You Keep Using That Word…

There’s a famous joke that occurs in the classic movie “The Princess Bride,” where the leader of the bad guys keeps saying the word “Inconceivable!” with regard to their enemies catching up with them, climbing up the cliffs, and so on. Finally, one of his henchmen responds in consternation “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This was essentially my reaction to one of the most recent pronouncements from a pretender to leadership of the Tea Party Movement this past week; I’m just worried about what will happen if more people start making the same malapropos…

You can find the story on TPM here if you want to, but I’ve cross-checked the story on some other sources, and it appears to be correct in the particulars. On Wednesday of this week, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips put out a list of what he called “Liberal Hate Groups” – in other words, groups that he and his followers (assuming he has followers) believe hate them and their values and possibly America into the bargain. It’s a direct reaction to the Southern Poverty Law Center (number 4 on Mr. Phillips’ list) declaring some of the hard-line conservative religious/political groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association onto its list of Hate Groups because of their opposition to same-sex marriage and the abolition of the military “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, along with more basic civil rights. Other groups named in the same fatwa include the NAACP, the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU, and the SEIU, all for the same general sort of refusal to adhere to a conservative Christian Euro-centric cultural view of the U.S. It would be even funnier if it wasn’t so clear that the Tea Party Nation has no idea of what a hate group actually is…

Now, in fairness to everyone, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list includes groups like the KKK, and having a political organization whose goals you agree with end up a list like that would certainly anger most people. But calling them a hate group because they take exception to organized (and well-funded) groups trying to deny millions of people basic civil rights is a little silly, and putting DHS on the list because it supports the current Presidential administration is asinine unless Mr. Phillips actually wants Federal agencies to declare open rebellion against a lawfully-elected government. The ACLU is just as stupid; the only rationale given is that the ACLU hates America (according to the Tea Party, anyway) and is therefore a hate group. By the time you get to the end of the list, it’s clear that whoever came up with this spew has both the intelligence and the manners of a spoiled child. The problem is, they’re also the nominal leadership for a group that numbers somewhere between five and thirty million people – and they don’t appear to be kidding…

It would be nice to end the year on an up note, and maybe sometime in the future I will, but for the moment, I read this sort of thing and a cold wind goes up my back. Because when those in power (any kind of power, I don’t care!) start calling their enemies “un-patriotic” and demanding that they be disenfranchised, imprisoned, or destroyed outright, I recall the lessons of history and what happened the last time a national government was co-opted by such people (reference Germany, 1930 to 1945, if you didn’t catch it), and I worry for the future of this Republic. In five hours or so it’s going to be 2011 – let’s all be careful out there…

Plummeting to the Bottom

I’ve done a number of posts so far about the excesses of junk food – and institutional food in general – and I want to be clear that I’m not going after the industry as such. I believe very strongly in personal responsibility, and thus I feel that if you are eating a nice 2,700 calorie entre and then washing it down with a 990 calorie milkshake and a side of 1,730 calorie waffle fries, that’s your business. Unless you happen to be 7 or more feet tall, work as a professional athlete, have the metabolism of a hyperactive weasel on speed, or all of the above, I believe that you should also accept responsibility for the obesity that will likely result from eating six to eight times the recommended calorie intake each day. But what about the people who have no choice in what they ingest, either because their meals are selected for them, because they have no income to purchase healthy options, or because they’re too young to know what a calorie is in the first place?

A recent study from thee Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, as cited by the U.S. News & World Report website examined kid’s meals from some of our better-known national junk food chains, and come up with some remarkable results. You can read the attached article (or its parent study) if you want to, but let me call your attention to the worst product offering cited: the cheeseburger kid’s meal available at Dairy Queen, with 973 calories. Obviously, no one goes to Dairy Queen to obtain health food, but 973 calories is a reasonably large meal even for me (it’s a third of my recommended daily intake), and I’m 6’2” and 250 pounds – no one’s choice for a small person. It seems a bit much to be giving a pre-teen, let alone a pre-schooler…

If that sounds like an isolated case, consider the Sonic chicken strips kid’s meal, at 708 calories, or a Taco Bell bean burrito meal at 760. In fact, Taco Bell did not offer any kid’s meals that the Yale team was willing to acknowledge as “healthy” for the purposes of the study; most of the other national chains at least had low-fat and low-calorie options that, if not exactly healthy, were at least probably no worse than any other form of lunch. It’s probably also worth noting that the offerings the study criticizes the most are also the ones that actual kids are most likely to eat – certainly, it’s harder to sell kids on macaroni and cheese with apple slices and milk than on a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, especially if you’ve gone to a junk food stand to obtain them…

Now, no one is saying that everything kids eat has to be healthy, or that there’s anything wrong with the occasion junk food meal. In that classic phrase, I’ve been eating the stuff all of my life, and I’m not dead yet. But at the same time I can’t help thinking that 973 calories (and the attendant amounts of fat and sodium) is a lot to put up with in exchange for the relatively small amount of food described. Even as a small child you could probably have talked me into a Happy Meal (at only 385 to 650 calories), and I suspect that modern kids aren’t that different – especially if they get the toy they really wanted in the package. I’m just suggesting that if eating habits are really learned in childhood (and all of the current research suggests they are) it might be possible to start teaching children to get the most from their calories and fats at the same time we start teaching them to get the most for their money and time, and give them the chance to opt out of both the massive health problems associated with obesity and the massive social problems of being a health food snob while there’s still time…

Because if we don’t, the next generation is going to be plummeting to the Bottom right along with us…

Point and Counterpoint

Over the past few years we’ve been hearing an increasing number of stories about atheist groups renting billboards claiming that there is no God and they’re all doing fine without one. A lot of religious people seem to take these as a direct attack against them, or at least against the institutions they belong to, while the atheists themselves see such messages as a counter-attack against all of the religious billboards, radio spots, television commercials, bus benches, movie trailers, and propaganda pamphlets (to call them by their right name) that most major religions spread around. Consequently, neither side seems to understand why the other side is mad at them – the atheists see their ads as nothing more than a demand for equal time (in the sense of publicly proclaiming their beliefs, just the way the religious advertising does), while the religious groups believe that the atheists are trying to destroy them (and in extreme cases, to turn the entire world over to the demonic forces of the Adversary) and everything they hold dear, and must be stopped at all costs. In at least one case, literally…

A story being reported by the Fox affiliate station in Dallas tells about how an anonymous group of “pastors and businessmen” has hired a number of mobile billboard trucks, equipped with Christian advertising messages, to follow the Dallas city busses that carry the atheist billboards around. I don’t know enough about advertising to say for certain if this campaign is likely to be effective; as a strategist, however, I can see at least three problems with the idea. First, the mobile billboard trucks are calling far more attention to the atheist billboards than they would ever have gotten on their own. Second, a lot of people don’t like mobile billboard trucks, religious advertising, or being proselytized in the first place; combining all of these things into a single event seems ill-advised. And third, who on Earth do they expect to influence with such a gesture? Anyone who is likely to convert to their particular brand of Christianity because of a proselytizing billboard has almost certainly already seen one, and the atheists already dislike efforts to convince them of the error of their ways, so directly attacking their advertising seems particularly useless. And that doesn’t even address the fact that this gesture directly contradicts mainstream Christian ethics in the first place…

Consider, for a moment, the huge amount of money that these billboard trucks are costing the consortium every hour they are on the road. Then ask yourself, how many poor people could be fed, clothed, sheltered, healed, medicated or educated with that amount of money? More to the point, perhaps, what is more likely to convince someone that your beliefs have meaning, the fact that you fed them when they were hungry and cared for them when they were sick because your faith demands that you treat all people as your brothers and sisters, or the fact that you hired a large diesel-powered billboard to shout down someone whose beliefs differ from yours?

