Monthly Archives: March 2014

March 13, 2014 · 10:41 am

Stupid Beer Tricks

I love stories like the one I’m about to share.  They’re the sort of tales that make points that are so blindingly obvious it makes my job as your friendly screed-writer extremely easy.  Well talk about a few of them in a minute but first, the details.

Draft A Bud

(Photo credit: Brave Heart)

Our story comes to us from Boise, Idaho, and the CenturyLink Arena.  This is the home of the Steelheads, a minor league hockey team and the Idaho Stampede of the NBA D League. It also hosts concerts.  Not surprisingly, they sell beer there.  Small beers for $4, large beers for $7.  Not very much unusual or instructive there.  One night at a game, two fans bought one of each size beer and, as fans sometimes do, tried to figure out if they were better off buying big beers or small beers.  As it turned out, although the $4 and $7 cup were different in appearance and shape, they held exactly the same amount of beer.  You can watch the video below to see it for yourself.  When confronted with this, the arena said they’d ordered the wrong size cups.  They’ll have a chance to prove that in court since the fans are now suing them.

The business points are pretty obvious.  Someone thought it would be a good idea to put the arena’s bottom line ahead of honesty with its customers.  They can’t really have thought that no one would figure this out, could they?  As we’ve said quite a few times here, happy customers will sometimes tell someone else but unhappy customers almost always will, and loudly.  As I’m writing this the video has almost 560,000 views and the story has been picked up by major news outlets.

What has the arena done to correct the problem?  Why they bought new cups, of course, and said they’re sorry.  Except in so doing they tried to pull another fast one since there is still better value in the small cups. Forty-eight ounces of beer costs $14 if you purchase two large beers or $12 if you purchase three regular beers.  The management thinks fans can’t do math.

To stay in business we can’t treat our fans as morons.  We can’t try to pull “a fast one.”  We need to provide excellent value for their money and treat them with respect.  That’s not so hard, is it?

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March 12, 2014 · 8:49 am

The “DOH” Factor

I did something really dumb yesterday and I thought it might be instructive. After all, as I tell my clients, the reason you hire someone with as much experience as I have is because I’ve already made most of the stupid mistakes. Why not learn from my stupidity?

A friend was excited to learn that very high-speed internet was coming to her town.

Homer Simpson

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She sent me a link to the local article about it.  I scanned the first paragraph and saw “Google Fiber” and assumed that’s what she was talking about.  I had read that Google was bringing its gigabit internet service to her town a couple of weeks ago.  Being the good-natured sort, I replied that yes, I was aware of it when it was news a couple of weeks ago.  Snark quotient off the chart, I know.  She calmly said, “No, not Google.  Read it – it’s a local company.  They’ll be here before Google.”  My apology was immediate and sincere.

We all do that, I think.  We’re so trained to multitask that our brains get good at parsing little pieces of information, evaluating them, and deciding whether and how to act upon them in an incredibly rapid fashion.  Maybe it’s become too fast.  As my faux-pas demonstrates, taking the time to get all of the available information might delay an opinion but it will probably make the quality of that opinion – and the decisions we make based upon our opinions – much higher.

Homer Simpson is one of my favorite characters but I’m not so sure he’s a great example for any of us as a businessperson.  “DOH” is a word he says on a regular basis, not that anyone would accuse him of moving in an overly rapid manner.  Taking our time – just a bit more time – to gather information more carefully and completely can help eliminate the “doh” factor.  I’m going to try to do just that – you?

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March 11, 2014 · 8:36 am

On Whose Scarecrow Are You Raining?

TunesDay, and this week it’s one of my favorite artists, John Mellencamp. Starting his career as John Cougar, a name he hated, he’s a member of the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame (2008) who has written some of the most American rock songs ever. Today we’re going to take a business point from one of my favorites – “Rain On The Scarecrow”. First – a listen:

As a founder of FarmAid, this has to be one of his most personally important songs.  It’s the dark cousin of his song “Pink Houses“.  Where does the land for all those houses come?  From the destruction of the family farm.  But the point I want to make today is buried in the middle of the song:

Called my old friend Schepman up to auction off the land
He said John it’s just my job and I hope you understand
Hey calling it your job ol’ hoss sure don’t make it right
But if you want me to I’ll say a prayer for your soul tonight

There are so many things I see these days where I wonder about what human beings are making the business decisions involved and, more importantly, how they live with themselves for having done so.  “It’s just business” is a lousy excuse.  That’s the “blood on the scarecrow.”  I know we don’t do politics here, but have a think about how the “profits over people” mentality has made this country and our world a little less human.

It’s impossible to serve our customers when we’re totally focused on the bottom like.  No, Schepman, I don’t understand.  Customers – and the people who work to serve them – aren’t numbers on a balance sheet.  Cutting staff or reducing their pay to improve profits hurts you because there are fewer (happy) staff to support customer issues.  It may be investors who make the decisions but it’s customers who pay the bills in a well-run operation.  Springsteen wrote in the similar-sounding “Cover Me” that

This whole world is out there just trying to score
I’ve seen enough I don’t want to see any more

Maybe it’s not our economy or our businesses that are in trouble but our priorities?

This is the title song from an album about the fading of the American dream in the face of corporate greed.  That trend has only become worse in the almost 30 years since the album was released (1985).  I may be too much of an optimist but I believe that can be changed.  As with everything, it’s people and not faceless legal entities called corporations that are doing this.  People can undo this too.  What say you?

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