Here’s a new round of photos. The first is from Watkins Glen State Park in New York. The second is on Lake Austin. The third, fourth, and fifth are all from New Mexico. The sixth and seventh are on the Barton Creek Greenbelt trail in Austin. The last is from the Zilker Kite Festival in Austin.
Why should a flight ever be canceled at the end of the day in an airline hub? After spending a wonderful Friday night in Dulles airport because my flight was canceled for “mechanical reasons,” I started wondering why an airline would do this? Follow my logic here:
Ok, so my flight had some kind of mechanical trouble (they never tell you what). Now during the day, all the planes are in flight. There’s never a “backup plane” they can just magically pull out of thin air. But at night, all the planes are offline. Why wouldn’t they just take another one and spend the rest of the night fixing the first one for use the next morning?
After witnessing the fiasco that followed, the costs to the airline to actually cancel a flight for mechanical reasons are enormous. Unlike weather cancellations, they actually have to pay for a hotel room, transportation, and food for the displaced passengers. They also have to pay the gate agents overtime to hang around and reschedule everyone’s flights. When this happens at 1:00 AM and the line doesn’t finish until about 3:30 AM, there’s also the issue of irate passengers (the 80 year old man in another line was really feisty) and lost goodwill. Oh, and they also have a plane out of place for the following morning, meaning that they either have to fix the original one and deadhead it later, or else they cancel yet another flight the next day.
I honestly have no answer for this. Maybe there are enormous costs to switch planes? Maybe they aren’t that similar and the flight crew wasn’t rated on any of the other Embraers? Maybe “mechanical reasons” was a convenient cover for something else? Anyone have any ideas for this?
For anyone who watches Hell’s Kitchen on Fox, you’ll learn two things:
If you haven’t watched the show, here’s the deal: A bunch of chefs all get together in a kitchen where they compete against each other for a reality show style prize. Each week, one of them is voted off the island *cough* kitchen, while the last one standing wins their own restaurant (for a year). The catch is that during each episode Gordon Ramsay screams at them incessantly while they’re cooking, and there’s not so much voting as just Gordon picking whomever he hates the most.
Ramsay is what makes the show so great. He’s been awarded twelve Michelin stars. Twelve! The man could probably setup shop in a cardboard box and get a Michelin star. He’s absolutely passionate about food, quality, and customer service. Watching him run a kitchen is like watching a true master craftsman do what he does best.
The contestants are a different story entirely. Every week the two teams compete in a challenge, someone wins, someone loses, and the losers have to perform some kind of punishment. Most of the time, the punishment is extra prep or kitchen cleaning. These punishments are almost always related to a typical restaurant task, but the amount of griping from the losers is usually insufferable. You would think that they had to clean septic tanks or something. They’re almost all chefs, yet none of them have passion for what they do!
If you love food, then you should love being with food. You have to do extra prep? Great! You love food and that’s what chefs do! You have to go pick vegetables from a field? Great! Thomas Keller grows his own produce for The French Laundry so that he can always have the best food in the kitchen.
Be passionate! Losing on Hell’s Kitchen should be like winning.
By the way, if you want to watch, you can catch episodes on Hulu. In fact, this gives me an excuse to try Hulu’s embedding feature. Here’s a nice video of grown men throwing tantrums because they have to go pick food from a field.
With everyone talking about food prices, I thought it might be interesting to do a little poll:
How much is one head of iceberg lettuce?
Total Voters: 7
Loading …The reason I ask is because of this article that somehow made it on CNN earlier today and has now slunk back to the blog where it belongs. In it, the author writes about how the price of iceberg lettuce has risen:
Organic mixed greens? Fancy leafy greens? Those handy-dandy bags of pre-washed salad mixes? Sure. But, iceberg lettuce? I am outraged!
Oddly enough, I had no idea what lettuce cost or what it historically cost when I read that post. A quick survey of my coworkers revealed that those who had families knew fairly well while those who did not were completely off.
Vote and then read to see if you too are outraged by the high price of iceberg lettuce.
Where is the most wind power produced in the United States? If you think it’s California, then you’ve picked the second biggest wind producer with 2,439 megawatts of installed power. The correct answer is Texas with a staggering 4,356 megawatts of wind power and another 1,238 under construction (California only has 165 under construction). This New York Times article has a great analysis of wind power here in Texas and why it’s growing so rapidly.
There are a few reasons in particular. One is that Texas is a vast state with both large empty plains and large cities that consume power. The second is that a single state controls the utilities connecting everything - you don’t have to figure out how to move power from one state to another. But the biggest is that Texans like making money from energy, especially when we make it ourselves. Quoting the Times who interviewed local billionaire T. Boone Pickens:
“I have the same feelings about wind,” Mr. Pickens said in an interview, “as I had about the best oil field I ever found.” He is planning to build the biggest wind farm in the world, a $10 billion behemoth that could power a small city by itself.
His windmill plans include a 4,000 megawatt site, while separately Shell and TXU are planning a 3,000 megawatt site in the panhandle. All told, Texas is looking to have over 12,000 megawatts within a few years. That’s equivalent to 4-5 large power plants (for perspective, the South Texas Nuclear Generating Station near Bay City generates 2,500 megawatts).
