When The City Comes After Your Home-Based Business Don’t Expect Logic And Common Sense To Save You Home-Based Business

This article is from the Wall Street Journal...

“Overzealous regulators are targeting yoga teachers, accountants and even YouTube video creators.”

“By C. Jarrett Dieterle and Shoshana Weissmann

July 15, 2018

(The majority of this article is about Kim O’Neil and that is the only part used for this Blog Posting)

Chandler, Ariz.—a city of some 250,000 southeast of Phoenix—describes itself as “built on entrepreneurial spirit.” You could forgive Kim O’Neil for not buying it.

 

Ms. O’Neil and her family are longtime residents of Chandler. Until recently she ran a medical-billing company in the town. For years she worked out of leased office space, but when Ms. O’Neil’s father became ill in 2013 she moved the business to her home. After her father died in 2015, she continued to run the business out of her house, because she could fulfill her work obligations while caring for her elderly mother.

 

In the summer of 2016, Ms. O’Neil received a letter from the city of Chandler informing her that she was illegally operating a home-based business. She needed to apply for a permit within seven days or face action from the city government. Ms. O’Neil assumed the permit would be easy to obtain. Her business was conducted entirely within her home, had no signage or visiting customers, and didn’t require the storage of commercial equipment or inventory.

 

Chandler officials didn’t see it that way. They told Ms. O’Neil that her three employees were not allowed to work on-site, though they parked in her driveway and didn’t cause traffic concerns. Eventually, in an attempt to appease city officials, Ms. O’Neil instructed her employees to work from their own residences rather than her home.

 

City officials were still unmoved. They informed Ms. O’Neil that she would have to build a parking facility, submit architectural drawings of her home, and obtain approval from every neighbor within 600 feet. Doing so would have been expensive, but that wasn’t all. The city even suggested Ms. O’Neil might have to attend monthly meetings with city officials. Her business bothered no one and was entirely self-contained in her home, but Ms. O’Neil eventually gave up. She shut down her business, calling the episode “one of the most stressful experiences of my life.”

 

Some regulation is necessary and nuisance laws can play an important role in ensuring that a home-based business doesn’t unduly burden the neighbors. But many local rules hurt small businesses with no discernible benefit. Not all businesses may be appropriate to run out of a home, but operations like Ms. O’Neil’s are the sort of entrepreneurial endeavors that government should be supporting, not thwarting.”

 

Mr. Dieterle is director of commercial freedom and a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. Ms. Weissmann is a policy analyst and the digital media specialist at R Street.

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Kim O’Neil’s business was completely self-contained within her home and, if she did not tell her neighbors that her home contained a home-based business, her neighbors would probably never have known the business was there.

 

Beware of a bureaucrat with a set of regulations.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

 

This Is All So Confusing!

I have never bought a Papa John’s Pizza. That proves I don’t have a vested interest in protecting him and his Pizza Company because I fear I will be cut off from his delicious pies.

 

I have several reasons for sympathizing with Papa John (John Schnatter)...

Ø I like hard workers and he must be a hard worker because he started his Pizza Chain of more than 5,000 locations in 45 countries in a converted broom closet in his father’s Jeffersonville, IN Tavern.

Ø He can’t be all bad because he stood up to all the craziness of NFL players kneeling during our National Anthem.

Ø My grandchildren call me “Papa”.

 

It now appears he has been kicked out of the company he has worked so long to build because of what people within his company are saying about things that happened in his company and a report that he used The N- Word!

************************

First Let’s Talk About The People Reporting About What Happened Within Papa’s Company

I decided that I would drive up to Kentucky and ask the reporting people about what they have reported and see if I can figure out if what they have reported has a basis in fact.

 

I tried to find out the names of these internal company reporters but that was not easy. I read an extensive article in the Wall Street Journal and here are the “names” I came up with...

I have listed their “names” each and every time I saw their “names” repeated in the article. 

