The End of an Era – Again

 It really shouldn’t be news to anyone that a lot of businesses have been having trouble during the current world-wide health crisis. Even if I were to tell you that the pandemic has driven an entire industry into extinction, you probably wouldn’t be surprised. But if I were to tell you that the industry in question was video rental stores, your reaction would more likely be: “There are still video retail stores?” Regrettably, the answer would appear to be: “Not anymore…”

Two stories appearing on the MSN.com site this week give an idea of where the economy is going these days, and the news isn’t very reassuring. First up, a story that originated in The Washington Post details bankruptcy effects in a number of industries during the last year, some of which have seen double or triple the number of Chapter 11 filings from the year before. Even more disturbing, though, is the corresponding rise in Chapter 7 filings. Companies can come back from Chapter 11, or at least make an effort to raise money, find backers, or sell off assets, but Chapter 7 means you’re not even trying to do anything more than liquidate the company and turn out the lights…

In the midst of all of the restaurants, retail stores, shared-space ventures, business incubators, entrepreneurial start-ups, and entertainment ventures that are going under (or at least circling the drain), you may have missed the story about Family Video, the last known multi-unit video rental company, having to shut down operations in January. Compared to behemoths like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video, Family Video was a relatively modest operation, but the fact that it was still in business years after all of the other chains were long gone suggests that their story might be worth a closer look…

According to the story which originated in Newsweek, Family Video managed to avoid the fate of companies like Blockbuster through a combination of strategies that included unconventional asset allocation, unrelated diversification, and selection of otherwise underserved markets – which is to say, purchasing the buildings in which their stores were located instead of renting them, building pizza stands into the same business space, and putting the stores into smaller communities where other forms of entertainment are limited and many residents can’t afford cable or satellite service. None of these are particularly complicated or innovative, but the fact that Family Video used them while their competitors did not goes a long way towards explaining why they were still operating in 2021 while their competition closed down years ago…

Now, I’m not suggesting that anyone should be upset at the demise of video rental stores, or the industry in general. Streaming video services are cheaper, more convenient, offer more viewing choices, and these days even produce their own exclusive content. There was never any real question that the days of any business requiring you to pick up and return physical media were limited from the day the first pay-per-view services appeared back in the 1990s. But as the linked article notes, this latest business failure is going to put another 5,000 or so people out of work, and eliminate one of the only entertainment options available, in a large number of communities that are already being hit by an economic disaster potentially as destructive as the health disaster currently ravaging much of the world…

When I think back to the days – not that long ago – when the big video rental chains were powerful enough to influence which movies and television programs got funded, or advertised heavily, it can be hard to believe that they’re gone now. But the same can be said about record stores (and, increasingly, bookstores), soda fountains, full-service gas stations, video arcades, fondue restaurants, resume writing services, and many others, and the world goes on without noticing or caring in the slightest. It makes you wonder what other common business types won’t be around in another ten years – and what world events will finish them off…

Protective Parents or Flaming Hypocrites?

 I’ve written in this space before about ordinary people generating risqué content for online distribution, and questioned if anybody other than the people involved and their families (and, presumably, their customers) have any real right to complain about it. Granted that somebody who us posting adult content on social media while also broadcasting who they work for probably shouldn’t, complaining about content that you had to track down and then pay to access is reminiscent of the joke from the last century about somebody being offended by nudist neighbors they had to use a telescope to see at all – that is, it’s stupid. But if anyone out there is surprised about private school faculty and/or religious organizations going berserk over such a situation, I’ve got to ask if you are at all familiar with American culture…

You can pick up the story from the People magazine Human Interest page, or from the local television station’s story about it, but the case seems to be spreading all over the Internet. It seems that the local Catholic diocese has decided to expel three students from their school in Sacramento, California, because parents of some of the other kids found out that their mom posts “adult” pictures of herself on a subscription site called “OnlyFans.com.” Up until the scandal broke, the mom in question was an unremarkable member of the community, who actually served as a volunteer teacher’s assistant or “Room Mom” for one of the second grade classes as the school. Now, however, she and her children appear to have been blackballed from all Church facilities in the diocese…

It seems worth noting that the woman at the center of this case insists that none of her pictures are actually pornographic, and that this is not being disputed by the school, the Church, or even the other parents raising an (anonymous) ruckus over the matter. I should also point out that “OnlyFans.com” is a subscription site that does check the ages of subscribers, and that the mom in our story doesn’t advertise her work; you’d have to know who she was, deliberately go looking for her, and then pay to get access to her pictures before could see them. I could also point out that by the time any child is old enough to have any interest in risqué pictures of any kind there is no power on Earth that will prevent them from finding some, even if they aren’t pictures of a classmates’ mother…

Now, I’m not about to suggest that any organization should be required to utilize volunteers or employees regardless of who those people are or what else they do. Certainly, there are people I wouldn’t want directly interacting with a room full of seven-year-old school children. Moreover, a religious school is, by definition, a private organization, and is therefore not subject to Equal Opportunity Employment laws or First Amendment protections. But throwing three children out of your school because you don’t approve of something their mother does on her own time to make extra money and/or improve marital relations does seem a bit harsh. It’s hard to imagine what harm the kids themselves could possibly be doing to anyone – and if any parents are allowing their seven-year-old children to access adult sites on the Internet, with or without adult supervision, they probably deserve whatever happens as a consequence…

