Best or Worst?

By now, any of my regular readers (assuming I have readers) must be aware that I spend a lot of time looking for products and organizations that have failed in amusing or instructive fashions – partly because I’m a business strategy teacher and a former failure analyst, and partly for my own amusement. To be fair, I have often brought you stories about the strange, bizarre and wonderful new ideas that turn up from time to time, some of which have actually lived up to the hype that their inventors and I have given them. This goes a long way toward explaining why the “Stupid” tag and the variations on the “Innovations” tag are so common on these posts. But much more infrequently, I will find a story online that might be either the smartest or the dumbest thing I have ever seen – or possibly both at once. Such was the case with the new movie theater design I read about today...

You can pick up the original story off the MSN home page if you want more detail, but the basic idea is that somebody decided to make a movie theater into an indoor playground. It’s got a typical screen and audio/visual equipment, but it also has a slide, a jungle gym, and various things to jump on, run around, and play with. They’re apparently going to include both conventional seating for adults (parents, one assumes) and kid-friendly seating areas like beanbag chairs and such. Since it’s difficult for smaller children to sit still and watch anything for two hours or more anyway, the people behind these facilities appear to have gone entirely the other way. Rather than trying to get people to be quiet and show respect for the other customers, they’re building a place where people can just let their kids do whatever they want…

Personally, I can’t think of any venue that would have less value for me, but then I don’t have (and do not ever expect to have) responsibility for any small children. I’m not the sort of person who takes children to age-inappropriate events, either, or at least I don’t think I am. Although I will concede that there are some people of my acquaintance who will never be able to watch a movie without annoying the crap out of everyone else in the building, and some of them are now well into middle age. But whatever the exact demographic of customers using these kid-friendly movie venues turns out to be, my strategy for dealing with them is simply not to go to any. The real question, from where I’m sitting, is what effect this will have on movie viewing experiences in other venues…

On the one hand, the existence of movie theaters in which the kids can run around and make all of the noise they want to might be a good thing. If we can convince any significant percentage of families with rambunctious children to go to such venues and leave the rest of us in peace, that could mean fewer disruptive children screaming and running around when we’re trying to watch a movie. On the other hand, I’m not sure that training people to assume that a given venue should make special provisions to accommodate their children is a good idea. It isn’t hard to imagine people who have grown up running wild in venues where they would normally be required to have some consideration for the other customers growing up to believe that they should always be allowed to do just as they like…

Of course, we should probably also concede that in recent years we have all witnessed increasing numbers of nominal adults who behave that way anyway. And we have already seen the appearance of movie theaters that do not tolerate any noise or disruption during the presentation, such as the Alamo Drafthouse organization, which does not permit very young children onto the premises at all. So maybe the idea of venues that serve the specific needs of a particular demographic group really is a brilliant idea; it might even be a way for this struggling industry to recover some of the market share it has lost to Blu-ray, DVRs, and Pay-Per-View/On-Demand cable services. Or perhaps this is the beginning of the end of movie-going as we know it…

I still can’t decide...

If Only I Had Known!

I may have mentioned once or twice previously that I have been writing fiction, off and on, since at least 1980 – and possibly before, depending on your point of view – with a grand total of zero professional sales to date. This isn’t actually all that unusual for amateur writers, as it happens. Even as the quality of instruction in writing has plummeted in recent decades, the value placed on writing has also declined, to the point where everyone who has never tried it seems to believe that writing a books is as simple as arranging 100,000 or so words into something vaguely coherent. At the same time, the decline of magazines, newspapers and books in favor of free content on the Internet has reduced the number of opportunities available to writers, until only the extremely fortunate or unreasonably well-connected (and those ghost writing for celebrities of various kinds) have any realistic hope of becoming published. But apparently, once you do actually achieve publication becoming a best-selling author may be as easy as writing a check…

You can check out the Wall Street Journal article online here if you want to, but the basic idea is that a number of services have appeared over the last decade or so that will artificially increase your initial sales for your new book by placing thousands of pre-orders in advance of your release date. Then when your book finally hits the stores it outsells all other new releases for that week, gets on various bestseller lists, and makes you a “Bestselling Author” – resulting in instant street cred, prestige, a much higher hourly or day rate for your consulting services, or whatever other befits you might be able to gain from being the author of a bestselling book in your field (whatever that might be). And the best part is that this method will work even if what you have written is complete twaddle, without any redeeming features…

Of course, the following week, when the artificially inflated sales dry up the book will drop to the level of sales it would have achieved on its own – possibly with a small increase for having been on any major Best Sellers list for a week, or at least until actual reviews of the book start to appear. In some cases, if the books has some utility or interest it may achieve modest sales following the jump-start, but these are unlikely to justify the enormous cost of using the tactic in the first place (up to $200,000 in some cases), and the Journal notes some examples where the books promoted in this fashion are actually experiencing negative sales (more people return copies each week than purchase new ones) once their debut week is over and they have to survive on their own merits…

Now, obviously this won’t affect writers of fiction as much as it will those authors trying to publish professional books, how-to and self-help books, business strategy books and so on, if only because the rewards available to a successful author of fiction are much smaller. Somebody whose novel appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List for a single week is unlikely to draw a lot of six-figure consulting or speaking engagements, and their ability to leverage such a “success” into a new opportunity will be much smaller – especially because a novel can’t have any utility; it’s either a good read or it isn’t. Most publishers are going to require more than just one good week of sales before they will order more copies printed, and if they ever find out about how you’ve gamed the system your chances are effectively shot. But I still can’t help wishing I had known about this strategy years ago…

I’d probably still be a scruffy blogger nobody ever reads. But I’d be a scruffy Bestselling Author who writes a blog that nobody reads…

