Here's a topic that will get me flamed (and possibly burned in effigy) no matter which side of it I decide to take: a story in the St. Petersburg Times indicates that more and more airlines are abandoning their ages-old tradition of letting families with small children board the plane first. If you're a parent with small children who travels by air, this is an outrage. If you're a single parent traveling with multiple small children, it's an abomination. If you're a business traveler (particularly single or childless) you will point to the study noted in the article that states that EACH family group with small children slows an already slow boarding process by 10 to 12 minutes. If you're an efficiency expert, you'll probably note that filling the plane back to front, and windows to aisles, speeds up the whole process and benefits everyone. If you're an experienced customer service agent (or an experienced traveler), you'll probably just shake your head...
Most passengers would agree that they want to get on the airplane as quickly as possible, get off as quickly as possible, and spend as little time in between as possible. Most of them would therefore also agree that speeding up the boarding process is a good thing. Where we get into the violent disagreements is when the issue of special needs comes into the equation. No one wants to tell a single parent trying to get a toddler belted in while holding an infant that they can’t have an extra few moments to get settled, but by the same token nobody wants to have to wait for an extra ten or fifteen minutes while this happens. And NOBODY wants to be the poor ramp agent who has to tell that overworked parent that they can’t have any extra time…
As an experienced traveler myself, I think a much bigger issue is those people who insist on sitting at the front of the airplane, and want everyone boarding behind them to wait while they try to wrestle a carry-on bag the size of a small car into the overhead bin. If people would just move to the back of the airplane before beginning this struggle it would definitely help – and if the airline has assigned seating they can expedite this by boarding from the back instead of the traditional First Class and Business Class and then the first 15 rows of Coach. The “families with children” scenario is a much bigger issue when the families are in row 6 and they’re taking 15 minutes to get the kids settled while everyone in rows 7 through 45 wait for them…
Of course, an airline with “Open Seating” like Southwest can’t do this – and in fact, one of the more annoying aspects of any Southwest flight is the tiny people with huge luggage mentioned above, who will invariably clog up the aisle. I’m not sure how Southwest would deal with this issue (if they ever do), but for carriers with assigned seating there’s an easy fix: give priority for the last few rows in any flight to families with small children. That way these folks can have the extra time they need to get settled, the rest of us don’t have to wait for them, and all of the crying, whining, squirming, seat-kicking, food-flinging and aisle-running behavior can be contained in the same part of the cabin…
I’d certainly be willing to board last, under those conditions. Heck, I’d be willing to pay extra to sit twenty or thirty rows forward of the kids’ section! Maybe there’s a new business model here after all…
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
A Booming Business
It's been said that any new technology brings with it its own hazards, drawbacks and assorted downsides, and the same can usually be said for new business models. Overuse of computers has given us workplace problems like carpal tunnel syndrome and eyestrain, and we can all remember the joys of technological breakthroughs like asbestos, to take the obvious example. There's a case being reported this week in the Arizona Republic that brings up a similar point about the new business of biodiesel, and one of the side effects that we really should have seen coming before now...
With the price of gasoline hovering around $4 nationwide, the idea of getting used cooking oil from the local greasy spoon and filtering it down to motor fuel in your garage has a very strong appeal. Nevermind that most people will spend dozens of hours of work on every gallon of fuel they obtain through this process (effectively making much less than $1 per hour, or perhaps one twentieth of minimum wage for this work; it's still free fuel, it's still good for the environment, it's still a way to avoid foreign oil, and so on. Unfortunately, it's also still motor fuel, used to power an internal combustion engine, and therefore (under the wrong conditions) both flamable and explosive...
Imagine if people all over the country were to start filtering cooking oil in their garage. Explosions of the type described in the article would become commonplace, and you'd definately want to invest in those new fireproof ceramic shingles for your roof, just to keep your house from being set on fire everytime your neighbor's biodiesel operation blows up. Even worse, if the E85 ethanol (flex-fuel) vehicles start to catch on, you might have people all over the country operating distilleries in their basement -- in which case you'll want to purchase armor for the side of your house for those occasions when your neighbor blows himself up, house and all...
