Got a new microphone, but now I am once again living in a hotel room in South Norwalk, Connecticut for two weeks. So, this week and next week, no silky smooth voiceover. One day, I’ll make it up to you.
Also I don’t have a silky smooth voice, but I appreciate the compliment.
I saw a tweet that said "There needs to be a website for renting your house to people who don’t drink and go to sleep at 9pm."
And I thought... that’s a great idea. And if that website did exist, I would use it. As a renter.
In our current state of affairs, it’s unlikely I’ll ever use Airbnb. I’ve heard too many horror stories about hidden cameras, surprise $150 “cleaning fees” (which are entirely up to the discretion of the owner), and other variables that are simply too complicated to allow a predictably good user experience.
And it goes without saying that the owners feel the same way. Because we’ve also heard horror stories about kids renting an Airbnb for a weekend, throwing a party, and causing $150,000 worth of damage. That’s why the tweet above was posted in the first place.
In other words, there’s very little you can do to ensure that you as a customer (or as an owner) have a good experience. There’s a good deal of luck involved.
Something we often do, in the pursuit of growth and profits and shiny new ideas, is accept all paying customers. We turn away no one. We don’t have clubs.
And the few bad apples often have such terrible impact that it partially (or completely) ruins the experience — and the system — for everyone else.
At my last job, we had some easy customers and we had some hard customers. That’s about par for the course. Customers that trusted us completely and didn't ask for much, and customers that were needy and hyperactive.
And then there were the black holes. The 1% of customers who consumed 40% of our time. With questions and demands and special privileges and hoop-jumping exercises for us to perform like dogs or ponies.
I told my boss at one point that we'd be better off without those clients, regardless of how much revenue they bring in. Not only because it’d allow us to focus on other revenue elsewhere, but because if we operate like a company with no self-respect, we’re not going to get any respect. My boss, of course, said that we rely on those clients and shrugged off my concern as naïve. Which was insulting. I knew right then that I understood business better than my boss or her boss. Which is one of many reasons I left that company.
See, I don’t think we relied on those clients. I think those clients relied on us.
Because here’s the real question: where else are those clients going to go where they’re going to get all of those ridiculous, unnecessary needs met? Where else are those clients going to go, stomping away in their fit of rage after we fire them? Not likely anywhere. Because no sane business is going to deal with those clients. At least not for long.
If you're in a business that requires you to do business with bad customers, you're either in the wrong business or you're bad at it.
The obvious exceptions are public healthcare and education, because there you are legally forbidden to tell people (or kids) to go fuck themselves. Which is a shame, because some people (and some kids) should.
But for everyone else: at some point you have to admit that revenue is not worth misery. Unfortunately, the larger an organization grows, the further the people who decide what you’ll do for revenue are from the resulting misery. This is an almost universal rule of business — with size comes executives making compromises that no self-respecting business should make. And it’s why there are very, very few large companies that are excellent to work for. Forget the customer experience — the employee experience has been so far divorced from the executives’ incentives that they no longer even think about it.
Amazon, by way of example, is literally going to run out of people to employ. Because everybody knows how horrible it is to work there. Amazon’s downfall is not going to be because of government intervention; maybe it’s going to be because they have shit on so many citizens of the free world trying to please bad customers that nobody will be there to run the company anymore. You can’t run a company when no one’s putting in applications.
As opposed to small companies, where you still have the sacred privilege of telling a bad customer to go to hell. Because you can’t have a business with 9 people where 8 of them hate one customer. It’s just not going to work. The effect is going to be both crippling and obvious.
We live in a culture that is increasingly focused on tolerance — the open-hearted acceptance of differences and ways of life. And that's great. Tolerating others for the sake of togetherness is wonderful, especially because we’re pretty bereft of togetherness right now. But tolerating others when it simply makes your life worse is not a virtue, it's just a waste of time. And it's not fair to you or those you're responsible for.
That may be the most important part — it’s not fair to those you’re responsible for. Even if you want to put up with bad actors in your life, you may be failing your spouse or children or employees or teammates. Being close to you, your business, or your family should be a privilege, not a right.
The problem with Airbnb is that it allows terrible owners and terrible renters to take advantage of each other, making the game harder and riskier for people who play by the rules.
The problem with DoorDash is that it allows terrible drivers and terrible customers to take advantage of each other — and ruins the experience for a huge number of people who want to play the game fairly.
This is the problem with this new “decentralized” economy: when a whole part of the economy is crowdsourced on both sides, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop bad actors from participating. Because the only person in charge is revenue, and he doesn’t play by any rules other than “more.”
These pieces of the economy would function better as clubs that you have to earn your way into.
When you check in at a reputable hotel, you know exactly what you’re getting: one room and zero problems. The hotel, likewise, knows exactly what it is getting: one dirty set of bedsheets and zero smoking. If either side breaks this pact, the punishments can be very serious, very financial, and even very public. There are consequences for bad behavior in systems that work. Hotels work.
A bank that abused its customers’ savings accounts would be shut down immediately. And, frankly there isn’t even a way that customers can abuse their banks.
You can log back into DoorDash after a delivery and claim that your food was never delivered, while sitting there eating the delivered food. You can’t do that with a bank or a hotel.
In systems that work properly in society, you can get banned for cheating — if you can even find a way to cheat in the first place. The problem with this silly new economy of “decentralized everything” is that it’s very hard to get banned at all, and it’s very easy to cheat. And everyone gets to participate.
The problem with modern video gaming is it allows terrible companies to build games entirely around in-game transactions, because a small minority of players continue to buy the worthless bullshit provided by those transactions. The companies are getting paid billions to provide a product that isn’t even good, and then monetize it with predatory tactics. The companies are getting rich for literally not doing their jobs.
Most consumers see what’s going on and they don’t want to participate. The trouble is, the good consumers have no way of separating themselves from the bad consumers who reward the game developers for doing this.
German Shepherds and Pit Bulls are serious dogs. They require the kind of attention and diligence that only a rare person can give them.
We test people pretty rigorously before they can drive a tractor-trailer. Both because it’s hard, and because there needs to be an understanding of how much responsibility you’re taking on when you drive something that can plow through 11 consecutive cars on a standstill highway.
For some reason, we do not make people pass any tests before driving a German Shepherd or a Pit Bull. Which is a shame, because most of the people who want to own Pit Bulls are the kind of people who are completely unworthy of having a serious dog. They have no appreciation for how dangerous a dog can be when it’s not driven correctly.
Somewhere reading this essay is the sort of person who thinks “what an arrogant thing to say. I am absolutely worthy of this dog, you know nothing, shut the fuck up.” And to that person I say, you’re exactly who I’m talking about. Nobody who understands serious dogs would ever show such a lack of humility about them. A wise person would say “he’s right, and that’s why I’m still taking classes after 15 years.”
That’s the person I want in my neighborhood. That’s who I want training my dogs.
It seems unlikely we’d ever make a 1-year training course mandatory before owning dangerous dog breeds. And it also seems unlikely that we’d ever be able to form a club where bad dog owners couldn’t get in in the first place. But it’d be pretty nice if we could. It’d be a lot safer if we could.
There are insurance companies whose membership is something of a cherished privilege. You have to have a pristine driving record to get a quote from them, and if you get accepted you pay lower prices.
That's a good thing. It means that people who drive like they have something to lose are being rewarded for it. It means that there are yet places in life where you can be rewarded for being on your best behavior. It means there are still forts you can build with a sign that says “no jerks allowed.” And that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.
Drink some water but pay someone $17.50 to deliver it to you first.
JDR
“If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”
- Chuck Palahniuk
I like your way of thinking!!! Very informative post.