There also seem to be locations that are “cursed” somehow. The same building or storefront will see a run of half a dozen business open and shut down in the course of a decade. I always wondered why that was.
It’s even worse than you’re portraying. You can do everything right - at least as far as the customer can tell - and still fail through lack of cashflow, financing, economic downturns, or four dozen other reasons.
It is about so much more than feeding people.
I’ve heard that the failure rate in non-franchised restaurants is about 75%.
I have attended four, and in all cases, it is hard to find organizations MORE poorly run.
Take physical plant:-huge buildings kept heated and lighted, with few classes held in them.
-old buildings with no preventative maintainence-insted, they let them decay
-poor utilization of athletic facilities-why not rent them out when not in use?
-faculty utilization: poor and uneven (some junior professors have too much work, many tenured guys do nothing).
College presidents are usually not good managers, as well.
A lot of times, in cases like this, it really is ‘location, location, location’.
When I lived in western Maryland, there were a couple of store-fronts in my town that seemed to change hands every few hours or so (hyperbolically, of course). But. . .if you really looked at the location, they were places where they were either very close to a shopping center that provided just about everything anyone needed, or because (in one particular case I can think of) there was nowhere to park. So, if you were in walking distance, great. Otherwise, not so much.
I can’t believe it took over 60 posts to get circuit city up here. The rise and fall of circuit city. I hated you.
Universities, especially small private ones with $$$, as mentioned by ralph124c.
The one I worked for was incredibly ultra-liberal in self-professed ideology and incredibly paranoid. They had a ‘consensus based’ management style, which in the end means utter paralysis as every asshole learns that all they have to do is object to every little thing and it will never happen - which soon becomes a pissing war of “She shot me down, so I’m going to object to HER proposal!” (regardless of it’s real value) and worse, “I won’t take a stand on this issue because it will be shot down by my enemies and cost me prestige”. Which means that people occupy positions only for the value of occupying the position, not for the actual job or what they could do with it.
I also worked for Prudential for a while. Big companies with lots of money can hire entire divisions full of people and not have a fucking clue what those people are doing for years at a time, pissing away millions before dropping the division without gain - and not even blink.
LLBean is awful lately. The material is cheap and it looks like it was made in a sweat shop. I had to send my last order back. I actually had a rude person on the phone and their customer service is usually the best. I ended up getting my money back and then some but that isn’t the point. I think they have sold out.
Comcast gets my nomination. The only reason they are still in business is because there are no practical alternatives for many people.
When my workplace first got Comcast Internet, the reliability of our connection was extremely poor. It would work fine for a week or two, but then it would be very flakey for a few days. The reason was that due to our distance from their head office, the strength of the signal was only borderline acceptable by the time it got to our office. Any big temperature swing or other external events would easily push it out of serviceable range. And because it was borderline, and the service was not down all the time, the tech would often just say everything was working fine and closed out the ticket. This went on for almost a year before we finally convinced them to install a signal amplifier. Now the Internet is only down about every month or two instead of every week. :rolleyes:
My Comcast service at home is also poor. They recently started converting my area to all digital cable, and I think the exercise is a complete disaster. Now everyone needs to hook up their little DTA device, which is a completely unreliable piece of shit. It seems that every month or so, my device would “loss” its activation signal, and I’d have to call Comcast to get it reactivated. Their CSR are always clueless, and sometimes rude. I’ll be switching to uverse or FiOS as soon as they are available in my area.
Is the website really that awful? At least it’s uncluttered. I think I will ask in IMHO, I’m curious what other people think of it.
Wikipedia’s run into the same problem. Some people don’t understand (or don’t want to understand) that a consensus means a majority agreement not a unanimous one. Few organizations can function with everyone having veto power.
The quality greatly depends on what you buy and who makes it. Their Buck Pathfinder Knife is a ridiculously great knife for the money, for instance. But of course it is; it is made by Buck.