Now I suppose if could be argued that this is a good thing in the larger view; it would certainly increase demand for fire-proof ceramic roof tiles, armored siding, bullet-proof window glass, and fire extinguishers. It would also represent a huge growth opportunity for contractors who install these products, and might even result in a new building boom to replace all of the exploding houses and garages. With luck we could even see new products start up to handle these needs, like built-in fire fighting systems for ordinary single-family houses, or carpets and window treatments made out of the anti-spall linings used inside tanks (they keep bits of the inside of the tank from being knocked loose and flying around the interior like shrapnel when the vehicle it hit by a shell or missile, a process called "spalling")...
Preposterous, you say? Then tell me this: how do you propose to stop it? Used cooking oil can't very well be made a controlled substance, and neither can the (very simple) filters needed to convert it to fuel. You can make the whole process illegal, as with stills for making alcohol, but even BATF has never been completely successful in shutting those down, either; I'd hate to put local law enforcement in charge of sniffing out used cooking oil in someone's garage. And in any case, we can't afford the extra police needed to carry out such a search, or the additional errosion of our civil rights that searches of this kind would cause. Unless the price of motor fuel comes down, or some other method of transportation is introduced, and soon, this type of story is going to become more and more common...
Maybe I'll look into investing in the companies that make those ceramic roof tiles...
With the price of gasoline hovering around $4 nationwide, the idea of getting used cooking oil from the local greasy spoon and filtering it down to motor fuel in your garage has a very strong appeal. Nevermind that most people will spend dozens of hours of work on every gallon of fuel they obtain through this process (effectively making much less than $1 per hour, or perhaps one twentieth of minimum wage for this work; it's still free fuel, it's still good for the environment, it's still a way to avoid foreign oil, and so on. Unfortunately, it's also still motor fuel, used to power an internal combustion engine, and therefore (under the wrong conditions) both flamable and explosive...
Imagine if people all over the country were to start filtering cooking oil in their garage. Explosions of the type described in the article would become commonplace, and you'd definately want to invest in those new fireproof ceramic shingles for your roof, just to keep your house from being set on fire everytime your neighbor's biodiesel operation blows up. Even worse, if the E85 ethanol (flex-fuel) vehicles start to catch on, you might have people all over the country operating distilleries in their basement -- in which case you'll want to purchase armor for the side of your house for those occasions when your neighbor blows himself up, house and all...
Now I suppose if could be argued that this is a good thing in the larger view; it would certainly increase demand for fire-proof ceramic roof tiles, armored siding, bullet-proof window glass, and fire extinguishers. It would also represent a huge growth opportunity for contractors who install these products, and might even result in a new building boom to replace all of the exploding houses and garages. With luck we could even see new products start up to handle these needs, like built-in fire fighting systems for ordinary single-family houses, or carpets and window treatments made out of the anti-spall linings used inside tanks (they keep bits of the inside of the tank from being knocked loose and flying around the interior like shrapnel when the vehicle it hit by a shell or missile, a process called "spalling")...
Preposterous, you say? Then tell me this: how do you propose to stop it? Used cooking oil can't very well be made a controlled substance, and neither can the (very simple) filters needed to convert it to fuel. You can make the whole process illegal, as with stills for making alcohol, but even BATF has never been completely successful in shutting those down, either; I'd hate to put local law enforcement in charge of sniffing out used cooking oil in someone's garage. And in any case, we can't afford the extra police needed to carry out such a search, or the additional errosion of our civil rights that searches of this kind would cause. Unless the price of motor fuel comes down, or some other method of transportation is introduced, and soon, this type of story is going to become more and more common...
Maybe I'll look into investing in the companies that make those ceramic roof tiles...
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Take Your Gun to Work Revisited
A while back I wrote a post in this space about a couple of employees of a supermarket who were able to defend their store and their personnel because they had taken advantage of a local ordinance and had, in fact, brought their guns to work that day. It's an incedent that drew attention because of its novelty more than anything else -- it's that rare case where the weapons-carry laws worked exactly as intended, and allowed law-abiding citizens to defend themselves with a level of force that was actually appropriate to the circumstances. All too often, the right to carry a weapon simply results in the sort of accidental shootings, property damage, or inapropriate uses of force so beloved of gun control advocates. And yet, the single most difficult part of this debate does not concern either of these issues...
