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...