Out of the Pool!

Back when I first became aware of Uber, and the other ridesharing aps, I remarked in this space that the whole concept was something in which I would only consider participating if that were one of the demands made by terrorists holding my wife hostage. Even granted that these services have become extremely popular in some areas, the first-hand accounts of people trying to make a living driving for Uber sound worse than any job I’ve ever had, and the idea of hitching a ride with someone I don’t know has not appealed to me since a classmate of mine was murdered while hitchhiking forty years ago. But none of that really compares to the company’s new policy of kicking people off of its service if their “rider rating” drops below 4 out of a possible 5…

You can pick up the Business Insider article here if you’d like, but they’re usually reliable to be going on with. Uber instituted a two-way rating system a number of years ago, with drivers allowed to rate their riders as well as the riders rating their drivers. I’ve also noted in this space that this has resulted in at least some percentage of Uber users and drivers developing a “quid pro quo” arrangement – you give me five stars, and I will give you five stars” deals that effectively gut both parts of the system. This doesn’t appear to have prevented a number of problem drivers from remaining “employed” by Uber, although in fairness we should note that the number of driver-related mass shootings has gone down in the last few years. It also hasn’t, apparently, prevented large numbers of riders treating their drivers as badly as they do most other service workers…

It isn’t clear from this article if the company already has such an arrangement with the drivers, and I certainly don’t plan to start driving for Uber in order to find out. Originally, of course, the whole business model was supposed to be self-correcting: drivers who compiled a bad record wouldn’t get any riders, and riders who were unpleasant enough (on whatever dimension) would not be offered any rides. But with the aforementioned accommodations reached between drivers and riders, it would appear that the company has felt the need to take a more active hand in managing the actual rides it sells…

Now, admittedly, I have no experience with Uber in either role, and no clear information on what effect (if any) being banned from using the service for six months at a time would have on the behavior of habitual riders. But as someone who does spend his working life dealing with anonymous rankings in a system where there is no verification of the complaints being made or appeal for inappropriately bad feedback, I can’t imagine doing business with a company (or its “driver partners”) under conditions where anyone who wanted to could give me a one-star ranking based on my appearance, political affiliation, favorite sports team, favorite food, alma mater, city of origin, city of residence, country of origin, age, height, weight, religion (or lack of it), profession, or reluctance to pay them off in return for a better rating…

Whether this new policy will have any impact on the problems Uber is trying to fix, whatever those might be, remains to be seen, of course. I’ll let you know if I spot any follow-up on this story, but for the moment, the idea of being kicked out of the ridesharing participation pool without warning or chance for appeal for whatever inappropriate (or dishonest) reason somebody feels like dreaming up isn’t making me any more likely to consider using their service…

Call Me Paranoid…

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the ride service that calls itself Uber; if they don’t have anyone working the area in which you live it may not have come up yet. The company is based around the smart phone app of the same name, which allows the user to summon a driver to pick them up from just about anywhere and transport them, much the way a taxi service does. The difference is that Uber drivers are not professional drivers and they don’t have a cab driver’s license; they don’t even work directly for the company. For the most part, the Uber drivers are just private citizens with cars whom you can pay to take you somewhere, assuming that they happen to be out driving around the area you’re in. Working from a modest start in 2009, the company is now reportedly operating in 34 countries and providing both work (for the drivers) and relatively cheap and safe transportation to the users – or, at least, that’s the idea…

My original reaction to the concept, when I encountered it in New York last year, was that this was something in which I would only participate if that were one of the demands made by terrorists holding my wife. To me, it sounded like the service was made for carjackers (have a car and a smart phone brought right to your door, whenever you want!) and armed robbers, not to mention the risk to Uber passengers, such as being kidnapped or assaulted by some random driver. And while it is true that the company would have some record of what happened to you – and where the police could find the driver after you went missing – I still couldn’t help thinking that this would be cold comfort to you if you ended up being the victim. I’ve known at least two people who were killed while hitchhiking, and while this is somewhat safer that just sticking your thumb out, it doesn’t seem that much safer…

