Tag Archives: Business and Economy

December 4, 2015 · 11:29 am

Warning Labels

Another Friday, some more Foodie Friday Fun! This week our topic comes from right here in NYC, where the Board Of Health has stirred up the restaurants again. What they did was to pass a new rule requiring major restaurant chains to label foods that are particularly high in sodium. The National Restaurant Association is suing them in response, claiming that the Board “overstepped its authority with an arbitrary and capricious mandate” in a statement to Eater.

Warning label on a cigarette box, which booste...

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This got me to thinking about warning labels. Obviously, this example is only one of many products that contain warnings – cigarettes being the most obvious. There are the less obvious warning labels – “past investment results are not an indicator of future returns.” for example.

There are also a number of products which, in my opinion, should also contain warning labels – things high in sugar, for example. But there is a broader point that I’d like us to think about.

Food products list ingredients – they have to. They also list what percentage of one’s daily intake of sugar, carbs, fat, salt – whatever – the product supplies. But there is no context. Nothing says if you consistently exceed the recommended sugar intake you are at risk for diabetes, and obviously there is an epidemic of it in this country. Is the ingredient list a warning label?

Less obvious are products the don’t warrant warnings on the surface but probably ought to have one. “This product is badly made and will fall apart after 5 uses.” “This fabric will shrink 3 sizes after the first wash.” Or how about “this garment was made using slave labor in unsafe working conditions” for an eye opener?

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that maybe we should ask ourselves if our product ought to have a warning label even if it’s the less obvious kind.  If it probably should, are we not doing the customer a disservice by foregoing its use?  I’m not talking about legal liability; I’m talking about doing what’s right.  Moreover, shouldn’t we be thinking about changing the product in such a way to make it “safer” as best we can so the label isn’t required?

Food for thought!

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December 1, 2015 · 12:22 pm

Unlimited Thinking

I’m not a fan of limited thinking. I much prefer the intellectual exercise of accepting the challenge of a difficult supposition and then figuring out a way to expand the set of answers. I often think of President Kennedy‘s challenge to put a man on the moon in 10 years when manned spaceflight had not really happened yet. Had everyone just said “no way” rather than “ok, so IF we were going to do that, how would we?”, we’d never have made it (nor had great films like Apollo 13!).

The Thinking Man sculpture at Musée Rodin in Paris

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought of that this morning when I read the quote below. It’s from a piece about the need for advertising to support content and a rant on how ad blockers are killing off content:

And so it really is a simple math problem. If there isn’t any money to pay the people who create content or buy and maintain the servers that host that content, there will not be any content. No one’s really coming at the story from that angle. And those who have lived almost their entire lives consuming content for free might need a good slap upside the head. In fact, everyone could use that slap. Because there are only two choices: ad-supported content or subscription-based content. And we all know most will take free if they can get it.

So there is our difficult challenge.  I disagree that there are only two choices, however.  I’ve also come to realize that it’s really only a problem for a select group of content providers.  First, the “two choice” thinking.  What about a freemium model?  Some very large publishers have successfully adopted it, and if the quality of what you produce is there, people will want more and pay.  What about a donation model?  PBS has used it successfully for years.  So does Wikipedia.  I know of several digital entities – podcasts and otherwise – that use Patreon to fund their content production.  It’s possible to use the appeal of great content to support an affiliate sales model too – buying products from links on a review site, for example.  Frankly, it’s not hard to argue that the ad-supported model is one of the worst options. Besides requiring a large audience to make it work, I think it encourages publishers to grab and abuse consumer data or to inflate page counts (and ad counts) with endless slide shows, etc.  Limited thinking means limited choices.

The realization is this.  Most “publishers” link to a limited set of high-quality content producers.  How many stories that you read, even on big sites, link back to the original work done in the NY Times or Wall St. Journal?  It might be a fun exercise to see how many of the people complaining about no money to support content creation are actually creating content or adding value to someone else’s content. Maybe another business model is a little pass-through of payments to the real content creators from those who are using that work to generate revenue?  There was such thinking back in the early days of the web.  What happened?

As I said upfront, I don’t like limited thinking.  Hopefully today you understand why that is.  Was I clear?

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November 20, 2015 · 11:57 am

Firing The Customer

This Foodie Friday, we have the tale of a restaurant that fired a customer. A regular customer ordered some takeout and asked that it be delivered. The delivery guy, who is autistic, had handed the customer the wrong order from his car (he went back and corrected it immediately). The customer called the restaurant, furious. and informed the owner that the driver was an idiot and strung out on drugs (neither of which was true). I’ll let the owner (via his Facebook post) tell you the rest:  

This driver has worked for us for two years. He is a seriously accomplished University student, has an amazingly inquisitive personality, a wicked sense of humor and one helluva work ethic! You would think, in the year 2015 the majority of the population would have learned or at least heard about autism. I understand that there is a large portion of our population that is content to remain uninformed and uneducated, but that doesn’t give them the right to take that ignorance and turn it into a foul-mouthed rant on two of my employees!

Therefore, we have fired this customer. That address, that name and phone number will be tagged with a DO NOT DELIVER DO NOT ACCEPT ORDER message.

Now, we talk a lot in this space about being 100% customer-focused and seeing the world through the consumer’s eyes.  There are times, however, when we need to fire a client or a customer, and clearly this is one of them.  When you have a client or a customer that does certain things, it’s really time to move on.  Such as?

When there is no longer trust between you.  Maybe you sense there is unethical stuff going on or maybe the communication has become irreparably damaged.  Time to move on.  When clients stop paying their bills on time and don’t have a good faith discussion about the reasons why and the plan to do so, it’s time to stop working.  Financial abuse is abuse nonetheless. Maybe they begin to demand more work (or additional products) for no additional money.  No, thank you.  Finally, as is the case above, maybe they’ve become abusive verbally on a regular basis.  Everyone gets mad once in a while and you can’t make a souffle without cracking an egg or two.  That doesn’t mean a customer gets to cross the line on a regular basis.

Being customer centric doesn’t mean being a punching bag.  No client or customer is worth demeaning yourself to retain.  You might lose a customer, but you’ll lose a headache in the process.

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