Our Rapidly Changing Culture

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Making the social media rounds recently was this observation shared on Craigslist by the management of a New York City restaurant who were trying to figure out why service was so much slower in 2014 than in 2004 despite a simplified menu and increased staff size. They found security footage from 2004 and compared it to current footage. Some results they shared in their post:

Before even opening the menu they take their phones out, some are taking photos while others are simply doing something else on their phone (sorry we have no clue what they are doing and do not monitor customer WIFI activity).

26 out of 45 customers spend an average of 3 minutes taking photos of the food.

14 out of 45 customers take pictures of each other with the food in front of them or as they are eating the food. This takes on average another 4 minutes as they must review and sometimes retake the photo.

9 out of 45 customers sent their food back to reheat. Obviously if they didn’t pause to do whatever on their phone the food wouldn’t have gotten cold.

27 out of 45 customers asked their waiter to take a group photo. 14 of those requested the waiter retake the photo as they were not pleased with the first photo. On average this entire process between the chit chatting and reviewing the photo taken added another 5 minutes and obviously caused the waiter not to be able to take care of other tables he/she was serving.

Given in most cases the customers are constantly busy on their phones it took an average of 20 minutes more from when they were done eating until they requested a check. Furthermore once the check was delivered it took 15 minutes longer than 10 years ago for them to pay and leave.

8 out of 45 customers bumped into other customers or in one case a waiter (texting while walking) as they were either walking in or out of the Restaurant. 

They studied 45 customers in both cases and found that, on average, the time spent in the restaurant went from 1:05 in 2004 to 1:55 in 2014. It’s fairly safe to assume that other service businesses are experiencing similar behavioral changes in their customers, and it’s stunning to think about how quickly it’s happened.

BTW, I’m a notorious food-porner, but I can’t imagine taking more than 10 or 15 seconds to snap a pic of my snapper. I like my food way too much to waste more time than necessary before I dig in.

Hype vs Hyperbole

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A few weeks back the folks at the Greensboro Coliseum started hinting to the press that they would have a “historic” announcement. What was this historic announcement? That Paul McCartney would play a concert there as part of his US tour this fall. Sure McCartney’s a big act – a huge act to many folks – but is one concert date on one tour really historic?

Compare that with yesterday’s announcement that downtown Greensboro will be getting an 850-seat venue affiliated with House of Blues. Much less hype for something that will have much more impact on Greensboro in the long run.

Some local folks got their panties in a twist when other folks got a little snarky about the McCartney announcement. They took it as a slam on McCartney when really it was an indictment of the over-the-top PR push by the Coliseum folks. There’s a reason people don’t trust marketers/advertisers and the Coliseum folks provided us with a perfect example when the crossed the line from hype to hyperbole.

Measuring Success

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There are many ways to measure success and/or failure, and it’s important to keep that in mind when you assess hot-button issues. For instance, this article in the Greensboro News & Record about Obamacare’s affect on insurance coverage in North Carolina:

In North Carolina, 16.7 percent of residents are now uninsured, compared with 19.6 percent before the onset of the ACA, according to a study conducted by the social network WalletHub.

 

North Carolina ranked 33 among states for its number of uninsured residents.

The Tar Heel state also ranked fourth among states with the most net new private insurance enrollees per capita.

WalletHub used data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Census Bureau to make its projections.

Those who supported Obamacare will likely tout this statistic as proof that Obamacare is working. On the other hand, those opposed to Obamacare can ask the question, “But at what cost?” That’s the crux of the issue: we can all probably agree that more people having health insurance is a good thing, but we’d probably have lots of heated debate over how much to pay for it, how to pay for it and how to structure the program. Does the phrase “socialized health care” ring any bells.

Quite frankly I think it’s far too early in the process to declare Obamacare a success or failure, but I’d say these numbers show a positive trend towards getting more people health insurance coverage. Long term who knows whether or not Obamacare will be a net success, but at a minimum we’ve seen thousands of North Carolinians moved off the roles of the uninsured and that’s a step in the right direction.