It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks so. In fact, apparently some of these things are actually happening, according to an article on the Daily Beast site earlier this year. It turns out that there have been complaints against Uber drivers, including at least one who was accused of raping a passenger, and several who appear to have gotten access to their riders’ personal information and stalked them over the Internet (and possibly in person). I haven’t seen any cases of Uber drivers being carjacked – I’m not sure how you would tell such a crime from a “regular” carjacking unless the company went out of their way to acknowledge it as such – but it seems unlikely that a large number of people can expect to place themselves in harm’s way on a regular basis without some ill effects. This is especially true when you consider the statistics on cab drivers being assaulted and robbed while on duty…

Now, I understand that the vast majority of Uber drivers are fine, upstanding citizens trying to scratch out a living as contractors for an Internet company, just as the vast majority of Uber customers are just ordinary people who are just looking for a safer, faster, and less expensive way of getting around the city. The problem is, most of the people who live in your town are probably good, honest folks, too, but that probably doesn’t keep you from locking your doors at night…

The author of the linked article describes being stalked by an Uber driver, who then tracked down her work email and her employer’s work email to protest the negative review she gave the driver as the result of the stalking incidents. He may not actually have meant any harm by this – it could in fact be a case of wanting to explain himself and apologize for his actions. But if the drivers can actually get access to passenger information (and the company has contradicted itself a number of times about how much of this is possible) then I don’t think it’s a very far stretch to conclude that eventually somebody is going to use that same information to do harm to one of their riders, either in person or in terms of identity theft…

All things considered, it just seems like a lot of risk to accept in the name of cheaper and potentially more convenient transportation – or for a low-paying part-time job. Or, to look at it another way, the entire business model looks a lot like another great idea ruined by people…

Supply and Demand

Quick, name the most basic remedy you can think of for there not being enough of something available in the market. Did you say, offer more money for it? Well, if so, that would indicate that you have a good understanding of how a free-market economy actually works, with the laws of supply and demand stating that anything for which demand exceeds supply with experience a price increase, and anything for which supply exceeds demand you should expect to see prices drop. It would also indicate that you know more about economics, or perhaps business in general, than the American trucking industry, which apparently can’t figure out why there aren’t enough truck drivers available despite lowering wages repeatedly over the last decade…

I got the story from the New York Times online, but apparently this issue has been kicking around for a while now. Adjusting for inflation, the average trucker’s salary is apparently 6% lower than it was a decade ago, despite an increasing demand for people to haul various goods and resources around the country. It seems obvious that this might be having a negative impact on the size of the labor pool – or, as reporter Neil Irwin puts it in the original article, “It takes a peculiar form of logic to cut pay steadily and then be shocked that fewer people want to do the job.” But what I found shocking, and truly appalling, about the facts of this case is the response from the industry, which is apparently complaining about a lack of skilled workers rather than instituting higher pay scales…

Now, I should come out and admit that while I have some experience with both shipping and logistics issues, I have no formal credentials in either of these areas, and I have certainly never run a trucking company. However, this has nothing to do with the issue at hand, because as Mr. Irwin correctly points out, saying that there is a shortage of skilled workers is effectively the same thing as saying we aren’t paying our workers enough. A significant number of drivers who are already qualified to handle these jobs have left the industry over the last decade due to declining wages, and the same factor makes training to be a truck driver increasingly less attractive. It is no exaggeration to say that this whole “crisis” is entirely within the ability of senior management to fix…

Without a great deal of additional research I can’t tell you if this situation is an outgrowth of runaway executive compensation (as Mr. Irwin implies), a decrease in the importance being placed on the role of labor, effects of an global recession, effects of an international economy, or some more subtle cause; I called the situation shocking because whatever the cause the solution is relatively simple. I called it appalling because this mentality – treating the workers like an unfortunate nuisance or an annoying inconvenience – runs counter to everything we have learned about management over the last hundred years, not to mention psychology, sociology and economics. The belief that you can ignore the workers, mistreat the workers, or act against the best interest of your workers and hope to achieve any long-term economic success has been debunked over and over again, and any first-year business student could explain the fallacy to you in detail – but apparently the people being paid multi-million-dollar salaries to run these companies can’t…

I can accept that even highly educated people might have trouble with subtle ideas – like the concept that outsourcing work to another country will throw people here out of work, eliminating the customers who would otherwise have purchased your product. But the idea that if your wages are too low, no one will be willing to take those jobs is another matter. I don’t know how this crisis is going to turn out, or if the Trucking Industry will be able to pull out of this tailspin while there is still time. But I really hope we can nip this kind of thinking in the bud before it destroys anything else…

They’re Everywhere!

