What’s Not Best: Starbucks Charging for WiFi
I was going to spend the afternoon working at Starbucks today. (I’ve been working remotely from home for the last few months, and sometimes it’s a good change of pace to get out of the house.)
Then I remembered how they charge for WiFi, and decided to stay away.
There are three reasons Starbuck’s decision to charge for WiFi is not best:
First, it slightly diminishes the value of their brand. My esteem for Starbucks is a bit lower because they are unwilling to make the simple customer-oriented choice to make their WiFi free. Especially when even most hotels now offer free WiFi.
Second, it complicates things. The problem is not simply that it costs $10 to get online there (although that’s a big barrier). The problem is also that adding the payment gateway increases complexity. You have to create a username and password, for example. My password list is already 16 pages long (yes, 16 pages). It is not fun to have to add to that list.
Third, it probably costs them sales. They’ve probably done the analysis on this, and so maybe they would say this is made up for by the revenue generated by the WiFi. But speaking as a customer, there is at least one less person buying coffee at Starbucks today because of this WiFi policy.
I don’t want to sound down on Starbucks here. They do great work. But if their value proposition is that they create a “third space” rather than simply selling coffee, they have an opportunity here to do things better and advance their brand.
Most Change Comes from People, Not Politicians
John Stossel (most known for co-anchoring 20/20) has an interesting column today called Who Will Run America?. He made two especially good points.
First, ultimately in America, it’s the people who govern. Referring to a recent interview with economist Walter Williams, he writes:
Williams pointed out that the White House doesn’t govern what happens in your house. And a president certainly cannot control the economy. We, all of us, run the country.
“Politicians have immense power to do harm to the economy. But they have very little power to do good,” Williams says.
The failure to understand this is at the root of many of our problems.
Second, most change comes from the people, not the government.
“Most of life is outside the government sector,” says David Boaz of the Cato Institute. “Most change in America doesn’t come from politicians. It comes from people inventing things and creating. The telephone, the telegraph, the computer, all those things didn’t come from government.”
This is why one of the most important functions of government is to stay out of the way. To let people live their lives, create, and serve.
Any administration that truly wants to see “change” (of the right kind) will make its central aim the preservation and maximization of individual freedom.
Congratulations
While I disagree fundamentally with the perspective Obama has taken on the three core issues of economic policy, foreign policy, and social policy, it is also important to acknowledge that he ran a very smart campaign and should be congratulated for that.
And far more important than that: It is not necessary to fully agree to also very gladly acknowledge the historic importance that, for the first time in our nation’s history, an African-American has become president.
Five Myths About the Great Depression
Andrew Wilson has an excellent article over at the Wall Street Journal today on Five Myths About the Great Depression. He states:
The current financial crisis has revived powerful misconceptions about the Great Depression. Those who misinterpret the past are all too likely to repeat the exact same mistakes that made the Great Depression so deep and devastating.
Here is perhaps the most pervasive myth:
Enlightened government pulled the nation out of the worst downturn in its history and came to the rescue of capitalism through rigorous regulation and government oversight.
In reality:
To the contrary, the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations — in disregarding market signals at every turn — were jointly responsible for turning a panic into the worst depression of modern times. As late as 1938, after almost a decade of governmental “pump priming,” almost one out of five workers remained unemployed. What the government gave with one hand, through increased spending, it took away with the other, through increased taxation. But that was not an even trade-off. As the root cause of a great deal of mismanagement and inefficiency, government was responsible for a lost decade of economic growth.
Why is this important?
With the vitality of U.S. and world economies at stake, it is essential that the decisions of the coming months are shaped by the right lessons — not the myths — of the Great Depression.
For two really helpful books on the Great Depression, I would recommend FDR’s Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression and Bernanke’s Essays on the Great Depression.
(HT: JT)
Lessons in Marketing from the 2008 Presidential Election
Seth Godin has a great post this morning on Marketing Lessons from the US Election. Well worth the read.
Here’s the quick summary:
- Stories really matter
- TV is over
- Permission matters
- Marketing is tribal
- Motivating the committed outperforms persuading the uncommitted
- Attack ads don’t always work
- We get what we deserve (ex: buy from telemarketers, and you’re going to get more telemarketers)
I would add an eight point: sometimes, we don’t get what we deserve. Thankfully.
How to Organize Your RSS Feeds
Typically, I am all about grouping and organizing things. But about a year ago I decided to test whether, when it came to my RSS feeds, it might actually save time not to organize them into folders.
My reasoning was that simply having them kept in a straight list would make them directly visible and accessible.
And there is something to that. I found it most useful back when I used Internet Explorer as my reader (I actually found it very handy to use IE for my RSS reader).
