Category: Business

Oh, Really?

Marketing / Advertising, Travels

At first, I thought this was good news:

Given the uncertainties of COVID-19, major airlines stopped charging penalties to change your ticket through the end of 2020. Now, United Airlines says it’s locking in the policy — it’ll be free to change in 2021 as well…

That sounds great, until you finish the sentence:

…as long as you didn’t book the low-price basic economy seats fare.

Which accounts for the vast majority of airline tickets sold.  But wait!  There’s more:

Apparently this wallet-gouging feature will not apply to international travel — which is the type of ticket most likely to be affected by borders closed off by the Chinkvirus for the foreseeable future.

Here’s the best part:

Since 2010, Chicago-based United has scooped up nearly $6.5 billion in change fees. Last year, it took in $625 million, third behind Delta and American, according to Transportation Department figures.

I already have a built-in animus against United Airlines, for reasons too many and varied to tell;  so it will be a cold day in Hell when they drag me kicking and screaming onto one of their foul airliners.

Update:  And right on cue, from American Airlines in my inbox today:

Killing Golden Geese

Anarchist thugs, BaconLettuceMayo, Business, Gummint, Marxists

The late and great Margaret Thatcher had it right (as usual) when she said of Communists that sooner or later, they run out of other people’s money.  What’s happening in many of the neo-socialist hellholes like New York lately is that the “other” (i.e. wealthy) people aren’t necessarily running out of money, they’re running out of patience with the filthy nest their government has created, and are running away.

It’s snapshot simple. The wealthy and the companies they work for pay most of the taxes. The poor consume most of the taxes through social programs. COVID is driving the wealthy and their offices out of the city. No one will be left to pay for the poor, who are stuck here, and the city will collapse in the transition.

Of course, that would be bad enough, because even if the wealthy folks came back to their Upper East- or West Side domiciles once the Chinkvirus had subsided, NYFC could continue to fleece them in the manner to which everyone has become accustomed.  But if their toney little brownstone houses and chi-chi apartment buildings are surrounded by homeless, aggressive beggars and rioting assholes of the BLM / Pantifa persuasion, the millionaires and billionaires will say (and are saying) “The hell with this shit” and leave for more hospitable climes — and their companies will go along with them.

I have another post bubbling under about the death of the traditional office-work model, but that can wait for another time.

What’s really interesting, from a socio-political perspective, is how quickly this has happened.  It might have happened at some point or another anyway, as the Blue Model metropolises collapsed under the weight of their underfunded pension plans and failing social services and infrastructure — but the Chinkvirus has been the Catalyst Supreme for our little domestic Lenins and Maos.  What’s even more interesting is that, being economic illiterates, our socialist pols have looked to Europe, their favorite model, and said, “But France isn’t collapsing!”

Oh yes, it is.  The difference is that rich Frogs can’t exactly load up U-Hauls and move to — where?  Germany?  Belgium?  Britain?  It’s the same situation in those countries.  There are no prosperous and successful business-friendly, low tax states in Europe like Texas, Florida or Utah — they’re all soft socialist states;  and the Chinkvirus is having the same effect on their economies and traditional business models as it is in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

So even in the best of times (booming Trump economy, no virus, no BLM / Pantifa riots), Illinois, California and New York — to name but three — would be sucking wind soon enough, and the writing has been on their walls for some time.  But in the current environment?  They’re screwed.

My only concern, as I’ve often said before, is that these fleeing rats don’t come to our happy little ships and infest them with their shitty ideas and political morality.

Exemplary

Business, Disaster

When I finally arrived in the U.S. following the Great Wetback Episode, I lived in northwest Austin with Longtime Buddy Trevor while waiting for my visa to be processed.  Having come from the supermarket business in Seffrica, I was keen to see just how good U.S. supermarkets were by comparison, so I went off to the local H.E.B. store just a couple hundred yards away from his apartment.  It was good, very good;  and I became a huge fan of the chain and its operation.  (Full disclosure:  I did once apply for a job at H.E.B., but I was turned down — not by HR, but by an exec VP who called me, complimented me on my resume, and semi-apologized for not hiring me because, as he said, I was not only over-qualified for a senior position there, but horribly over-qualified and they couldn’t fire someone just to take me on.  Classy move — executive to executive instead of fobbing it off onto some HR clerk — and it only increased my admiration for the chain.)

