With pretty much every of these "[X] marries/divorces/cheats on/feuds with/blasts [Y]" headlines, I am usually very blissfully unaware of who exactly those people are. Blessed ignorance.
25 thoughts on “June 29, 2023: Who?”
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One of the signs that I'm old is that I see people on commercials who are obviously celebrities of some sort, but I have no idea who they are.
If you also replace "on commercials" with any combination of "being arrested", "found dead", "are selling their home for $13M", etc, and you can add me to the list of oldsters, too
It’s not every day that SCOTUS writes a landmark decision that upends my work(place), but today’s is a doozy.
I expected this, but its still shocking.
Now if we could only overcome educational bias in the selection of SCOTUS justices…
Hey Twayn - you're bro said last night that he was up in MN last week; I told him that it apparently wasn't worth mentioning 😛
I normally will not eat in an airport without a significant layover, but an evening stop in MSP last night prompted an exploratory visit to the Blue Door outpost there. Worst service I can remember having in a very long time.
I walked in to a nearly empty restaurant, with one 8-top table in the middle of their meal, two women with cocktails at an 4-top, and everyone else at the bar. I passed a person sweeping up but didn’t see any waitstaff in the seating area, so I sat down at a table near the bar. A waiter comes out to check on the 8-top already eating, sees me, goes to refill drinks, brings drinks, starts bussing a table on the other side of the place, heads back into the expo area. Are they ignoring me? Maybe I’m not sitting in their section?
After about five more minutes, I wonder if I’m supposed to place my order at the bar. I go up, order a Hamms & a Classic. Barkeep asks if I’m sitting at the bar, I say no since there’s nowhere for my backpack (no roller bags for this hombre). He gives me the beer, says I need to order food from my server.
I sit back down. One of the women sees me being back my drink, says I was smart to order at the bar. Oh? I say I only got my drink, so I hope the server’s by soon. They look like they’re waiting, too; one says something about everyone who eats there having a plane to catch…
Another front-of-house person emerges! This one is chatting with the person waiting on the 8-top and the one I saw sweeping up. The ladies with cocktails look over, too. After a few minutes the conversation breaks up and the new person goes to lean chairs up against unoccupied tables, then wanders back to the kitchen.
Three more people come in several minutes later; a couple who sit several tables over and a single traveler who sits at the table next to me. The server emerges to chat with the bartender. One of the women with drinks gets up and goes to the waitstaff station, where the once-sweeping person is standing. She comes back a couple minutes later and tells her friend she’s ordered their food and another round of drinks. The third server ends her conversation with the bartender and comes over…to the couple. Takes their order. I raise my hand to catch her eye and…no dice. She walks to put in the order and disappears again.
I flag down the person who swept up and ask, “Whose section am I in?” She points at the third server, who is carrying drinks from the bar over to the couple, and rolls her eyes. Asks what I would like to order, so I say a Classic and some fries. She walks off toward the waitstaff station. I pull out my phone to call home and check in, pop in my earbuds since it’s kinda noisy.
As I’m talking, I see the third server finally come over my way. She goes to the guy sitting next to me to get his order. By then I’m explaining to the Poissonnière I hope I have enough time to eat before my plane starts boarding in twenty-five minutes midway up the C concourse…
New server interrupts — “Did you want something to eat?” Excuse me? I pop out one earbud. She repeats herself, visibly annoyed that I was listening. I explain I gave my order to one of her co-workers. “Oh, I know. She told me, but I forgot what you ordered.” That was five minutes ago…so my order hasn’t been fired yet?
I repeat my order for the third time to a third person, pop my earbud in, and make an exasperated remark to home folks about the best case scenario being getting to choke down a burger filled with molten cheese in ten minutes. Server, who had turned back to me, gets chippy. “I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to them,” I say without looking back.
A couple minutes later, a tall guy in an apron I haven’t seen before is standing in front of me. I’m still on the phone with my kiddo, but ask her to hang on a sec. He’s come out from the kitchen to apologize for the delay. I say thank you. A few minutes later, I’m off the phone and he’s back out with my food and says he’s comping it. Thank you, that’s unexpected (and easy on the per diem). The guy next to me hears it, says to me the server just brought him somebody else’s drink…
A few minutes later, the chippy server comes by and sets a crumpled receipt for my Hamm’s on the table without a word. Thirteen bucks & change for a pint of Hamms…okay. After I finish I take the receipt up to the bar to settle up. Bartender says he’s comping the beer. Well! Thank you!
