Coyote Blog

I was pretty frustrated after my negotiations with Florida State Parks on Friday.  We were apparently the winning bidders for one of their park concessions, but their process requires a "negotiation" after the winner is accepted, something that is very unusual in these situations.  Typically, these Request for Proposals (RFPs) for these projects include all the minimum requirements the bidders must accept.  The RFP then lays out a point system that will be used for scoring the submissions (e.g. 20% of score on bid rent, 20% on financial stability of bidder, 30% on experience, etc).  Usually, the relevant agency reviews proposals to see if they meet all the minimum requirements, throwing out proposals not meeting these minimums, and then choose a winner from the remaining proposals based on the scores.

In this case, in the Florida State Park RFP, there was no minimum rent payment set (rent is usually bid as a percentage of concession sales).  Also, in the scoring, of the 800 total potential points, only 20 or 2.5% were assigned to the size of the bid rent payment.  The other 97.5% of the points were allocated to experience and services offered, etc.

Well, after spending a lot of time and money on the bid response itself, I was called to Tallahassee as the winning bidder to "negotiate".  After we sat down, the first thing they said was "your bid of x% is too low -- we won't accept anything less than twice that".

This is a classic bait and switch.  I assume it is legal under Florida government contracting law but it is illegal for federal contracts and in most other states.  They caused me to spend a lot of time and effort bidding and then flying to Florida on the assumption that there was no minimum rent amount and that the rent amount was a trivial requirement, as compared to quality and experience.  In their negotiations, the revealed the opposite.  They are hoping that now that I have gone through all this time and effort, I will agree to up the $ given my sunk costs.  What they don't know is that I am the world's number one believer in "sunk costs are sunk and therefor irrelevant".

If Best Buy issued an ad in the paper saying they were selling Sony plasma TV's for $500, and I rushed to the store only to find no $500 Sony's for sale but instead a pushy salesman trying to sell me up to the $2500 model that is on hand, they would be breaking the law in most states.  What Florida is trying to do is no different.

I am going to tell Florida that I need a few more days to respond to their hijack demands concerns.  I was taught long ago not to get emotional in a negotiation, and right now I am emotional.  When I calm down, I will sit down and try to calmly evaluate if it is still a good deal at twice the rent.  I will also call up some other concessionaires in Florida to see if this is an isolated incident or see if it is representative of ongoing arbitrary behavior I can expect in the future.

I HATE most new loyalty programs at stores.  When loyalty programs really came in vogue with airlines, they made sense.  Airlines gave their best customers bonuses for spending lots of money with them.  Today, though, every store I go into has a loyalty program.  I have a Fry's card, an Albertson's card, and a Safeway card (grocery stores);  I have a Borders and a Barnes and Noble card;  I have an Ace Hardware card and a Best Buy card;  For god sakes,  I have a TGI Friday's card.  Not to mention the cards from American, America West, Southwest, Hilton, Hyatt, Marriott, National, Hertz and probably 20 others I can't remember off-hand.  I carry a stack of the travel related ones in a big rubber band in the bottom of my briefcase.  The rest bulge my wallet up to about an inch thick, even when it is (all too often) devoid of cash.

Did I mention I hate all these programs?  Most of them have no real reward for purchase volume, you just have to have their card in your pocket to qualify for the best deal.  What is the point of this --its not like they are rewarding purchase volume (in fact, grocery stores do just the opposite, by rewarding the people who buy the least with better service via the express lane).  Why do I need to fatten up my wallet to unmanageable proportions just to get a store's best price? 

This analogy will date me, but its kind of like all those women who used to carry eggs and live chickens in their purses on Let's Make a Deal in the hopes that Monty Hall will ask for that item to qualify for some prize.   When I check out in the grocery store, they even put little asterisks by certain items to remind me that I am not getting their best price because I have not shown them their plastic card.  Come to think of it, my Monty Hall analogy may be flawed.  It is more like the pagan gods refusing to provide rain until their hapless subjects had sacrificed the right kind of goat.  Now how would that be for a loyalty program -- "I am sorry Mr. Meyer, but you sacrificed a goat, and Best Buy requires that you sacrifice an ox to get 10% off that DVD player".

Well, the revolt (or, if you accept the pagan religion analogy, the reformation) begins today.  I chucked everything in a drawer except the travel cards.  The book store cards are easy - its Amazon all the way now.  I used to drop in and buy some impulse items at my local Borders, but with free 2-day shipping for the rest of the year at Amazon (I signed up for the offer) there is no reason to buy anywhere else.  Amazon always gives me their best price without a piece of plastic in my pocket or an animal sacrifice and I don't have to deal with that irritating reminder from the cashier at Borders that without their card, I'm not going to get their best price.