My only quibble with living here in metro North Texas is that there are no H.E.B. stores anywhere nearby (Central Market is owned by H.E.B., but it’s a different division altogether and caters mostly to upscale customers).  I don’t know why there aren’t — the common saying is that 50% of South Texas shopped at an H.E.B. last week — and as I see it, the only reason that it isn’t 50% of all Texas is that they don’t have any stores up here.

This article (found via the Knuckledragger, thankee Kenny) is just one reason why I respect their business and miss their stores.  If H.E.B. were to open one nearby, none of the others — Kroger, Tom Thumb, Market Street, Aldi or Wal-Mart — would ever see me again.

Come on, Steve;  get your South Texas asses up here.

Overvalued

Business, Travels

Back in the fall of 1982, I and Wife #1 came to the U.S. for the first time in my life — in fact, the first time I’d ever left the African sub-continent at all — and because I didn’t know diddly about New York City (our first stop), I booked us a room at the Hotel Edison just off 47st and Broadway because it was cheap.  I didn’t know, at the time, that the area was known as Hell’s Kitchen for a very good reason, but in those days I was tough and didn’t really give a damn — I was coming from fucking Johannesburg, how bad could New York be?  (Not bad at all by comparison, actually.)

Anyway, from memory, the room cost about $47+tax a night, and while it was awful, I’d stayed in much worse (errr South Africa, remember) and while we we assailed by Volkswagen-sized cockroaches a couple times, the hotel was close to most of what we wanted to see around Times Square, and was easy walking distance to Greenwich Village to the south and Central Park to the north.  Also, the delis on 8th Ave were fantastic — my first experience with a gut-busting NY-style pastrami sandwich was an eye-opener — and so we spent our days walking around the place, seeing the sights, eating deli food and holding our noses to block out the smells (garbage strike).

Anyway, years later (after the Great Wetback Episode of 1985) I had occasion to go from Chicago back to New York, this time on business, and as the Manhattan branch office was quite nearby, I booked into the Edison again, for nostalgia’s sake.

It was the same crappy hotel, same foul rooms, only this time the room cost $285+tax.  When I first saw the rate when I was booking the trip, I thought the hotel had to have undergone a huge refurbishment to justify that kind of price increase;  but of course it hadn’t:  it was just New York Fucking City.

Still later, I checked out the hotel again, just out of curiosity, and the rate was $385.  And from what I could gather, still no refurb of the place.

I should remind everyone that I have never shrunk from paying top dollar for a quality product, whether it was The Mayfair Hotel in London, the Madison in Paris, Imperial in Tokyo or wherever.  Five-star is five-star, and there ya go.  Paying five-star prices for total shit, however… nu-uh.  And from my experience, most Manhattan hotels were shit.  Even the “highbrow” ones like the Waldorf-Astoria or the Algonquin were overpriced flophouses, and their astronomical prices were justified either by the “cachet” attached to being in New York, NY [eyecross]  or else the high (overpriced) cost of the real estate.

So you can imagine my response when I saw this article via Insty:

During the second quarter ended June 30, average asking rents along 16 major retail corridors in Manhattan declined for the eleventh consecutive quarter, falling to $688 per square foot, according to a report from the commercial real estate services firm CBRE. The drop marked the first time since 2011 that prices dropped below $700, the firm said, representing an 11.3% decline from a year ago.
…
A number of retailers have outright stopped paying rent to their landlords during the pandemic, which in some instances is resulting in litigation.

Boo fucking hoo.  Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of supercilious chiselers and snooty price gougers.  And then there’s this, at the end of the article:

“I think there is a short-term and a long-term look at this,” NKF’s Roseman said. “Short-term, we are in survival mode right now. But when things do sort of turn back around, it will still be the same. There is only one Fifth Avenue in the world.”

If you look up “Wishful Thinking” in your dictionary, this sentiment will be under the heading.  (It probably links to “Dinosaur Perspectives” too, speaking as it does about L.A.’s Rodeo Drive and Chicago’s Michigan Avenue as being Places To See And Be Seen.  Dream on, Bubba:  we’re facing a new world.)

Anyway, I see that the Edison is “temporarily” closed because of the Chinkvirus — and from the looks of it, has had a refurb since I last checked — but one of the “business-class” hotels on Broadway, where I paid over $500 a night in 2007, is now asking $121.

No wonder they’re not paying the rent.

Irrelevant Institution

Business, Seen On Campus

Over at the awful Forbes magazine, writer Stephen McBride opines thus:

Here’s some great news: one of America’s most broken industries is finally being exposed as a sham.  And make no mistake, the end of college as we know it is a great thing.
It’s great for families, who’ll save money and take on less debt putting kids through school.  It’s great for kids, who’ll no longer be lured into the socialist indoctrination centers that many American campuses have become.

He goes on to talk about the savings to be made and the investment opportunities (in companies which will rush to fill the void), but that’s not central to the theme of this post, other than to note that as college costs have ballooned, the return on investment has decreased while its concomitant debt has increased.  Simply put:  for a huge number of kids, college tuition is not only a gamble, but a bad one.

While I don’t quibble at all with the writer’s perspective on universities as propaganda outfits rather than places of learning, I have a somewhat different take on the whole thing.

I’ve written before on the wisdom of young people learning a trade prior to (or even instead of) going off to college, so I’m not going to repeat that thought.  Rather (and this is my difference with the above Forbes article), I think that colleges and universities have become less relevant to people’s education.  Other than careers which require intensive knowledge (engineering, medicine, bio-mechanics etc.), there’s very little a college degree can teach you that could not be equally imparted through a lengthy apprenticeship in that field.

And if any good has come of the Chinkvirus pandemic and its related effect on our lives, it’s that realization of how little a truly motivated person needs classroom instruction.  (As an aside, if the would-be student isn’t motivated to learn, college is absolutely the worst place for them to be, not only for the cost but also for the array of distractions extant.)

I can hear it now:  “Oh,” stupid parents will moan, “my little Jimmy / Susie / Jamaal / Shaniqua won’t learn anything from an online course because they’ll just play their online games instead.”

I’ve got news for you, O Stupid Parents:  your undisciplined and ineducable kids are already doing that, only they’re doing it in the lecture room.

The late, great and much-missed columnist Mike Royko once said (and I paraphrase because I’m speaking from memory) something like:  most people shouldn’t go to college;  they should become butchers or janitors.  Worse yet, he added, the problem with giving butchers and janitors college degrees is that they then go into business with the same intelligence level, only now they’ll be woefully under-qualified to be managers, because they should have been butchers or janitors.

Or, as Daughter so eloquently put it after her first semester at college:  “Most of these idiots belong in the grease pit at Jiffylube.”   After two years, she expanded that thought to include the professors.  (Lest we forget, this was a girl who taught herself Japanese at home while being homeschooled.)

And this is the problem with most college graduates these days:  they had no business going to college in the first place because they were either stupid or ineducable.  Now they can be found in the outside world suitably “qualified” by their degrees:  at best, they’re busy screwing up some enterprise in a middle-management position;  at worst, they can be found among the ranks of the rioters in Portland and Seattle.

So yes, I agree with McBride that most colleges will disappear, and good riddance.  The ones that survive should get a wake-up call, and realize that in business, nothing is truly irreplaceable — and yes, their beloved ivory towers are indeed just a business.

All I can hope for is that parents will point their kids at careers and activities that will not only be valuable as income streams, but that the kids will actually enjoy doing because they’ve discovered the psychological value of a job well done.

For the rest, there’s the grease pit at Jiffylube.  Good luck to them as they compete with hungry Third-World immigrants.

Still Laughing

BaconLettuceMayo, Business, Heroism

I know that this is an old story, but I just can’t stop laughing about it.

The maker of Red Bull energy drinks has replaced its top U.S. executives amid internal tensions over the closely held company’s response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Red Bull GmbH, the Austrian company that makes the drink, said Stefan Kozak, its North America chief executive, and Amy Taylor, its North America president and chief marketing officer, have left the company. It named other executives to temporarily fill the roles.
Red Bull didn’t give a reason for the changes, which were announced in an internal memo Monday.

Here’s my favorite part:

Ms. Taylor had been working on diversity and inclusion efforts within the company with Mr. Kozak’s support for several years but was met with opposition when she began advocating for Red Bull to be more overt in its support of racial justice in the last month, according to people familiar with the matter.
Some U.S. employees had recently raised concerns about what they considered the company’s inaction on the Black Lives Matter movement.

Hope all those “some employees” were canned as well.  “Diversity hiring” is one thing;  overt support for a bunch of Commie street thugs is another thing altogether.

I don’t drink Red Bull or any other “energy drink” (unless 10-year-old Glen Morangie gives you energy — not according to my experience, though).  But just for the hell of it, I might try it as a mixer with a shot of  Tanqueray tomorrow morning, as a wake-up call.

I mean, such good deeds should not go unrewarded, right?  Hell, I might even start supporting Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen:

Prosit  to Herr Kozak, and a hearty fuck you to the wokesters.