If you listened to President Obama's recent State of the Union Address, you will have noticed his (expected) emphasis on job-creation through small business and entrepreneurialism. With the US economy struggling to its feet, politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle have been making regular political hay of the macroeconomic benefits of entrepreneurialism. Typically this means touting small businesses and the removal of regulatory 'red tape' without describing in any detail how exactly we can promote and foster entrepreneurialism. For example, our elected officials and policy leaders seem to have plenty of vague ideas about how to provide tax breaks and incentives for the promotion of already-existing small businesses, but don't seem to have any substantive sense of where those small businesses come from in the first place. What educational and professional background (yes, they do at least acknowledge that education gives one a significant advantage in starting a successful business), or what set of skills, leads to successful entrepreneurship? Though our politicians and policy wonks do have stock answers to these questions--it's generally and uncritically accepted that business and technology education is essentially all we need to pay any attention to if we want to train the next generation of job-producers)--we are, as usual, living in a political climate in which it's easier to latch onto a few popularly held assumptions and repeat them for political gain than to think entrepreneurially about entrepreneurialism itself.
One economic sector that is truly a powerhouse of entrepreneurial spirit and practice is academia, though the talking points of politicians, journalists, and the like would have use believe otherwise. Conventional 'wisdom' would have it that entrepreneurialism is anathema to academics. As in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, in which the sensibilities of a curmudgeonly academic writer, Senior C, are contrasted with those of Alan, the young financial pragmatist, the academic man of belles lettres is portrayed as disconnected, unambitious, and sedentary, while the young businessman is always looking for ways to get paid (ethics aside). Such stereotypes even apply to academics who are viewed to be in more 'pragmatic' and widely encouraged fields, like the natural sciences: we don't look to the boffin the the white lab coat to start a company (like, I don't know, Genentech).
The truth, however, is that few professions, if any, are as fundamentally entrepreneurial as academia. Even in the study of subjects like, say, literature, which are less 'applied' in terms of their research output, one's livelihood depends directly and almost exclusively on one's ability to generate new, viable, and reasoned ideas, to articulate these ideas to several levels of audiences, to identify and/or create a market for these ideas, and to capitalize on them (literally, to translate ideas written on paper into real monetary gain). There are no teams, and rarely any collaborations for the majority of research output, which means that you live and die by your ability take an idea from its infancy to its marketability to your payday. If this sounds like a crude way of expressing the academic research process, consider yourself disabused of the dated stereotypes and silly fantasies you've been fed about life in the 'Ivory Tower.' If there's anyone who understands what it means to be an entrepreneur every day and in every step of his or her career, it's an academic; particularly an academic in a field for which there is little governmental or other institutional support and a hypercompetitive marketplace for ideas. No, this experience is not in itself identical to the experience of starting a company and managing a crop of employees from the ground up; but it is an outstanding exercise in realizing ideas from conception to viability to marketability to payoff, an exercise not unlike some of the earliest and most crucial phases of business entrepreneurship (likely for this reason, academics actually tend to be more likely than the average American to start a business of their own).
Beyond these aspects of entrepreneurialism, of course, it remains the case that in 'knowledge economies' academics are also tremendously important as educators. But, when policymakers are looking for new ideas and new sources of economic growth, they would do better to acknowledge the unacknowledged entrepreneurial resource that most of us presume falsely to be useless and idealistic by choice: the academics.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Why RyanAir Sucks
PMB doesn't usually write about explicitly personal experiences, though this case warrants an exception. The personal issue at hand is what many would readily know and expect as typically poor treatment of this RyanAir customer by the Soviet-like machines that RyanAir trains as staff.