Some years ago, the great American musician and folk singer Cheryl Wheeler wrote (of evangelical Christians of her acquaintance) “If the Lord is telling you what to do, that’s great. If the Lord is telling you to tell ME what to do, we’re going to have a problem!” To date, this remains the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say on the subject of religion in general and evangelicals in particular. For all you or I know, the Dallas consortium may be absolutely correct in both their beliefs and their interpretation of what their creator wants them to do; it might even be that renting those billboard trucks will get every one of them a free ticket to Heaven and ten free games of skeeball when they arrive. But in terms of civility, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, tolerance, or even the ethical structure of the very religion they claim to be champions of, this is nothing more or less than a diesel-powered entry in our Race to the Bottom…

Come For the Mold, Stay For the Idiocy…

In our ongoing collection of bad customer service decisions, I noted a story that was quoted on the WPXI website and later aggregated by the nice folks over at The Consumerist , about a man who was apparently blacklisted by a Motel 6 after he complained about a moldy shower curtain. If you’re like most people, your immediate reaction was probably “How skuzzy do you have to be to get on a Motel 6 blacklist?” or perhaps “Wait, Motel 6 has a blacklist? WHY?” I read the story and was transported back in time to a similar case in my personal experience – where the local management team got it right, instead…


My wife and I were on vacation and had selected a national hotel chain supposedly a few ranks above Motel 6 because they were offering a good rate and a convenient location. Everything had been reasonably satisfactory until one night when we came back to our room and discovered that the maid service had left us the most disgusting bed sheet either of us had ever seen. What on Earth they were thinking I’ll never know; the thing was stained, torn, and generally looked like the sort of sheet your mother would have thrown out without even making into dusting rags first. My gut reaction was that somebody had probably quit that day and was going out of her way to cause trouble for the management team. My wife’s reaction was that whoever was running the place had completely dropped the ball, and needed to do something about it…


We made a point of being discrete when we showed the hotel manager the sheet; he in turn was appalled, and apologized profusely for the screw-up. It probably helped that we clearly weren’t trying to scam anyone (we didn’t demand cash, a reduced bill, free room service or anything else), but the fellow clearly knew that he had a problem on his hands, and went out of his way to correct it. For the rest of our stay, he personally inspected the room everyday after the maids were done with it, and I recall getting a better rate than we had originally been quoted when we checked out – although I can’t swear to that one; it’s been a few years and my memory is getting worse. All I can tell you is that whatever he did, the lasting impression I have is of someone trying very earnestly to get it right…


Now, you and I weren’t there when the Motel 6 case went down; we don’t know for any certainty whether there was mold, how bad it was, whether the customer was an ass about things, whether the on-site manager was an ass about things, whether any effort was made to satisfy the customer’s demands, whether the customer’s demands were outrageous, or anything else. It’s possible that a business-friendly website would have told a very different side of the story from the one I found on The Consumerist. Still, it’s hard to imagine what possible good could come of leaving mold in a shower, blacklisting a customer for complaining about mold in a shower, or refusing to take that customer’s money when he actually returned to that location. Unless he was noisy, disruptive, abusive, threatening, or actually appeared to be trying to cheat the company (none of which has been alleged by Motel 6), there should have been no reason for a for-profit venture to blacklist him in the first place, let alone backpedal when called on it by the media or consumer-advocate websites…


I’m not saying that Motel 6 is racing toward the bottom any faster than any other national chain; I’m just saying that if you go you might want to bring your own Lysol…

Hate the Malfunction, Not the Robot

From time to time people who know me will hear me going off about the automated ticket cameras used to enforce red lights, speed limits and so on. I’ve been against these for a number of reasons, not least of which is because I feel they violate our civil right to be confronted by the witnesses against us, and actually getting a ticket from one for something I know (but obviously can’t prove) I didn’t do only reinforced my opinion. In most municipalities, even if you can prove you’re in the right there’s no point in trying; court costs (and lost wages from spending the day in court) will cost you more than just paying the ticket and going to traffic school, and there are venues in the U.S. where the court will not actually hear traffic cases involving the traffic camera – you are on camera doing something, therefore you must be guilty. It’s a slippery slope with some really chilling implications, but most people just ignore it, on the grounds that they’ve never been caught doing anything wrong. All of which is fine, until you get “caught” by a speed camera in a city you’ve never visited driving a car you don’t own…

The Chicago Tribune website has the story of a woman who was sent a ticket for driving her 2005 Nissan 62 miles per hour in a 45 mph work zone in Sangamon County, Il earlier this year – despite the fact that she does not own a 2005 Nissan, has never been to Sangamon County, and looks nothing like the woman in the speed camera image in the first place. If you really care, I can direct you to first-person accounts as well as cases documented in the public record of incidents like this occurring all over the United States and Europe, as well as related information about companies being paid a commission based on the number of tickets issued by the equipment. The real kicker, as far as I’m concerned, is the studies showing that these devices do not lower average driving speeds, increase compliance with the law, or improve road safety; in point of fact, there seems to be good evidence that traffic cameras actually cause accidents…

The only known benefit to these devices is that they generate revenue for the municipality that installed them, as well as for the company that provides and services them. In the story linked above, public records clearly indicated that the woman being fined did not own the car in the picture; a quick glance at the speed camera image and her driver’s license photo would also have confirmed that she wasn’t the driver. Yet despite being confronted with all of these facts (and the relevant legal documents), the County refused to even consider her case unless she made the nine-hour drive to appear in court in person. It wasn’t until the local consumer advocate reporter got involved that the State and County officials finally backed off enough to consider the facts of the case…

I will offer no argument to the fact that my personal feelings about these devices color my view of them, but I don’t believe the facts of this case (or any of the hundreds of similar ones) require any special pleading from me. If we are actually willing to accept the enforcement of criminal laws that extort money from innocent people and threaten them with jail time for things they’ve never done in places they’ve never been, and allow private companies to profit as a result, then somewhere nearby Franz Kafka is laughing his little black heart out – and our Race to the Bottom has become institutionalized…

Words Fail Me

As previously noted, sometimes I read about stories that are so astonishing that beyond the obligatory “Epic Fail!” there just isn’t much to say about them. Acts of stupidity so profound and disgusting, and profoundly disgusting, that it’s hard to come up with my customary 500 words of snarky commentary. One such case occurred yesterday on State Route 101, in Hollywood, California…


You can catch the story on the Orange County Register website if you want, but if you’re not familiar with the Los Angeles freeway system, let me set the scene for you: Highway 101 runs from the San Fernando Valley into Downtown Los Angeles, passing through the Hollywood Hills and through the heart of Hollywood itself. It’s not the most modern roadway you’ve ever seen, and frequently clogs up even before reaching the infamous Four-Level Interchange (one of the most traffic-ridden junctions in North America); even when all lanes are open and there are no accidents or construction sites (which is rarely the case). But it’s still the most direct way to get from the dozens of bedroom communities in the Valley to the commercial district in the heart of the city. Now imagine what would happen if somebody were to deliberately block most of it as a publicity stunt…


This was the case on Tuesday of this week, when a hip-hop band from Orange County decided to block three of the four lanes of the freeway with their touring vehicle and stage an impromptu concert for anyone who might be stuck in the massive traffic jam they had just created. As a native and long-time resident of Los Angeles County, the part of this story that amazes me the most is that they weren’t shot in the resulting mass of road rage. Setting fire to their truck or climbing up and knifing the band members were never serious issues, since that would have meant getting out of your car and exerting physical effort (two things that must never happen on a Los Angeles freeway), but I’ve seen cases where people unleashed deadly force on other motorists for far less cause than this. Of course, in some American cities, the band members would have been assaulted, truck or no truck – and then somebody would have stolen their truck…


