You’re Making This Too Easy

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this blog (which is kind of a far-fetched assumption, I realize, but stay with me) you’ve probably realized that I spend a lot of my time writing about business failures. This is partly because Institutional Failure was one of my research interests long before I ever realized I would go back to graduate school and research anything, but it’s mostly because this sort of story makes for interesting and snarky blog posts. Of course, if you really want to you can find something to sneer at in most business operations, because we (the observers) are working from the perfect knowledge of hindsight, whereas the people running the companies had only the imperfect knowledge of the moment when they made their decisions. That said, I still think the latest pet-related screw-up on the part of Delta Airlines has moved from petty theft into felony cruelty to animals territory…

You can find the original story here if you want to, but the facts of the case are clear enough. A customer paid Delta the required fees to have a hairless kitten (it’s a breed of cat that, as you’d probably guess, doesn’t have hair) shipped from Utah to Connecticut last week. The flight went smoothly enough, but after the plane landed the baggage handlers took over 50 minutes to offload the kitten – and the cargo hold of an airplane isn’t heated once the craft lands; neither are the baggage carts or the back end of baggage claim. As a result, an animal that has no protection from the cold (it’s hairless, remember) was left exposed to 7 degree temperatures for nearly an hour and eventually died from hypothermia…

Now, I don’t believe the owner is at fault here; when you pay someone to ship live animals for you there is a reasonable expectation that they will still be in that condition when they arrive. I don’t know if criminal charges against the baggage people would stick either, although if I were the district attorney responsible for that airport I would definitely be in the middle of finding out right now. And as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m not sure the owner will be able to bring suit in civil court, either, although if I was an attorney admitted to the Connecticut Bar, I’d take the case just to find out. But even if there are no criminal or civil repercussions of this action, it’s still one of the most completely bloody stupid things I’ve ever seen, and it’s going to make things worse for the airline every time a scruffy blogger picks up the story and decides to mock them – which doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon, given the post you are currently reading…

You see, the problem is that air travel has become a commodity product. There was a time when people would select their airline out of brand loyalty, claiming that TWA had the most comfortable aircraft, while National Airlines had the best cabin crews, Pan-Am had the most International experience, and Western Airlines had the best food and Hughes Air West had the best prices (if nothing else in particular). But all of those airlines have long since gone into the dumpster of history, and most people today are choosing their tickets by price, convenience, or frequent flyer programs – unless they need to transport an animal or are easily offended by stories like the one today, in which case they will avoid Delta like the plague…

The simple fact is, Delta can not afford to keep alienating large groups of the general public with this sort of screw-up. Even people who don’t like cats (and there are a LOT of people out there who DO like cats, very much) are going to look askance at this sort of thing; after all, if they can’t even take care of a kitten for a few hours, what are they going to do to your belongings during such a flight? Delta can not win against low-cost fliers like Southwest Airlines in a commodity market, and the more episodes like this one they produce, the harder it will be for them to maintain parity at the same price level. Which is good for Southwest, Greyhound and Amtrak, but bad for bloggers like me…
The truth is, I work hard at finding these stories and mocking them for the entertainment and edification of my readers (assuming I have readers), and sometimes I hesitate to even write about stories like this one – because they’re making it too easy…

Homicidal Chicken

It was with great concern, perhaps ever consternation, that I viewed the news story with the headline: “Armed Rooster Kills California Man” on the MSNBC website today. I know very little about biology, and even less about agriculture, genetic engineering, or animal husbandry, but from what I had been lead to understand about chickens, their normal behaviors do not include using tools, wielding weapons, or attacking humans. I suppose it might be possible for a chicken to grasp a weapon in one of its claws, but if the weapon were a gun, how would the bird pull the trigger? If it raised its other claw to the trigger guard it would fall down. And if the weapon were a knife, the chicken would then have to chase down its victim while hopping on one foot, which doesn’t seem practical if the victim is a human (who could presumable run away). It would be different for a bird which can fly (it could simply take wing with the gun in one claw and fire it with the other), but a chicken would find it difficult to stay aloft long enough to get off a shot…

