemorative plates (and at least two of them can be), then most people will see no problem with doing so at the highest profit margin possible. The people who make stadium blankets and custom crockery may grumble a bit, since it will take them a week or two to get their products ready to ship, whereas the people who make t-shirts and hats can be ready to go in a matter of hours, but even they will probably concede that these are merely the breaks of the game…

Then we have the curious prospect of people, most of whom would never wish death upon another human being (and many of whom could not find Pakistan, or possibly even New York City, on a map) cheerfully purchasing the hats, t-shirts, blankets, plates, artwork and goodness knows what else, and proudly wearing/displaying all of it. Most of them probably have some idea who Osama bin Laden was, and the majority could probably tell you that the 9/11 Outrages were his fault, but what the purpose of those attacks might have been, how either the man or his organization fit into the scheme of international politics, or what the long-term ramifications of his sanctioned killing might be are probably beyond the interests of most folks. All most of our countrymen really care about is that our armed forces tracked down and killed a terrorist (whatever that might mean) responsible for killing at least 3,000 Americans (and some number of less important people from less awesome places) and that means that we win, America rocks, and their lives (complete with the buying and selling of tasteless consumer products) will continue uninterrupted for the foreseeable future…

We’re simple people, Americans. All we really want is to be left alone, to go about our business making things and selling them to each other at a very reasonable price, and try and carve out a piece of the pie that’s just a little bigger than our parents had. For over two centuries now, everyone who has tried to interfere with that surprisingly mundane American Dream has ended up in the mud somewhere with a bullet in their heads, and the next morning the Americans he or they were trying to destroy have gotten up early and gone on with the business of trying to sell each other cheaply-made schlock…

It’s the greatest country in the world, and we laugh at anyone who tries to say otherwise – and then attempt to sell them a crappy t-shirt…

Career Day

One of the long-standing jokes among humanities majors is calling any degree program without a clear professional application (e.g. anything outside of accounting, nursing, engineering, or one of the other professions) a “Do you want fries with that?” degree – on the assumption that any job you can get with a bachelor’s degree in English or Sociology (for example) will involve asking that question on a regular basis. It’s a measure of how far our society has evolved – or perhaps deteriorated – into a service economy, in that previous generations would more likely have mentioned something about selling shoes, delivering mail, or teaching high school. But today those are considered relatively good jobs, and working for a burger joint has become the bottom of the barrel. None of which prevented over a million people from applying for a job at McDonald’s last month…

Unless you frequent the McDonald’s restaurant in your neighborhood, or pay close attention to the business page, you might not have noticed that the company had decided to have a national “Hiring Day” event on April 19, 2011. They had originally announced their intention was to recruit and hire 50,000 new personnel, but the most recent estimates from around the country put the total at somewhere closer to 62,000. Now, in some respects, that’s a great thing; it’s 62,000 people who will almost certainly make more money than they could get from Unemployment or Welfare, and could (at least in theory) advance and develop to gain management experience, medical benefits, paid vacations, and the experience they would need to get somewhat more desirable jobs in a year or two. On the other hand, it also means that there are somewhere on the order of 938,000 people wandering around the country this week trying to come to terms with the fact that they weren’t quite good enough to get hired at McDonald’s…

Now, I want to be clear about this: I am not putting down any of the people who applied for jobs at McDonald’s. The fact is, I’ve had some jobs that were probably worse than anything they are likely to experience, and I can’t say I’m any the worse for the experience. The new McDonald’s employees are not likely to be asked to work any 25-hour shifts (that’s 25 consecutive hours, without more than a half-hour break) for example, and they almost certainly won’t be asked to work unpaid overtime unless they get promoted to management. By the same token, they probably won’t be asked to clean up the Incontinent Supplies aisle because the janitor called in sick – because McDonald’s probably doesn’t have an Incontinent Supplies aisle, unless our definition of junk food has gotten considerably wider than it used to be. It’s also very unlikely that they’ll be asked to deal with collections operations that include death threats, commission-only sales positions where the boss will belittle you any time you fail to make quota, or people who assume that because they’re good at math they know more about managing people than you’ve learned in a decade-plus of doing just that…

The fact is, I’ve fun on jobs like Audit-Team Leader, Swing-Shift Billing Facilitator, Pizza Delivery Person – and if Resume Writer was still a job, I’d probably still be running the Los Angeles District of the resume company. I’ve also seen people have a completely miserable experience on what are supposed to be high-prestige (or at least high-desirability) jobs, and enjoy crap positions that no sane person would ever want. From this I’ve come to conclude that most of what they told you on Career Day was nonsense made up by people who have never been within fifty miles of a clue, let alone had one – and that anything that pays the bills, puts a roof over your head and food on the table, and doesn’t put more wear on your nerves than you can handle is a good thing, even if it does sometimes involve asking customers if they would like to purchase shards of potato starch fried in vegetable shortening…

The Ethics of Professional Ratings

We’ve talked a lot in this space about people using the online rating systems on Amazon, Yelp, and various other virtual communities to commit what is essentially vandalism; damaging the reputation of people or products (or occasionally entire companies or communities) simply because they can – and because there is no way to hold people accountable for such behavior. In some cases there is a recognizable profit motive involved (people will attempt to damage the competition in order to further their own sales), but in many cases it’s nothing more than the impulse to throw a brick through a window just to hear the glass break. Things have gotten so bad in some sectors that businesses have begun fighting back, as in the case of doctors who are requiring patients to sign confidentiality agreements before agreeing to begin treatment (see one of the original stories here if you want to)…

For the moment, these online postings are still considered to be protected speech, at least to the same extent that any other published writings are. That is, knowingly publishing something that defames the subject is considered libel, and legal action can be brought against whoever wrote it if his or her identity can be confirmed in the first place. The problem here is that a single online post made by a single disgruntled patient can, at least in theory, destroy the reputation a doctor (to take the obvious example) has spent decades establishing. Moreover, the patient wouldn’t have to publish any information they know to be false; the same effect could be achieved entirely through statements of opinion or simple dislike. It would be the equivalent of a patient in pre-Internet times taking out an ad in a national magazine saying that a specific doctor is a jerk, or that his bedside manner makes you wonder if he spent his formative years working in the stockyards – except that very few print publications have ever had a circulation of more than a few million, whereas everyone on Earth with an Internet connection can read what you said about the doctor you don’t like…

Even worse, patient confidentiality laws would prohibit the doctors from commenting on anything their patients say about treatment, methods, or manner in the professional setting. Even something as simple as “I never did that!” might not be permitted, and explaining what they did or why would almost certainly be out of the question. There would be no effective way for any doctor to defend against any sort of online rumor-mongering short of a full-blown lawsuit for libel, and even that might not do anything to alleviate the damage. A libel suit is a civil (not criminal) action, so there would be no way to have the miscreant jailed, and if the defendant is broke (it doesn’t cost much to get online, and leaving comments on the Internet is usually free) there would be no way for the doctor to recover either compensatory or punitive damages. All of these factors might make you think that the “gag order” forms some doctors are insisting on are completely reasonable – until you consider that such agreements are not only a violation of your First Amendment rights, they’re also keeping you from telling other patients about REAL misconduct…

The real question would appear to be whose rights should be given priority in such cases. Or, if you like, do the rights of people to make unfounded and harmful charges against innocent practitioners supersede the rights of doctors to practice without worrying about innuendo? Or do the rights of people to say what they want and report on whatever happens outweigh the rights of practitioners to practice without having to watch their backs?

It’s worth thinking about…