I almost put this post on the main blog, since it’s difficult to see this as anything other than a faulty business decision. Any publicity stunt is about business, whether it’s album sales or concert attendance, and it’s not generally advisable to promote your business by means of a stunt that makes hundreds or thousands of people hate you. But in this case there are two subtle points that need to be considered: First, the band is from Orange County, and the traffic disaster they caused is in the neighboring community of Los Angeles, which is widely reviled by OC residents; and Second, hip-hop acts frequently attempt to position themselves as anti-establishment or even counter-culture – in other words, the sort of people who would be expected to “stick it to the Man” by performing a free concert in the middle of a busy freeway…


I’m left wondering if any of the people responsible for this stunt gave any thought to the people they were inconveniencing before they decided to do this. It’s unlikely that anything particularly dramatic happened; that anyone died because they couldn’t reach medical attention in time, or that anyone had their career destroyed because they were unable to get to their job interview on time, or that anyone lost the love of their life because they couldn’t get to the airport of the train station on time, or so on. But the fact remains that any of these things could have happened, and that at the very least these idiots managed to steal several thousand person-hours of time from innocent people who had never done them any harm. Personally, I hope the local authorities throw the book at them, and that a massive class-action lawsuit sues them for all of the lost time…


And if we’ve reached the point where this sort of stunt can even be considered acceptable behavior, then I’d say we’ve also reached the point where we can be racing to the bottom while standing perfectly still…

New Food Warnings

For anyone out there who thought the Friendly’s burger using grilled-cheese sandwiches for buns was the worst regular product we were going to see – well, you didn’t really think that was going to last, did you? Now, I’m not counting intentional gross-outs like the 6 pound, 11 pound, 25 pound and 50 pound burgers available at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Pennsylvania (and its occasional competitors); while these are commercially available food offerings, fair and square, they are only available from one rather specialized provider and were created specifically for the purpose of being a challenge to eat, whereas the Friendly’s and Hardees offerings referenced in an earlier post are mass-produced products available in thousands of locations. And then there’s the two new products that have just popped up…


According to several articles like this one in the New York Daily News and this one from the Daily Mail online , there are two new contenders in the ultra-burger market: Burger King’s Pizza Burger, and Carl’s Jr.’s/Hardee’s Foot Long Cheeseburger. The Footlong is really just three smaller cheeseburgers laid out on a foot-long, submarine sandwich bun, and with total calories of only 850 is only a bit worse for you than several other entre cheeseburgers already on the market. It’s the Pizza Burger – which is shaped and sliced to look like a pizza, but is actually just a heavily accessorized burger – with its 2,560 calories that really tips the scale into the absurd. Unless you plan to share this thing with a few of your friends, you’ll be ingesting more calories than the average person needs in a day, and that’s before we add on fries, a milkshake and dessert…


Now, as previously noted, no one is forcing customers to consume this virtual “dinner of doom” at one sitting, and if you share it out it’s really no more dangerous than anything else on the menu. What’s really disturbing about these developments is the way this trend is proliferating across the industry. Time was, unless you wanted to drive out to Denny’s (or whatever your state’s local equivalent might be), the only way to get that many calories on a bun was to purchase several ordinary cheeseburgers and stack them. Now it’s possible to order a single entre with enough calories to feed a large person for a day at any one of several fast-food chains, and the trend is showing no signs of dying down. For now, it takes hours (or days) to prepare an 11-pound or 25-pount burger (the Pub requires advance notice), but what happens once the fast-food giants start applying flash-cooking and mass-production techniques to such products?


I kid, of course, but there really is a serious point behind these rantings. If the concept of eating 2,500 calories (the equivalent of 10 plain beef patties by themselves) for lunch, or even worse, 4,000 calories including side dishes and drinks, becomes commonplace, why would anyone even worry about the 850 calorie foot-long burger? Or, more to the point, perhaps, why would anyone worry about a harmless dish of stuffed meatballs, or a simple deep-fried onion – both of which are almost as bad for you? I myself am not a slender person; I have in fact had a weight control problem since I was 10 years old, and I freely admit I enjoy a nice meal as much as the next person (unless the next person is a Vegan who eats nothing but law clippings and tofu). But if our nation is reaching the point where eating grotesque amounts of food has become not merely commonplace, but routinely possible on every street corner, then we’re not so much racing to the bottom as plummeting straight through the floors…

Fear and Loathing

There’s a recurring question, raised by the late Robert Heinlein among others, that asks why people seem to be willing to legislate against things they don’t like – that is, why do people assume that anything they personally don’t like, don’t appreciate, fear or find disgusting must be against the law, or must be made illegal if it isn’t already? Heinlein argued that anything you enjoy that does not unnecessarily harm another human being can not be considered “wrong” or “evil” in an ethical sense (harming yourself isn’t evil – it’s just stupid); he also contended that attempting to impose legal restrictions on things simply because you do not approve of them IS evil. I would like to point out that in America, such legislation is frequently unconstitutional – and in the 21st Century, it’s generally also expensive…


Consider the case of Manassas, Virginia, which is attempting to legislate all “sexually-oriented businesses” out of their city limits. You can find the story here if you want to, but the basic issue is that there’s an “adult boutique” opening in the Old Town section of Manassas, and the local residents are up in arms about this business generating an entire red-light district, attracting perverts, corrupting innocent children, and all of the assorted uproar this sort of business always seems to touch off according to conservative commentators. Whether these fears have any grounding in reality is, as always, a matter of opinion, but in this case the cost of hiring an independent legal counsel to review the situation and the proposed ordinances is going to cost the town an estimated $71,000 – not counting potential lost revenue from sales taxes, business permits, and other effects of having a successful business operating nearby...


Now, no one is saying that local governments shouldn’t be able to legislate against business operations that will work against the needs of their community; that’s one of the things a local government is created to do in the first place. If the city council wants to pass an ordinance to keep a big-box retailer out of their 19th Century downtown area (I’m looking at you, Wal-Mart) or prevent a large pesticide factory from opening next door to the local grammar school, they should have the right to do that. But by the same token, it’s hard to imagine that a single retail store operated by a mother-daughter team will turn a small town in Virginia into another Las Vegas, and there’s no conclusive evidence that anything this store is going to sell would actually do anyone any harm in the first place. More to the point, if the good people of Manassas want to purchase questionable videos, explicit pictures or “marital aids” they can get them sent discretely from thousands (if not millions) of Internet sites anytime they want to. Thus, it’s hard to imagine what benefit this ordinance will do anyone except for those who regard anything to do with sex with fear, disgust, or loathing…


It seems ironic that in a time when people are living in fear of terrorists from extremist groups that oppose free speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and gender equality, those same people would attempt to outlaw the construction of religious institutions, limit the publication of print and video media, and browbeat women into returning to a subservient role that has been inappropriate for centuries (assuming it was ever appropriate in the first place). As with the “defense of marriage” hysteria of the past few years, I have to say that if your moral fiber (or the alleged purity of your children) can be threatened by a small boutique opening downtown, then you need professional help, not legislation banning certain types of businesses. And if this sort of puritanical nonsense becomes commonplace in America, we will have hit the Bottom – and started to dig…

Lower Than Usual

Between the main blog and this newer space we’ve seen a lot of bad behavior over the past few years; the sort of knavery, chicanery and douchebaggery that would make you lose your faith in humanity if you still had any, as well as the sort of credulous idiocy that borders on arrogance (the “Oh, that sort of scam could never happen to ME!” kind of thing). Needless to say, they go together – there’s very little a scam artist likes better than people who (for whatever reason) believe themselves immune to a particular scam. But I personally can’t think of any class of people more subject to this type of self-delusion than the senior management groups of non-profit organizations, or any type of low-life more scummy than the ones who intentionally prey upon such groups. Unfortunately, I’ve just run across a story that illustrates both points all too well…