Of course, this assumes a standard-issue meat-animal type of chicken. If we are talking about an anthropomorphic chicken of the sort you’d expect to find in a Warner Brothers cartoon, that could be quite different. One can almost picture platoons of six-foot tall white roosters with arms instead of wings, all dressed in military uniforms and wielding rifles, as they seek vengeance for thousands of years of wrongs, real, imagined and animated. Their battle-cry could be “Why did the human cross the road?” or “Eat this, Colonel!” Of course, they’d probably spook at the sight of mashed potatoes or dumplings, and they’d get positively snippy at the mention of gravy…

Alternately, we might imagine that some mad scientist who also happens to be a practicing vegan had created a genetically-engineered Battle Chicken, designed specifically to take bloody revenge on those who question why a chicken would want to cross a road in the first place – or maintain those “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke sites. Given a sufficiently large number of such chickens – and enough chicken feed – an unscrupulous individual would have a real chance of taking over the world. Unless the United States and the other major military powers of the world were able to pool their efforts and develop an anti-chicken machine gun (preferably something with a rotisserie and barbeque function) it might be the end of the world as we know it…

Fortunately, upon reading the actual story much became clear. The chicken in question hadn’t armed itself; it was a fighting rooster and had been fitted with small razor blades attached to its feet in preparation for a cockfight. And the human victim hadn’t been shot, or had his throat slit, or even been chased down by a feathered minion of vengeance and cut to pieces; he was a participant in a cockfighting ring who had been slashed by one of the birds at a fighting event, and then avoided seeking medical attention in the hopes of also avoiding arrest and prosecution for his participation in an illegal sport. Far from being a flying nemesis, the chicken was just doing what millions of years of evolution had already programmed it to do when the fight was interrupted by the arrival of sheriff’s deputies and the bird had to vent its frustration on one of its hapless handlers…

So, other than comic relief, why am I calling your attention to such a story in a business blog? Because as comically misleading as this headline was, you can find far more outrageous things posted online almost any day of the week – and if you don’t read carefully, fact-check from multiple sources, and maintain a healthy skepticism, you’re likely to find yourself investing in a massive anti-poultry mortar for you back yard and a 12-gigawatt self-targeting laser on the roof to drive back the invading horde of battle chickens (or something equally silly) sooner or later…

Our National Disgrace

From time to time you will find some grumpy old blogger going on about some lapse that he or she feels is the latest embarrassment to these United States – almost always something of which the writer disapproves, and which most of the rest of the country either does not care about or (in extreme cases) has never even thought about. Probably the most tragic of these are the ones that involve religion or politics, since the chance of getting even the majority of our population to agree with you are almost zero. I try to avoid this sort of post, partly because there is no way I’m going to convince anybody of anything, and partly because this is a business blog, which means that most of us here don’t really care if something is a national disgrace or not, as long as the company responsible for it is providing a good return on investment for its stockholders. But in a case that popped up this week where someone is suing Nutella for calling itself a “healthy” and “nutritious” food is enough to make anyone slightly embarrassed on behalf of his or her countrymen (and –women)…

The story as recounted for us by Canada’s Globe and Mail online site tells the story of a woman who has filed a claim against the makers of the chocolaty spread, claiming that the advertising that claims that this product is part of a nutritious breakfast when combined with other healthy foods is somehow fraudulent. It’s important to note that under US law, the Nutella packages have to include the amount of sugar, fat, sodium, and so on that the product contains, and the plaintiff in this case is not claiming any violations of that law. It’s also important to note that many other products (including some breakfast cereals and breakfast pastries) also contain large amounts of sugar and fat and also claim to be part of “this nutritious breakfast” in a picture that generally contains toast, orange juice, milk, and occasionally eggs, bacon and fruit as well…

I can’t decide what would be worse: whether the person in our story is sufficiently ignorant to have never even considered the fat or sugar content of literally hundreds of other products marketed as breakfast foods, or if the entire case is simply an attempt to screw money out of a firm with supposedly deep pockets for her own enrichment. On the one hand, it would be depressing to think that we live in a nation full of people who would consider extorting money from an otherwise harmless company simply because they can. On the other hand, it would be sad to think that we live among people who can’t grasp basic ideas like sweet breakfast foods being commonly popular, chocolate spread having sugar in it, or the use of something sweet to make dry toast (or anything else without an inherently interesting flavor) more appealing being common practice. Certainly jams and jellies (which also have large amounts of sugar in them) have been marketed as breakfast foods for centuries, without any noticeable ill effects…