Ø “citing people familiar with the matter”

Ø “People close to the company said”

Ø “they said”

Ø “said one of the people”

Ø “said one of the people familiar with the company”

Ø “The people close to the company said”

Ø “said a person familiar with the meeting”

Ø “this person said”

Ø “said the people close to the company”

Ø “one of them said”

Ø “said a person who attended”

Ø “this person said”

Ø “said some of the people close to the company”

Ø “A person familiar with the company said”

Ø “said one of them”

Ø “said one of the people close to the company”

Ø (Again) “said one of the people close to the company”

Ø “One of the people close to the company said”

 

It’s must be only in a court of law that the accused has a right to face his accuser but not in a Pizza Parlor.

************************

Now Let’s Talk About Papa’s “Use” Of The N-Word

Quote from WSJ... “John Schnatter’s relations with Papa John’s International Inc., the pizza giant he founded, appeared to crumble abruptly and irreparably after reports this month that he had used a racial slur.”

 

I know what most of you are thinking... A Racial Slur! He ought to know better! He ought to be fired! Adios, Papa!

 

Paul Harvey is visiting with me today and, as usual, he asked me to tell you the rest of the story. Here is another quote from the same article in the WSJ... “The company agreed to bring him (John Schnatter) back to events such as one involving the National Hot Rod Association in Chicago in May and arranged to have Laundry Service (Papa John’s Ad Agency) conduct a role-playing session that would pose tough questions he might face from reporters. Asked during the session whether he was racist, he said, he answered “no,” and went on to use “n—” when explaining that Colonel Sanders used the word but Papa John’s didn’t. He said he resisted the marketing firm’s suggestion to use rapper Kanye West in ads with him because Mr. West used the “N-word” in songs.”

 

I have a question for my Dear Readers... Is saying the N-Word the same as using the N-Word? If you say that someone else said the N-Word, is the sayer who said that someone else said the N-Word just as guilty as the sayer who actually said the N-Word?

I don’t think so.

 

What if you say the N-Word in your sleep?

 

Now I’m getting silly...Or am I?

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

 

Lagniappe: The CEO who replaced Papa declined to be interviewed.

 

Was Jesus Conceited?

Saint Matthew at 26:11 quotes Jesus as saying...“The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me”.

 

Can you imagine how the Modern News Media would treat Jesus for daring to say such a thing as this?...

Ø Jesus caught on a hot microphone being heartless!

Ø Does Jesus really think he is that special?

Ø National Inquirer: Inquiring minds want to know. Is Jesus really as uncaring for the poor as he appears?

Ø How can he really be the Son of God when he apparently is so self-centered as to say, “You will not always have me”?

Ø A Gallup Poll reveals that 72% of Americans say they agree with the statement, “We prefer a God with at least a modicum of humility!”

 

Jesus showed how really smart he was because he did not wait till 2018 to come walk among us.

 

If he had waited he might have been overheard on a hot mike saying, “Beam me up, Father, there’s no intelligent life down here”.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

They Used To Announce, “Elvis Has Left The Building”. Now We Think To Ourselves, “The Mental Midget Has Not Left The Car”.

I saw it with my own eyes. I timed it on my Apple Stop Watch. I am here to tell you she was a certified (certified by me) Mental Midget.

 

At this point you are saying to yourself, “Self, what the heck is Fella talking about?”

 

I apologize. Sometimes I get carried away. Please allow me to walk this one back to the point of clarity.

 

I was pumping gas in a crowded gas station. On the other side of the pumps a lady pulled in but did not get out of her car right away and start pumping gas. Instead she started Texting. Right away the question hit me about how long she was going to Sit There and Text, so I started my Apple Stop Watch.

 

She sat there for 4 minutes and 17 seconds while the lady who had pulled up right behind her waited to get her gas. She looked like a nice person but, to my way of thinking, she was being discourteous and oblivious to the lady behind her.

 

I found myself thinking... Does she not know she can start the gas flowing and, while it is flowing, she can get her Important Texting done?

 

Important Texting means different things to different folks. Here are 3 examples of what passes for Important Texting in the mind of a Texting Obsessed Mental Midget...

Ø Do you wanna do lunch today?

Ø I’ve about had it with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’m going to go into the grocery store right after I pump this gas and buy some ham and cheese. (It does not dawn on her that “after” she pumps her gas will never come if she does not start pumping her gas.)

Ø Did you hear that Agnes and Walter are calling it quits again?

 

What I found hard to believe was that the person behind her in line did not get out of her car and start shouting at the Sitting and Texting Mental Midget to Start Pumping Your Darn Gas! (Or some such words.)

