I Miss the Old Days…

I was saddened to hear that in the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan last week there were apparently cases of people using the occasion for a few cheap laughs. I’ not referring here to the firing of Gilbert Gottfried by AFLAC because of a few insensitive tweets; that has always been Mr. Gottfried’s style of humor, and if the idea bothers them the company shouldn’t have hired him to voice their spokesduck in the first place. No, here I am referring to some roguish jokester who apparently thought it would be funny to tell the parents of a young woman living in Japan that she had been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the disaster…

You can pick up the Associated Press story off of the Toronto Star website if you want to, but the basic idea is that someone posted a message on a Google site set up for the purpose of tracking loved ones who might have been in the affected area, saying that the woman in question had been confirmed dead. It became clear that this was incorrect when the woman managed to get a text message through to her parents using a satellite phone a day or so later, and it became clear that this was a deliberate hoax (not just an informational error) when it was determined that the name signed to the “medical” report was not that of any doctor who had ever worked at the facility where the “death” supposedly occurred, and no one has been able to identify who actually posted that entry in the first place…

Now, I realize that modern-day trolls are not, for the most part, truly descendants of the hacker culture of the last century. I used to run with a group of hackers, back when the Internet was still just a gleam in DARPA’s eye and most computer exchanges were done over telephone lines using 300-baud modems and bulletin-board systems, and I can tell you that not only would we never have considered such a hoax, we wouldn’t have tolerated anyone who did. We might have attempted humor by listing Julius Caesar, Richard M. Nixon, Pope Pius IX or the AFLAC Duck among the departed, or political commentary by making entries for Wisconsin’s Public Employees’ Union or Governor Walker’s career (depending on our party affiliation), but causing somebody’s parents such a moment of heartbreak and grief isn’t just unfunny, it’s also cruel, callous and stupid – and those are just the adjectives I can print…

There was a time when being a hacker meant something; when we aspired to be the knights of the Information Superhighway, defenders of the defenseless, the conscience and the whistle-blowers of a nation (and, one day, the world). We knew it wasn’t really true, of course; just as we knew that the majority of us really were zit-faced nerds playing video games in our parents’ basements who had never had girlfriends. But it was something to believe in; something that made us more than just a bunch of poorly-socialized technology geeks with a penchant for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and vintage Mountain Dew. The interconnection of all of humanity has done some wonderful things for our world, bringing people together and creating friendships and communities where once there was only quiet desperation and loneliness, but it has also given that tiny number of truly monstrous human beings the chance to vent their spleen, hatred and cruelty onto innocent people in a time of crisis…

It makes me sad for my species, sometimes. And if this behavior is ever accepted – indeed, if it is ever greeted with anything less than a murderous rage – then our Race to the Bottom has achieved a new speed record…

The Human Factor

Every once in a while you’ll hear someone talking about how all of the new security we’ve been seeing since 9/11 is just window dressing; not only are the borders still as open and the ports (air and sea) just as vulnerable as ever, but the actual TSA security, which manages to defy multiple Amendments from the Bill of Rights, manners and (frequently) sanity is accomplishing nothing. Now, I’m as security-minded as the next guy, and more patriotic than most; I want to be as sure as possible that no one is going to slip a bomb onto the next airplane I ride on, and I’m perfectly okay with whatever our government decides to do to anyone who does. Nevertheless, you have to wonder if the pessimists are correct when you hear stories like this one from the CBS affiliate station in Boston …

If you don’t want to hit the link, the story is pretty straightforward: TSA agents testing the security procedures in Charlotte managed to get a package onto a Jet Blue flight to Boston by the time-honored method of slipping a $100 bill to the agent at the front counter. Yes, you heard that correctly; for a measly $100 an otherwise sane adult was willing to place a package containing who knows what onto an airliner. I’m not sure if I’m more appalled as a consumer (I expect better from the private sector!) as a reasonably ethical human being (how could ANYONE risk over a hundred human lives in such an idiotic and reckless fashion for mere personal gain?) or as a business teacher (you risked a life sentence for $100? Really? You’re okay with being paid the equivalent of $2 a year for the next fifty years? Assuming they don’t just execute you for being a terrorist or an idiot?) Nor do I find assurances by the TSA or the airline that all packages going aboard are screened for explosives in any way reassuring; the desk agent was willing and able to commit forgery, perjury, and accept a bribe that put over a hundred people in mortal danger – do you expect me to have any faith in his or her adherence to safety protocol?

I should also point out that this is a plot element from a movie that was, unfortunately, released the same week as the 9/11 outrages: two minor criminals are able to get tickets for themselves and a hostage out of the country simply by offering the desk agent several large bills. They’re also carrying an atomic bomb with them in the mistaken belief that it’s really a case full of diamonds, but that’s not point; 9/11 itself proved that you don’t need to get a bomb onto a plane to destroy it – or to kill several thousand people on the ground at the same time. My point here is that as long as the people working for the airlines and TSA remain fallible human beings there will always be some chance of this happening – and if these individuals are underpaid and overworked (or even believe that they are) they will be able to justify such misdeeds in their own mind for long enough to cause another set of catastrophes…

Of course, this time there was a happy ending; this time the mysterious package was just a test article and the sender was an undercover TSA agent. But as long as our entire airline security system is based on everyone who works at every airport doing the right thing regardless of temptation, resentment, or personal feelings, then it’s only a matter of time before this sort of outrage happens for real – and another airline destination joins us on our Race to the Bottom…

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…

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…

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...

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…

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…

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…”

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...