Now, I don’t want to suggest that people shouldn’t have the right to sue for correction of wrongs they feel are being done, or to recover damages that someone has inflicted upon them; such actions fulfill a necessary role in our society and help keep some people honest who otherwise might not be. But in this case it’s hard to see what damage the Nutella people are doing to anybody who is sufficiently literate to read a product label, or what harm using the product could possible have done to the plaintiff or her family. I don’t know if this action began with ignorance or greed, but either way, they’re not making the rest of us look very good right now…

The Ethics of Quid Pro Quo

A few weeks back I brought you the story of a man in Texas who has donated a significant amount of money to the private high school he attended with the understanding that his own son would be admitted to the school. It’s not unusual for private schools to solicit donations from alumni, and from parents of current students, on the principle that if the school becomes more prestigious, you automatically benefit from having graduated from it successfully – or your offspring does. But it’s generally considered ethically questionable to either solicit donations in return for admitting a future student, or to accept such a deal if offered; the ideal of only admitting the best possible candidates (and only accepting positions and honors you have actually earned) lies at the heart of the system. Certainly, the prestige of any educational institution will decline if it becomes common knowledge that you can buy your way into the place, and the prestige of an individual will decline if it becomes common knowledge that he or she paid for his or her academic achievements rather than earning them. The real question is whether this process is also inherently wrong…

Consider, for example, the case of a small institution which admits 100 students each year. If you like, you can imagine that the 100 students are divided into groups of 20 for the purpose of any particular class. Under such conditions, it would be difficult to argue with any conviction that the addition of a 101st student would in any way lower the quality of education received by the students. In fact, if the extra student’s credentials are reasonable (if not actually superior) there shouldn’t be any noticeable effect on the others. Now suppose that that one extra student is present because his or her parents contributed badly needed operating funds (and the others did not); is that wrong? You could argue that the extra teaching capacity (if you actually have it) would be better spent on a more deserving student, but would that really be better than having the extra funds – which theoretically benefits all of the other students as well?

If we take this argument to its extreme, we could legitimately ask if it would be better to have 101 students and a new library (or a new field house, or an entire new campus, if you like) or 100 students with no library or other inadequate facilities? Are we really best serving the needs of the remaining students by guarding the moral and ethical purity of our admissions process but denying them the use of new facilities, new equipment, or new opportunities? Does that answer change if we have 400 students and 1 extra who is only present because of his or her parents’ generosity? How about if we are a university of 40,000 students? Does our answer change if the “extra” student proves worthy of our institution, graduates valedictorian, and goes on to a career so illustrious that it actually raises the prestige of our institution just to claim that individual as one of our alumni?

No one is suggesting that actual degrees – or diplomas, in the case of high schools – are or should be for sale, despite the fact that rumors persist that they are sometimes given in exchange for athletic performance or very large donations. But assuming that an institution has the capacity to admit an additional student, and that the individual is subsequently able to handle the expectations of the institution and graduate honorably, is it actually wrong for the school to accept a donation in return for admitting that student in the first place?

It’s worth thinking about…

The Grad School Diaries: High Desert Airshow

I’d never seen a Thunderbolt fly before today. There aren’t a lot of examples of the Republic Aircraft P-47 left in flying condition; there aren’t a lot of them left at all, in fact. Unlike the Corsair and the Mustang, which had long careers in the Korean War and various foreign air arms, the T-Bolt’s role was filled by the newer jet-powered types within just a few years, and the huge airplane (the largest single-seat, single-engine type ever built at that time) was rapidly phased out of service…

But today there’s one warming up its engine about 30 feet from where I’m standing…

It’s a perfect fall day in Apple Valley, California, and we’ve come to the community’s tiny (but well-run) general aviation airport for the local airshow. There aren’t that many show-worthy aircraft based here, but fortunately the Planes of Fame Museum is just down the road in Chino, California, and they have flown a few prize specimens up here for the occasion. I’ve seen most of the warbirds before; the Corsair and Hellcat in several museums (including the Air Zoo ); the Mustang and B-25 Mitchell in flight and on the ground; the P-40 Warhawk at least twice; but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a P-47 in person, and I’ve definitely never seen one (or the P-40 or Hellcat, for that matter) actually take off and fly…