I book it for my plane at C10, arrive just as my boarding group is called.
Unfortunately, the trend is to replace decently-paid, competent waitstaff with as much self-service or automation as possible. I have been a tech guy my whole life, but generally from the standpoint of using tech to solve technical issues. In the theme of calculators and soreadsheets to automate error-prone mathematical busywork. Once the MBAs (apologies to any MBAs reading this) got a hold of the idea to use tech to solve non-tech business problems (like taking orders in a restaurant), it’s been rocky, especially since the advent of widespread data collection.
For instance, point-of-sale tech near me has only just in the last year gotten to the point where I can pay the check electronically at a restaurant without the server coming back after dropping off the check. 25 years ago, you’d generally just plop your money on the table and walk out, at least as I remember it. But somewhere along the line, credit cards took over from cash and while it’s still generally possible to pay with cash, it always seems like swimming upstream. (As an example, I had a friend who put off getting a credit card and simply by not funneling his purchases through a credit card, it tanked his credit score.)
I think maybe what bothers me most is that I feel as a group we’ve generally been manipulated into accepting more self-service. ATMs were a good early example, because banking hours were notoriously short in the first place. So it was an improvement to have ATMs available outside of banking hours, but the better solution would have been longer banking hours.
So now we have grocery stores where it once used yo be pretty trivial to get everything checked by a human, but when self-check became an option, they slashed the number of human checkers, and then self-check becomes the solution to a problem that didn’t exist for me in the first place.
In theory, some of this automation saves me money as a consumer, but these days so many lines of business are dominated by so few giant companies that I don’t believe sufficient price competition exists for the savings to be passed along to me. I just have a bunch of microjobs now (that I am not paid for) that used to belong to someone else (who was paid.)
I agree with this but I blame all of us, not just the MBAs. Just about the only metric many people use is price. Very few people will pay for service. The more we demand cheaper and cheaper, the more we'll get this.
That’s fair enough. Not even just our individual purchasing decisions, but our collective political willingness over the last 45+ years to toss aside or reject most ideas that might even somewhat stem the tide against this trend. For instance, allowing huge mergers to go ahead in already non-competitive industries instead of going the other direction and breaking up big businesses to foster more competition.
A lot of the time, even if I wanted to pay for better service, there really aren’t a lot of options to choose from. Airlines are maybe a bit of an extreme case (since it is a bit of a natural monopoly at the current level of demand for air flight and high barriers to entry), but it’s an example where I usually can’t differentiate on service because there are so few non-stop options for flights that I want, once I have chosen a rough itinerary, it’s unlikely that I have much or any choice when it comes to seating or service. Maybe there’s an economy-plus option, but even that conflates, say, seat sizes with boarding order, in-flight food, etc. There’s no real way for me as a consumer to push the airlines towards more leg room but no included food (that I usually don’t like anyway). And there are no options to choose from airlines that put a jetway on the front and back entrances to speed up the boarding process.
Actually, I’m pretty sure that the airlines have a perverse incentive to keep the deplaning process really long for passengers at the rear of the plane — if passengers at the rear could deplane as quickly as 1st class, it would lower the value of a 1st class ticket and they probably couldn’t sell them for as much as they can now for the volume of tickets that they sell. But it’s the same perverse incentive for all the airlines, so there’s no real reason to expect anyone to do differently when there are high barriers to entry in the industry.
But it’s the same perverse incentive for all the airlines, so there’s no real reason to expect anyone to do differently when there are high barriers to entry in the industry.
SWA has no 1st class ticket -- if there was an easy way to board from both ends, they'd be doing it already and putting their birds back in the air even quicker.
I’m generally in favor of businesses that don’t treat one group of people like sh!t in order to sell preferential treatment to people wealthy enough to purchase a veneer of civility laid over the exact same product.
If a plane full of whales was a viable business model, we’d still have the Concorde — or something better.
Put the blame on me. I will happily use an ATM, self-checkout, EFT payments, self-service gas for the time savings and convenience. I'd much rather take care of things myself in a fraction of the time than wait in line somewhere. I don't like that it reduces the payroll, but I'd much rather employees were handling meaningful customer transactions than things so trivial I can take care of them myself.