When I switched to a Mac, I didn’t find Firefox’s Live Bookmarks very convenient, so I switched to NetNewsWire–which I really love. It also has a very good interface for easily allowing you to organize your feeds into folders if you want.
I concluded that it makes things simpler and saves times to organize my feeds into folders, for two reasons:
- It allows me to more easily read my feeds by topic
- It makes the number of feeds less overwhelming
I find that it is more efficient, at least for me, to review my feeds by topic because I can go faster when I can roughly keep my mind on the same subject and proceed in chunks.
And when I didn’t use folders to group my feeds, I came to have a mental resistence to them because the list was so long.
Grouping them in folders also makes it easier to prioritize. Basically, my first folder is called “Priority.” This folder contains the feeds from any topic that are most important to me. So I can easily skip all the other folders if I am short on time, and focus in on these.
Then, if I have a bit more time it is easy to determine which topic is of greatest interest to me at the time, and I can just scan those folders quickly.
Compared to my experience of keeping my feeds in a straight list, I’ve fond that I save time by organizing them into folders.
Here is the list of categories I use:
- Priority
- Friends
- News
- Politics
- Business
- Career
- Social Good
- Productivity
- Blogging
- Publishing
- Technology
- Theology
If You Are Not Economically Free, You Are Not Politically Free
Nearly all recognize the value of freedom in the political sphere. It is wrong for the government to coerce us to speak, believe, or think contrary to our wishes, or to deprive us of our right to life without due process.
But it is equally necessary to realize that economic freedom is a necessary component of political freedom. If the government tells me how much of my money I can spend, what I can or cannot buy, where I can or cannot work, or what prices I can charge for goods that I produced, I am not free. I am being constrained to act, rather than allowed to act in accord with my voluntary and free choice.
OK, so the government doesn’t tell us what we can buy or where we can work, so there’s no problem here. Right?
Well, fortunately nobody wants to take things to that extent. But have you ever considered the subtle role that taxation plays in hindering the economic freedom of the people in our nation?
Now, I’m not against taxes. I completely affirm that taxes are necessary and it is right for the government to tax.
The problem comes with excessive and overcomplicated taxation. The higher taxes are, the less free we are economically to spend our money as we choose. This is a real restriction on freedom.
This is why I would argue that it is a responsibility of government to keep taxes low — and on all income levels. If the fundamental purpose of government is to protect life and liberty (see previous post), then it follows that government has an obligation to keep taxes low and thus prevent the reduction of economic liberty.
The integral relationship between political freedom and economic freedom is one of the main points of Milton Friedman’s classic work Capitalism and Freedom. “Clearly, economic freedom, in and of itself, is an extremely important part of total freedom.” If I am not economically free, then neither am I politically free.
This is why it is not only bad policy, but also wrong in principle (given current tax rates and the current tax complexity) to raise taxes on those earning over $250,000/year. (Plus, it doesn’t work.)
The Purposes of Government
One of the fundamentals of making good decisions is to know the purpose of what you are doing. If you don’t know the goal, you won’t make a good choice in how to get there.
In making a good decision about who should lead the country next, it would be smart to remind ourselves of the purposes of government in the first place. There are few better places to go than the Declaration of Independence. Here is what we read:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.—That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among them, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
So why does government exist? To protect life, to protect freedom, and to protect opportunity. There is nothing in here–or the Constitution–about “spreading the wealth around.” In fact, the wealth is “spread around” better through the decentralized function of the free market than through centralized government control.
In the age of Google, I am amazed that there are still people that do not appear to believe this (or, while believing it in theory, do not accept it in practice). The internet revolution is an incredible illustration of the power of decentralization. Yet we still have people holding firmly to the idea that when it comes to politics and economics, the need is for greater centralized control (higher taxes on the wealthy to redistribute income, etc., etc.).
Let people be free. This is both right in principle (based on “unalienable rights” given by God) and results in greater welfare for society. Government exists to protect this freedom–not encroach upon it in the name of the “greater good.”
We cannot separate out economic freedom from political freedom, either. As Milton Friedman said, economic freedom is an essential part of total freedom.
For more on the purposes of government, I would recommend Justin Taylor’s post where he breaks down an article by Robert P. George into an interview to make it easier to skim.
The original article, Law and Moral Purpose, was published in January of this year in First Things. Robert P. George is Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.
I found Justin’s post very helpful. Especially helpful was the distinction between government’s primary and subsidiary roles.
The post also covers the common objection that since the Constitution says that one purpose of our government is to “promote the general welfare,” vast and sweeping governmental powers are called for. In reality, George shows how this clause actually requires limited government–which is a fundamental principle behind the entire constitution.
About Matt Perman
Follower of Christ. Husband of one, father of three. Former director of strategy at Desiring God. This blog exists to help equip Christians in good works, because that's what productivity is really about.
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