The other question that strikes me is, how did the parents who sent in the packet of pictures to the school authorities get them in the first place? It’s possible that somebody’s kid got access to their credit card or hacked the site’s firewall, but given the vast amounts of pornography available for free online it seems unlikely that anyone would bother. Absent any evidence to the contrary – and the school hasn’t even claimed to have any – I think we have to assume that someone in the community got wind of the mom in our story posting adult pictures of herself, and then spent hours or days combing through the seamier side of the Internet until they found the pictures. At which point my first question isn’t even “Why do you care?” so much as it is “If you are so against this type of material, why are you surfing adult websites in the first place?”

Think about that one really carefully before you answer…

Here We Go Again - 2021 Edition

Fifty years ago, the United States Airforce had a problem: its premiere fighter, the F-4 Phantom II, while exceptionally fast and capable, was also big, heavy, and expensive. For the new generation of aircraft, the service requested a high-performance air-superiority fighter to replace the Phantom in that role, and a simple, light-weight, and relatively inexpensive aircraft capable of flying both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions. The results were the F-15 Eagle, arguably the best pure fighter of its generation, and the F-16 Fighting Falcon, one of the most capable and widely-used fighter-bomber types ever built. Critics complained that the F-16 was still too expensive, and crammed with too much equipment, but it is hard to deny that the plane was very successful, given its combat record…

Thirty years later the United States was looking for a new generation of aircraft to replace the F-15 and F-16 – not unreasonably, considering the technological development during those years. Consider, for example, that in 1971 some of the most capable computers in the world still required most of a small room and were less powerful than the phone in your pocket. The new F-22 Raptor fulfills the air-superiority requirement quite well, and both the manufacturer and the Department of Defense insist that it has never lost an air-to-air combat to a peer competitor. The problem came when the Air Force decided to buy the F-35 Lightning II to replace the now 44 year-old F-16. Intended to be lightweight, inexpensive, and reliable, the F-35 has proven to be none of the above – and now it seems as though even the top brass are admitting that…

An article on the Forbes website this week discusses the request from the Chief of the Air Force for a new lightweight and inexpensive multi-role aircraft to supplement the F-35. The general compares the F-35 to a Ferrari, explaining that you don’t drive your Ferrari to and from work every day; you drive it on Sundays and special occasions. This is true, of course – exotic sports cars generally have a lifespan of 25,000 miles or less, and you’d have to be out of your mind to drive one every day – but it doesn’t speak well for the F-35, which was intended to be a replacement for the F-16 but has instead suffered from massive cost overruns, lengthy teething problems, and the installation of far too much exotic, temperamental, and heavy equipment…

I’ve written in this space before about the problems with government budgets in general, and the Air Force’s problems with vehicles that are insufficiently sleek, thrilling, and pointy to suit their image in particular. In this case, no one doubts that the USAF needs a multi-role fighter, or that it would be possible to develop a more advanced and capable aircraft for this purpose than the venerable F-16. The problem is that with the Air Force’s perennial battle to get a bigger share of the defense budget than the other services, and the U.S. Congress’ tendency to allocate funding based on getting its members re-elected (as opposed to spending money on things we actually need), there is a very real chance that any future attempts to acquire a light, cheap, and reliable multi-role warplane will end up exactly the way the F-35 did…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that anything about this situation is simple, or easily solved. All kidding aside, it really does take years to develop a new airplane, and getting the balance between offensive capability, defensive capability, and maneuverability just right in any piece of military equipment is a challenge that predates both the airplane and the United States of America. But unless we want to continue throwing money down a rat hole (or a pork barrel), somebody needs to sort out this situation before the next piece of light, cheap, and reliable war gear turns into a gold-plated waste of time – and the whole thing starts all over again…

Drive-by Groceries

A few weeks ago I decided to try out one of the curbside pickup services offered by our local supermarkets. I’ve avoided them for several years now, partly because I prefer surveying the products on offer before making my selections, and partly because there are some things I want to check for myself – expiration dates, freshness and lack of mold, amount of fat and/or gristle, and so on. I trust the company not to try to pass off expired goods on me, if only because of the massive legal and regulatory problems that would cause them, but the difference between something that expires on Thursday and something that is good until the following Monday can be important in my household, especially when you only go shopping once a week. Recently, though, there have been offsetting considerations…

 Unless you’ve been living on another planet since January of 2020 you already know about the world-wide health crisis that makes going out in public a risky proposition, but there are other issues worth the mention here. For example, I already didn’t like people who insist on standing close enough to you in a checkout line that you can tell what they had for lunch; these days, though, that’s practically germ warfare. I also hate people who insist on arguing with the cashier about every price, why the store should accept coupons for things they aren’t actually buying, or why corporate has chosen to impose any one of hundreds of policies. And don’t get me started on people who insist on trying every credit card they own – three times each – before reluctantly admitting that they may not have paid their bills in a while…

And who’s even mentioned people who won’t wear a mask, or who insist on explaining at length why they have the legal, moral, political, or religious right to infect anyone they want to yet?

