I went past a small independent convenience store this morning, the sort that would not think of itself as a restaurant or fine eating establishment, nor a place that puts much budget into advertising. There was a roadside message board with the words "Fresh Hot Soup Is On."
Fresh. Well obviously we knew that or you wouldn't be advertising it.
Hot. Sure, there are cold soups, but for this situation, it could only be a hot soup. So why tell us?
Is On. Obviously it's on.
Really you could have just written "Soup" and we would have gotten the whole message. There are places in the world that would just say Soup. But Americans who are in business know how to sell things without even thinking about it. That it's fresh, it's hot, and it's on makes you want it a little more. Maybe you didn't know that soup would hit the spot, but the sign gets your mouth watering, just a bit. They didn't think about this that much when they put the letters up on the sign. It just sounded right to them. Mmm, soup.
We are reading a Thomas Sowell book, and he writes about the business skills that some societies have which others could learn, but have not been exposed to or resist learning. He gives the example of a middleman for a contract to shingle a house between an owner and a worker of different cultures. The worker was unable to quote a price for the job, so the middleman bid on it, got it, and hired the worker to do the job for a lower set price, making a profit. A simple skill, but one that the worker's culture did not have.
They usually can learn it. When I was in Romania in the 90s I would observe behavior in a store and think "An American fifth-grader could figure out that you need to take some of those shelf-stockers who are standing around useless because there's nothing to put up at the moment, and get some of them to work the check-out registers, because those are overworked at the moment and the lines are long. The child wouldn't see that right away, but they would eventually make it happen if you just turned them loose."
By the time we came back in 2005 a lot of Romanian stores - not all - seem to have figured this sort of thing out. There are a thousand little things that go into know-how, many of which are not even noticeable they are so common in your culture.
10 comments:
Me thinks you buried the lead. Did you try the damn soup or not??
No, It was 10AM. And we're already having soup tonight.
This technique was mastered by Krispy Kreme Donuts, which learned to put glowing neon red signs by the road that were lit up to read "HOT DONUTS NOW" whenever there were, in fact, hot donuts ready right then. It was hugely successful in motivating people to stop in.
Mmm, donuts. Honey, do we have any donuts I could heat up?
Which Sowell book is it?
The one in your book group. The middleman is in this week's section on the Slavs. The general point is made in the sections about Africa and Wales.
If you think there is a lot of valuable "know-how" in running a grocery store, imagine how much there is in a field like manufacturing, or engineering, or science, or in your own field (which I gather is psychiatry). No, not book learnin', but the little nitty gritty of how you make things work from day to day. And yet, the bean counters who run so many things these days don't seem to put any value on experience.
A kinda trivial example that was nevertheless pretty embarrassing: I used to work in a large building, with many clocks controlled from a centralized control panel. So, if there was a power outage, or at daylight savings time, all the clocks could be reset to the correct time at once. Problem was, the system was quirky, and only one guy knew how to make it work. He was laid off in one of the many staff reductions, and for about a year, every clock in the building was off. They finally came through one weekend and ripped out all the centralized clocks and replaced them with battery powered versions. The old clocks were kind of a neat Art Deco style, so I retrieved the face of one such clock from the trash, and it is currently on the wall in my basement.
@ Uncle Bill - I love that story. You are right about more complicated fields as well. It's hard to create even a bad job, and it's hard to make even a crummy product and bring it to market.
Interesting enough, I am currently reading that same Sowell book, as I recall the shingle stuff.
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