The broader issue is the extent to which we as consumers have been conditioned (or conditioned ourselves) to tolerate certain business practices that make absolutely no good sense whatsoever, and ought to be better 'punished' by the consumer market. I've been critical of the boycott as a means of governing, through market imperatives, our moral action in public life; but strictly as a capitalist I think it's necessary for consumers to be as informed and act as rationally as possible in our consumption choices for capitalism to run optimally. Admittedly, in one sense, capitalism is a self-sealing ideology: because it's meant to be maximally efficient in and of itself, any functions or results of capitalism, however unacceptable and truly and absurdly irrational, are deemed optimal, because the machine does not err. On a less utopian note, however, it's clear that many of the bases of capitalism in its original form--foremost the accountability that comes with looking someone in the face who's providing you a service that you genuinely want, and that person and his or her associates bearing some level of shame when they cheat you or screw something up--have been evacuated from the site of most transactions. Either a company conducts business from behind a wall or through subsidiaries, consultants, or hired agents with no actual ties to the company otherwise (and little stake in its success or failure), or it trains its own staff (usually in a call center somewhere) to dehumanize the entire process of exchanging goods and services for money, and to address any needs or problems with a kind of robiticism that makes you think, frankly, yeah, now I see how Soviet communism claimed so many casualties: by using the communist version of the capitalistic trick of training humans as automata. Consider the following commonplace business practices that we put up with, despite their absurdity:
1) Bank fees of the order of charging someone for using a debit card as a debit card, or for failing to use a credit card a minimum amount of times in a given month, etc.
2) Fine print on television advertisements that flashes by in seconds and is so small that it is objectively unreadable in the time it appears...and yet it also fundamentally alters or modifies the message of the advertisement and the terms of the service being offered (false advertising loophole).
3) Tipping (especially in the United States), a system by which a business gets consumers to pay directly not only for the service they purchase (the meal, which, typically, has labor and production costs built into its price) but for the wage of the employee (the waiter): restaurateurs typically pay their waiting and bar staff below minimum wage, but get away with it because the tipping expectation from consumers puts their total earnings above minimum wage and into legal territory. But why should a consumer pay directly the hourly wage of the business staff, especially after already paying for the associated costs of producing a meal built into the price of the meal itself? It's the employer's responsibility to pay its labor costs and set its prices accordingly, not the consumer's responsibility to pay for labor directly out of pocket per transaction.
Bearing all of this in mind, we come now to RyanAir.
By way of disclaimer, I've flown RyanAir many times, and I understand what it is, how it operates, etc. I know they look to charge customers for virtually anything they can find (I could recite to you a litany of such charges, and, for that matter, much of their entire service level agreement text); I know they're a cut-rate airline that pride themselves on getting you somewhere cheaply and on-time and nothing else (not at all an ignoble goal) (in fact, when they land you on time, which should be a given, a chime comes on the loudspeaker in the plane bragging about how they've landed on time and boast the highest on-time flight rate in Europe); I know they have strict policies and the strictness and ruthlessness of the way they carry out such policies is essentially their lifeblood as a business. I should also say that I don't expect even friendly service, not even a smile, no frills and no extras. I don't care about that stuff. I want basic, competent service that matches what was advertised to me and what I paid for it. I don't pay for smiles. I don't walk into a McDonald's expecting four-star restaurant service, and then complain when I don't get it.
But alas, RyanAir has finally failed me on the fundamentals. The troubles begin with the RyanAir website. If you haven't checked out the RyanAir website, it looks like what you'd expect to get if you accidentally clicked on a spam e-mail for male enhancement pills. But no, it's actually a prosperous and widely patronized European airline, operating out of offices in multiple countries, rather than some guy's mom's basement in central New Jersey. As I suggested, though, I'm not particularly moved by web aesthetics in this case; the real problem with the website is that it's clunky and suffers frequent errors that make it impossible at times to obtain certain basic services from the website. If one of those times and one of those certain services happens to be when you're trying to check in for your flight online and when you're trying to print out a boarding pass, the consequences of RyanAir web failure are dire, as I discovered.
After trying to check in and print out a boarding pass on two separate computers and two separate internet connections on two separate days, I was unable to do so. The RyanAir website does, helpfully, inform you when purchasing a ticket that failure to print out your boarding pass and bring it to the airport with you results in a 6 euro re-issuance fee (essentially for them to print your boarding pass at the airport). Knowing this, yet unable to access my boarding pass on their website to print it out before leaving for the airport, I figured I'd let them know that their website wouldn't give me access to my check in and boarding pass, and so I ought not to be charged. In the back of my mind I figured that, were I unsuccessful, I'd fork over the 6 euro.
The first RyanAir representative I spoke with listened to my 'story' for about 30 seconds before telling me, plainly, that I was lying. His exact words were 'You're lying, I'm done with you sir,' before sending me to the ticket counter to pay my fee.