Time will tell whether I can live with the increased grocery prices that will come from not having their card, but I am going to give it a shot on principle.  The revolt begins -- anyone want to join me?

PS - should I name this effort my loyalty pogrom?

UPDATE:  Thanks David, I fixed "principle".

UPDATE #2:  Per the comments, I do indeed understand that  one of the major goals of  well-structured loyalty programs is to gather data about the customer.  However, I would argue that out of 100 companies gathering customer purchase data, maybe 3 know what they are doing with it - meaning that they do more than just make nice powerpoint slides for the bosses with the data.

Take an example of my grocery store, Fry's.  Fry's has a loyalty card you must present at the register to get the best pricing.  Once you present the card, the checkout person will tell you at the end of the transaction how much you saved by using the card.  But half the time the people around me forget their cards, and the checkout person asks other people in line to lend their card, so the hapless customer who forgot theirs can still get the better pricing.  In other words, if the data is really being used, it is corrupted.

But how do they use the data?  Certainly bricks and mortar stores have limited options - they can't do like Amazon does and present me with a custom selection of goods when I first walk into the store.  They might send me a customized coupon package, but I have found no evidence that any loyalty program I have used has ever done this.  My guess is that most of the data just feeds the voracious appetite of the bosses to see data.  At best, the data might be used in vendor negotiations, but I doubt this too.

By the way, to provide a customized customer experience

UPDATE #3:  One of my friends who used to work with me in the pricing practice at McKinsey & Co. suggested that the cards may be a way of maintaining multiple pricing levels for different customers, much like airlines have done for years with business and leisure travelers.  The theory goes that the most price sensitive will get and use such a card, while the busier, perhaps wealthier and less price-sensitive shoppers won't bother.   This is certainly possible, but if this is the strategy, they certainly need to train their register people not to shout all over the store to find a card for shoppers that don't have one.  Since I put my Fry's card in the drawer last week, I have visited the store three times and every time the register clerk, without my asking, has borrowed a card from someone else so I could get the discount.

This, from Marginal Revolution, is kind of funny for its irony value:

For years, France has fought what is sees as an American cultural invasion, powered by Hollywood movies, U.S. pop music and giant brands like Coca-Cola.  Now, it is going to great lengths to save an American cultural icon in its backyard: Disneyland

The French government has just finished helping Walt Disney Co. bail out Euro Disney SCA, the operator of two Disney theme parks outside Paris.  A state-owned bank is contributing around $500 million in investments and local concessions to save Euro Disney from bankruptcy.  This comes after 17 years during which French leaders have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours to ensure that the land of Money [ed: Monet?] could keep Mickey Mouse.  Still saddled with debt, Euro Disney is gambling that expensive new attractions and an improved tourism climate will deliver a turnaround.

I am not sure the Euro Disney site will ever work.  The main problem is that it was put in the wrong place.  The plurality of European tourists go to Spain for vacation - Spain is the Florida/California of Europe, with its warm weather and nice beaches.  Putting a theme park in northern France may seem geographically logical, on the transportation nexus between England, France, and Germany, but it makes no sense for tourism -- its in a great place for a distribution warehouse, but no one wants to take their vacation there. 

The equivalent would be putting a Disney theme park in Chicago.  Chicago is a wonderful town and sits astride the #1 transportation hub in the US, but few people want to go there on their vacations, at least not for about 9 months of the year (by the way, due to ocean currents the situation is not that comparable, but note that Euro Disney is actually NORTH of Chicago!)

Too many CEO's of public companies in the 80's and 90's seemed to act like they owned the company.  In particular, the CEO's of Tyco and Adelphia appeared to be more interested in lining their own pockets with shareholder financed perks than with managing the company.  And, I highly recommend "Barbarians at the Gate" as not only a great story about the largest LBO of all time, but also as a narrative about CEO perks gone mad.

The fact is that public company CEO's are the hired help.  Talented, well paid, but hired help none-the-less.  Professor Bainbridge has a good post on the demise of the Imperial CEO. 

In theory, a corporation is run by its board of directors, whose decision-making is guided by the principle of shareholder wealth maximization. In practice, however, all too often corporations are run by their top managers for the benefit of those managers. Times are changing, however. In particular, the cult of the imperial CEO that dominated the business world in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s is dying a slow death.

I hope he is right - it is past time for do-nothing OK-everything boards to reassert their primacy and fiduciary responsibility.

So what does valet parking, soft drinks, and firewood have in common?  More in a second.  First, some background.

We have had a problem over the last few years in our California campgrounds.  We sell a lot of firewood to campers, usually in bags of 6-8 sticks.  We are having difficulties getting a good, inexpensive firewood source in the Owens Valley.  We can find a bunch of people who will deliver stacks of firewood by the cord for a very good price, but only one person in the valley bags the wood.  As a result, the bagging step alone is effectively costing us between $1 and $2 a bundle, which is a lot for something we sell for $5-$6. 