Some of you will remember that I spent a number of years doing consulting work with non-profit organizations, and a common trait of managers within that industry is that most of them are motivated more by their dedication to the cause they serve than by money, professionalism, or even satisfaction at a job well done. While this may be seen as praiseworthy, or even noble, it does give rise to a certain misplaced confidence in the importance of what they are doing – or, perhaps, that everyone else in our society is just as invested in the cause as they are. Thus, such people earnestly believe that no one would consider suing them for unpaid bills, arresting them for misappropriation of funds, or running a scam on them because what they are doing is all “for the greater good…”


Leaving aside for a moment that this is an end-means argument, and thus inherently ethically weak, this belief ignores the fact that people who are willing to steal from ordinary people without regard for relationships damaged, dreams crushed, or lives destroyed are not going to care if their actions will also have a larger negative effect on our society. A good case in point came up in an NPR story this week, which details an ongoing scam preying on non-profit groups. You can find the original story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that this company offered to produce a professional documentary about the targeted non-profits, generally using stock footage of some well-known newsreader as bait. The scammers claimed that the documentary would air on PBS stations, resulting in nation-wide public awareness of the agency and its mission, and leading to vast increases in street credibility, celebrity and philanthropic attention, and ultimately increased fund raising…


It would be tedious to enumerate all of the things about this dubious piece of business that should raise red flags in the mind of any reasonably sane person, but the one that stands out (at least to me) is the fact that these scammers are promising a host of benefits, but not actually guaranteeing anything. The fact that there are no such programs on PBS (and never have been) and that there are no references they can offer you could be explained away as factors of the firm just starting up – although we should question if any business, let alone a small non-profit group, should be throwing large sums of money at an untried new company with no evidence the investment will be worth anything – but in almost any other business enterprise, most people are savvy enough to realize that you get what you pay for, an offer that appears to be too good to be true usually ISN’T true, and even a signed contract won’t keep you from being cheated, let alone scammed outright…


So here we have the case of people who prey upon non-profit executives because they know such people are frequently unsophisticated (if not openly credulous or foolish) in a business sense, and people who foolishly squander charitable donations and philanthropic support which may be the only hope their constituent populations have because they can’t be bothered to learn how businesses actually work, hire a competent lawyer, check out suspicious offers with their state and local authorities, or even look up such offers on line. It’s very rare to encounter a crime where both the criminal and the victim are racing to the bottom, and taking our entire society along for the ride – but I think this story qualifies…

We apologize for the Inconvenience

I try not to rail against Political Correctness on these blogs – and in person – because it’s one of those topics that are easier to be smug about when you’re a male of European ancestry than it is for anyone else. As such, there are going to be things that I believe are cases of people being too sensitive – or too willing to jump on the PC bandwagon in order to get what they want – that are deadly serious to the people doing the jumping, and it’s really not my place to be telling them so. That said, I still think that the business of a newspaper having to print a public apology to readers for mentioning the end of Ramadan on the anniversary of 9/11 is a Race to the Bottom…

If your local news aggregation cite missed it, you can view the apology here, and the online version of the original article here. Basically, this was a weekend “slow news day” piece about the local observances of the end of Ramadan; something which should not be indicative of anything beyond a small local newspaper not having the budget to do anything really impressive to fill space in the front section over the weekend. But since last Saturday was the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks – and since there was no corresponding story about the evil people who claim to be part of the same religion causing those attacks – apparently a whole bunch of people started calling, writing and flaming the paper in protest…

I can’t really fault the paper for taking this position; it’s a business operating in a relatively small town, and it can’t really afford to risk alienating people who buy papers or ad space in papers in the community it serves. Printing an editorial that says, in effect, “we’re sorry if we said anything that offended you” is not much of an issue in itself. What seems unfortunate (at the very least) is that a harmless piece of low-intensity writing (you can’t really call it reporting) would cause such an outcry in the first place. There have been Muslims living in the United States for well over a century now, and for the most part, no one paid any attention to them, any more than they did to the Buddhists, Hindus, or Zoroastrians, until the wave of militant fundamentalism that had been building in Central Asia resulted in the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even then, Americans in general would probably have ignored the whole thing if not for the taking of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, the World Trade Center bombing in the 1990s, and the outrages of September 11th, 2001…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t still be furious about the attacks on American soil, or outraged at the deaths of over 3,000 innocent people who died on that day nine years ago. And it should probably be acknowledged that actions like publically calling for the execution (or outright murder) of cartoonists for exercising their civil rights is not a good way to get people to respect your right to exercise your own. But even if we do not wish to consider that some of those who died on 9/11/01 (on the ground and in the airplanes) were Muslims themselves, or that members of that faith have lived among us in peace for their and our entire lives, or even that a bunch of cave-dwelling idiots half a world away do not speak for the American Islamic community any more than a local nutcase preacher in Florida with fewer than 50 followers speaks for everyone else in the U.S., it’s still hard to imagine what would be wrong with a simple newspaper article about local residents, neighbors and taxpayers all, celebrating a holiday…

Folks, what made this country the greatest one in the world wasn’t some mindless devotion to a political ideal that no one should ever be offended by anything, any more than it was a fanatical adherence to any particular religion or a determination to only have people who look, act, sound and behave “like us” living here. What made us great was the willingness to take all of the best things that all of our thousands of immigrant groups brought from all over the world and combine them into something stronger and more powerful than any one people or nation could ever be. The “melting pot” we all learned about in civics class isn’t kettle, it’s a forge – and the alloy that has come out of it is why all Americans believe, without a trace of irony, that we really are the shining example for the rest of the world, and the hope for humanity’s future. “From Many, One” isn’t just a fancy slogan to print on money; it’s who we are and it’s how we came to be this way…

And if we’ve lost sight of that; if we have reached a time when it’s more important to shout angry slogans about the “other” and rage against innocent people for having the temerity to celebrate a holiday that was already a part of their culture a thousand years before we were even a sovereign nation, then it’s our entire society that is racing to the Bottom – and we’re not going to enjoy the ride…

It Gets Worse...

One of the early posts on this blog was about the new Friendly's mega-calorie entrees, and why these products, though certainly not the worst things that could possibly happen to your body, are nevertheless not something you should indulge in without either an unusually active metabolism or a latent death wish. Still and all, they're really no worse for you than eating two entree cheeseburgers, to take the obvious example, and certainly many people do this everyday with no immediate ill effects. The fact is, that if you are eating your lunch in any venue where you can place your order by yelling into an intercom system and then picking up your food without getting out of your car, you probably weren't expecting health food (or even healthy food) in the first place. When the items in question appear on a sit-down restaurant's menu, and especially one advertising good (if not particularly healthy) food, that's another matter...

Consider, if you will, the case of the Applebee’s Provolone-Stuffed Meatballs with Fettuccine, as profiled on the newest article from Yahoo, Men's Health, and the authors of "Eat This, Not That." There's no denying that these little nuggets of death are tasty; they're large meatballs stuffed with cheese and served on a bed of noodles soaked in butter, cream and more cheese. Unfortunately, they've got even more calories and fat than the Friendly's offering mentioned in my original post, and nearly twice the sodium. It's an entree that makes most fast-food cheeseburgers look positively healthy in comparison, and is actually worse for you than a product consisting of a hamburger patty stuck between two grilled-cheese sandwiches. But what makes this really amazing is that Applebee's has been positioning itself as a mid-price family restaurant, or bar and grill, depending on which store and which neighborhood we're talking about, whereas Friendly's (and most fast-food operations) have never made any pretense at being anything other than junk...