The second RyanAir representative suggested first that there was no IT problem, then backed away and said that if I had an IT problem (ah, what an admission!) I should have contacted the IT department (for one euro per minute on the phone), but now they had to charge me. Curiously, the guy at the counter before me happened to have had the same problem as I did. Nonetheless, the clerk then proceeded to tell me that the surcharge for failing to check in and print out my boarding pass was not 6 euro, but 60 euro. When I asked how this was the case, pointing to the information I had on my ticket receipt, she said 'because it went up.' Thanks.
After arguing further with her and her supervisor up until the point at which I might miss my flight, I forked over the 60 euro, flew back to England, and obtained a form letter from the RyanAir desk in Birmingham for how to make official complaints to the airline (curiously, the staff in Birmingham, like at most airports, but unlike Dublin, a RyanAir headquarters where I started from, do not directly work for RyanAir; they're specially contracted to check people in and print boarding passes, but cannot receive complaints or grievances because they are not with RyanAir; no coincidence, of course).
Upon further investigation of the materials I received from RyanAir, an itinerary they sent me immediately after ticket purchase suggests that the check-in/boarding pass fee at the airport is 40 euro. This puts the information I have at the following: upon purchasing the ticket, the charge was 6 euro; at the airport, the charge (which I actually paid) was 60 euro ('it went up'); on my e-mailed itinerary it's 40 euro. I've since discovered that RyanAir, a while ago, upped this charge from 40 to 60 euro; but then why did my itinerary have the 'old' price? Does RyanAir even know it's own policies?
The point in all of this is that there's a difference between accepting that cut-rate business services like RyanAir aren't exactly luxurious and flexible, and drawing a line at blatantly poor, inconsistent, fraudulent, and predatory business practices. RyanAir does catch people off guard with little inconveniences that could have been avoided by measures within the control of its customers, like, for example, charging massive rates for even the slightest amount of excess baggage weight. A google search produces endless complaints about huge fees for bags that are fractions of a kilo over the weight limit. In these cases I'd say to the customer 'tough shit,' because the baggage policies are pretty explicitly there on the website (so long as the website is actually working).
In my case, however, RyanAir crossed a line. For one, it failed to take responsibility for the fact that its lousy website prevented a knowing customer (actually, in that little time window, at least TWO knowing customers; coincidence?) from executing the instructions it set out. Though the woman at the ticket desk repeatedly informed me that my printed receipt was not a boarding pass, and I repeatedly told her I fully understood that, and brought it to her to prove that I had indeed purchased a ticket in the first place, but couldn't get to my boarding pass because of website problems, there was no actual communication going on about how plausible and regular it is for people to have such problems with high-volume commercial websites, and how absurd it is to penalize someone with proof of purchase 60 euro for the trouble.
Notwithstanding having been called a liar by one of the RyanAir employees, the second way RyanAir crossed the line here was by sending me two different correspondences that indicate radically different fees for the same situation, and then charging me a third different fee, completely unadvertised and unmentioned in my receipts, itineraries, and their website, a fee which happened to be 20 euro more than the second fee they advertised and 54 euro more than the first, the one that appeared while I was making my decision to purchase my ticket. If a business doesn't give the customer the opportunity to factor these types of things into their decision, then they're not practicing fair business. At best they're predatory, at worst fraudulent. Were I aware that it would cost 60 euro to show up with no boarding pass; even that such a possibility existed; I would have made a series of very different decisions. For example, yes, I could have contacted the RyanAir IT department for 1 euro per minute on the phone; but since it was advertised to me that I'd pay 6 euro at the desk for failing to show up with a printed boarding pass, and it's likely that I'd be on the phone with IT for more than 6 minutes, why should I have called IT?
This is, ultimately, why RyanAir sucks: not because the staff are unfriendly and unprofessional; not because of baggage fees or sparse legroom in the cabin; not because they try to sell you everything under the sun that you don't want both while buying a ticket online and during the flight; but because they fail to provide with honesty the fundamental service that they advertise.