As long as they still have their total return policy - meaning I can return that twenty-year-old L.L. Bean shirt for no real reason and get a comparable replacement, I think you can only call them incompetent in *our *favor - if at all. My father shipped them a pair of knee-high Bean hunting boots that were older than I am. He wanted to get them resoled. They did it at no cost. Years and years later, he shipped them back to be resoled yet again. This time, however, they determined the leather was just too far gone (40 years?) for another resoling to be worth while. Solution? Brand new pair of the same boots!
All that said, they do carry some things that are not up to snuff. But the origin of the item is the big tip off there.
Well yes, but the user generally survives for decades and continues to smoke while hauling around an oxygen tank/speaking through an artificial larynx/left with 40% of cardiac function, and new generations start using because obviously they are immune to such problems.
There’s so much money in it that you can even afford to make the occasional huge lawsuit payout and still rack up profits. And after your U.S. operations get curtailed there’s terrific earning potential in developing countries.
A highly addictive product ensures that your business model doesn’t have to be super-efficient.
It’s not bad to look at, just uninformative. I wouldn’t have referenced it except for the other issues with the business.
Bingo. A lot of the companies listed in this thread with poor customer service, especially best Buy, I could turn around and tell stories of great customer service. And Greyhound was great when I didnt’ have a car.
I agree with Blockbuster and the like.
I agree, btw, on the opening up your own business thing. I never understood how people did it. The American dream may be to open your own business but not all of us can. (And it’s not my dream!) The employers still need employees!
Pittsburgh city government. Latest fiasco? Given a parking ticket for not having a parking pass…when I did have one on my dash. I was told I must formally have a hearing on it…because it was a guest parking pass. No hearings on regular parking passes. Just a way to screw with visitors. Luckily, I’m a visitor from two blocks away. But just utter incompetence. I’ve worked with day laborers who look like string theorists compared with city employees.
I live on the same street (not quite a city block) from some spankin’ new half-million dollar condos. So what do they do to welcome the new wealthy retirees
Also, Verizon Wireless. Orders of magnitude dumber than your average ATT employee.
Macy’s is so odd in this way. Shopping retail always makes me feel like I’ve stepped into the 1970’s - the associates always have old hairstyles, prices are outrageous (unless they’re on sale), and the whole experience is just very odd. Retail shouldn’t last much longer, especially once companies jump on the Zappos/Amazon bandwagon of easy/free returns and exchanges.
Missed the edit:
I live on the same street (not quite a city block) from some spankin’ new half-million dollar condos. So what do they do to welcome the new wealthy retirees? Why they pave the street and put in new sidewalks, of course! But only…on their half of the street. So the whole street looks utterly absurd, half strewn with massive potholes and half brand new.
I certainly didn’t. It was like eating a gooey ball of lard.
Another anecdote: Our engineering firm was originally going to be a consultant for a KK flagship store here in Niagara Falls, ON, but their market research led them to relocate it to Kitchener/Waterloo due to the larger population base and tech industry (geeks love donuts).
I thought it was a spectacularly boneheaded decision. After all, Niagara Falls is a major tourist destination. Perhaps you’ve heard of it? Y’know, all that water falling from a great height? Lots of people come to see it. In fact, Our population effectively doubles 8 months out of the year and a very large proportion of that transient population is American. And, gawd knows why, Americans love Krispy Kreme. The math isn’t that hard.
I agree wholeheartedly. There’s been commentary on how NBC’s move is a noteworthy example of rejecting the younger demographic that Conan O’Brien appeals to. That may be, but O’Brien’s format also appealed to a much older demographic that liked the back-and-forth banter between Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon or Doc Severensen, not to mention a jazz band wearing suits, and featuring a top-notch drummer. In choosing Leno they’ve gone with a narrow, in-between demographic, while O’Brien ought to have been pulling both the younger and older audience on either side of it. Only he wasn’t, apparently.