The Hellcat and Corsair take flight together, and they make a fascinating contrast; the Corsair is one of the most graceful and agile aircraft of that period, while the Hellcat is a squat, solid, pugnacious product of the company affectionately known as the “Grumman Iron Works” by the pilots who flew their designs. The Corsair was designed to fly rings around much lighter enemy machines (and quite frequently did), while the Hellcat was designed to smash the competition and blast them out of the way, with the structural integrity to make maneuvers that would tear the wings off a lighter airplane (like a Japanese Zero), and the armor to shrug off hits it received in return. But they both fly beautifully, even sixty-five years later…

A few minutes later it was time for the land-based fighters to have their turn; the under-rated P-40 Warhawk, the elegant P-51 Mustang, and the massive P-47 Thunderbolt. The Warhawk lacked the high-altitude performance required for a successful dogfighter, but down on the deck they did just fine, and in the close air-support role they gave invaluable service in all theaters of the war (especially North Africa and China). The Mustang was the superlative fighter and interceptor of the era; the perfect marriage of the famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine (which also powered the Spitfire) and one of the best airframes ever built in North America (or anywhere else). The Thunderbolt had massive power and even more massive firepower; nearly as good a pure dogfighter as the Mustang, it was also one of the deadliest ground-attack platforms in history. Armed with a combination of heavy machine guns, 5-inch (125mm) tube-launched rockets and gravity bombs of 1,000 pounds or more, it was definitely bad news for any ground forces unlucky enough to be in its path…

We stand near the flight line for a while and watch the different warbirds wheel around in the sky. There are a lot of other interesting aircraft on display here, too, including an excellent example of the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber (the type used by the Doolittle raid on Tokyo) and the Predator drones so extravagantly hated in Afghanistan. I’ve never seen one of the drones in person before; you could walk up and touch this one if you wanted to. But for me it’s the flying demonstrations that will stay with me when everything else fades. These airplanes are 65 years old now, and they won’t last forever anymore than we will. Future generations may never have the chance to see Mustangs, T-Bolts, Warhawks, Corsairs and Hellcats soar and swoop through the brilliant blue of a High Desert sky…

I’m grateful to have seen this show – even if I could wish it came under happier circumstances. But perhaps that’s the point of this whole episode. It is not given to us to choose what we will see, or when things will happen; the world goes on around us and it does not care how we feel about it. All we can do, as we walk down this lonely road, is to remember to stop and watch the Thunderbolts fly when we are given the chance…

Legalize Cats!

Over the years we’ve heard a few news stories and the occasional television segment that make it clear that people in Japan are much fonder of cats than you might expect if all you know about that country is business-related. Last year we had the tale of the cat who became stationmaster of an otherwise automated train station, and this year we have the story about neko cafes (cat cafes) which seem to be catching on in Tokyo – unless the CNN Travel site is being hoodwinked by fake news generated to see just how gullible we Westerners really are again…

If the story is true, however, it would appear that people in Japan are shelling out the equivalent of about $12 USD per hour for an otherwise typical coffee house experience – which is to say, a clean, well-lighted place where one can sit, read, write, blog, converse with friends, consume food and drink, and have other forms of social interaction. The difference in this case being that the neko café also supplies cats – ordinary house cats, according to the pictures – which will lounge around with you while you do this. The concept certainly isn’t that strange – we’ve all encountered bookstores with a store cat, and I’ve seen several other businesses with a resident feline or two – but the idea of just socializing with cats present (and paying for the opportunity) may seem a little odd to our Western sensibilities. On the other hand, if you live in a densely-populated city where it is difficult to get permission to keep a cat of your own in an apartment, perhaps this idea makes sense – especially if the domestic cat has a special place in your culture…

I’m not sure this business model would work in this country; Americans aren’t good about paying for space to park themselves in the first place, and having cats in a food service establishment could cause problems with various health agencies. If you could get around the regulatory issues, and the obvious health and safety issues, I can’t help thinking it would be fun, though. You’d need enough staff people to make sure that none of your customers were harassing the cats – or being harassed by the cats – in the course of their visit, and you’d have to find some way of dealing with the feeding, dander, and sanitary issues associated with cats, but a lot of people would probably like the idea of having a friendly cat join them for a drink. Alternately, I suppose, you could try the same concept with other types of animal, if you (or your customers) aren’t cat fanciers…

