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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.