Now, this is not to suggest that all fine-dining restaurant serve only food which is actually good for you; or event that such venues would be able to stay in business if they did. Most such establishments, unless they are specialized health-food or vegetarian operations, are going to have steaks, cream-based sauces, lavish desserts, and elaborate alcoholic options available, all of which are (cumulatively) worse for your health than a simple stuffed-meatball dish. Nor do I intend to suggest that we should all live out our lives eating nothing but broiled fish and steamed vegetables; I personally like a nice "meatball 'o death" from time to time, and if you're healthy enough to eat this kind of food and survive, I don't see any reason why you shouldn't. I am suggesting that any company which is attempting to base its brand around a moderate to upscale position with a focus on good food and healthy eating while actually offering products more harmful to the customer's health than anything you'd find in a junk food stand is, if not actually racing to the bottom, at least sauntering that direction at an reasonable clip...

And You Thought Lost Luggage Was Bad…

One could probably suggest that without the Airline industry, this secondary blog would never have made it out of the gate; I first got the idea for Racing to the Bottom when I realized that by the time I’d written an airline rant and posted it something worse would have surfaced on the news, and I’d be starting all over again. Of course, it’s also true that given how low the bar has been set, all the industry would have to do to get me (and probably five to ten million other bloggers) to stop ragging on them would be to just spend a few weeks operating with the same competence demonstrated by your average fast-food stand. This is not one of those weeks, however…

In a story that hit yesterday, MSNBC is reporting that a nine-year-old boy travelling by himself from San Francisco to Ottawa was left stranded at O’Hare International Airport for nearly eight hours because the airline personnel who were supposed to get him onto his connecting flight forgot about him and left him in the daycare center in the terminal. It wasn’t until his plane arrived (late) in Ottawa and his mother realized that he wasn’t on it that anyone realized anything was wrong…

Now, there’s no evidence to support the mother’s contention that her son was intentionally bumped off an overcrowded flight, on the principle that a child isn’t going to complain when adults tell him to do something. It’s actually quite possible that the ramp agent who was supposed to be looking after the boy was diverted to other duties, sent home early, or just didn’t realize that no one else was going to come and pick him up from the daycare center. None of that changes the fact that the child’s parents had already shelled out a hefty “unaccompanied minor” fee, or that the airline had a contractual responsibility (not to mention legal, ethical and moral obligations) to make sure that someone looked after the boy and got him onto the correct airplane. Nevertheless, it does make you wonder just exactly what was going on in O’Hare that would classify as more important than not making the company look like blithering idiots in front of the entire world…

That is, until you realize that the airline in question is United; the same people who managed to lose the luggage of a musician who had already become world-famous for mocking them on You Tube. In this case, they’re just lucky that the boy in our story had a pre-paid cell phone on him, and the presence of mind to call his mother and tell her what had happened; most parents in that situation would have informed the authorities, and since this was an international flight, that would have involved the FBI and their Canadian counterparts. There’s a very real possibility that there would have been arrests, criminal charges, or even an international incident, if the wrong people got their noses out of joint. As it is, the airline is going to considerable limits to avoid being sued – and I’m not convinced that any of them will help…

It’s been said that if you can’t get the little things right, you’ll never get the big ones right. It’s probably not fair to say that a company that can’t get one small customer from one gate to another without losing him for eight hours doesn’t inspire much confidence, but there’s no question that it would suggest a careless, lackadaisical and unprofessional attitude that we can only hope does not extend into the people who operate or maintain the airplanes. Because if that ever happens, United is going to be racing straight into the ground…

In a Nutshell

Sometimes a story comes along that is such a perfect Racing to the Bottom piece that I know I can’t even get 500 words of snarky comments out of it; I can only present its moronic goodness to the Universe (or whatever part of the Universe wanders by my blog from time to time) and let all of my readers (assuming I have readers) bask in the dull-witted glow. This is one of those times: I bring you the story of a large group of people who live in public housing who decided to attack safety and rescue personnel with incendiary devices just for the fun of it…


You can pick up the story from the local news here if you want to, but the basic story is that a mob of people who live at the Oakwood Housing Complex in Alton, Illinois, decided to call in a false alarm to the local Fire Department, and when the firefighters showed up, the people in the crowd started shooting bottle rockets and firing off Roman candles at them. The same miscreants decided to give the same treatment to several Alton police officers who showed up to investigate as well. However, there are currently no suspects, since no one who lives in the complex saw or heard anything, or was within 50 miles of the place on Sunday night. Or, at least, that’s the story they’re all telling the authorities…


Now, I’m not going to sermonize about the lack of trust that has grown up between various at-risk communities and the police in the United States over the past fifty years. The fact is, there have been enough atrocities on both sides of that war to make you wonder if anyone left in this nation has pure intentions, and I don’t have anything approaching the arrogance to assume that I can settle anything with a little humor blog. I do have to wonder about the intelligence of people who do something like this and then complain that emergency services are slow to respond to their complex, or even to their part of town, however…


Several authors, notably including the late Robert A. Heinlein, have argued that once basic courtesy disappears from a society, that civilization is simply and frankly doomed, and there is no way to save it. Heinlein in particular cites several examples, noting that this sort of decay is almost rationalized by the people who are doing it as a matter of “strength” in taking full advantage of their opportunities and not allowing anyone to take advantage of them. I call this to your attention because it takes little imagination to picture the people shooting fireworks at firemen being very pleased with themselves, for taking advantage of “the man” or “the system” to provide them with free entertainment, or justifying their treatment of these underpaid rescue workers by citing some wrong done to their parents, grandparents, or ancestors at some point over the last 150 years…

So far, this is still drawing outrage and Internet ridicule from the so-called “decent people” who object to this sort of hooliganism, but it’s hard to imagine any such events occurring even 50 years ago in this country. Which means it’s just possible that I might be onto something with this whole “Racing to the Bottom” concept…

Negative Energy? Really?

Sometimes the hardest thing about writing a post for Racing to the Bottom is just coming up with a title that doesn’t involve profanity, obscenity, or just asking “Are you putting me on?” over and over again. The point of this blog is to showcase news stories, events and trends in our society that are outrageous or jaw-droppingly stupid or both, and thus a lot of the time I’m just staring at the screen going “No way!” or the equivalent with more cussing. You’d think after three years of writing a business blog, five years of graduate school in business where one of my research interests is institutional failure, and more than 20 years in Corporate America, there would be nothing left in the news that would surprise me that much. The story of a woman from Omaha who was fired because her boss thought her unborn child carried “negative energy” would prove you and me wrong about that, however…


According to the story from the Associated Press an employee of Hearthstone Homes was fired because her boss, the CEO of the company, thought that the child she was carrying was causing harm to the company by giving off negative energy. When a number of psychics, including a chiropractor who the CEO described as an “energy worker” confirmed his suspicious about the fetus, he fired the employee, who had up to that point been his personal assistant. She is, quite logically, proceeding with wrongful termination and discrimination lawsuits, while the company (and her former boss) are being mocked by the local radio stations, television news, various Internet news aggregators, and of course, your friendly neighborhood bloggers…


What struck me about the story was that I honestly can’t decide which would be worse: if the CEO in our story honestly believes this new-age negative energy claptrap, or if he doesn’t. On the one hand, if he does, he’s allowing a preposterous lash-up of superstition, animism and self-help nonsense to interfere with the proper operation of his business, costing the enterprise a huge amount of money (even before the cost of legal fees and possible legal sanctions are applied), in addition to revealing to competitors and customers alike that he runs his company based more on his emotions and insecurities than on any responsible business principles. If, on the other hand, this is simply a ploy to avoid having to pay for having an employee out on maternity leave (and possibly increased insurance premiums for having a dependant child on the firm’s policy), or a mean of ridding himself of an employee who will now have childcare responsibilities that might interfere with her demanding work schedule (e.g., his demands), then he’s a cretin and should be imprisoned as well as sued…