To get a good mixture of animals, and keep them supplied with medical care and proper grooming, one possible option might be a joint venture with a pet store. Or perhaps you could consider working with a local shelter or rescue organization; they’d supply the animals and someone to look after them during operating hours, and in return they’d have a regular supply of people who might want a pet, or want to contribute to a rescue organization or shelter. If you or they had a problem doing this sort of thing every day you could have “cat days” or “dog days” or dedicated adopt-an-animal days; if you can work out the aforementioned health agency problems you could even allow people to bring their own animals in with them…

Now, the truth is, I don’t know if any of this would work, or if it would all just be a big, hairy (literally!) mess. What I do know is that with the proliferation of coffee houses, if you want to open a new one in your community, you’re going to need something that will cut through the clutter and distinguish your operation from all of the others – and resident cats might do that. The same goes for any other overcrowded business segment. I’m not saying that cats would get you noticed, let alone bring in an extra $12 per hour per customer; I’m just saying that if you don’t find some way of making your business stand out from the competition, you’re going to have much larger problems than someone who doesn’t especially like cats finding a hairball in their shoe…

Figures Don’t Lie…

Normally I wouldn’t be paying much attention to an Internet pay-site acquiring the rights to a free site, or to anything that has been taken off of the free site since its acquisition, but in this case the acquiring site is one of the big dating sites (Match.com) and the deleted material was a blog post explaining a why you should never pay for a dating site that used to appear on the “OK Cupid” free site. Since this type of Internet business has come up on the blog a few times in the past month, I decided to take a look at the argument that the founder of the free site was making. It turns out that there are some interesting numbers here…

To begin with, consider the claim that these sites have tens of millions of customers. In one case, one of the big companies claims they have 20 million of them, but if you divide their gross income for the last year by the amount they charge per customer and take into account their own figures for turnover every 6.5 months, they can’t have more than about 750,000 paying customers at any one time – or about 1/30th of the total. You read that correctly; 96.25% of their accounts are going to be inactive (and therefore unable to respond to your attempts to contact them) at any give time. Even worse, if you’re a man sending messages to an active account, you have about a 30% chance of getting a response (which is huge, compared with most advertising, for example). If only one out of every thirty messages you send actually goes to a live account, that means that you can expect to get 1 response for every 100 messages you send. Which, in turn, means that to get any significant number of responses you need to send hundreds or even thousands of messages, which means you’re going to have to make them impersonal form letters which are even less likely to get a response…

But even worse, according to the author, is that according to census figures and one of the dating sites’ own success claims, you are more than 12 times more likely to get married if you don’t belong to this site than if you do. Which is to say that the group of single people in the US who don’t belong to this online dating site account for a percentage of all marriages that is 12 plus times larger (relative to their numbers) than the percentage that belong to this one site and get married. It’s not a true correlation, since those figures don’t account for all of the competing dating sites, old-fashioned services that don’t work over the Internet, professional matchmakers, and so on. Still, it is kind of a disturbing thought – and it’s rather unpleasant to think that one of the biggest pay-sites just bought one of their free competitors and took these warnings about pay-sites down…

Now, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with Internet dating sites as such; I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with ones you pay for. The two biggest sites claim to be responsible for about 5,000 marriages and about 86,000 marriages a year, respectively, and it would be difficult to say that those 91,000 people didn’t get value for their money. If we assume that at least twice that many people at least got dates or other enjoyable experiences out of their investment, that would mean as many as 300,000 happy customers, which isn’t bad – unless you happen to be one of the 39,700,000 people who paid their $600 and got absolutely nothing because all of the people they tried to connect with were “ghosts,” as the inactive accounts are called...

Twenty years ago in Los Angeles I worked with some people who belonged to one of the pre-Internet dating services, paying $3,000 a year for public mixers and the occasional “personal” introduction – and back then, that was a lot of money. No one I knew ever got a date using the service, but it hardly mattered; even though they knew the odds, there was always the chance that they might end up being one of the 3.75% and not one of the 96.25%, and that was enough to keep them coming back month after month. Modern dating sites can claim that they are selling something other than hope (and a rather forlorn hope, at that) if they want to, but just remember the old saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure…”