In Florida, the issue of bringing your gun to work has raised an entirely new controversy, as some employees of companies that prohibit weapons on the job have begun to insist on bringing their guns to work and locking the weapons in the trunk of their cars during the work day. The gun owners involved claim that since they have carry permits, and can carry a gun all the way to and from work, they should be allowed to just leave these weapons in their cars during the day, so they can be armed for the trip to and from home. The company parking lot is still private property, and the company should still be able to ban guns there, but the employees are claiming that this would require them to leave their guns at home (since they'd have no way to secure them outside of the company's property) and therefore violates their Second Amendment right to carry a gun...
Even worse, in my opinion, is the implications for people who don't drive to work. Suppose they ride the bus, or walk to work. These people have no car to secure their guns in while on the job. Should they therefore have the right to bring their guns inside and carry them in the office? And if not, aren't they also being required to leave their guns at home? More to the point, perhaps, if we don't allow these people to bring their guns to work and secure them inside the building, aren't we discriminating against those who are too poor to operate a car and those who are ecologically minded enough not to want to?
What's really disturbing about this issue, at least from where I'm sitting, is the impact on private property rights. The Second Amendment to the Constitution does not address the rights of private property owners explicitly; it merely restricts the ability of the government to control gun ownership. But if the right to bear arms supercedes the rights of property owners to prohibit people from bringing guns onto their property, then by extension gun owners should be able to bring their guns anywhere they want to (e.g. schools, churches, hospitals, crowded shopping centers, airports...). It's clearly not what the Framers had in mind when they mentioned a "Well-regulated militia," but it's just as clearly what lies at the end of this particular slippery slope...
So my question is, if you were the company's owner, if it was your office or your factory, what would you do? Would you allow people to leave their guns in their cars? If so, how would you deal with someone who is being fired being escorted out of the building by Security and right up to where they've stashed their gun? On the other hand, if you prohibit people from bringing their guns to work, and one of them is killed on the way home in a situation he could have survived if he'd had his gun with him, can you be sued for wrongful death? What about a situation like the one in my earlier post? If your employees aren't able to shoot their way out of an armed confrontation and some of them die, what happens then? Especially if state or county law would have permitted them to carry a gun anywhere other than your property?
It's worth thinking about...
In Florida, the issue of bringing your gun to work has raised an entirely new controversy, as some employees of companies that prohibit weapons on the job have begun to insist on bringing their guns to work and locking the weapons in the trunk of their cars during the work day. The gun owners involved claim that since they have carry permits, and can carry a gun all the way to and from work, they should be allowed to just leave these weapons in their cars during the day, so they can be armed for the trip to and from home. The company parking lot is still private property, and the company should still be able to ban guns there, but the employees are claiming that this would require them to leave their guns at home (since they'd have no way to secure them outside of the company's property) and therefore violates their Second Amendment right to carry a gun...
Even worse, in my opinion, is the implications for people who don't drive to work. Suppose they ride the bus, or walk to work. These people have no car to secure their guns in while on the job. Should they therefore have the right to bring their guns inside and carry them in the office? And if not, aren't they also being required to leave their guns at home? More to the point, perhaps, if we don't allow these people to bring their guns to work and secure them inside the building, aren't we discriminating against those who are too poor to operate a car and those who are ecologically minded enough not to want to?
What's really disturbing about this issue, at least from where I'm sitting, is the impact on private property rights. The Second Amendment to the Constitution does not address the rights of private property owners explicitly; it merely restricts the ability of the government to control gun ownership. But if the right to bear arms supercedes the rights of property owners to prohibit people from bringing guns onto their property, then by extension gun owners should be able to bring their guns anywhere they want to (e.g. schools, churches, hospitals, crowded shopping centers, airports...). It's clearly not what the Framers had in mind when they mentioned a "Well-regulated militia," but it's just as clearly what lies at the end of this particular slippery slope...