Not For Everyone

I’m not sure what the worst job I’ve ever had actually was; I’ve worked some pretty bad gigs in my time, and many of them were bad in different ways. I’m not sure it’s fare to compare a job in which your boss is a total douche bag who makes your life miserable to a job where everybody is really nice, but the physical labor is unpleasant enough to make you wonder if permanent disability is really as bad as everyone says it is. By the same token, I saw an article on the wire this week that sounds like the worst job ever to me, but might seem like nice work (if you can get it) to someone who actually LIKES weddings…

A story being reported by Reuters tells the curious story of Office Agents, a Tokyo firm that rents out wedding guests to brides and grooms in Japan who would otherwise not have enough people (or too many of the same ones) at their weddings. That’s right; if you have no family or friends of your own, or if they’re all too cheap to travel to your wedding (or so flaky that you worry about them not showing up), this company will keep you from being embarrassed in front of your boss, your co-workers, and your new in-laws, by providing you will lots of clean-cut, well-dressed people to sit on your side of the aisle. For a small additional fee, they will even provide you with friends (or family) who can tell jokes, make speeches, or even give toasts…

Now, obviously, this kind of service has limited utility outside of Japan. In America, for example, there is much less pressure to invite your boss or your co-workers to your wedding in the first place, and unless you are unusually blessed, your in-laws will probably disapprove of you anyway, just because they’ve been conditioned by our dysfunctional culture to believe that this is how in-laws are supposed to behave. But similar firms do exist on this side of the Pacific as well; they’re more usually used to provide appreciative audiences at public events (product launches, sales meetings, franchising presentations, business conventions and so on), but they’re perfectly willing to furnish guests for social events if that’s what you want…

A much more interesting question, at least to me, would be how often people with perfectly good friends and family of their own hire professional guests just because their own guests would not look good enough in the wedding pictures. I know it’s a far-fetched suggestion, but I’ve met people who are easily that shallow; people for whom the wedding was more about looking good for posterity than it was about actually celebrating your (theoretically) most important relationship ever. I’ve never actually heard of a case where the marriage was shorter than the wedding reception, but growing up in Los Angeles I do remember a few cases where the marriage did not last until the end of the honeymoon…

In which case, maybe having some professional-grade pictures and video of yourself with a good-looking supporting cast wouldn’t be so bad. In any event, I’ll admit that getting paid about $200 USD plus food, drink and travel expenses doesn’t actually sound like a bad gig, especially for just a few hours work. But all things considered, if the pay was the same, I think I’d rather have a job delivering pizza than pretending to be somebody’s friend on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of their life…

Specialty Business, Specialty Problems

I could never understand what the big deal was with the Hooters chain. Possibly this stems from the fact that I was raised in Los Angeles and took my undergraduate degree in Santa Barbara, two cities in which one can observe women dressed far more revealingly than any Hooters waitress merely by going to the beach on a sunny day. And while I grasp the concept that many women find the infamous Hooters uniform offensive, the great American custom of voting with one’s feet seems to take care of this situation, in the sense that these women do not patronize Hooters restaurants, and the people (male and female) who do are not those who find the uniform offensive…

In fact, Hooters is hardly the only company that selects its personnel in accordance with a specific image; one can find similar (if less blatant) examples throughout the service and retail sectors. Many jobs actually have much more extensive physical requirements than those placed on the Hooters wait staff, who are, after all, only required to maintain a “glamorous appearance,” whatever that means. Specialty job functions may place requirements on the height, weight, girth, age, or physical abilities of the employees selected for those jobs, and no one seems to mind. Unfortunately, specialty businesses that require the services of specialty personnel experience a series of problems that will never occur in a mainstream firm…

There is a case being reported in The Des Moines Register this week that illustrates the point rather well. It seems that a waitress at the Hooters in Davenport was unable to report for duty after a domestic violence incident that left her temporarily unable to present a “glamorous appearance,” whatever that means. The waitress wasn’t fired or even laid off; she was just told that she wouldn’t be put back on the work schedule until her injuries healed. Unfortunately, the waitress was unable to just go without pay for several weeks, and had to file for unemployment – which left the company in a really unpleasant situation…

If they refused to pony up their share of the unemployment benefits the waitress would receive, they ran the risk of being lambasted in the media, mocked by bloggers and Fark readers, and sued for any number of discriminatory offenses, real and imagined. But if they paid the claim to someone who had not, actually been fired they ran a very real risk of having to pay those same benefits to anyone who quit their jobs, or being lambasted and sued for quite real discriminatory practices (e.g. providing benefits to attractive women, but not other employees who might have chosen to quit for other reasons)…

Now, I know some of you are saying “It’s their own fault; they chose to have this idiotic dress code for their servers, they can live with the consequences!” And, in fact, you’re quite right. If Hooters hired people based entirely upon their abilities as servers and dressed them in, say, white long-sleeved shirts and black trousers, the waitress in our story could have been back on the job as soon as she was well enough to stand up. It is only because they have chosen to occupy a specialized business niche and provide a specialized version of casual dining with specialty personnel that they are experiencing this monetary expense and public relations nightmare. The point here is that, sooner or later, every specialty business is going to face a similar or identical problem…

Maybe a business that needs very tall people will have to deal with injuries sustained on the overhead fans; maybe a business that requires very small people will be sued by someone who was pulled off a roof while trying to pull something up on a rope; maybe a business that requires people with exceptional senses of smell will be sued for using the wrong brand of disinfectant in the restrooms. Unless your workforce is an exact cross-section of the people who live in your community, your business will have this same problem, albeit in a less cosmetic sense, sooner or later…

How are you going to deal with it?