 

Basic Income Guarantee

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Until stumbling across a post referencing it at Fred Wilson’s AVC I’d never heard of “basic income guarantee.” So what is it exactly? From Wikipedia:

An unconditional basic income (also called basic income, basic income guarantee, universal basic income, universal demogrant,[1] or citizen’s income) is a proposed system[2] of social security in which all citizens or residents of a country regularly receive an unconditional sum of money, either from a government or some other public institution, in addition to any income received from elsewhere.

A basic income is typically intended to be only enough for a person to survive on, so as to encourage people to engage in economic activity. A basic income of any amount less than the social minimum is sometimes referred to as a ‘partial basic income’. On the other hand, it should be high enough so as to facilitate any socially useful activity someone could not afford to engage in if dependent on working for money to earn a living.

Interesting concept, but this quote from Wilson’s post echoes my initial reaction:

I don’t have a formed opinion on this idea. I know that welfare didn’t work out too well in the last century. So I’m nervous about any system that encourages or incents people not to work. But if we really are headed into a world where there aren’t any low skilled jobs, then I guess we need to be talking about ideas like this.

One of Wilson’s colleagues has been writing about the concept and has a couple of posts that explore how this all might work. You can read them here, but this excerpt highlights why this might be a concept worth exploring:

A higher minimum wage, as vigorously argued for in an interesting recent piece on Politico, can inject some short term liquidity into the economy and I am sympathetic to that but it is also a very blunt instrument and still doesn’t help with the many unpriced activities. The same goes for government mandated shorter working hours or longer vacations (although I am pretty sure that Google’s founders did not have a government mandate in mind)…

This brings me once again to the idea of a guaranteed basic income. This is a potentially attractive alternative for a number of reasons:

First, it sets human creativity free to work on whatever comes to mind. For many people that could be making music or learning something new or doing research.

Second, it does not suppress the market mechanism. Innovative new products and services can continue to emerge. Much of that can be artisanal products or high touch services (not just new technology). 

Third, it will allow crowdfunding to expand massively in scale and simultaneously permit much smaller federal, state and local government (they still have a role — I am not a libertarian and believe that market failures are real and some regulation and enforcement are needed, eg sewage, police).

Fourth, it will force us to more rapidly automate dangerous and unpleasant jobs. Many of these are currently held by people who would much rather engage in one of the activities from above.

Fifth, in a world of technological deflation, a basic income could be deflationary instead of inflationary. How? Because it could increase the amount of time that is volunteered.

Very interesting.

Why We Help Second Harvest

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At the day job we’ve been running annual food drives for Second Harvest Food Bank of NWNC for ten years. Every year we try to do better than the last and so I find myself doing what appear to be silly or crazy things to gin up publicity and interest for our efforts – things like wearing a pink tutu while jumping into a pool with the word EPIC painted on my back. You may wonder why someone would do something that odd, but when you read about some of the programs that Second Harvest supports it becomes clear that a little embarrassment is the least we can do for an organization that fills a vital role for our community. Scott Sexton’s column in today’s Winston-Salem Journal brings us the story of one of those programs:

In six short months, the H.O.P.E. truck has become a staple in neighborhoods where fresh food is often a rumor.

It is part of a larger project dreamed up by Tennille and his wife, Marty, a retired couple with hearts as big as their imaginations. When they learned that children in Winston-Salem are more likely to go hungry than kids in Detroit or Chicago, they were horrified.

But instead of wringing their hands, stamping their feet in protest or simply writing a check, they decided to do something about it…

Since it started rolling in January, H.O.P.E. of Winston-Salem has mushroomed into something of which the entire community should be proud.

The Tennilles pick up items from the Second Harvest Food Bank and 50-pound bags of fresh food donated by the Vernon Produce Co. during the week.

A small group of volunteers meets every Saturday in a retreat center at the Children’s Home, where they set up an assembly line to make healthy bag lunches for kids and to box up fresh produce for adults who come with them. Groups from a variety of churches assemble lunches at their buildings, too, and pack them into giant coolers so a volunteer can pick them up later.