In kicking the problem around, we considered what is becoming an increasingly common approach - if bagging is labor intensive and costly, lets see if we can outsource that step to our customers.  Outsourcing to your customers has been around for a while, but has gotten more popular of late.  Many furniture and equipment makers have been doing this for years, by outsourcing final assembly to customers.  While some of this is to reduce shipping costs, part of the benefit to manufacturers is that they save on assembly labor.

Service industries have started to get into the act of late.  Banks have been outsourcing teller functions for years via ATM's.  Most fast food restaurants have outsourced soft drink cup filling to the customers.  Grocery stores (and now Home Depot) have hopped on the bandwagon, providing self-service checkout for those who don't want to wait in line.

What all these examples have in common is that they seem to meet with customer acceptance if they provide some sort of value to the customer(short-circuiting lines, easier drink refills, the right amount of ice in the cup) , and not just cost-savings to the company.

Which brings me to the examples that really irritate me - of companies outsourcing their payroll to me.  [Note, I am a libertarian -- please do not interpret the following as a call for government action!]  Tipping, in its purest form, is a way to reward exceptional (meaning - beyond the standard or expected) service.  Unfortunately, restaurants and other service establishments have twisted this act of reward and generosity into having customers pay the wages of their staff.  Restaurants are simultaneously increasing tipping expectations (from 15% to 20%+) while requiring tips on more and more occasions by building them automatically into the bill.

The event that brought my irritation to a boil the other day actually happened valet parking my car at a restaurant.  As background, the establishment charged $4 to valet park your car.  Now, I am not a socialist, so I accept that value is not driven by cost but rather by what I am willing to pay for it, and I was willing to pay $4 to avoid having to walk a few blocks from the free lot  (those of you from Boston or NY are wondering what the fuss is about -- a valet parking charge of any amount is virtually unprecedented in Phoenix, at least until recently).

So I paid my $4, and then I saw the sign:

"Our employees work for tips"

What?  You mean I just paid your company $4 for what amounts to about 5 minutes of labor, and now you are telling me that in addition, I need to pay your employees' wages for you too?  This is pretty nervy - I mean, other than a percentage concession payment they are probably making to be the parking company at that location, what other costs do they have?  I didn't want to hurt the young guy actually doing the parking, but for the first time in years I didn't tip the valet.  That little sign turned, for me, an act of goodwill into a grim obligation, extorted from me by guilt. 

Which brings me back to firewood.  In outsourcing bagging to the customer, I did not want to tick off our customers like I had been angered by similar steps, so I set two criteria for my managers and any plan they came up with:

• It had to save a substantial amount of money, some of which we could pass back to customers as a price savings
• It had to offer the customer more value - a better product somehow.

The plan my managers hit on was to purchase a number of small milk crates that customers could fill with wood for the same price as the old bag.  These crates would hold a bit more than the old bag, so customers can get more wood for their money.  In addition, customers can pick out their own pieces of wood from the stack.  This is actually something that has been requested in the past - some customers complained the bags had too many small sticks, some complained they had too many large sticks.  Now people can get what they want.  We will try this out in a few sites to see what customer reaction is, and, perhaps more importantly, to see if we can hold on to our milk crates without them walking away.

I bet you thought I was kidding here when I said I might pursue my new niche in parking lot blogging.  Not so - here today is an idea from Ross Mayfield:

My uncle was a guru on wall street when I asked him where I should invest my paper route money. He said to visit the parking lots of Silicon Valley companies during the weekend. If the parking lot was full, there was a good chance they were close to a breakthrough or release.

At the corporations I worked for, this would probably just mean that everyone was working on Powerpoint presentation for an upcoming planning conference.  Anyway, I don't know much about Silicon Valley, so I don't know if it will work, but this is an interesting suggestion to use the Internet to gather intelligence:

But with enough mobloggers, a panopticon of performance may be a great leading indicator.  So this weekend I started the Parking Lot Indicatr group and people have taken interest.

Hopefully, the cars are not all there responding to an SEC inquiry.

George's Employment Blawg has a roundup of a lot of good HR-related blog posts.

Recently, the government announced that it would take over the United Airlines pilots pensions in the government-funded Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.  This move is irritating pilots, because their pensions get reduced, and it is annoying to me as a taxpayer, that I have to bail out a company that was too screwed-up to fully fund its pension obligations. 