I generally don't believe that a lot of that stuff winds up taking less time over the long run. Take EFT payments on my mortgage. Over less than 7 years, I've had 4 different banks servicing my mortgage and none of those changes benefitted me in any real way -- they just keep selling my mortgage amongst themselves. That means in order to do online automatic payments for my mortgage, I've had to create 4 different accounts just for the mortgage companies, plus at least one for my personal bank (and then more than that if it turns out that it would be better for me to bank at another bank.) Just in the time it takes me waiting on hold to understand why my automatic payment has been cancelled (because I got an automated email that didn't explain anything instead of an interaction with a human who could immediately tell me it was because my mortgage had been sold again), I could have easily written over a dozen checks. That doesn't include the time it takes to re-enter all of my payment information in yet another (similar, but just different enough that autofill doesn't really work) online form to get the payments going again.
It is a system that has the potential to be more convenient, but it hasn't actually lived up to its potential to really be more convenient. Everyone has a different system -- daycare is different from preschool is different from swimming lessons is different from any other extracurricular activity is different from the local baseball team or the local soccer team (because even though they are both through ticketmaster, the system hasn't actually been set up to properly transfer my account information), which is different from the banks (which are all different from each other) which is different from the hospitals and clinics (which are definitely all different from one another) or summer camps or airlines or practically anything else.
It's just convenient enough to keep people from getting frustrated enough to lobby for a meaningful change (like if the banks are going to put me through some administrative work because they made a change that I didn't ask for, like selling my mortgage or credit card account, then they should have to pay me for that work.) But when I have to adopt an entirely new technology (like a password manager) just to do all of my unpaid administrative work, then it ultimately feels like more of a burden than a benefit.
I'm not one to walk away from an opportunity to shake my cane at something, but this is not one. I maybe write a half dozen checks in a year, and half of those I snapped a picture of and deposited in a different institution via an app. Was it unpaid labor? Well, I didn't have to drive anywhere or use a stamp or wait in a line. I'll take it everyday.
The self-service concept certainly predates the era of MBA inflation; Horn & Hardart’s Automat opened in 1902, but that restaurant format was nearly a decade into practice in Berlin. That concept waned over the years until COVID created a market for contactless dining again, but laundromats are analogous and have persisted.
The irony of shadow work is not simply that we so devalue the labor of other people that we wish to eliminate their jobs in order to save money or to chase “convenience,” but that we don’t see how assuming their jobs devalues our own labor and creates new annoyances like typing produce SKUs into dirty touchscreens frequented by scores of dirty fingers.
I think it's probably worth qualifying this all a little bit by pointing out that, where tech is able to replace worker shortages, that matters and is a good thing.
Long term, I picture something like the Star Trek Universe, where so much of labor is replaced by machines that people can do bigger, better, more important things. Right now, that's not where things are - we're doing less important things, like checking out our own groceries - but maybe someday we'll get there?
I’ve often been envious of the casual eff-you attitude I see from airport employees. You, the traveler, are captive and at their mercy. There is no need to be efficient at all. Who cares if you’re online for a burger and have to get the eff because your flight is leaving. What’re you going to do, leave a negative review of the chilis too franchise in the msp airport? There is no negative consequence for shitty behavior. In fact, I think I’m going to apply to manage the shake shack at msy and quiet quit living.
(Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely detest the shit treatment I see and experience at airports… I’m just curious what it would be like to absolutely not give one shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit)
Not just that, but there are very few repeat customers.
And those franchises face verrry little competition within the airport concourse space. That is the fundamental problem -- captive markets due to the inherent oligopolistic nature of competition in those enclosed spaces. High prices, shitty service.
Tipping is a flawed mechanism for solving the server incentive problem. Because management has little incentive to improve service overall.
Jeff made an interesting observation yesterday about the fraction of games the Twins have scored 2 or fewer runs in. I was curious how that has varied for the league as a whole over time.
1906 -- 41.6%
1916 -- 40.9%
1926 -- 29.4%
1936 -- 23.5%
1946 -- 36.9%
1956 -- 29.3%
1966 -- 35.7%
1976 -- 34.6%
1986 -- 29.7%
1996 -- 24.3%
2006 -- 25.3%
2016 -- 29.9%
2023 -- 29.7%
I think it's kind of interesting to see contemporary MLB in the middle of the roughly 25-35% range that's been around since after the dead ball era where the league was averaging 40% of team games at 2 runs or fewer per game.
The Boston Beaneaters of 1906 had 55% of their games where they scored 2 runs or fewer. The 1936 Yankees only had 13% of their games where they scored 2 runs or fewer. That is a large range!
Cool info. Thanks for doing it.
Arraez announced as the All-Star starter at second base.
I wish the game was in Minneapolis this summer.