Around noon on Sundays, more volunteers start to trickle in at The Children’s Home to load the truck and a similarly painted minivan. The entire operation runs like Swiss trains; it stops at the same places every Sunday at the same time. By the time it finishes, more than 700 children get to eat and a few dozen food boxes are distributed.

By the way if you want to help us support Second Harvest you can do so by making a donation at helpsecondharvest.com. Also, if you want to see me embarrass myself yet again you can drive by the Robinhood Court Apartments and Villas this Thursday (July 10) from 4-5 p.m. where I’ll be part of “Two Guys Wearing Prom Dresses” to raise funds for Second Harvest. You guessed it: I’ll be wearing a dress. Here’s a handy map for you find us:

PTAA Food Drive for Second Harvest

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Each year my employer, the Piedmont Triad Apartment Association, puts on a food drive for Second Harvest Food Bank of NWNC. The folks at WPTI were kind enough to have Dale Holder, our food drive committee chair, and yours truly on their Triad View Points show to talk about it. Here’s the interview:

Health Care Rights

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Have you heard about the SCOTUS decision in the Hobby Lobby case? If you live in American and haven’t heard about it then you might live in a cave, but here’s the gist of it:

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a decision whereby closely-held companies can request exemptions the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage provision for some contraceptives because of the corporations’ founding family’s religious beliefs…

Much of the controversy over today’s decision derives from the fact that Hobby Lobby and Conestoga are not in the business of conducting religious services or overseas humanitarian missions as their primary business. They are for-profit companies. The ruling allows the corporations to refuse coverage because of the religious beliefs of individual leaders.

Beyond selectively singling-out women’s reproductive care, the decision raises the question of whether corporate leadership elsewhere might refuse coverage of other drugs due to religious beliefs.

A lot of the reaction I’ve seen online has focused on a couple of points: the weirdness of bestowing religious rights on closely held corporations using the argument that the corporation is an extension of the owners (that’s simplistic but I think gets to the heart of it); that the religious rights of the corporation/owners trumps the reproductive rights of their female employees.

I’d like to focus on the second point for a minute because I think the argument is a bit off and, quite frankly, misses the larger point. While it is regrettable that employers like Hobby Lobby would refuse to pay for insurance that covers all of their female employees’ contraceptive choices it doesn’t mean that those same employees can’t go out and get those contraceptives if they’re willing to pay for it themselves. Thus they aren’t denying them anything, they’re just not paying for it. That might seem like semantics, but I think it’s important because what it exposes is that corporate health insurance in this country is not a right for anyone.

Health insurance as we know it came into being in the World War II era as an incentive companies used to attract and retain employees who were in short supply at the time. As such, health insurance was never a “right” but was a benefit that came to be so commonplace that most employees started to view it as a right. Then something funny happened – companies realized they could shift the cost of health insurance back to employees and not suffer too many dire consequences and so they starting jacking up premiums and co-pays or simply doing away with health insurance all together. The result is a growing percentage of our population without access to health insurance, which means they forego preventive care and rely on ERs when they get sick, helping drive up health care costs for everyone.

The Clinton administration’s effort to deal with the rising health care problem twenty years ago was a notorious failure. ObamaCare started out as an ambitious plan to provide health care coverage for everyone, fought the “socialized medicine” stigma, went through a negotiation phase involving the health insurance cabal that resulted in the imperfect system being fought out in the courts today. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone happy with the system, except maybe for the millions of people who had NO access to health insurance pre-Obamacare and now at least have the option to buy it.

Long story short, while it’s easy to get hung up on the reproductive and religious rights arguments raised by the Hobby Lobby case, it would be a mistake to limit the scope of the conversation. The bigger question is why we can spend so much time and energy talking about our religious rights, women’s reproductive rights, our right to bear arms, etc. but we never seem to debate whether we should have a fundamental right to affordable, adequate health care and whether or not relying on private companies to provide it is the best way to approach it.

Be Nice

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Fred Wilson’s take on being nice in business is spot on:

So its conventional wisdom that being nice is a bad idea in business.

