Monthly Archives: June 2017

June 16, 2017 · 11:26 am

The Health Inspector

For our Foodie Friday Fun this week, let’s talk about the grades restaurants receive from the health department. Depending on where you live, you might see an “A” to “F” scale or some number on a 100-point scale. Most jurisdictions require that the establishment display its most recent grade and I, for one, make a point to have a look at it, especially when it’s an unfamiliar place. I don’t know about you, but I won’t eat in a place where the grade drops below 92 or “A”. Better safe than sorry, right?

I looked up the record of a place in which I eat frequently. It’s well-run and I’ve peeked in the kitchen to see if my opinion might change (back of house and front of house are two very different worlds, after all). It too looked well run. Their last 9 inspections confirm this – they run from a low of 96 to a few perfect scores of 100. Does that make the food taste any better? No, but at least I have no qualms about tasting it.

Why do I raise this since most of us aren’t in the restaurant business? Because each of us gets inspected and publicly rated every day. Search for any business and you’ll almost assuredly see several review sites or actual reviews in the search results themselves. I’m not even thinking of influencers here, just normal folk who have some information (if they’ve patronized a business and you haven’t, that’s knowledge) and the ability to share it. I suspect that Amazon’s product reviews are almost as valuable an information source as their purchase data, and Consumer Reports has built a business in doing unbiased reviews for as long as I can remember.

Everyone who interacts with you business is a health inspector of sorts. The National Restaurant Association has some tips on how to prepare for a health inspection and a few just might apply to your business as well:

  • Walk into your establishment from the outside to get an outsider’s impression.
  • Brief your kitchen staff to review any problems post-inspection.
  • Ensure all staff are on the same page.
  • Know your priorities.
  • Train your managers to ensure they are up-to-date on the latest food-safety techniques.
  • Review your local health code.

In other words, approach things from the customer’s perspective, reinforce that need to everyone on the staff, operate as a cohesive unit, listen and respond to customer feedback, stay current and be sure you’re operating under whatever set of rules govern your field of business. Those tips will keep health inspectors of any sort happy, don’t you think?

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June 14, 2017 · 2:00 pm

Death By 1,000 Cuts

When I was in the TV business, the most sought-after demographic was always young adults. While they often weren’t the key to the heaviest volume of product sales, it’s when we’re young that we build consumption habits and establish brand loyalty. Let’s keep that in mind as we look at some recent trends in media.

You’re probably not surprised to hear that cord-cutting – consumers ditching their cable or satellite TV subscription in favor of streaming and.or over the air services – has continued to accelerate. As the Techdirt blog reported:

MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett has noted that 2016’s 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record. SNL Kagan agrees, noting that traditional pay-TV providers lost around 1.9 million traditional cable subscribers. That was notably worse than the 1.1 million net subscriber loss seen last year.

They also noted that those numbers don’t tell the entire – and much worse – story. Those numbers report those who canceled an existing subscription. When you take into account the youngsters moving out of their parents’ houses or graduating from college and forming their own household for the first time, there are around another million “cord nevers” who are missed sales by the traditional cable and satellite providers. It really doesn’t matter what business you’re in. When you stop attracting younger consumers, you have a problem.

Why is this happening and how can we learn from it in any business? Techcrunch, reporting on a TiVo study, said that:

The majority of consumers in the U.S. and Canada are no longer interested in hefty pay TV packages filled with channels they don’t watch. According to a new study from TiVo out this morning, 77.3 percent now want “a la carte” TV service – meaning, they want to only pay for the channels they actually watch. And they’re not willing to pay too much for this so-called “skinny bundle,” TiVo found. The average price a U.S. consumer will pay for access to the top 20 channels is $28.31 – a figure that’s dropped by 14 percent over the past two quarters.

There is also the matter of convenience and personalization. Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming services do a great job in making recommendations and offering you programming based on your viewing habits. Has your cable operator done that for you lately?

We can learn from this. Cable operators who focus on broadband and “throw in” the TV offerings aren’t doing much better than those who don’t, since the overall out of pocket is sullied by broadband caps and other, often hidden, price increases that help the bottom line but only prolong the inevitable. It also just makes it easier for a lower-priced competitor to enter the market. I know enough about how the TV business works to recognize the issues with skinny bundles (it’s hard to offer channels on an ala carte basis due to contractual restrictions). We’re seeing more and more offerings that bundle channels outside of the traditional providers and that’s going to exacerbate the aforementioned trends as well.

What’s needed is a rethinking of the business model. Getting local governments to preclude more broadband competition isn’t a long-term solution (look at the wireless business!) nor it is the “free and open market” to which most businesspeople pay homage. Listen to your consumers and give them what they want, especially the young ones. Cord cutting isn’t some far off fantasy that naysayers have dreamt up. It’s here, and it’s killing you by 1,000 cuts. The rest of us can learn from this and, hopefully, not make some of the same mistakes. You agree?

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June 12, 2017 · 11:52 am

Learning From The Apocalypse

While you’re probably aware of the loss of jobs in the coal mining sector, you might not have been paying attention to what’s going on in retail. Department stores alone have lost 18 times the number of jobs when compared with coal miners since 2001. That doesn’t include all the smaller players that have gone out of business nor the number of jobs lost among those who are support people at shopping malls – cleaners, etc. The term you see most often as you begin to research this topic is “apocalypse.” If you’re in the media business, the music business, or many others, you might think of it as just another incidence of disruption.

Inside an abandoned mall in Allen, Texas. The ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the most disturbing things I’ve read recently was as study by GetApp, which reported that

Two out of three business owners who currently run both an online and physical store believe that they will close their physical store’s doors within ten years and operate their business solely online, according to new research conducted by GetApp.

In fact, there were over 3,500 store closings from Macy’s, JCPenney, K-Mart, and others this year. It’s happening because of technology and globalization. Ask yourself when the last time you went to the mall to go shopping. The only times I’ve been have been when I needed something in my hands immediately, and even that reason is being addressed by Amazon and others. It’s not going to get better, either.

So what do you do if you’ve invested millions of dollars building malls or other large retail spaces? That’s really the situation many businesses find themselves in. Not with respect to owning physical space but in having to expand their thinking. Landlords who thought of themselves as containers for retail are now having to think about servicing a different clientele. Churches, movie theaters, medical offices, gyms, and other tenants can move in while others move out. I drove through what used to be an outlet mall this weekend, and while it was pretty deserted (and kind of depressing), there appeared to be a couple of small start-up companies who had leased space. I’m wondering if the space was less expensive than comparable space in one of the many start-up hotels that have popped up seemingly everywhere. Of course, servicing these other tenants will require a different set of services and skills but that’s what disruption breeds, isn’t it?

The retail apocalypse is just one manifestation of what’s been happening for the last 25 years. Every business is ripe for disruption and it’s really a case of how far along it is in the process. The real question is how prepared are you as it’s happening?

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