Observe Business

I have an intellectual interest in airlines, car rental companies and hotels. In all cases, the companies have made huge capital investments and have to eke out a living in a very competitive environment. Getting even an extra 1% from every customer is huge for these companies.

I was making the rounds of the car rental sites and came across this link for ‘Street Fleet’. Since I am always curious about product offerings, I clicked on it. Here is what I saw:



I read this and it made no sense to me. First, we start with the misspelling of the word ‘guaranteed’.

Then, I am trying to figure out what they are offering here. If I book a ‘Street Fleet’ vehicle, apparently, I will get that vehicle when I arrive if it is available. Isn’t that how the entire rental car model works? How is this different?

I think it’s silly how they say  ’our reservable collection of makes and models’ in one sentence and then say ‘if available’. Either it can be reserved  or not.

They say they have a Cadillac CTS or a Chrysler Crossfire-that is a definitely a good value proposition. These are unusual cars.  They just have to do a much better job of selling it. You can’t call a premium purchase ‘Street Fleet’. It should be something like ‘Prestige Collection’.

So I tried to upload a pic to my twitter account…and it says that my tiny little favicon is too big. I expected more from a company that could have squeezed half a billion out of Facebook.

Cough up 40 bucks or so for webex…and then try to figure out where to login. Yeah, people can claim that ‘Host A Meeting’ is the login button, but why not say that? 

America is crying out for high-tech investment. Please, please, please build a factory, a design center, an assembly line, ANYTHING, in America. We need jobs. Mr. Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of GE, goes ahead and does exactly that, invests half a billion dollars.

So what thanks does he gets? An ugly, ugly photograph in the NY Times. Shame on you, NY Times. You could have at least shown a nice picture.

A pet peeve of mine is the country lists on websites…someone went to the United Nations website and compiled a list of all the countries, and everyone blindly uses those lists. Here is another example of how websites blindly copy other websites. In this case, it is even stupider, because this Kern County Community College lists the U.S.S.R as a choice…even though it ceased to exist BEFORE the WWW was invented.

Youtube only shows you the first x letters of the title, so they all look the same. They need renaming.

You are efilecabinet.com, one of many companies that are trying to get big and hit the big time so you can be bought out by Oracle or whichever sugar daddy happens to come along.

Now here you are, in a recession. Or a depression. Or a world-wide pandemic that will turn us all into zombies. Take your pick. You decide to increase sales by putting up an ad on Google.

Then when someone clicks through to your site…you might as well have thrown the money away

I am on a redeye from LAX to NYC, desperate to score a window seat so I can try and get some sleep.

I go to the online app to see what seats are available. It’s nice that they have a seat map, and they helpfully mark out my seat for me. 

And then I scroll down to the bottom of the page

And there are no seats.

There are NO seats available on the ENTIRE plane.

So why even show me a seatmap? Just tell me that there are no seats available to choose from.

Instead, you make me waste time, and waste your own server cycles.

I had a computer science teacher in high school who would have a field day with this example of bad design.

I am convinced that the government is incompetent. Yes, I know, some parts of the government work well, and the US is pretty well governed as a whole, when compared with the rest of the world (except for Switzerland and Singapore).

But it is little nitwit things like this that drive me up a wall.

Los Angeles is the country’s second largest city, and Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the entire USA, with a population that tops 10 million.

All property owners must pay tax twice a year, on Dec 10 and on Apr 10. So what do most taxpayers do on April 8 and April 9? They go to the website to figure out how much tax they have to pay.

And what happens to the website? That’s right, it goes down.

Stuff like this makes my usual bogeymen the FTC,the SEC and the FAA look competent.

I read this headline like ten times and I couldn’t figure it out.