So my question is, if you were the company's owner, if it was your office or your factory, what would you do? Would you allow people to leave their guns in their cars? If so, how would you deal with someone who is being fired being escorted out of the building by Security and right up to where they've stashed their gun? On the other hand, if you prohibit people from bringing their guns to work, and one of them is killed on the way home in a situation he could have survived if he'd had his gun with him, can you be sued for wrongful death? What about a situation like the one in my earlier post? If your employees aren't able to shoot their way out of an armed confrontation and some of them die, what happens then? Especially if state or county law would have permitted them to carry a gun anywhere other than your property?
It's worth thinking about...
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The Ethics of Sunday
Moving to a new city and a new state always insures that there will be new experiences and unfamiliar features to the landscape, a fact brought home to me today when several of the retail stores we wanted to visit were closed on Sundays. At least one of them actually had a sign on the door stating that they were closed every Sunday so that their employees could devote the time to family and/or worship. Now, in Southern California you may run across the occasional business that follows a practice like this, and of course there are national chains that maintain this policy operating in the Los Angeles area, but to see more than one of them in any given month would be unusual at best. It got me started on the ethics of declaring a specific day of the week off for religious observance, and I thought it deserves a closer look…
The obvious question is whether or not such a policy is fair to those employees whose religion does not have its Sabbath on Sunday. If they celebrate their holy day on Saturday, Friday, or Wednesday for that matter, is it fair that all of the Christians (at least all of the ones from Christian sects who go to church on Sunday) are getting their Sabbath off? A good manager can probably work around that, since there will still be five days available in which any given employee can work, but if the business has a weekly peak on a day that somebody wants to take off, this will be awkward. And no matter how hard they may try, at that point management is (by definition) treating some of its employees differently from the others…
Of course, in some industries it hardly matters; most professional offices (doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on) are closed on the weekends, and anybody who takes a weekday off for purposes of worship is already aware that most of the world will not be joining them. On the other hand, some industries require personnel fully 24/7 (such as cable television companies, telephone companies, health care and the like) and it can be extremely useful to a manager to have people on the payroll for whom Good Friday and Easter Sunday are just another day, or who (in extreme cases) might not even mind working Christmas Day. In both cases this issue will never come up…
Which brings us to the whole issue of religious holidays. If your company observes all Christian holidays, for example, but will not acknowledge those of any other faith, you are basically a discrimination lawsuit looking for a place to happen. To the people who claim that because they practice a specific faith they should only have to honor the religious holidays of that faith, I can only say that if you want that kind of protection for your observances, you’ve also got to grant it to everyone else. To this end, most employers offer their people a specific number of unspecified paid holidays each year (3 is common, although I have seen 2 and 5) which can be used for whatever observance you like, and is also fair to the poor atheists and agnostics in our society, who would otherwise only get our national holidays off…
So is closing the company down on Sundays fair to people who don’t worship on Sunday? I think the answer is that it can be, if the management team is willing to accommodate those people who need another day off. Just don’t ask me what we’re supposed to do when we’re trying to operate in a country that does have a state religion – and they’re taking a religious holiday on a day when we have a critical need to accomplish something…
It’s worth thinking about…
The obvious question is whether or not such a policy is fair to those employees whose religion does not have its Sabbath on Sunday. If they celebrate their holy day on Saturday, Friday, or Wednesday for that matter, is it fair that all of the Christians (at least all of the ones from Christian sects who go to church on Sunday) are getting their Sabbath off? A good manager can probably work around that, since there will still be five days available in which any given employee can work, but if the business has a weekly peak on a day that somebody wants to take off, this will be awkward. And no matter how hard they may try, at that point management is (by definition) treating some of its employees differently from the others…