Now, I realize that just because I don’t believe in something, that doesn’t make it wrong. Every American has the constitutional right to believe in whatever he or she wants to believe in; if you want to make decisions based on “intuitive spirituality” and your beliefs about “reincarnation and energy fields” that’s your business. But your rights to believe in and be guided by exotic new-age beliefs do not supersede the rights of other people. And if our society has actually reached the point where we have to use legal proceedings to discourage people from doing so, or from using such beliefs as a cover for eliminating employees who might become expensive and/or inconvenient, then our race to the bottom is starting to pick up speed…

Wasting Your Time

In the main blog, I have occasionally gone off about frivolous lawsuits, although technically they’re not really a business topic. Actual business suits are, of course; if you are sued (or sue someone else) because of a broken contract, a dispute over debts, or a product that failed and/or caused harm to someone while being used as suggested, then it’s hardly “frivolous” and is most likely just part of doing business. By the same token, there’s nothing you can do about truly frivolous legal actions – most municipalities allow you to counter-sue the person, but for the most part, if someone wants to sue you because the weather today was ghastly, they can. However, this blog is more oriented toward making snarky comments at people who deserve them, and the woman who is suing because she was arrested for illegally taping a movie falls into that category…

You can pick up the story off of the local broadcast station if you want to, but the facts of the case appear to be that the movie theater operators noticed the woman taping the opening of the second “Twilight” movie and summoned the police, exactly as they are required to do under both criminal law and their contract with the studio that made the movie. The police arrived and arrested the woman taping the film, but the charges were later dropped when it was discovered that she hadn’t actually taped the whole movie and was mostly just recording a few scenes and images of other members of her party in the theater. Now the individual who was arrested is suing the theater for the “great public ridicule, embarrassment, humiliation, inconvenience, damages to her reputation, and other damages” that her lawyer says resulted from the incident…


I call this to your attention for two reasons. First, this individual is wasting your time – more so than I am, I mean. You, the taxpayer, are the one who ponies up the funds to operate the courthouse; every moment it is open costs you, and this individual is wasting those moments trying to capitalize on a profoundly stupid, self-absorbed action that is, in fact, in violation of both civil and criminal statute. Second, this individual is wasting your money – you, the movie-going member of the public who actually pays to see movies on the big screen. Because the movie studios, production companies and theater companies aren’t just going to suck up the costs of the lawsuit (and the damage award, if there is any); they’re just going to pass those costs along to you in the form of higher prices at the box office. And since time IS money – you have to work, for the most part, in order to get the money with which to buy these ticket, your time is being stolen and wasted again…

Now, I certainly don’t want to suggest that people shouldn’t be allowed to sue corporations for actions that embarrass or humiliate them, or that businesses should be able to use law enforcement agencies to damage whomever they wish without risk or penalty. But I’m also opposed to frivolous lawsuits (for all of the reasons stated above, and many more) and I’d have to say this one fits the description well enough. Suing a company because they had you arrested for an actual crime – even if the local district attorney decides not to bother trying you – is not an appropriate use of civil court, and should not be something you can just cash in on for money…

So before you call this a victimless crime, or express your approval for the gutty little consumer who is getting to really “stick it to the man” here, just keep in mind: it’s not the big, bad corporation that will suffer here, it’s you. That’s your money she’s going to walking away with – and it’s your time she’s wasting…

Does It Come With a Side of Hemlock?

One could legitimately argue that fast food companies have been racing for the bottom ever since Ray bought the burger stand from the McDonald brothers and set up for mass production; however, it’s also true that no one has ever been compelled to purchase fast food, and healthier options are almost always available. Thus, I’m not going to do a lot of posts about how junk food meals (“made with real junk!”) are an insult to your intelligence as well as your health. When I saw the new Friendly’s sandwich being offered, however, I thought it deserved at least a mention in passing for its truly creative use of things that are not good for you in a single entre…


You can pick up the Consumerist story about it if you’d like, or go visit the company’s website for yourself here if you prefer. Basically, the new product is less hype than it is a hamburger patty with grilled cheese sandwiches for buns. You read that correctly, folks; a large flattened spheroid of ground beef stuck between four slices of buttered toast with cheese between each of the bread layers. It’s 1500 calories, 79 grams of fat (38 grams of it saturated), and 101 grams of carbohydrate, although to be fair I suppose we should also note that it provides 54 grams of protein (the equivalent of two cans of tuna). It’s kind of a lot for a single meal, but what makes it truly remarkable is that’s not even the worst thing on the company’s menu…


A quick search of the menu items turns up four other sandwiches with even higher calorie contents, as well as seven “basket” entre items and a few other things that go well above these figures. Any of these choices far exceed the much-maligned Hardee’s “Thickburgers,” the largest of which only weighs in at the 1320 calories. To those asking “why” anybody would field such a product (and risk another round of Doonesbury strips making fun of them), it seems clear that this is an attempt to compete with the much smaller (and far less destructive) “Double-Down” product from KFC, which uses pieces of chicken as the bread in a sandwich. A much better question would be why anyone would actually eat such a thing…


Now, I realize that there are people for whom 1500 calories really is just a light snack; there are also a fair number of people in our society who will routinely eat two smaller entre cheeseburgers for lunch, which is all this product really is. It wouldn’t rise to the level of mind-blowing, coronary-inducing excess unless you started with, say, the Loaded Jumbo Waffle Fries (1650 calories) and washed it down with a Butterfinger shake (990 calories), at which point you really do have one of the 4,000+ calorie meals parodied in the comics pages. And even then, there would still be people who could eat this will no ill effects – as could most people, in fact, if they were careful not to indulge too often. That’s not really what makes this a race to the bottom…


My point in calling all of this to your attention is that it clearly is an attempt to compete with several of the other “mega-entre” offerings produced by competitors in the same industry – which means that it’s really just an escalation in an ongoing war to see who can make the most unhealthful thing a person could ever eat. If this trend continues – and it’s hard to imagine why it wouldn’t, given how lucrative these products are – then eventually we can expect to see a single food item introduced to the public that is more hazardous to your health than smoking a carton of Lucky Strikes while chugging a case of rum, and can be ordered by yelling into a clown’s head and then driving around to the window…


Of course, you don’t have to purchase that ultimate product, anymore than you have to go to Hardee’s or Friendly’s right now. But I think we can say with some confidence that the fast food industry isn’t about to stop Racing to the Bottom any time soon…

Profiles in Scumbaggery: BP

Okay, I will admit that this post is a lot like kicking a guy when he’s down; it’s also a lot like shooting fish in a barrel or making “Nixon” jokes. But as I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t actually have all that much condemnation for British Petroleum regarding the disaster in the Gulf. The fact is, if we had demanded proper environmental accountability from our national government at ANY time in the past fifty years, none of this would be going on, and if we’d made even the most casual efforts at improving fuel economy and energy conservation during the last forty years the price of oil would never have gone high enough to make deep-water drilling economically viable in the first place. The blame for the current disaster has a lot more to do with people who want to leave all of their lights on in empty rooms and use a 7,740-pound SUV to transport one person and one briefcase to and from work everyday than it does with an opportunistic corporation exploiting lax regulations and laughable enforcement in order to make obscene profits. The company’s treatment of their clean-up personnel and insults to our intelligence are another matter, however…


First, you have the issue of BP insisting that the people it is employing to clean up spill-related problems on the ground not wear hazardous materials gear, because it looks bad. It’s hard to keep maintaining that nothing terribly alarming is going on when you have people dressed in white coveralls and respirators (level 2 or 3 hazmat gear, depending on what they’re using) on camera. But if you spend any time in the petroleum business you rapidly find out just how toxic this crap is; I had the Level 1 hazmat training at Unocal, and the stuff in crude oil (let alone gasoline) would turn your hair white it you knew about it. It’s toxic, carcinogenic crap that can literally corrupt the DNA in your genes if you’re not careful with it, and BP is pressuring otherwise innocent people to risk exposure to it simply because it might be bad for their image…