The broader issue is the extent to which we as consumers have been conditioned (or conditioned ourselves) to tolerate certain business practices that make absolutely no good sense whatsoever, and ought to be better 'punished' by the consumer market. I've been critical of the boycott as a means of governing, through market imperatives, our moral action in public life; but strictly as a capitalist I think it's necessary for consumers to be as informed and act as rationally as possible in our consumption choices for capitalism to run optimally. Admittedly, in one sense, capitalism is a self-sealing ideology: because it's meant to be maximally efficient in and of itself, any functions or results of capitalism, however unacceptable and truly and absurdly irrational, are deemed optimal, because the machine does not err. On a less utopian note, however, it's clear that many of the bases of capitalism in its original form--foremost the accountability that comes with looking someone in the face who's providing you a service that you genuinely want, and that person and his or her associates bearing some level of shame when they cheat you or screw something up--have been evacuated from the site of most transactions. Either a company conducts business from behind a wall or through subsidiaries, consultants, or hired agents with no actual ties to the company otherwise (and little stake in its success or failure), or it trains its own staff (usually in a call center somewhere) to dehumanize the entire process of exchanging goods and services for money, and to address any needs or problems with a kind of robiticism that makes you think, frankly, yeah, now I see how Soviet communism claimed so many casualties: by using the communist version of the capitalistic trick of training humans as automata. Consider the following commonplace business practices that we put up with, despite their absurdity:
1) Bank fees of the order of charging someone for using a debit card as a debit card, or for failing to use a credit card a minimum amount of times in a given month, etc.
2) Fine print on television advertisements that flashes by in seconds and is so small that it is objectively unreadable in the time it appears...and yet it also fundamentally alters or modifies the message of the advertisement and the terms of the service being offered (false advertising loophole).
3) Tipping (especially in the United States), a system by which a business gets consumers to pay directly not only for the service they purchase (the meal, which, typically, has labor and production costs built into its price) but for the wage of the employee (the waiter): restaurateurs typically pay their waiting and bar staff below minimum wage, but get away with it because the tipping expectation from consumers puts their total earnings above minimum wage and into legal territory. But why should a consumer pay directly the hourly wage of the business staff, especially after already paying for the associated costs of producing a meal built into the price of the meal itself? It's the employer's responsibility to pay its labor costs and set its prices accordingly, not the consumer's responsibility to pay for labor directly out of pocket per transaction.
Bearing all of this in mind, we come now to RyanAir.
By way of disclaimer, I've flown RyanAir many times, and I understand what it is, how it operates, etc. I know they look to charge customers for virtually anything they can find (I could recite to you a litany of such charges, and, for that matter, much of their entire service level agreement text); I know they're a cut-rate airline that pride themselves on getting you somewhere cheaply and on-time and nothing else (not at all an ignoble goal) (in fact, when they land you on time, which should be a given, a chime comes on the loudspeaker in the plane bragging about how they've landed on time and boast the highest on-time flight rate in Europe); I know they have strict policies and the strictness and ruthlessness of the way they carry out such policies is essentially their lifeblood as a business. I should also say that I don't expect even friendly service, not even a smile, no frills and no extras. I don't care about that stuff. I want basic, competent service that matches what was advertised to me and what I paid for it. I don't pay for smiles. I don't walk into a McDonald's expecting four-star restaurant service, and then complain when I don't get it.
But alas, RyanAir has finally failed me on the fundamentals. The troubles begin with the RyanAir website. If you haven't checked out the RyanAir website, it looks like what you'd expect to get if you accidentally clicked on a spam e-mail for male enhancement pills. But no, it's actually a prosperous and widely patronized European airline, operating out of offices in multiple countries, rather than some guy's mom's basement in central New Jersey. As I suggested, though, I'm not particularly moved by web aesthetics in this case; the real problem with the website is that it's clunky and suffers frequent errors that make it impossible at times to obtain certain basic services from the website. If one of those times and one of those certain services happens to be when you're trying to check in for your flight online and when you're trying to print out a boarding pass, the consequences of RyanAir web failure are dire, as I discovered.
After trying to check in and print out a boarding pass on two separate computers and two separate internet connections on two separate days, I was unable to do so. The RyanAir website does, helpfully, inform you when purchasing a ticket that failure to print out your boarding pass and bring it to the airport with you results in a 6 euro re-issuance fee (essentially for them to print your boarding pass at the airport). Knowing this, yet unable to access my boarding pass on their website to print it out before leaving for the airport, I figured I'd let them know that their website wouldn't give me access to my check in and boarding pass, and so I ought not to be charged. In the back of my mind I figured that, were I unsuccessful, I'd fork over the 6 euro.