Of course, in some industries it hardly matters; most professional offices (doctors, lawyers, accountants and so on) are closed on the weekends, and anybody who takes a weekday off for purposes of worship is already aware that most of the world will not be joining them. On the other hand, some industries require personnel fully 24/7 (such as cable television companies, telephone companies, health care and the like) and it can be extremely useful to a manager to have people on the payroll for whom Good Friday and Easter Sunday are just another day, or who (in extreme cases) might not even mind working Christmas Day. In both cases this issue will never come up…
Which brings us to the whole issue of religious holidays. If your company observes all Christian holidays, for example, but will not acknowledge those of any other faith, you are basically a discrimination lawsuit looking for a place to happen. To the people who claim that because they practice a specific faith they should only have to honor the religious holidays of that faith, I can only say that if you want that kind of protection for your observances, you’ve also got to grant it to everyone else. To this end, most employers offer their people a specific number of unspecified paid holidays each year (3 is common, although I have seen 2 and 5) which can be used for whatever observance you like, and is also fair to the poor atheists and agnostics in our society, who would otherwise only get our national holidays off…
So is closing the company down on Sundays fair to people who don’t worship on Sunday? I think the answer is that it can be, if the management team is willing to accommodate those people who need another day off. Just don’t ask me what we’re supposed to do when we’re trying to operate in a country that does have a state religion – and they’re taking a religious holiday on a day when we have a critical need to accomplish something…
It’s worth thinking about…
Friday, August 22, 2008
A Few Small Repairs
Regular readers of this space will recall that my wife and I have just completed a relocation from Los Angeles to East Lansing, Michigan, where I am joining the doctoral program in the Management Department of the Broad College of Business. As part of the process, we hired packers to come and pack up most of our belongings, loaders to load everything onto a moving van (and then into a warehouse and back into another moving van), and movers to move everything across the 2,300 or so miles between our previous city and our current city. I’m happy to report that the packers did an excellent job, wrapping several things much more securely than their contract really required. The moving crew that delivered our things were also quite good, carrying on despite summer heat, attacks by bald-faced hornets (whose nest they had accidentally driven the truck into) and the fact that the City had decided that last week was the ideal week to sink an 11-foot deep hole into the street in front of our house, after removing all of the concrete and leaving us on a dirt road…
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the crew that loaded everything onto the trucks and into the warehouse. In the course of doing so, the somehow managed to smash one of our television sets, damage the piano, and lose our vacuum cleaner altogether. There were a few other losses, such as one of our photo boxes (smashed, but the pictures are intact) and one of the two supports for a trestle desk (without which the other trestle and the desk top are both useless as well), but none that I felt reflected the total lack of competence suggested by a television set wrapped in a blanket or two and then crushed between other items packed into the truck…
If it sounds like I’m being unkind here, well, I’m really not. There is such a thing as a television packing box, used to protect a television set that is being transported by truck, and the company we hired to pack and move our stuff does in fact sell them. I’m fairly sure that they billed us for a couple of them in the packing supplies, but I can’t prove it. In any case, they didn’t bother to USE ONE when packing up our TV. Fortunately it was our second set; the main one is set up in our family room and working just fine, and our smaller emergency backup set (actually a flat panel that we acquired here at the Meijer) is also working perfectly. Which does not make this any less idiotic…
And don’t even get me started about the piano. My wife tells me that the damage is to one of the legs, and should be easy to repair; she insists that the sound quality of the instrument will not be affected. Which is all very well and good, but considering how much money we shelled out to have the piano moved in the first place, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to show up undamaged. Or at least, without one of the casters broken off and the foot cracked…
Which brings me to the point of this rant (yes, I do have one!). Our sales representative is going to get the sort of telephone call we all hope we never get sometime this week, and he will then have the choice of taking care of some very unhappy customers, or facing the consequences. It’s a situation so bad that it normally takes bad language to describe it, but this one man has the chance (and presumably the power) to make it all go away. Let’s all hope he chooses wisely…
I’ll keep you posted.
Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the crew that loaded everything onto the trucks and into the warehouse. In the course of doing so, the somehow managed to smash one of our television sets, damage the piano, and lose our vacuum cleaner altogether. There were a few other losses, such as one of our photo boxes (smashed, but the pictures are intact) and one of the two supports for a trestle desk (without which the other trestle and the desk top are both useless as well), but none that I felt reflected the total lack of competence suggested by a television set wrapped in a blanket or two and then crushed between other items packed into the truck…
If it sounds like I’m being unkind here, well, I’m really not. There is such a thing as a television packing box, used to protect a television set that is being transported by truck, and the company we hired to pack and move our stuff does in fact sell them. I’m fairly sure that they billed us for a couple of them in the packing supplies, but I can’t prove it. In any case, they didn’t bother to USE ONE when packing up our TV. Fortunately it was our second set; the main one is set up in our family room and working just fine, and our smaller emergency backup set (actually a flat panel that we acquired here at the Meijer) is also working perfectly. Which does not make this any less idiotic…
And don’t even get me started about the piano. My wife tells me that the damage is to one of the legs, and should be easy to repair; she insists that the sound quality of the instrument will not be affected. Which is all very well and good, but considering how much money we shelled out to have the piano moved in the first place, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect it to show up undamaged. Or at least, without one of the casters broken off and the foot cracked…
Which brings me to the point of this rant (yes, I do have one!). Our sales representative is going to get the sort of telephone call we all hope we never get sometime this week, and he will then have the choice of taking care of some very unhappy customers, or facing the consequences. It’s a situation so bad that it normally takes bad language to describe it, but this one man has the chance (and presumably the power) to make it all go away. Let’s all hope he chooses wisely…
I’ll keep you posted.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The Qdoba Difference
Some time ago I wrote in this space about a unique food service operation called Chipotle, and how they managed to parlay a handful of food items into over 2,000 different menu choices – resulting in extremely high speed in food production and relatively low costs while maintaining relatively high ingredient quality. Not surprisingly, about two years after the launch of the first Chipotle, a competitor using a similar formula launched in the same market in Denver, Colorado. The new organization was called Qdoba, and it utilized a number of the same production elements. But, as I discovered on visiting a Qdoba for the first time this past weekend, it’s not an exact copy or even the complete rip-off it initially appears to be. The truth is, the Qdoba people are using a similar business model to produce a different product and service…
The first difference in the business model is obvious the moment you walk into a Qdoba restaurant: there is no pounding Mexican/Industrial music, no corrugated iron siding on the walls, no stainless-steel seating areas or post-industrial décor. Instead, you’ve got acoustic ceiling tiles, carpet, and conventional seating areas combined with a much quieter background music, resulting in a dining environment in which it is actually possible to talk (dining at a Chipotle the conversation usually consists of yelling “What?” every minute or two). The restaurant we went to in East Lansing had a flat-panel TV on the wall with Olympic coverage going, as well. The whole message of the place is different; where a Chipotle is supposed to be “crazy fast” and edgy, this operation encourages the customer to actually sit and enjoy their meal, and take their time over it…
Then there’s the menu. Like its older competitor, Qdoba offers burritos, tacos, nachos, and other semi-traditional Mexican food (yes, I know that most real Mexicans do not eat these dishes; it’s traditional Mexican food as made in the US, all right?), but instead of the multiple permutations menu favored by Chipotle, the menu here has specific combinations of meats, cheeses, and condiments. You are encouraged to modify any or all of the combinations to suit your particular taste, but there is no requirement to make up your own combination unless you want to. This increases the time needed to construct your meal, and increases the complexity of both food fabrication and staff training, but it also gives the illusion of a more conventional restaurant meal…
And then there’s the food itself. The one constant in a Chipotle menu is the heat; unless you like your food relatively spicy you will find most of the menu items a bit on the hot side. By contrast, the Qdoba menu includes a number of much milder elements, which makes it possible for those with a wider range of tastes to enjoy their food – and permits those who do like spicy food to eat it more frequently with the attendant heartburn. Taken in combination with the slower pace, the more comfortable seating, and the less threatening menu, it’s a combination that should be able to compete with Chipotle anywhere, and which seems to work very well indeed in the upper Midwest…
