Food Snark

I wasn’t planning to do a follow-up on yesterday’s post about IHOP – or, as they have temporarily re-branded themselves, IHOB for International House of Burgers. I figured that mocking them for the promotion – not so much because it was ill-advised as much as it was pointless and probably redundant – would be a fun post to write, and hopefully read, and that everyone else would lose interest in the story as quickly as I did. A generation ago, or even a decade ago, that would probably have been the case, but in the world of social media nothing ever goes away quietly…

Not surprisingly, Business Insider ran a short piece on Tuesday recounting some of the replies that competing hamburger chains had tweeted, which is a valuable service for those of us not currently on Twitter, by the way. Wendy’s already has a reputation for snarky tweets, so you would probably have been expecting them to comment. Their reply was “Can't wait to try a burger from the place that decided pancakes were too hard,” which I feel shows the proper spirit. Red Robin, another likely competitor I had mentioned in yesterday’s post tweeted that “We’re as serious about pancakes as @IHOb is about burgers,” which is probably also what you’d expect. Seeing A&W Restaurants get into it by tweeting a version of their logo turned upside-down and adding “We don’t know what it means either,” was a bit more unexpected, because I hadn’t realized that the restaurants division of A&W was still in business…

IHOP appears to have been expecting the tweet storm, as well, since their response “We don't want any beef with you, we just want to share our beef with the world," seems a little too rehearsed to be natural. Their CEO was later quoted as saying that “If we have other people in the world of burgers commenting on our burgers, it can only help,” which also suggests that they had anticipated the reaction from the industry. I personally thought that Waffle House had the best reply, though; asked by one of their fans (in a tweet) “Please stay waffle house don’t become burger house!” the company’s own Twitter account replied “No worries here...”

We’ve discussed the question of whether all publicity is good publicity, or whether being publically mocked – regardless of the platform on which that is happening – is worth the lost business from people who will decide that your original move was bone-headed enough to motivate them to avoid your company. In this case, I really doubt whether IHOP is actually going to lose business over the IHOB strategy; they’re an iconic part of American life, and anybody who wants cheap breakfast food at all hours of the day or night (and doesn’t have a Waffle House nearby) will probably continue going there…

Whether or not their new burger offerings gain traction, or whether people start visiting the restaurants during the off-peak lunch and dinner shifts in which they were trying to pick up ground remains to be seen, however…

Equal Time

I’m not sure why being a fair-minded man is so important to me. It’s possible that it’s just how I was raised – our family is known for a very direct honesty, to the extent that some of my cousins don’t understand me when I try to tell them that this behavior is unusual. But whatever the reason, I do try to see both sides of a discussion, and to provide both sides of the case when I present news stories for your consideration in this space. So in the interest of even-handed discussions, I should probably acknowledge that just because I spend so much time in this blog making fun of the airlines, that does not mean that transporting huge numbers of people great distances in complex machines according to an arbitrary schedule and set of rules is easy. On the contrary: as recent events have shown, even something as small as a mishandled diaper can bring a flight to a sudden halt…

According to a story on the UPI “Odd News” page this week, a United Airlines flight from Phoenix to Cleveland was delayed and ultimately cancelled because one of the passengers tried to flush a diaper down one of the onboard toilets, causing the plane’s waste disposal system to back up and shutting down most of the rest of the lavatories. The story does not specify the type of aircraft or the total number of passengers affected by the cancellation, but if there were over 71 people on board it wasn’t a CRJ or ERJ type; you would need something at least the size of a 737 or A320 to get that much payload. What that tells us is that this wasn’t just a case of some small puddle-jumper not being up to the challenge; this was a major episode aboard a 200-ton airplane – caused by something weighing less than a pound when empty…

Now, the point of my bringing this up is that I really don’t feel we can blame the airline. Every lavatory on every United aircraft is equipped with signs in multiple languages, as well as International pictograms, telling the user not to put foreign objects down the toilet, and anyone with the intelligence of a newborn hamster should be able to figure out that doing so is a bad idea. By the same token, United’s maintenance and repair people could be the very best in their field, and follow all FAA, NTSB and manufacturer’s specific requirements for maintaining their aircraft, and there still wouldn’t be anything they could do about sabotage – which this is, albeit unintentional sabotage. At least, I certainly hope it was unintentional…

The American Author Tom Clancy once pointed out that the minimum number of mines your need to build a minefield and keep anyone from moving through a specified area is zero – you just need to issue a press release claiming those waters or lands have been mined, and then watch your adversary try to prove a negative in a life-or-death situation. Recently, the same point has been made about using disinformation to shut down airports in the U.S. – you don’t even need actual bombs; just leave a suspicious package in the baggage claim area and the whole airport will be shut down for days. Do this in enough cities and you could completely disrupt commerce in an economy that is already on the shaky side; economic warfare at its most basic level. And now we find out that you could completely cripple the U.S. airline industry, and possibly that of every other nation in the world, using nothing but a battalion of colicky babies and really stupid parents…

I’m not saying the airlines don’t deserve public mockery and scorn for some of the outrageously stupid and incompetent things we’ve seen them do over the past few years, or for the political idiocy that led directly to making the terrorist outrages of September 11 possible. I’m just pointing out that given how inherently difficult it is to run an airline in the first place, it would really behoove them to get the little things right. Because it approaches a mathematical certainty that somewhere, sometime, some other passenger is going to try flushing something unfortunate at the wrong moment – or something equally stupid…