This points up the biggest danger of government guarantees -- it causes companies to be more reckless.  Back in the 80's, banks and S&L's made insanely risky investments with bank deposits.  The people who should have been most interested in this problem - bank depositors - ignored it because they felt safe that the government had guaranteed their deposits.  In the same way, airlines and other ailing businesses with defined benefit pensions cut back on pension funding when times were bad, and the very group that should have been crying foul - the company unions - did not, because they again counted on a bail-out.

I put the blame squarely on the company's management, who made a commitment to employees and then failed to keep it, and now are using government pension gaurantees as a subsidy to close their cash flow gap.  However, it is interesting to look at the role of unions too.  For decades, unions have demanded defined benefit pensions (ones that promise a fixed amount per month at retirement) and have opposed defined-contribution pensions (ones where the company promised to contribute a fixed amount today into an investment fund).  I assume the main reason for this is that unions do not want workers to bear the market risks on investments.

Over time, though, defined benefit plans have, despite this opposition, gone the way of the dinosaur (at least in private companies - most government jobs still have them).  This is for a number of reasons:

• 401-K accounts now offer much of the same tax-deferral benefits for defined contribution programs that defined-benefit plans had
• Defined-benefit plans turn out to have market risk too.  One is inflation - benefits levels may be guaranteed, but unexpectedly high inflation can effectively reduce them, while defined contribution plans, if invested correctly, will likely produce returns to offset these inflation losses.  In addition, during go-go stock markets, holders of defined-benefit plans found out that they did not enjoy the benefits of higher investment returns - their employers pocketed them (by the way, may Americans are discovering the same about their Social Security benefits).
• As employees move around more, workers have found that defined benefit plans are not very portable, and tend to punish workers who do not stay for decades.  401-K plans are much more beneficial to workers who do not stay their whole career, or at least 20 years, in one place.
• As United pilots have found, defined benefit pension plans are hard to police by current employees- there are just too many variables that allow companies to argue that the pensions are OK.  On the other hand, defined contribution plans are very easy to police- one can check the amount of contribution each month against the amount promised.
• Finally, defined benefit plans rely on their company staying in business and fiscally sound for decades into the future.  This may have seemed a good bet at US Steel or United Airlines in 1950, but would anyone make that bet today?  For any company?

Yesterday, my kids and I set out to buy ourselves a Christmas tree.  Instead of going to Home Depot first, like we usually do, we stopped at one of those tent places that grow up this time of year on vacant lots, mainly because the tent was closer.  We soon left the tent, though, moving on to Home Depot, but not before the tree sales person made sure to tell my kids that he thought their dad was a jerk.  Here is how we got there:

I walked around the lot - there were only about 20 trees up, which is kindof a small selection, but they were all sitting in a pan of water, which can be a good sign that they are trying to keep the trees fresh.  I immediately saw a couple of trees that would work fine, so I walked up to them, looking for a price tag -- no price.  I looked around to see a posted price list, or a list of prices per foot - no price list.  I asked the guy working there where the prices were - he said just pick the one I liked, bring the tag to the register, and they would tell me there how much it costs.

At this point, I turned to my kids and said "lets go someplace else".  In my book, businesses can operate and price most any way they like, but I can also decide if I want to do business with them.  I don't like doing business with companies that have no posted prices (similarly I hate doing business with people like car dealers whose posted prices aren't the real prices, but that's another story).

The guy asked me why I was leaving.  I should have known better.  I should have just said something like I don't see one I like.  But I actually tried to explain what I was thinking.  I said, "What would be your reaction if you went into a Walmart and none of the items had prices - if the only way you could find out what the prices were was when they rang you up at the register.  Would you shop there?"  What I left unsaid, because I didn't want to discuss it in front of my kids, was that I didn't want to be put in the position of having my kids fall in love with a tree (they get very emotional about this choice) and then having to tell them a few minutes later that sorry, it was too expensive.  I much prefer the Home Depot approach, where each set of trees is clearly marked, so I can steer them away from even looking at the $100+ trees.

Anyway, I confess I probably was huffy about it, because this is one of my hot buttons, and as I called my kids to me the guy told them their dad was a jerk.

I probably am.  I know this guy is trying to make a living.  He may well not have had prices posted just out of lack of sophistication rather than any sinister desire to trap me into buying more tree than I wanted.  So I probably need to be publicly chastised -- feel free to use the comment section to do so.

Back in Texas in the 1980's, a number of large tottering banks merged, in an attempt at survival.  The result was called two drunks propping each other up, and it seldom worked.  The classic example is the Pennsylvania-New York Central railroad merger which ended in one of the most catastrophic bankruptcies of all time, and the largest industry nationalization in US history.

It was exactly these precedents that occurred to me today when I heard that Sears and Kmart are merging.  Scrappleface apparently was thinking the same thing, but is much funnier than I am.

UPDATE:

Other good examples in the comments.  I fell over laughing at "the EU".