Then there’s the whole business about lying to the press. There have been a lot of stories about this, but here’s one from Yahoo! News in case you need another one. This kind of thing was bad enough when Halliburton did it in Iraq; what BP is doing here is happening on American soil and doesn’t even have the excuse of military security or “encouraging our enemies.” Until such time as the affected beaches declared a State or Federal disaster area and placed under martial law, all that is going on here is a private company preventing members of the public from gaining access to public lands. In other words, they’ve got people giving pious statements for the press about openness and transparency and accountability, while at the same time using hired muscle to restrict information and intimidate anyone who challenges their version of events…

Would any other oil company have behaved better under these circumstances? It’s hard to say for certain; Exxon’s response to the Valdez disaster was blasted by environmentalists and libertarians alike, but I don’t remember anything quite as scummy as what we’re seeing in the Gulf this week. On the other hand, it’s many years later, and things that would have been considered unendurable violations of our civil liberties and way of life even a few decades ago have now become commonplace. Perhaps what we’re seeing along the Gulf Coast is simply the new normal; the level of outrageous and unethical behavior that will become the standard for life in the 21st Century…

In which case it’s time to start investing in interstellar spacecraft, because if this level of scumbaggery becomes the standard, this planet’s days are numbered…

Striking Back At Random

By now, some of you will have heard about the now-resolving pilot’s strike at Spirit Airlines, and the fallout that resulted from it. Spirit has a special place here on Racing to the Bottom; they were the company profiled in the original post from the main blog that inspired this one in the first place; you can read about their new carry-on baggage fees by following the preceding link, assuming you still want to. But as much of a new low as this concept was just two months ago, their performance over the past week, while their flight crews were out on strike, may have shattered their previous record or even established a new standard for their industry to avoid – all during a week in which the company wasn’t even operating…



Spirit had been wrestling with the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) for some time; there’s a Federally-mandated 30-day “cooling off” period between the time when talks break down and when a labor action can legally be started, and that time had obviously expired before the Spirit pilots walked off the job. However, as reported on Portfolio.com, the company did not inform any of the people who had purchased tickets on Spirit that a strike was forthcoming, or that they would be cancelling all of their scheduled flights over the weekend; nor did they allow anyone who had purchased their tickets to change their flight dates or request a refund for the flights without paying a $100 fee. The company did promise to find pilots from other airlines to operate their flights, or purchase tickets for their passengers on other airlines to make good the loss, but neither activity ever occurred…



Now, I understand that Spirit is one of the most heavily discounted airlines in the world, and that they don’t manage to offer cheap airfares because they have little airplane fairies working for them. They pull off both their operational and financial performance by pinching pennies harder than anyone else in their industry, and all of these games with the cancelled flights are only what you should expect when you attempt to do business with a “low bidder” as low as they are. We can also understand their CEO’s attitude in refusing to extend any loyalty to customers who have no history with the company and are only flying with Spirit because of the low price. Neither partner in such a relationship is extending any loyalty, in fact; the customers are only doing business with Spirit because it is cheaper to do so, and the company is not likely to run out of people who want to travel but don’t want to pay for doing so – unless they keep doing things like this, of course…



In all of the years I have been observing (and making snarky comments about) bad business practices, this is the only occasion I can remember in which a company accepted money from customers, refused to provide the service that had been paid for, and refused to fully refund the money – without being shut down by the Federal authorities while Law Enforcement personnel took all of their executives away to jail. I’m not even sure I’ve ever seen anything to compare to knowing that upcoming flights had been cancelled and still selling seats on them in the first place, but this behavior on the company’s part was so bad that people are now complaining to Congress about it, and there may be an investigation in the next few weeks. This just leaves us with the question of what the company thought it was doing – other than racing to the bottom of how you treat your customers, that is…

Gaming the System

Despite the name, not every post that makes its way onto this blog is actually going to establish a new record for slime, crime, or general inhumanity; the number of truly exceptional stories that come down the newswires is actually limited to no more than a few times each month. Some of these rants are just going to be cases of remarkable or noteworthy idiocy that make an important, illuminating, or educational point. And then there are going to be cases like the one I found today, about credit companies using the criminal justice system to have people thrown in jail for outstanding debts…


One might reasonably argue that debtor’s prisons were abolished in the United States over a century ago, violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishments, and constitute a disgusting misuse of public safety services (and funds) that could otherwise be used to apprehend, prosecute and incarcerate actual criminals. And one would be correct on all points, especially the one about using criminal courts to enforce civil matters being a complete perversion of our justice system. But, as this article in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune website makes all too clear, in at least some of the states the people actually running the system don’t appear to care…


Now, it is certainly true that there exist people in this country who, as one of the judges in the linked story puts it, “there are people who have the money but just won't pay a single penny." Many of the people who receive notice of the court actions don’t understand what the documents mean, don’t recognize the company that says they owe money (often because the debt has been sold to another institution to recover), or just assume that these communications are part of some attempt to defraud them. But if even a single case occurs where someone is jailed over legal proceedings before they were officially notified, let alone served with court documents (and there are several of these in the linked news story), then this situation has exceeded a mere perversion of our justice system and become a perversion of justice itself. This is the sort of abuse of privilege and influence that this country was founded to avoid in the first place, and any such actions should be repugnant to all Americans – and anyone else with a working sense of justice…


So it’s not a case of incompetent management, criminal malfeasance, or customer service so completely asinine that it actually damages the customer and ultimately the company providing it. This is all completely legal; it’s just so disgusting that I can’t even think of a bad metaphor for how disgusting it truly is. It’s a reason to avoid Minnesota, Arkansas and Washington State altogether, and another good reason for staying out of Arizona. It’s a truly inspiring effort at racing to the bottom – and until a new outrage appears on our radar, I think we have to call this one the winner…


It’s just sad to think that there should be another one along by next week…

Just Because You Can…

There’s an old saying that goes “Just because you can, that doesn’t mean you should…” People will usually quote it when someone has just done something that is technically possible, and may even be legal or socially acceptable, but is still not a good idea. The classic admonition is that given to someone who has decided to eat or drink to excess, stating that they have the food or beverage, time to consume it, legal right to do so, and so on. In today’s case, however, the same truism can be applied to real estate and obsolete property laws…


As reported on the News OK website there’s a company in Guthrie, Oklahoma that is buying small parcels of land – often as small as a few feet at the end of a driveway, or the alleyway through a condo complex – at county auctions for pittance fees, and then offering to sell them to the owners of the main property for vastly inflated amounts. The article mentions a shared driveway, for example, that was purchased for $1,584 which is now being offered to the owners of the complex served by that driveway for $80,000. The residents are calling it extortion, the owners are suing, and the state courts are still trying to figure out what the law actually says…


It was tempting to file this under the “Profiles in Scumbaggery” category, but the fact is that the businessman behind these outrages isn’t actually doing anything illegal; if you are too careless to secure the right-of-way to and from residential property you are developing, or notice that the right-of-way is being sold at county auction for a pittance, then you probably deserve to be taken advantage of. More to the point, perhaps, you almost certainly WILL be taken advantage of, as soon as anyone notices the situation. The man being profiled (and lambasted) in our story is hardly the only person doing such things in Oklahoma, let alone the United States, let alone the whole world. It’s one of the reasons it’s so important to have your real estate transactions handled by professionals whenever possible, especially when you’re dealing with commercial properties. That said, it’s still not the kind of business practice that will win you any friends…