So I’m getting into the line at the Hertz counter to pick up my rental car, when one of the employees working the floor tells me I can do all of that using one of the kiosks. Looking around, I notice a line of small machines, a little smaller than a bank’s ATM, each of which appears to include a touch-screen computer interface, a second monitor mounted at about eye level, and a telephone handset like the one on an old-style payphone. After a moment, I realized that there was a video camera mounted just below the upper monitor, like you sometimes see in a teleconferencing or video phone setup. The line in front of me was about 20 people, and there were only four live agents working the counter, which struck me as a rather silly way to spend an hour or more, so I decided to give the kiosk a try. I walked over and touched the “Start” icon on the lower screen…

It took a few minutes, but eventually the upper screen lit up, showing me the face of a woman and a nametag that gave her name and said she was working in the Oklahoma City call center. The conversation went about the way renting a car usually does, including the agent on the monitor trying to sell me on various upgrades and add-on services that I didn’t need (this wasn’t a driving vacation, it was a business trip, and I don’t need GPS navigation to find my way around the city in which I grew up). The kiosk had a card-reader which proved capable of reading the magnetic strip on my Driver’s license as well as the one on my credit card, and after a few more attempts to enhance my bill the printer built into the kiosk came to life and spat out my rental car documents. All I had to do was go find the numbered parking space the agent on the screen had mentioned and drive off…

I didn’t really have time just then to start interviewing my rental agent – and it can be really difficult to get someone to answer your questions when they can just press a button and disconnect your video call. But from what the agent told me the company maintains a very large call center at their Oklahoma City complex, and the agents working there may find their workstation linked to a Hertz kiosk anywhere in the world as needed – presumably assigned according to the language choice selected by the customer when they log into the kiosk screen. This means that instead of having a large crew of rental agents standing around in each airport and rental location waiting for customers to assist, the company only has one large group of rental agents standing around in the middle of North America, who can help our wherever they happen to be needed at the moment. With a couple of extra shifts this one call center could take care of customers in rental locations all over the world, all without leaving their cubicles…

Now, I’m not sure this idea would work in all industries. Most companies with equivalent business models have either build completely automated systems – telephone and website – that allow the customer to take care of his or her own business as desired, or have retained live personnel at their customer service locations, or occasionally both. The airline I was flying that day, for example, handles all of the check-in and seat-assignment tasks using automated kiosks, but has live agents standing by (one for every five to twenty-five automated terminals, depending on the location) to handle anything too complicated for the automated system. Since those duties do occasionally involve handling or moving baggage, an agent calling in from a remote location couldn’t handle them. But there are any number of other businesses that could use such a system…

I suspect that as telecommunications systems (and bandwidth) become cheaper it will become economical for more companies to use this sort of remote live agent system. Whether this is ultimately good for the customer, or for the employees, remains to be seen. But there is something appealing about the idea of a team of customer service representatives being stationed at every company location in the world simultaneously…

You Make the Call

There’s been a lot of ink over the past week about the response Carnival Cruises (the company that owns the giant cruise ship that ran aground off the Tuscan coast) to the accident and the demands from both the passengers and the public that they do something about the situation. The company has apologized for the incident at length; they’re blaming the captain for the whole situation, and offering to refund the cost of the trip and all expenses incurred while on board the ship. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be enough to satisfy some of the passengers, who apparently feel that the company owes them something more than just a refund for endangering their lives. The question of what the company does owe the passengers will be up to the courts to decide, but from a business standpoint the question is what should the company offer the passengers – and can they avoid additional trouble by doing so?

