Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
So, a mere 50 years after the development of the technology, the FDA has graciously allowed us all to purchase produce irradiated to kill pathogens. Hooray!
Too bad so many people had to die needlessly in the last 50 years, and in the last two years in particular.
The long saga of irradiation fits the mold of a more general phenomenon: The willingness of many leftists to tolerate very real, actual deaths today in exchange for the hypothetical risk of deaths tomorrow.
I wonder how big this group actually is?
It seems Carl las opened up quite the can of worms talking about the shoddy service he receives on a regular basis in Chicago. First off, Carl needs to move to Racine or Valparaiso and start commuting every day so he can begin to enjoy the fruits of living rural. Jokes aside, I do have some relevant thoughts.
I agree with Ginny in her post on the subject on the red/blue states.
I tend to agree with the comments about red state/blue state divisions, though clearly it is often a matter of rural/urban and mompop/corporate.
On Service: I tend to agree with the comments about red state/blue state divisions, though clearly it is often a matter of rural/urban and mompop/corporate. Engagement takes energy and minimal intelligence, but most of all it takes an attitude. Tailoring service to customers is generally best done by widely distributed responsibility and encouragement of innovation. Shannon’s observations are good. Establishing a relationship requires some time – a large turnover of either customers or workers means that the relationship can’t grow. Knowing customers, we soon expect that customer to add the extra change that keeps his pockets cleared – though such an exchange was surprising the first time it happened. After a while, a customer knows what the business can do and a business knows what the customer is likely to like. In the old days, clerks at stores would put aside certain dresses they knew their customers would like; clerks would step into the dressing room and discuss exactly how a bra should fit. But the temporary nature of workers, the shifting clientele – all these make such interactions impossible.
Carl From Chicago’s post on poor service reminded of my own service career during my extended college tenure. I learned that some problems in service have to do with customers.
For example, Carl innocently observes:
There are two dimensions for my coffee – “black” and “large”. I have learned through hard experience to wait until the clerk is ready to receive this complex and easily forgotten information; you’ll just have to repeat it five more times.
The problem that a counter-jockey has with this order lies not its complexity but rather its ubiquity.