They key point to consider here is that Qdoba isn’t just a copy of the Chipotle operation – though it easily could have been. Even granted that the founders of Chipotle were graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, and that their food is generally superior in flavor and design, there is no reason the Qdoba people could not have reverse-engineered the entire process, or else hired their own culinary experts to produce a close copy. Instead, they took many of the competition’s best design elements, and created a product/service that could complete directly with Chipotle, taking advantage of all of the weaknesses of their adversary’s model (e.g. loud, uncomfortable, a menu you have to figure out for yourself, a rushed experience, and spicy food). As a result, their business is much more successful than a knock-off version would have been. It’s something to consider the next time you are thinking about reverse-engineering a competitor…
The first difference in the business model is obvious the moment you walk into a Qdoba restaurant: there is no pounding Mexican/Industrial music, no corrugated iron siding on the walls, no stainless-steel seating areas or post-industrial décor. Instead, you’ve got acoustic ceiling tiles, carpet, and conventional seating areas combined with a much quieter background music, resulting in a dining environment in which it is actually possible to talk (dining at a Chipotle the conversation usually consists of yelling “What?” every minute or two). The restaurant we went to in East Lansing had a flat-panel TV on the wall with Olympic coverage going, as well. The whole message of the place is different; where a Chipotle is supposed to be “crazy fast” and edgy, this operation encourages the customer to actually sit and enjoy their meal, and take their time over it…
Then there’s the menu. Like its older competitor, Qdoba offers burritos, tacos, nachos, and other semi-traditional Mexican food (yes, I know that most real Mexicans do not eat these dishes; it’s traditional Mexican food as made in the US, all right?), but instead of the multiple permutations menu favored by Chipotle, the menu here has specific combinations of meats, cheeses, and condiments. You are encouraged to modify any or all of the combinations to suit your particular taste, but there is no requirement to make up your own combination unless you want to. This increases the time needed to construct your meal, and increases the complexity of both food fabrication and staff training, but it also gives the illusion of a more conventional restaurant meal…
And then there’s the food itself. The one constant in a Chipotle menu is the heat; unless you like your food relatively spicy you will find most of the menu items a bit on the hot side. By contrast, the Qdoba menu includes a number of much milder elements, which makes it possible for those with a wider range of tastes to enjoy their food – and permits those who do like spicy food to eat it more frequently with the attendant heartburn. Taken in combination with the slower pace, the more comfortable seating, and the less threatening menu, it’s a combination that should be able to compete with Chipotle anywhere, and which seems to work very well indeed in the upper Midwest…
They key point to consider here is that Qdoba isn’t just a copy of the Chipotle operation – though it easily could have been. Even granted that the founders of Chipotle were graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, and that their food is generally superior in flavor and design, there is no reason the Qdoba people could not have reverse-engineered the entire process, or else hired their own culinary experts to produce a close copy. Instead, they took many of the competition’s best design elements, and created a product/service that could complete directly with Chipotle, taking advantage of all of the weaknesses of their adversary’s model (e.g. loud, uncomfortable, a menu you have to figure out for yourself, a rushed experience, and spicy food). As a result, their business is much more successful than a knock-off version would have been. It’s something to consider the next time you are thinking about reverse-engineering a competitor…
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Business of Birdfeeders
In an earlier post, I wrote about my amazement with the array of colorful birds that live in our neighborhood and come to our bird feeder each day. I suppose I must sound quite bumptious to someone who grew up here, but you have to remember that in Los Angeles what you mostly see are pigeons, seagulls, and crows. Growing up in the Santa Monica Mountains we also had mockingbirds and scrub jays, and occasionally a Great Horned owl would perch in the tree outside my window and hoot for a few nights, and at our house in Redondo Beach we were frequently inundated with house sparrows (too many to count), but that’s basically it. And you might go weeks or months at a time without seeing any birds except for the ubiquitous crows and pigeons…
Meanwhile, in the month or so I’ve been watching, I’ve seen wild geese, mallard ducks, Great Blue herons, snowy egrets, American goldfinches, cardinals, robins, chickadees, more house sparrows than you can possibly count, red-tailed hawks, house finches, red-winged blackbirds, and blue jays. Not to mention crows, pigeons (and rock doves), and seagulls, for that matter. And that’s just wandering around Greater Lansing; I can’t even imagine how many more I’ll get to add to my list when we take a trip up to Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Or how many more birds will pass through our neighborhood during the Fall and Spring migrations…