First off, the company can’t really expect that the refunds are going to be enough; their initial offer of 30% off on any future cruise would be asinine if that was really going to be their final position, but I think we are justified in being skeptical about that. The fact that the passengers really were in danger of their lives is hard to deny, given that at least a dozen of them were actually killed in the accident; it’s also hard to deny that the company was to blame for the event, since they hired the captain and gave him command of the ship. I don’t know if Italy has strict liability laws like the ones in the US, but even if they don’t it’s going to be very difficult for the company to claim that they had nothing to do with the wreck. And even if the company could defend all of these actions and walk away scot-free, they shouldn’t – because that effectively sends the message of “screw the customers, we don’t care if a bunch of them die and the rest have to abandon ship, we’re looking out for ourselves!”

I don’t pretend to know a lot about the cruise industry, but the concept of value added applies here just as much as anywhere else, and the number of technological innovations or management breakthroughs available is going to be limited. If you’re going to add value to a ship’s cabin, you might be able to get something out of larger rooms or better furniture, but it’s more likely to come down to how well the cabins are cleaned, how good the food and other services aboard are, and how good the customer service provided is. And none of that is going to matter if potential customers are convinced that the company is going to throw them to the sharks – either figuratively, in the sense of ignoring their claims, or literally, in the sense of letting them sail on ships that could be crashed onto a rocky coast because the person at the wheel is an idiot…

At the same time, the company can’t simply hand each passenger a blank check; they have a responsibility to their stockholders, not to mention their employees and all of the vendors and their people who will be out of a job if the company guts itself. Refunding all of the tickets from one cruise doesn’t sound like much, but with 4,200 people aboard, even a thousand dollars each takes us into multiple millions, and the company still has to worry about repairing the ship, assuming it can be repaired and also assuming that their insurance company doesn’t refuse to pay out on the grounds that the accident was human error, and the company should have known better than to give someone that careless his own ship. Add in the clean-up costs and whatever the Italian government decides to fine them for, and the company may not have the funds available to pay out much. And that doesn’t even consider how much revenue they might lose if people stop booking cruises over this incident…

Somewhere between a basic refund and a settlement package that will bankrupt the company is the optimal choice for Carnival in this situation. If the call was yours to make, how would you balance the needs of the company and your responsibility to your stakeholders with the needs of the customers and the need to maintain public relations and customer relationships? If you were CEO of the cruise line, what would your call be?

Worse Than That

Quick! What’s the worst thing you can imagine an employee doing with a large company asset that has nothing to do with his or her normal responsibilities? Sleeping or playing computer games while flying a commercial airliner has possibilities, and so does navigating a supertanker full of crude oil through dangerous waters while drunk, but both of those cases did at least involve driving the vehicle to where it was supposed to be going at the time you were supposed to be there. Sailing a barge into a major highway bridge because you weren’t paying attention, or derailing a freight train full of poison gas because you weren’t paying attention are both fairly egregious, but again, the employees responsible were at least on course, if not very conscientious. Opinions will vary, of course, but I believe the top spot has to go to a ship captain who wrecks a 1,000-foot vessel against the rocky shore of an island so that one of his crew can wave to family members who live there…

In case you missed it, MSNBC is running a story claiming that this is exactly what happened in the crash of a passenger liner off the Tuscan coast on January 13 of this year. It seems that the captain had decided to ignore the safety requirement of staying at least 500 meters (1650 feet) away from the coast of the island of Giglio, instead closing to about 150 meters so that the ship’s head waiter could wave to members of his family who live on the island. So far there are still 29 people missing in the wreck, and six bodies have already been recovered, making 35 deaths a genuine possibility. Wrongful death suits tend not to be quite as expensive in Europe as they are in the US, but this is a fairly extreme case, given that the accident was entirely caused by human error, and none of the people who perished in the crash could possibly have foreseen the danger or taken a reasonable action to avoid it…