The wealth generated by wind power is plainly staggering. Entire West Texas towns are suddenly prospering, and one rancher mentioned in the article receives $500 per month per windmill. He has 78 today and another 76 coming, yielding almost $1 million a year for the value of capturing some wind flowing over his property.
On the other hand, not all Texas counties are alike. The map on this page (scroll down) breaks down the wind power available in different regions of the state, showing outstanding opportunities in the panhandle, the Pecos mountains, and along the coast. East Texas, sadly, is a little more out of luck. However, the possibilities are enormous for the future. Read Table 3 and you’ll see that the medium wind regions alone can power 371% of the state’s electrical needs.
I love the idea of wind power, and as the technology improves it’s only going to get cheaper. One doesn’t need to dig too deeply to see that there are tremendous opportunities here for making money, especially if you own land in one of these windy regions. The rest of the country will catch on soon enough, and pretty soon I think we will see wind farms up and down the plains.
Quick: did you notice the amazing new Starbucks logo? It’s a little different from their old one and a lot more like their really old one. Still drawing a blank? Well, here’s an informative BusinessWeek article with all the details.
Starbucks has long used the funny looking crowned creature in its logo, but as you can see from the image here, their original logo depicted a classic Siren. Well, actually it showed the Siren’s more bawdy cousin: the Melusine. This interesting article has all the details on the evolution of their logo, but the short version is that the big breasted mermaid was toned down over time into something very…corporate.
And that’s the problem. Howard Schultz, their new CEO (who was actually their old CEO), is trying to reposition Starbucks as a provider of quality coffee rather than the ubiquitous purveyor of over-roasted corporate flavored coffee that many people describe as “burnt.” So he decided to introduce a smoother flavored coffee and bring back the original logo in all its glory for eight weeks. The message: Starbucks is once again a neighborhood coffee shop founded on the principles of delicious coffee.
Interestingly, the logo you see here and the one they’re using on the cups aren’t quite the same. The melusine in the old logo shown here is showing a little more…breast. The new one (visible in the BusinessWeek article) shows a slightly more modest mermaid.
So has this new old new logo worked? Well, you decide. Did you notice the new logo? If you have noticed it, did you have any idea what it meant?
Based on an informal poll of my coworkers, not a single one of them had given it any thought. Starbucks may be fighting an uphill battle with this one.
What does 1 + 1 equal? Well, if you’re Delta and Northwest, the answer is Delta. The two companies have agreed to combine, but in the world of Mergers and Acquisitions (frequently called M&A among business geeks), there’s always a whole lot of ‘A’ and never that much ‘M’. MOEs or Mergers of Equals are rare, and when they do happen they fail even more often that plain old acquisitions (which fail pretty darn often themselves).
So what’s up with DAL and NWA? Well, according to Dealbook, Delta wins for a lot of reasons:
From a business point of view, there’s a lot to like and dislike about airline consolidation right now. The biggest dislike is that it’s not clear that consolidation works. America West survived buying US Air (no, it wasn’t the other way around), but I’m not really sure that deal worked out for shareholders. On the other hand, Delta’s shareholders would have been a whole lot better off had they been bought by US Air/America West back in 2007.
The biggest advantages to consolidation are the cost savings and the sharing of valuable landing slots at major airports. The latter is very important right now as European air carriers begin entering the US market. American air carriers will have to raise their own efficiencies to compete, and improving airport access is one way to do that. We’ll see if any of this actually works out or not for Delta.
With apologies to Thomas Friedman, the World is Flat. For a marketer, that means two things: your products must be global and so should your advertising. In the past, it was possible to brand and advertise differently in different markets, but that’s no longer true. An ad produced in one country will be posted on Youtube for the entire world to see, while branding can suddenly go from local to global in the blink of an eye. Witness the trouble with the Ford Fusion when Ford’s global marketers failed to communicate - they ended up trying to differentiate a sedan in the US from a totally unrelated little SUV in Europe.
Of course, nationalistic advertising can be real trouble. Nationalism rarely works on a global stage, either because only one group will actually “get it” or because some other group to which you market will find it offensive. Which brings me to this recent ad for Absolut Vodka:
The message is simple: in an Absolut world, Mexico would still own the Western United States. Of course, for anyone who has forgotten their American history, Mexico lost this region after Texas seceded in 1836 and the United States won the Mexican-American War with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
Obviously, it’s a subject of nationalism for both sides, but that’s beside the point. Absolut is a global brand, and vodka is consumed worldwide. While the ad was originally intended for a Mexican audience, the Internet thwarts attempts at regional advertising and makes all media global. Perhaps Absolut wanted “edgy” and this was their intention, but advertising this way is incredibly risky.
Border security and immigration issues are at the forefront of American politics, and many Americans are incredibly sensitive about these topics. While this ad may grow vodka sales in Mexico, many middle-class Americans who have long formed the core market for Absolut’s trendy alcohol will be turned off. Already, some conservatives are calling for a boycott, showing that Absolut has probably done more harm than good to their brand.