The first RyanAir representative I spoke with listened to my 'story' for about 30 seconds before telling me, plainly, that I was lying. His exact words were 'You're lying, I'm done with you sir,' before sending me to the ticket counter to pay my fee.
The second RyanAir representative suggested first that there was no IT problem, then backed away and said that if I had an IT problem (ah, what an admission!) I should have contacted the IT department (for one euro per minute on the phone), but now they had to charge me. Curiously, the guy at the counter before me happened to have had the same problem as I did. Nonetheless, the clerk then proceeded to tell me that the surcharge for failing to check in and print out my boarding pass was not 6 euro, but 60 euro. When I asked how this was the case, pointing to the information I had on my ticket receipt, she said 'because it went up.' Thanks.
After arguing further with her and her supervisor up until the point at which I might miss my flight, I forked over the 60 euro, flew back to England, and obtained a form letter from the RyanAir desk in Birmingham for how to make official complaints to the airline (curiously, the staff in Birmingham, like at most airports, but unlike Dublin, a RyanAir headquarters where I started from, do not directly work for RyanAir; they're specially contracted to check people in and print boarding passes, but cannot receive complaints or grievances because they are not with RyanAir; no coincidence, of course).
Upon further investigation of the materials I received from RyanAir, an itinerary they sent me immediately after ticket purchase suggests that the check-in/boarding pass fee at the airport is 40 euro. This puts the information I have at the following: upon purchasing the ticket, the charge was 6 euro; at the airport, the charge (which I actually paid) was 60 euro ('it went up'); on my e-mailed itinerary it's 40 euro. I've since discovered that RyanAir, a while ago, upped this charge from 40 to 60 euro; but then why did my itinerary have the 'old' price? Does RyanAir even know it's own policies?
The point in all of this is that there's a difference between accepting that cut-rate business services like RyanAir aren't exactly luxurious and flexible, and drawing a line at blatantly poor, inconsistent, fraudulent, and predatory business practices. RyanAir does catch people off guard with little inconveniences that could have been avoided by measures within the control of its customers, like, for example, charging massive rates for even the slightest amount of excess baggage weight. A google search produces endless complaints about huge fees for bags that are fractions of a kilo over the weight limit. In these cases I'd say to the customer 'tough shit,' because the baggage policies are pretty explicitly there on the website (so long as the website is actually working).
In my case, however, RyanAir crossed a line. For one, it failed to take responsibility for the fact that its lousy website prevented a knowing customer (actually, in that little time window, at least TWO knowing customers; coincidence?) from executing the instructions it set out. Though the woman at the ticket desk repeatedly informed me that my printed receipt was not a boarding pass, and I repeatedly told her I fully understood that, and brought it to her to prove that I had indeed purchased a ticket in the first place, but couldn't get to my boarding pass because of website problems, there was no actual communication going on about how plausible and regular it is for people to have such problems with high-volume commercial websites, and how absurd it is to penalize someone with proof of purchase 60 euro for the trouble.
Notwithstanding having been called a liar by one of the RyanAir employees, the second way RyanAir crossed the line here was by sending me two different correspondences that indicate radically different fees for the same situation, and then charging me a third different fee, completely unadvertised and unmentioned in my receipts, itineraries, and their website, a fee which happened to be 20 euro more than the second fee they advertised and 54 euro more than the first, the one that appeared while I was making my decision to purchase my ticket. If a business doesn't give the customer the opportunity to factor these types of things into their decision, then they're not practicing fair business. At best they're predatory, at worst fraudulent. Were I aware that it would cost 60 euro to show up with no boarding pass; even that such a possibility existed; I would have made a series of very different decisions. For example, yes, I could have contacted the RyanAir IT department for 1 euro per minute on the phone; but since it was advertised to me that I'd pay 6 euro at the desk for failing to show up with a printed boarding pass, and it's likely that I'd be on the phone with IT for more than 6 minutes, why should I have called IT?
This is, ultimately, why RyanAir sucks: not because the staff are unfriendly and unprofessional; not because of baggage fees or sparse legroom in the cabin; not because they try to sell you everything under the sun that you don't want both while buying a ticket online and during the flight; but because they fail to provide with honesty the fundamental service that they advertise.
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