Santa Cruz, CA – In a classic clash between customer delight and business realities, the very busy Lulu Carpenter’s coffeehouse is throttling WiFi squatters to restore profitable client turnover! No Internet when I was in college, but I still managed to spend a lot of time at The Wooden Shoe coffee shop during all night study sessions amid throngs of friends. You had to supply your own Bennies, but the coffee refills were free!
Short Takes
- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
January 17, 2012 | 8:54 pmSays psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led [a] study published yesterday…
’The baby in order to imitate you has to figure out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they’re hearing,’’
Can you “figure out” why this is utter nonsense? I should as obvious as monkey see, monkey do. With this sort of thing passing for science, we are surely doomed.
- The Mark of Cain
November 9, 2011 | 3:13 amWatching Herman Cain duel with his female accusers is like watching the Jerry Springer Show. Not a pretty picture. If you partake, be sure an wash you hands afterwards.
- The Truth About Sovereign Debt
November 1, 2011 | 4:01 pmDuring the housing bubble people bet on rising home prices by taking out loans on to-good-to-be true terms and investment banking made bets on the rising home prices by lending on to-good-be-true terms. Everyone drank the Kool Aid. Prices went down. Having made bad bets, home owners should default on their loans and bankers should take their losses. This is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
The nations that joined the EU placed bets on rising economic prosperity that would come from joining the EU and adopting the Euro and borrowing from the EU banks on to-good-to-be-true terms. The EU investment bankers made speculative bets on EU member nations by lending them billions on to-good-to-be-true terms. The borrower economies went down not up. Everyone drank the Kool Aid and having made bad bets the borrowers should default on their loans and the bankers should take their losses. This too, is the simple-minded logic of every-man-for-himself market economics.
So how do the bankers hold the world hostage to their bad bets? They claim they are too big to fail. In other words, the only game they know is heads they win, tails we lose.
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- Lip Reading Babies: Utter nonsense!
I worked in restaurants while in high school and college and was always told by management that a key to profitability was ‘table turn over’. On a busy (say, Saturday) night turning a table over three times rather than two markedly affected profitability. The expectation was we (the waitstaff) would hurry patrons along to get that extra turn-over before closing. Maybe if he’d had a profit sharing plan I would have cared…
But I digress.
When I moved to Thailand I noticed that in clubs and restaurants there was no such pressure. One could get there early, dine and sit around the table and chat and never feel the slightest pressure to leave. You could go into a bar, order one beverage and ‘nurse’ it the rest of the evening. The waiter or waiteress would ask if you wanted another, but it was not done in a pressuring way.
What a difference in experience! Now, back in America, when in restaurants I always feel rushed and it dampens my fun in the social part of the experience.
Of course, the restaurant needs to be profitable to survive, but perhaps trading profitability off with the customers desires is not the best route to success. Maybe it’s just the most obvious.