So a few days ago we went out and bought a bird feeder to put on the feeder station attached to our deck (it came with the house). It seemed like a good idea, since I like watching the birds, and we already had a place to hang a feeder, and there was a store just up the street that sells birdfeeders and associated apparatus, called Wild Birds Unlimited. So we went, and discovered that there is a lot more to feeding birds than meets the eye. To begin with, there are over 300 of these Wild Birds Unlimited stores in North America, including one located less than five miles from our old place in Redondo. The things you find out when you relocate two-thirds of the way across a continent…
Then there’s the fact that these stores carry dozens of different types of feeders, including trough feeders, tube feeders, finch feeders, hummingbird and oriole feeders, hopper feeders, tray feeders, window feeders, suet feeders, specialty feeders, and feeders rather optimistically described as “squirrel-proof.” Then there are “instant” feeders – essentially balls of seeds or other popular bird feed held together with peanut butter or other edible binding agents, which you can hang in a tree or stick to a fencepost, and “bark butter” which is essentially the same product in tub form, which you can spread onto a tree branch or a fence post, presumably with a putty knife…
Equally bewildering is the array of bird feeds themselves, including dozens of different types. These are important, as the clerk at our local Wild Birds Unlimited explained, because different birds have different favorite foods and different dietary needs. We selected a bag of “Supreme Blend” bird food, which includes favorites for cardinals, finches, and chickadees, and also peanuts for the robins and seeds for the sparrows. The blue jays aren’t much of a bother; they will apparently eat anything that doesn’t eat them first, including the eggs and young of other birds. We also selected a classic balcony-style feeder with a gravity-feed system, because the cardinals prefer this type of feeder, and most of the smaller birds don’t really mind it (again, the jays don’t care)…
“Why does he tell me this?” I hear some of you asking. It’s simple, really: a month ago I had no idea there was such a thing as a national chain of retail stores dedicated to feeding birds; today I have a club card that will give me 15% off on all future bird food purchases. What new business models will I stumble upon tomorrow? More to the point, what new business models might there be waiting just outside your window?
Meanwhile, in the month or so I’ve been watching, I’ve seen wild geese, mallard ducks, Great Blue herons, snowy egrets, American goldfinches, cardinals, robins, chickadees, more house sparrows than you can possibly count, red-tailed hawks, house finches, red-winged blackbirds, and blue jays. Not to mention crows, pigeons (and rock doves), and seagulls, for that matter. And that’s just wandering around Greater Lansing; I can’t even imagine how many more I’ll get to add to my list when we take a trip up to Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. Or how many more birds will pass through our neighborhood during the Fall and Spring migrations…
So a few days ago we went out and bought a bird feeder to put on the feeder station attached to our deck (it came with the house). It seemed like a good idea, since I like watching the birds, and we already had a place to hang a feeder, and there was a store just up the street that sells birdfeeders and associated apparatus, called Wild Birds Unlimited. So we went, and discovered that there is a lot more to feeding birds than meets the eye. To begin with, there are over 300 of these Wild Birds Unlimited stores in North America, including one located less than five miles from our old place in Redondo. The things you find out when you relocate two-thirds of the way across a continent…
Then there’s the fact that these stores carry dozens of different types of feeders, including trough feeders, tube feeders, finch feeders, hummingbird and oriole feeders, hopper feeders, tray feeders, window feeders, suet feeders, specialty feeders, and feeders rather optimistically described as “squirrel-proof.” Then there are “instant” feeders – essentially balls of seeds or other popular bird feed held together with peanut butter or other edible binding agents, which you can hang in a tree or stick to a fencepost, and “bark butter” which is essentially the same product in tub form, which you can spread onto a tree branch or a fence post, presumably with a putty knife…
Equally bewildering is the array of bird feeds themselves, including dozens of different types. These are important, as the clerk at our local Wild Birds Unlimited explained, because different birds have different favorite foods and different dietary needs. We selected a bag of “Supreme Blend” bird food, which includes favorites for cardinals, finches, and chickadees, and also peanuts for the robins and seeds for the sparrows. The blue jays aren’t much of a bother; they will apparently eat anything that doesn’t eat them first, including the eggs and young of other birds. We also selected a classic balcony-style feeder with a gravity-feed system, because the cardinals prefer this type of feeder, and most of the smaller birds don’t really mind it (again, the jays don’t care)…
“Why does he tell me this?” I hear some of you asking. It’s simple, really: a month ago I had no idea there was such a thing as a national chain of retail stores dedicated to feeding birds; today I have a club card that will give me 15% off on all future bird food purchases. What new business models will I stumble upon tomorrow? More to the point, what new business models might there be waiting just outside your window?
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