I have found otherwise. I have found that reputation is the magnet that brings opportunities to you time and time again. I have found that being nice builds your reputation. I have found that leaving money on the table, and being generous, pays dividends.

I am not saying you should be overly generous or nice to a fault. There’s a limit to everything. But I do think that thinking about others, and trying to make things right for everyone (which is impossible and will drive you crazy) is an approach that pays off in business.

It’s not the fastest way to make a buck. It takes time. But it is way more sustainable than screwing people over.

A Possible Solution to Gerrymandering

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For my day job I have the fortune of occasionally working with Greg Brown, the Sr VP of Government Affairs for the National Apartment Association. He recently wrote a blog post about term limits for Congress (he’s not in favor of them) and what might be done about gerrymandering, which he sees as the real problem with our political system right now:

The second part of my answer was to suggest that what is worth focusing our attention upon as voters is the process for re-districting in the states. This is a structural change that took hold in the last decade and, in my view, has contributed to the deterioration in problem-solving capabilities in Congress.

After every decennial census, the states undergo a redrawing of the lines for their Congressional districts. This is intended to respond to changes in population (some states gain seats in Congress while others lose seats), ensure compact, contiguous districts and perhaps keep local units of government within the same district. In practice, however, the process has been used by both parties to draw lines that create almost impenetrable partisan strongholds that virtually guarantee one-party control until the next decennial census. You know this process as gerrymandering and it has become increasingly easy due to improvements in technology and mapping. As a result, in at least five states the “opposition” has been relegated to just a few districts while the majority controls the rest of the state. Moreover, the only way majority incumbents can lose is to a primary opponent from their own party. This tactic has been used by Democrats in states where they control the legislature and by Republicans in states they control.

I prefer the approach that Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Jersey and Washington have adopted which is to give the district drawing process to an independent or bipartisan commission. The goal is to reduce the impact of partisan politics. While far from perfect, it has to be an improvement upon what has been done in some of the 34 other states where the legislature draws the lines.  

If the goal of “compact and contiguous” congressional districts is met through these independent or bipartisan entities then you typically have heterogeneous districts not solidly in one party’s hands. That can organically mean fewer extremists of either party. While it does not guarantee more moderates, it does increase the chances that the representative of that district must take into account a wider pool of perspectives than just those of his or her own party. Extrapolate that to Congress and you would have less polarization and more discussion to solve the big issues facing the nation. That should be something we all want. 

I totally agree.

With Malice Toward None

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A quote from Lincoln contained within an Esquire piece titled The United States of Cruelty:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

That is a necessary reminder in this day and age, because the author of the Esquire piece is on to something with this paragraph:

We cheer for cruelty and say that we are asking for personal responsibility among those people who are not us, because the people who are not us do not deserve the same benefits of the political commonwealth that we have. In our politics, we have become masters of camouflage. We practice fiscal cruelty and call it an economy. We practice legal cruelty and call it justice. We practice environmental cruelty and call it opportunity. We practice vicarious cruelty and call it entertainment. We practice rhetorical cruelty and call it debate. We set the best instincts of ourselves in conflict with each other until they tear each other to ribbons, and until they are no longer our best instincts but something dark and bitter and corroborate with itself. And then it fights all the institutions that our best instincts once supported, all the elements of the political commonwealth that we once thought permanent, all the arguments that we once thought settled — until there is a terrible kind of moral self-destruction that touches those institutions and leaves them soft and fragile and, eventually, evanescent. We do all these things, cruelty running through them like hot blood, and we call it our politics.

Here’s the thing; our political debates lean towards us vs. them. We agonize over paying taxes that we perceive to be too high because we think that others are riding our coattails. Are some folks slackers? Sure, but many others are victim of circumstance just like those who are beneficiaries of circumstance. In the end what we need to remind ourselves is that a “common good” does exist, that in the end it is better for ALL of us if people have access to good healthcare, clean water, healthy food and a place to lay their heads. We can debate the details about how its done, but we shouldn’t be debating about whether it’s done. That, to me, is the definition of a divided and sick society.