There’s also a tremendous risk of environmental damage, as the ship went aground in the protected waters of a preserve for whales, seals and dolphins. Cleanup might not be quite as difficult as the operation following the Exxon Valdez incident, if only because the cruise ship has less oil to spill, but ocean clean-up efforts are never easy, and they only get worse in sensitive environments. This could easily destroy the entire preserve, as well as all consumer confidence in the shipping line. And we should probably acknowledge that the ship itself is worth somewhere on the order of $513 million USD all by itself, bringing the potential bill to $1 billion or more before the suing is done…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that any of my readers (assuming I have readers) would do something as monumentally idiotic as sailing a huge passenger ship (it’s the size of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, or about 68 feet longer than the Titanic, if you prefer) into shallow, rocky water so that a member of the crew could wave to people on the shore. I’m not even suggesting that we, as managers, should take steps to ensure that no one who could be stupid enough to do such a thing is ever given command of a major corporate asset like a $500 million passenger liner; that’s just not something you’re going to turn up on a job interview or an annual review. What I am suggesting is that we, as managers, should never assume that none of our employees could ever be arrogant, stupid or short-sighted enough to make an error this horrendous while working for us. The people who run this cruise line thought that, too…

And you know that it is only a matter of time before someone does something even worse…

254 Pounds of Awesome

If you’ve ever lived in a major city – not just Los Angeles, but anywhere traffic is a problem – you’ve probably had wistful dreams about personal aircraft at least once while sitting in a massive traffic jam, but unless you’re a complete geek you’ve probably never really considered what it would mean to own one. Most people will just point out that even with electronic beacons, full-time ground control, radar, ex-military pilots in charge, and the threat of being blasted out of the sky by trigger-happy F-16 pilots, we still can’t get people to stop flying airplanes into places they’re not supposed to be; and despite billions of dollars and thousands of deaths every year, we can’t seem to get people to stop driving drunk, either. Putting the two together has just never seemed like that good an idea to most people in the United States. But apparently, the New Zealanders have a different take on this issue…

According to a story on the Daily Telegraph website, a company based in Christchurch, New Zealand is planning to start selling about 500 personal aircraft per year at about $76,000 each; these “jetpack” units (which actually use ducted propellers, not jets) will have about 30 minutes endurance and a top speed of about 60 miles per hour. If the company can work out the fuel efficiency and payload issues, there’s reason to believe that the range could be increased to about 60 minutes in the air; certainly long enough for most commutes. With a ceiling of only about 8,000 feet there’d be no need to worry about life support, and with built-in landing gear, there’s no real issue about not being to land this craft without breaking your legs, detonating the gas tank, or destroying your $76,000 new toy. There’s even a parachute attachment, which means that it you are actually stupid enough to ignore the gas gage and plummet out of the sky when your engine fails, you still shouldn’t die. Flying while drunk is another story, however…

Now, in point of fact this isn’t really a new idea; people have been experimenting with ducted-fan and rotary-wing ultra-light aircraft (which is all this thing actually is) for decades now; there was a very similar design that was actually considered for use in the Second World War before they realized that the control systems of the day made the thing a deathtrap. Most places in the United States already have ordinances against flying ultra-light aircraft within city limits, and those that don’t would probably enact them as soon as these aircraft become available on the open market, which means you still couldn’t use one to commute from (for example) our place in Redondo Beach, California to UCLA in 16 minutes of flight time instead of the 60 to 110 minutes of ground travel we used to endure. You might be able to use one in a place like East Lansing, where most of the surrounding area is pastoral rather than urban, but my current commute is only about 8 minutes as it stands…

Which does nothing to change the fact that, assuming I’ve got the money (and can get clearance to fly one) I’m going to buy one of these things as soon as they become available in North America – and so will thousands (if not millions) of tech geeks just like me. Because while these things are probably rubbish for reducing commute times, they’re still 254 pounds of awesome by any other standard…

Take the Train?

It’s a truism in America that public transportation is cheaper than driving one’s own car – and, in fact, many people are convinced that public transportation is ridden exclusively by those people who can not afford to drive. Of course, riding a bus or train is usually slower than driving, but most people will assure you that the amount you save on parking, gasoline, car repairs and insurance more than makes up for the time you are spending. Environmentalists praise public transportation, claiming that the lower emissions of one bus compared to 40 cars (or one train compared to 300 cars) is more than enough motivation for riding it. Some people will go so far as to praise the lower stress involved in riding over driving, or cite the ability to read, study, nap, or whatever during this time. But what happens when the country is in the grips of the worst recession in a generation, and the price of riding public transit isn’t cost effective?