Only in the Movies

I’m not going to be posting much over the month of August, since my cohort is in the middle of our run-up to Comprehensive Exams, and most of us are working fifteen to twenty hours a day reviewing the past two years of class assignments and readings. It’s one of those times when you really wish you had the “Time-Turner” gadget from the third Harry Potter story, so you could keep turning back time and pick up as many additional study hours as you wanted. The problem, of course, is that most of us will never have as much time as we want, even given an effectively infinite supply of it – and, so far as we know, mucking about in closed temporal loops is so impossible that it makes flying broomsticks, magical transfigurations and owls that are actually smarter than bread mold all look positively realistic. You can’t run your life – or your business – like something out of a Hollywood blockbuster…

Take, for example, the fictional “Omni Consumer Products” company from the “Robocop” movie franchise. In the films, it’s supposedly a giant mega-corporation that wants to buy up the near-future version of Detroit, level the place, and build a utopian hyper-city on the site. To do this, however, they have to eliminate the crime rate first, and in order to do so they decide to invest in cyborg technology when their huge, armed and armored robots (the infamous ED 209 “Enforcement Droid”) prove unworkable. As a recent article on the Cracked.com humor site points out, this is a terrible idea, not just because of the inevitable unethical human experimentation or because of the equally predictable collateral damage that results, but also because it’s a completely inefficient way to accomplish such a task…

Now, let’s be clear about this: experimenting on people is wrong, even if said people are too dim to realize that their employment contract gives the company the right to do just that; I would go so far as to call it blatantly evil, in fact. But even if we leave the movie’s eponymous hero out of it altogether, the company’s efforts to build giant robots brimming with military-grade weapons to enforce municipal laws would already be stupid from a business or economics standpoint long before we ever get to the ethics of the situation. For what a single billion-dollar robot that doesn’t work would cost you could field a police force of 20,000 uniformed officers for a year – or, if you prefer, roughly five (5) times the number of police officers currently employed by the Detroit Police Department in real life. For what even a small fleet of Enforcement Droids would cost you could flood the city with uniformed policemen, not only eradicating crime (without resorting to machines that occasionally spray their surroundings with bullets before falling down flights of stairs) but also providing a huge number of new jobs and giving a lot of deserving people a chance at a better life…

“Why does he tell us this?” I hear some of you asking. After all, it’s not like anyone reading this blog (assuming anyone reads this blog) is actually the head of an evil mega-corporation that is going to start building robotic enforcers, let alone stealing people’s brains for cyborg utilization. I bring this up partly because, as the folks who wrote the linked humor piece correctly note, this isn’t even the most egregious movie example of corporate stupidity in the last twenty years, let alone the most evil. In fact, if you watch enough movies you could get the idea that all senior managers are not merely evil and without a conscience, but credulous idiots as well. Which brings me to my main point: in a world where people were willing to risk a multi-trillion-dollar eco-disaster rather than spend $500,000 on safety equipment, it’s hard to say that impression is entirely wrong…

People don’t fight wars the way it happens in the movies; people don’t build buildings, heal the sick, care for their families, or teach their students the way you see it up on the silver screen. Maybe, in addition to the other standards we maintain for new businesses, we should be asking if anything the management team is doing is pure Hollywood movie logic – and, if it is, preventing them from ever starting operations…

Fair and Balanced?

I was online reading news stories this week, and I came across a gleeful piece about how Newsday, the Long Island daily paper, made a huge mistake in making its web side a pay service. The authors were obviously appalled that anyone would be trying to charge for web content – even as little as $5 per week – and were crowing that after three months, only 35 people had signed up for the pay service. The authors also mentioned the $4 million that Newsday spent redesigning their website, and calculated that the paper has grossed $9,000 – suggesting that the remaining $3,991,000 was a waste of money, and that the site’s readership has dropped from millions of people each month to just 35. If you didn’t already assume a healthy skepticism about anything you read on line, let me suggest that this article would be a good place to start…

If you actually read down through the rest of the story, which you can find in the New York Observer online site, you will find out that the drop in traffic to the Newsday site is significant – it goes from 2.2 million unique visits in October to 1.5 million in December – but hardly the disaster the headline would imply. You will also note that the site is available free of charge to anyone who already has a subscription to the paper or subscribes to Optimum Cable, one of the local cable providers (which happens to be owned by the same people who own the newspaper). Together, that’s believed to be something along the lines of 75% of the population of Long Island. We might also wonder if the drop is actually going to affect the long-term performance of the paper, since it has only been three months since it became a pay service…

Now, no one is claiming that charging money for content on the Internet is an especially successful business strategy; most of the companies that have tried it so far have met with marginal results at best. It’s especially problematic in the news business, since there are still a large number of free news services available online, and all of them will carry the same news stories – sometimes literally, as in the case of stories purchased from the AP, UPI, Reuter’s and other wire services. And it probably is true that if the traffic flow to the Newsday site continues to drop the owners will find it increasingly difficult to sell advertising space on the page. I’m even willing to concede that life has become hellish for the local reporting staff working for Newsday, and that they are desperately unhappy with the current configuration of their employer (to the point of resurrecting the nickname “Hellville” for Long Island). The headline is still deceptive…

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it hardly matters if someone who runs a free-content website is complaining about pay-for-access sites; even assuming that they’re not jealous of the $9,000 in subscription money (that’s the equivalent of a LOT of paid Internet advertising, folks), they’re still right that charging for content is both obnoxious and silly – especially given the availability of alternate websites. I just can’t help thinking that if we’re going to hold up unpaid web producers (and bloggers) as some pure and unbiased reporting source, then we have the same responsibility for telling the truth and checking the facts as any other news source – and we deserve the same mockery and contempt when we slant the news to suit our own particular biases…

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong…