Category: Observed (Page 15 of 24)

“Government statistics show there are about 1.7 automobile caused fatalities for every 100,000,000 vehicle-miles. If you drive one mile to the store to buy your Mega Millions ticket and then return home, you have driven two miles. Thus the probability that you will join this statistical group is 2 x 1.7 / 100,000,000 = 0.000000034. This can also be stated as ‘One in 29,411,765-‘. Thus, if you drive to the store to buy your Mega Million ticket, your chance of being killed (or killing someone else) is nearly 6 times greater than the chance that you will win the Mega Millions Jackpot.”

—“Mega Millions Odds” by Durango Bill

“The new four-week daylight saving extension won’t save fuel or lives, but it will put our clocks seriously out of sync with Europe’s, costing airlines $150 million a year. It will foul up clocks in computers, confuse trade with our continental neighbors and make it impossible for many Jews to recite sunrise prayers at home.”

—“Endless Summer” by Michael Downing in the New York Times.

The pending extension to Daylight Savings Time in Congress is a sad example of government doing the wrong thing for the right cause. Energy conservation comes from tightened fuel economy, recycling, and emissions regulations, not by clinging to the afternoon sun.

Extending DST won’t “save energy” just by keeping the sun up later. Lights will still need to run overnight on highways, city streets, and 24-hour facilities, and most stores won’t change their operating hours. Try as they may, Congress can’t mandate a shorter nightfall.

More importantly, solving one problem (people like when it’s light out later) simply creates another. The shift to a longer DST period means that the sun will rise at extremely uncomfortable hours. For example, under the proposed change, sun-up won’t happen in New York until 7:55 a.m. the night before DST ends, compared with 7:23 a.m. in the existing schedule. In fact, the entire four-week fall extension will put sunrise past 7:30 a.m. I used to get to high school by 7:40—how will students feel when they spend weeks or months in homeroom while the sun is still down?

Representatives Ed Markey (D., Mass.) and Fred Upton (R., Mich.) must be proud of the energy-conscious labels they can wear in their next election cycles, but this is terrible policy. I suppose it’s par for the course in government, though; whatever sounds good on the TV news can get approved. Heck, with all this grandstanding in Washington, perhaps the 28-hour day can get an endorsement someday.

My apartment building is currently up in arms about a redesign of the lobby space that isn’t going very well. I’ve been reading the mailing list chatter for the past few weeks, and the overall complaint arc unveils some great basic project-management pointers.

My apartment building is currently up in arms about a redesign of the lobby space that isn’t going very well. I’ve been reading the mailing list chatter for the past few weeks, and the overall complaint arc unveils some great project-management pointers.

Don’t work halfway. The revamp of my lobbies is only touching half the decor: new tiles replacing hardwood, new ceiling paint and lighting, and new furniture. The designer did not touch the walls, columns, or border tiles. This has created a nifty mismatch, as well-marbled and worn tile abuts shiny new tiles without much marbling. Residents hate the look, as do I, but there’s a lesson in here: why rip up half a floor, or change the ceiling without updating the walls? If an effort doesn’t seem to be creating an optimal output, it’s probably better to wait until the project has the funding and momentum to do all of it, rather than retrofitting items that are hard to match to the existing ones.

Keep the communication lines open. A few years ago, when the building redid its residence hallways, the board made several mockup units to display the proposed designs. Some of this process was disastrous; unsurprisingly, no one could come to an agreement on what designs worked, and the board ultimately had to push through the least-controversial design. For the lobbies, the board, figuring no good could come of it, decided not to post a design for comment, which has added fuel to the fire. At least if residents had seen the designs before construction began, they’d know what to expect, and any disappointment would be somewhat mitigated.

Don’t grant and then remove access. As noted above, the board lessened its transparency from the last project to the current one. This is a bad move: no one happily endures a power shift from democracy to oligarchy. People used to being in-the-know expect, rightfully, to stay that way. The building also went from great explanatory signage, updated weekly, to three weeks without notices. The longer the community goes without information, the more unrest generates.

Open forums solve nothing. The only thing that has come out of the mailing list posts has been aggravation. An organized dialogue, with questions sent to and answered by the board, would serve a far better purpose than the virtual graffiti that we’re currently enduring.

Imagine if the board president had done the following instead:

1. Announce that a renovation design has been tentatively approved.

2. Post the design and solicit feedback.

3. Create a revised design and present it back to the community as “finalized using your input.”

4. Give a weekly status report, including any bad news with explanations.

5. Midway through the project, hold an open-forum meeting with all interested residents.

With a little project management, my lobbies would have a cleaner, more universally accepted design and a lot less bickering. (Simply put, any side griping could have been politely deferred with, “I wish you had come to the meeting,” “Did you see the initial design?” etc.) Instead, my in-box is like a soap opera: entertaining but tiresome with no end in sight.

Exiting the metro on the wrong side of the avenue, heading back to your hotel after a shopping excursion, you pass by an old woman carrying a delicious-smelling baguette. You are instantly jealous and look around, only to discover a boulangerie a few paces away. Voila! So you go into the shop and, after poking around, see a nice pile of small baguettes next to the register, which makes it easy for you to say, “un baguette,” to the proprietor, in your best I-don’t-know-French accent. Only after paying do you discover that—voila!—your baguette is piping hot and quite wonderful. “Buerre?” you ask the shopkeeper, who directs you to a shop around the corner, where you buy a stick of butter, which by your estimation is only about a bajillion times more tasty than the Breakstone’s in your fridge at home.

And off you head for your hotel, mashing hunks of hot baguette into a partially unwrapped stick of butter, pleasantly ignorant that your joy trumps the fact that no self-respecting Parisian would be so reckless, because you don’t want to miss a single moment of freshness and bakery perfection, one that is somehow unequivocally better for its location.

This, dearest reader, is Paris. And it’s not even dinner time.

Pharmacies in New York City have become quite the consistent experience:

~ open 24 hours and available every three blocks

~ a vast selection of merchandise, but few of the exact products you seek

~ astoundingly filthy floors that rival a movie theater for cleanliness

~ indifferent employees, including the managers

~ understaffed cash registers and six-deep lines to pay

The whole business has become a big morass of saturation and lowballing. Not ten years ago, pharmacies were still wonderful local institutions in New York, a city that brimmed with apothecaries and helpful staff. Even the chains were lovingly local, from Duane Reade, which once upon a time was a basic New York staple store, to the dozen Love Discount outlets around Manhattan (most of which are Duane Reades now). Pharmacists were helpful and stores were clean.

Today, that experience is all but gone. To walk into any city pharmacy (particularly in the winter) is to wish one’s delicate pharmaceutical products could be kept in a clean environment somewhere else. Floors are full of grime and, in the snow, wet cardboard. Shelves are either overflowing or understocked. The pharmacy counter invariably has a long line of patients shifting their feet while a lone technician tries to process orders and deal with a litany of customer service complaints. Checkout counters at the front of the store reveal a long row of cash registers manned by one or two cashiers who have zero concept of expediency. Paying within five minutes of getting on line is a dream.

This isn’t just a function of big business muscling in; debating the merits of chain stores that underprice local ones is a completely separate issue. The bigger problem now is how the chain stores have come to run their businesses.

This is a funny topic to consider until you’ve bounced around a handful of stores in Manhattan, as I did this past week. Duane Reade, CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens: all of them ubiquitous, all identical in their shortcomings. It’s a big, ugly mess, and no one is even mildly attempting to do anything better. The shame is that just a few years ago, this wasn’t the case. The Duane Reade by my old apartment was a well-stocked, well-staffed store with friendly pharmacists and only moderate job stress; the Walgreens on 14th Street and 4th Avenue was a gleaming, smooth-operating shop when it opened in 2002. Now they’re both sad reflections of the undermanning and laziness inherent in the business today.

Visualizing the meetings and budget memos that created this mess is easy. Chains are expanding every which way in oder to claim market share and muscle out competitors—I want to meet the strategy genius who opened three Ricky’s outlets within walking distance of my apartment—and all that floor space creates significant overhead. Sales are plentiful enough, but the multitude of store options forces prices down, which keeps margins low. This makes staff the one area with a flexible cost base. As a result, stores have pushed to find the minimum personnel necessary to operate the store without alienating consumers.

Let the record show: I am officially alienated. And I’m doing something about it. As of this month, I’m shifting my prescriptions to Bigelow, the Greenwich Village pharmacy that hasn’t opened fourteen local outlets or cut its staff to an unmanageable level. It’s not the greatest pharmacy in the world, and it’s too far for me to stop in on errands, but they deliver prescriptions, have the right amount of personnel, and keep their floors clean.

My local Walgreens, meanwhile, is almost always out of Kleenex tissues. Really.

That I have to differentiate my pharmacies on such trivial matters speaks volumes about the industry as it stands. What a mess.

Well said, Lane.

I have noticed in recent months that several household and food products I enjoy have disappeared from shelves. Sometimes the transition is easy—for example, switching from Tide Ready-Tabs back to plain old laundry detergent—other times, less so (you try finding a paste-and-gel fresh-mint toothpaste without whitening that you and your spouse both like).

Obviously, market forces create the shifts; my beloved Turkey Hill low-fat choco mint chip ice cream has ceded shelf space to low-carb mint chip instead. That doesn’t make it easier, though. As an ordinary consumer, I like what I buy, and I’m confused and disappointed when I can’t buy it. Companies don’t announce discontinuations; instead, one day consumers can’t find the product in the corner store, which leads to an increased neighborhood scouring, then a touch of hoarding as the realization sets in that this could be a last gasp to buy.

The problem is that in an age of increased brand segmentation, the expectations of simpler product worlds still persist. You like Coca-Cola, you buy Coca-Cola, simple as that. New Coke failed not because it was an inferior product but because it pulled the rug out from the expectation level of a vast array of demanding consumers. Now that toothpaste comes in 59 varieties, each one a little more suspect than the next (citrus whitening toothpaste with built-in mouthwash?), product turnover becomes more of an everyday occurrence. Yet the overarching brand continues, leaving consumers confused: do you switch to another tube of Crest, or change allegiances entirely?

Companies need to keep an eye on product discontinuations as much as introductions, for each dead product has an allegiance pining for it. Perhaps I would have benefited, for example, from getting free samples of replacement products along with the toothpaste I used to buy. Create a transition so the consumer realizes that there is a suitable replacement to the soon-to-depart. Higher marketing and production costs, sure, but higher customer satisfaction and loyalty, too. (Consider: I don’t buy Turkey Hill ice cream now that my favorite flavor is gone.)

I am more old-school than I thought, because I miss my discontinued products, right down to the Arizona diet asia plum green tea that I knew from Day One was too niche to spend much time in the corner deli. But that doesn’t make me wrong as a consumer. Just a little more wary as I settle into new habits. And I am probably just one of a sizable segment of shoppers who would benefit from a savvy marketing department that made product transitions easier.

In case you were wondering, Coca-Cola C2 tastes like—well, actually, it tastes like New Coke. A little too sweet, a little differently carbonated, a lot wrong.

In the interest of disclosure, I drink more Diet Coke than sugared these days, so my tastes are a little off. But I’d much prefer an eight-ounce glass bottle of the real thing (100 calories) to a 12-ounce can of C2 (70 cal). Or a Coke Slurpee. mmmm… slurpee

Third Avenue near 16th Street, yesterday at noon