A story reported this week in the Mercury News tells the sad tale of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, better known in Northern California as BART. Often hailed as California’s greatest public works project ever, BARD connects most of the communities in and around the San Francisco Bay Area in a network of trains and subways convenient to both main airports and most of the business districts. But despite the pro-environmental and anti-big-business nature of the Bay Area, the BART system is currently losing on the order of $130 to $140 million each year – which has led to price hikes in an attempt to stem the losses, which has lowered ridership even further. People were reluctant to use BART when it was priced competitively – citing commutes that were as much as 8 times longer, in terms of minutes in transit, than driving a car – but with price hikes making driving cheaper, the system is doing even worse…

Some of the problem is political – the contract the city signed with the bus and train operator’s union is so disadvantageous for the city it’s surprising there haven’t been riots – and some of it is simple bureaucracy – none of the people who could change the situation has any personal or financial motivation for doing so – but most of it is just poor management. The city needs to encourage ridership any way it can, and placing various nuisance fees (what is an SFO round-trip surcharge, anyway? And in what world is it a good idea to more than double it when your ridership is already dropping?) on riders who are already dubious about your service is no way to run a railroad. Or, in this case, a public transit system…

In the long run, the City and State will continue to support the BART system, but with California’s budget already at the breaking point, the last thing they need is to put more strain of the highway system, run up costs for road repairs and bridge maintenance (above the levels those things are already at), and shovel more money into an inefficient public works project. Unless somebody in the City by the Bay wakes up and smells the smog, things are about to get worse for our friends in Northern California…

Parking Magic

Did you ever find yourself facing the unappealing choice of either risking a ticket because you don’t have any change to feed a parking meter, or not being able to park and having to go somewhere else? How about those occasions when you need to be somewhere for a few hours and the only space available has a 30-minute limit, forcing you to keep running out to feed the meter? Well, if a new development going on in Chicago starts catching on in other cities, these problems may soon become a thing of the part – although I won’t make book on a new set of problems failing to appear soon thereafter…

According to a story being reported in the Chicago Tribune this week, the city has been testing an electronic parking system that allows you to purchase parking time electronically from a device mounted on your dashboard. Plans are already underway to expand the system and adopt new technologies that will allow you to purchase your parking minutes directly from your cell phone – and buy more minutes if you should find that your virtual meter is about to run out and you need more time to complete whatever errand you’re on. As usual, this idea has both positive and negative aspects…

On the one hand, feeding coinage into a parking meter is a pain, particularly when the amount you’re being charged for the space is as high as it is in parts of Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other large city. Consider that if parking is $2 per hour (not unusual these days) you will need 8 quarters per hour, or 64 of them (nearly two rolls of quarters) for a day at work. Even at 75 cents per hour I was spending $3 or $3.50 per day to park in Santa Monica the last time I worked there, which meant three rolls of quarters every two weeks – not a very appealing choice, but still preferable to the $175 that the parking lot under our office building would have charged me for a month of non-reserved parking. I’d probably have preferred an electronic system to taking $60 in quarters out of the bank each month…

On the downside, this system not only requires the user to have a higher level of technology available in order to park, it eliminates any practical considerations for not raising the cost of parking in the city. If your parking enforcement personnel no longer have to empty parking meters – or even walk a beat to write parking tickets – but can handle all of the functions of their jobs from a desk somewhere, not only is it much easier to enforce parking laws, it’s much easier to keep increasing the cost per hour. In fact, this would really require no effort at all…

In the long run, of course, it really doesn’t matter what we think of such developments; cities will continue raising parking rates because they need the money – and because they can. Eventually, the simple pole-mounted coin box will become obsolete, simply because it will not be possible for anyone to carry enough small change around with them to buy enough time for even a short errand, let alone a day at work. At that point a system that accepts credit cards, debit cards, and electronic payments by cell phone or over the Internet (for as long as there is any difference between those functions) is probably a good thing. A much more serious issue is that those electronic purchases can be traced – in fact, they have to be traced for billing purposes…