The point I’m going after here is that while the business dealings profiled in the linked story are perfectly legal, they are also things that will cause your neighbors to excoriate you in the local paper, assuming that they don’t attempt something worse. In this particular case, the residents are taking legal action, attempting to get the sale of their driveway overturned, and talking about ways to drive the businessman who did this out of business. I can’t help thinking that as much fun as it might have been to charge 50 times what you paid for something, it would have been a better business model to have asked for $2,000, $4,000 or even $10,000 for the tiny “parcel” involved – the later amount is still not that unreasonable, given that the property owners were oblivious enough to be caught by surprise by the sale, and it still represents a 634% markup on the original price. The businessman in our story would then have the opportunity to conduct many similar transactions in the future, without having everyone in his community howling for his blood…


The point here is that just because something is legal, and will (potentially) fetch you 5,000% of what you paid for it, that it may not actually be a good idea in the long run. Or, as the old saying goes, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…”

Profiles in Scumbaggery

Of course, no blog about business failures would be complete without an occasional series about the men and women who have brought us these monuments to bad behavior, which I’m going to call Profiles in Scumbaggery because “Profiles in Douchebaggery” was taken. I’m going to try to stick to current events, and scumbags whose bad behavior is relevant to business in some way, but even so I’d expect to see one of these posts pop up every few weeks at the longest. And I can’t imagine a better individual to start off this series than the man whose work almost single-handedly redefined what it means to be a scumbag in America, if indeed not the world in general. The one, the only, Bernard “Bernie” Madoff…


In any time before the era of Internet news and 24 hour satellite channels, Bernie would have used up his 15 minutes of fame and left the stage, but in this twenty-first century it seems no one ever does anymore; consequently I was not really surprised to find an article about the man online this week. In a story from New York Magazine about Madoff in Federal prison, the former con artist is described as being unrepentant, blaming his victims for being rich, greedy, and willfully oblivious to the fact that the “genius” fund manager who claimed to be making them rich was, in fact, actually running one of history’s greatest Ponzi schemes…


I call this article to your attention not because I think there’s much I can add to the reams that have already been written about Madoff and his crimes – enter his name on any search engine you like, and there will be millions of pages of text written by people more capable and more knowledgeable submitted for your consideration – but rather, because this is the only true answer to the question that all of the Madoff victims (and most of the rest of America) have been asking for years now: why did he do it? How is it possible for one man to do that much harm to that many people without actually growing horns and a tail?


Some of it, of course, is simply ego run amok. When Madoff claims to have made a few bogus trades, expecting to make up the difference later, and then never managed to catch up, I think we should believe him. Not that he was blameless, of course; simply that his massive overconfidence led him to believe that he could do as he pleased, without any chance of facing the consequences later. We should also consider that his contempt for the Bush-era SEC is probably warranted; the Commission has always been a little too close to the agencies it is supposed to keep watch over, and has always been far too lax in both investigation and enforcement – because politically, it would be unwise to do anything else. The whole system depended on everyone playing by the rules and not taking the kind of chances that could destroy our economy and way of life, and all it would ever have taken to game the system is one man who knew the rules – and was willing to take insane risks…


If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same kind of lack-of-thought that was responsible for the cozy relationship between third-party auditors and their clients that created the Enron scandal, or the de-clawing of the FAA that make airport security a joke and led directly to the 911 attacks, which we can blame on political maneuvering and lobbying by the airline industry. Years of deregulation and under-emphasis on government oversight following decades of politically emasculated enforcement set up a climate in which millions of people could do whatever they wanted in our financial markets – and it only took one of them to screw things up to the tune of $65 billion…


So if the story of Bernie Madoff disgusts you, let me recommend you take a good look in the mirror before you start telling anyone about it. Because the fact is, we made Bernie what he is today; we may not have lit the match, but there is no doubt about who set the charges. And until such time as we, you and I and every other American, start demanding accountability from our government and requiring that our watchdog agencies start actually enforcing the laws they were created to oversee, there can be no question that it’s only a matter of time before it all happens again…

That Just Leaves Taxes...

On today’s edition of “Race to the Bottom” we explore another new low in the field of customer service achievements, with the case of a company for whom death isn’t enough to get out of paying your service fees. In fact, according to the story as presented by the local television news, death, two death certificates, a written request and statements by the executor of the estate and the beneficiary of the will were not enough to get out of paying your account maintenance fees. Which would probably be a little easier to understand if the bank account in question had more than just $40 in it to begin with…

In what I have to consider a truly exceptional example of bureaucracy run amok, a woman in Virginia who was trying to close her late mother-in-law’s checking account at Bank of America had to produce a death certificate for her mother-in-law, then that of her father-in-law who had passed away 15 years earlier; she was also required to bring in the executor of the estate to confirm the situation. After all of that, the company still refused to close the account and issued a bill for another “account maintenance fee,” then claimed to have never seen any of the relevant paperwork and demanded it be faxed to them…
It wasn’t until the local television station I linked above got the story and started telling everyone in their broadcast area (and everyone in the world over the Internet) that the company finally promised to resolve the matter and repay the account fees it had been charging. If that sounds to you like a case of closing the barn door after the horse has already run off, you’re not alone in that…


Now, clearly there was no one at B of A rubbing their hands together and cackling with glee at the prospect of raking in $40 dollars of extra profits from this account; it’s just a case of the company screwing up a routine function somewhere in their infrastructure and failing to complete the operation as they were supposed to. Given that they process thousands (if not millions) of similar account changes each day, it’s not that shocking that the occasional one falls through the cracks, or that the company is not particularly concerned by it. What is remarkable about this situation is the amount of money involved versus how much this foul-up is likely to cost…


If B of A charges just $7 a month for small checking accounts (and they often charge more than that), then the loss of a single account for six months (or six accounts for one month) will cost them more than they could have made on this situation if they had been in the right in the first place. They had no prospect of getting more money from the customer (since she’s dead) or from her estate, and the very real chance of alienating the family and anyone else who saw this story online, but this risk wasn’t enough to warrant making any special effort to resolve the situation before it go spread all over the world…

The truth is, the amount involved really isn’t enough to inspire the company to any special effort, and losing $7 (or even $40) will not ever draw the company’s attention. But if a few million people see this story (which they have), and even one percent of them decide not to do business with B of A as a consequence (which they might), then this could easily go from losing $7 to losing $140,000 per month – rather a lot for failing to fix what was probably just a clerical or routing error…

A Race to the Bottom

All right; so why a second blog? I already write a blog here on blogger.com called "Notes on a Business Page," where I share my thoughts on business, management, and current events, along with the occasional musing on life, graduate school, and human nature. So why start a second blog specifically devoted to customer service foul-ups, idiotic business decisions, and management policies so asinine they bear repeating?

Part of it, of course, is just that it might be fun. I write a lot of institutional failure posts for the main blog, partly because that's one of my research interests as a management scholar, and partly because any given day will bring dozens of them in the business pages of any major news aggregation site, but mostly because they're fun to read about and provide me with lots of comedic opportunities to make sarcastic remarks about people who aren't really trying - or, at least, aren't trying hard enough. I'll reprint a bunch of those posts here, too, but this also gives me a place to snark about things that I think are contributing to the decline of our civilization that aren't appropriate to the main blog. So, partly rage against the things that I feel are destroying the world as we know it, partly mean-spirited (but hopefully very funny) humor about people and institutions that should really know better, and partly things that are supposed to be vaguely educational or editorial but aren't necessarily serious. A mixture of Sam Clemens, Frank McConnell, Sam Kinison and Andy Rooney, if you like - all writers and observers whom I deeply admire, and all men whom I hope to be like when I grow up. Assuming, of course, that I ever do grow up...

So let's start things off with an image that I think captures the spirit of the thing perfectly. Some time ago, somebody decided to create a wall hook (like what you would hang your jacket on) in the shape of a roaring hippopotamus head - and, naturally, somebody else decided to create a hook in the shape of the back end of the hippo. Anyone who would consider hanging their hat on the back end of a hippo can't be all bad - and any blog that would feature such an item is in no danger of taking itself too seriously...

So, here we go. Anybody want to come along for the ride? It might be fun...