I’m not going to specify which vendor I was using, any unless you are from this part of the country you probably haven’t heard of it anyway, but like most supermarket chains these days they have their own smartphone app and a website where you can pick out the items you want to purchase. First, the good news: setting up an account isn’t difficult, and the website isn’t hard to navigate. It can take a very long time scrolling through lists of products to find the exact size and flavor you want, and the “search” function isn’t as much help as you’d probably expect, but setting up the order isn’t hard.

 Finding the pick-up location was a bit of a challenge the first time. There are eight parking spaces on one side of the lot with a phone number to call when you arrive, but the parking lot is big enough to land a 747 on, and there’s no indication of where the pick-up spaces are. You also have to plan out the trip in advance – there is a lead time before they can get your order ready, and only so many pick-up times in any given day – but I expected all of that. A much bigger issue, at least for me, was the stock-outs…

The website has a number of products on it with an “out of stock” notation on them, but this does not appear to be tied into the individual store’s Inventory Control system, because almost a quarter of the items on my list were out of stock when I arrived, and the crew member processing the order offered me substitute products instead. Some of these were acceptable (I really don’t care what shape my French fries are in) but others weren’t (my wife will not go near anything cherry-flavored except actual cherries), and there were a number of items for which no practical substitute exists. And there was at least one case where I didn’t want the substitute product, but ended up getting it mixed in with my order (and having to pay for it) anyway…

Now, I’m not saying that going inside the store would have helped with any of these issues, particularly the stock-outs. There were a few items in my order that I haven’t seen on the shelf in weeks now, but I selected them anyway, since they weren’t marked at “out of stock” on the website, and it was always possible that they had some in the stockroom that hadn’t been put out yet. And there are some health and hygiene products I’m not going to trust someone to pick out for me anyway. But while I don’t believe the curbside service will ever completely replace going into the store and looking for things I might need, I can’t deny that there is a definite utility to not having to deal with quite so many stupid, annoying, entitled, or diseased people when I go to the store every week…

We Can Get Them For You Wholesale

 Have you ever been shopping online and found yourself wondering about the user reviews? There are some that seem natural enough – if you ordered a child’s wading pool, and it turned out to be the size of a soup bowl, you’d probably be peeved enough to leave a negative review. By the same token, if you ordered a bottle of floor polish and discovered that it also cured athlete’s foot, waterproofed your boots, recovered lost data from your hard drive, killed mildew in your shower, healed minor cuts and bruises, and make a satisfying mid-morning snack – all at once – you might be moved to write in and extol the virtues of this wonderful product. But if you spend any time reading such reviews, you will also find huge numbers of them that go on for far too many words about products no one could possibly care about…

If you’ve ever wondered how such reviews get posted in the first place, or, for that matter, how some truly appalling products manage to accumulate dozens (or hundreds) of five-star reviews full of superlative praise, it’s possible that you’re dealing with the owner and/or manufacturer writing fake reviews in an attempt to boost sales. There have also been cases of people buying up a product and then attempting to inflate its reputation before unloading it at a profit. But it is also possible that somebody, somewhere, has just bought and paid for those reviews – wholesale…

You can find the story on the BBC website if you want to, but the basic idea is that the consumer group that publishes the “Which?” magazine – somewhat like Consumer Reports in the US – went looking for firms offering fake product reviews, and found some that hire large numbers of free-lancers to generate unique reviews of the product. Unlike random reviews generated by expert systems, or bots, or those created by cutting and pasting pre-written passages repeatedly, reviews of this type are almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing – precisely because they are written by real users, without a script to follow. What makes these fake reviews so problematic, though, is that they are available in large numbers at a discount…

Consider, for example, one offer that the folks at “Which?” turned up, with a bulk order of 1,000 fake reviews for just £8,000 (about $11,400 USD as of this writing). That might be beyond the means of a small start-up company, but it’s cheaper than most television ads cost to make, and competitive with what having your ad run on a local television station. Moreover, the fake reviews can remain up indefinitely, while a broadcast channel or streaming service will charge you for every time you ad is viewed. If your fake reviews are believable, they could go on generating new sales for years into the future, and even if nobody actually reads them, the positive impact of a thousand 5-out-of-5 reviews will dramatically improve your aggregate product rating. Best of all, it will be almost impossible to sue you for false advertising or prosecute you for fraud…

Now, I will admit that I have no idea how many people out there still believe everything they read on the Internet – although, if the events of the last year are any indicator, there do appear to be a lot of them. And I suppose that it could be argued that if the worst thing that ever happens to you in e-commerce is that the combination floor polish, water seal, data-recovery, mildew-killer, antiseptic, and snack food product that you bought because of all of the glowing reviews turns out to be useless in any of those functions, you are still a very fortunate person. Just remember that no matter how legitimate someone’s user reviews look, there is somebody out there who is offering to get them for you wholesale – and plan accordingly…