On-street parking will probably always be the low-cost alternative to expensive parking lots, and it may remain more convenient than having to drive off and find space in a lot somewhere. But the idea that one day soon anyone who wants to find out will be able to learn exactly where you park your car everyday has some very disturbing implications…

Washing the Car

Tonight before dinner I took the car over to the gas station around the corner and filled the gas tank, and then went through the automated car wash to get all of the salt, road dirt, and other crap that had accumulated on the outside of it over the past two weeks. Simplest, most natural thing in the world, right? Certainly nothing you’d weary your long-suffering blog readers with. But on the way home it struck me that there were at least three different business lessons to be had just in this ten-minute errand – which is at once why I love this discipline so much, and also why I keep saying I’ll never run out of things to write about in this blog…

First off, let’s consider the fact that it has been two weeks since I last put fuel in the car. For someone who grew up in Los Angeles, the concept is almost inconceivable. My daily commute before leaving L.A. to come here was 32 miles round trip, and in fact the shortest work commute I had the entire time I lived in Los Angeles was about twelve. In a car like our Pontiac Torrent, which gets about 16 miles per gallon in the city, the daily drive was taking up two gallons of gas per day, every day. With a 17-gallon tank, we could generally limit ourselves to one tank per week, but only if we limited our non-work driving rather sharply, and didn’t go anywhere on the weekends. Here in East Lansing, my daily commute is about six miles round trip, meaning that in an entire week I use roughly the same amount of gas that I would have used in a single day working at UCLA…

Actually, I could probably cut that down even more, considering that East Lansing has a quite good public transportation system, and there’s even a bus that goes from in front of my office to the supermarket up the street (half a mile or so). The point here is that because the University is located in East Lansing, it’s possible for students like me to get around for a fraction of what it would cost in L.A. or a dozen other cities. Of course, MSU has to be here – it’s been on this site for over 150 years now. But if you were going to select a new base for your company, choosing a city where even your lowest-paid employee can afford to get to work (and even senior management will spend a fraction of what they are used to on gasoline) might have a certain appeal…

The second point is the car wash itself. During the rainy season in Southern California you may want to wash the crap off your car from time to time, since all of that crud that you see overhead has to go SOMEWHERE when it rains, and it usually just falls on you. This pales in comparison to the salt, mud, dirt and dust involved in an urban/suburban setting in a cold-weather city in the winter. The salt used to keep the streets free of ice will also rust out every part of your car’s body if you don’t keep it clean. But the large, free-standing car wash operations common on the West Coast (and other warm-weather regions) are impractical on days when the ambient temperature is before freezing, so what you mostly see here in Lansing are small, completely-enclosed automated facilities like the one I drove through tonight. They’re not quite as effective at cleaning a car as their more labor-intensive cousins, but there’s something nice about being about to get your car cleaned whenever you want…

Which brings me to the very obvious third point: the gasoline was $1.49 a gallon. Lower than it was in the early 1990s when I was in graduate school the first time. Or, if you prefer, about a third of what it was in Los Angeles when I left, when everyone was talking about $9 per gallon and changes in our way of life. Will it go back to $4.50 by next summer? Will people go back to buying giant SUVs that get a quarter of the mileage my Torrent gets? Will the next year bring even more record profits for the oil companies, or will the car makers finally get back to good?

Darned if I know. I’m just pointing out that if you made plans based on $4.50 a gallon gasoline or the equivalent in diesel or heating oil you’re probably wishing you hadn’t; if you had all of your retirement funds based in some Wall Street investment scheme that seemed too good to be real you’re finding out it was; and if you bet the farm that a man of African ancestry would never be elected President of the United States, you’re probably out one farm. You’ve all heard me ranting on and on about the need for good business intelligence before making plans for the future. The past few months have demonstrated just how difficult that can be in exhaustive detail, but if you needed any further proof of it you only had to ride along with me tonight as I ran my errands…