 

Then I looked at the Potential Pumper behind her and saw why she was not shouting at the Not Pumping Person...The Potential Pumper Behind Her Was Texting!

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Where Do Litterbugs Come From?

At the end of this Blog Posting you will see pictorial evidence of the end result of Litterbugs being Trained, Nurtured and Educated to be what they are.

 

As you will see at the beginning of this Blog Posting, the Trainers, Nurturers and Educators of the Litterbugs are doing one hell of a job and they are everywhere.

 

The smaller print below was sent to me by one of my Dear Readers…

Reading your blog made me think of one of our pet peeves – litter. I “walk the street” (not in the biblical sense though) every Sunday AM and pick up litter along our front property (about 600 ft.). It’s amazing how many cigarette butts I pick up with my “Grabber”, along with the many sandwich bags, cigarillo plastic holders and every fast food in the world’s stuff. Louisiana is such a dirty state!

 

I am the Secretary of “Tangi Clean” for the past 8-9 years where we try to make a difference in educating folks about litter. Our Chairperson personally supervises community service workers who have been given service hours to pick up litter (DUIs, minor offenses). It’s amazing that they can pick up an area around a street and then a couple weeks later go back and pick up just as much trash as they pickup two weeks earlier! It’s a generational thing; maybe because we recently got the State to legislate that school children get taught about how bad litter is – maybe they can make an impact later in their life.

 

What brought this “pre blog” on was the regular image of a driver flicking a butt out the window – many of which I have picked up. What’s worse than a reformed smoker? A reformed smoker (over 50 years ago) who is also an anti litter nut!

 

Foolish – or not??

 

Oh yea, the Training Part I promised at the beginning of this Posting…

It goes back to 1976 when we were living in California. My daughter came home one day bug-eyed because of what she had just witnessed…

Ø She was riding in the back seat of a car being driven by the mother of a school friend.

Ø The school friend finished eating a candy bar and she dropped the wrapper on the floor of the car.

Ø The mother admonished the school friend (educated her), “How many times have I told you! Don’t drop your trash in my car! Throw that out the window!”

 

Yes, our parents are the First Litter Teachers of the Good Ole USofA’s children (future teaching adults).

************************

The picture below is conclusive proof that that Littering Child has moved from California to Georgia...

I confronted this family about their dumping their dinning trash out the window of their car...

Ø I said... “Why do you feel it is OK for you to throw your dining trash out of the window of your car onto the ground in this parking lot?”

Ø Their leader said to me, “It is OK because, while we admit it is our Dining Trash, any fool can see it is not our Parking Lot! You ought to learn to mind your own business!”

 

When confronted with such irrefutable logic what could I do? I apologized for questioning their Trashing Rights and humbly smiled and waved while every single one of them gave me the finger as they drove away.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT ABOUT FOOLISHNESS...OR IS IT?!

I have now gone over 100,000 Page Views in Blogger!

That's a big number!...Or is it?

I decided to compare myself to Justin Bieber.

I wish I had not bothered to compare myself to Justin Bieber because I found this...

Justin Bieber just became the first artist to crack the 10 billion total video views mark on Vevo. The company said that the lofty global click total was accumulated in just over six years (2,316 days, to be exact).

I don't think I'm going to catch up with Justin because it took me 4,380 to get to my measly 100,000.

Fella

As Long As A Janitor Is Paid $500,000 A Year This Is Manageable Home Price...Or Is It?

I read where the Median Home Price in San Francisco is $1,600,000.

 

I’ve figured it out...

Ø I’ve often heard that California is the Land of Fruits and Nuts.

Ø I have also heard that a lot of Crazy People like to live in San Francisco.

Ø This must mean Nuts Have A Lot of Money.

 

Did my use of “Median” throw you for a loop? It threw me too. I looked it up...

Median

The median is the value separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. For a data set, it may be thought of as the "middle" value. For example, in the data set {1, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 9}, the median is 6, the fourth largest, and also the fourth smallest, number in the sample. For a continuous probability distribution, the median is the value such that a number is equally likely to fall above or below it.

 

Now that I have gone to all this trouble to explain “Median” to you, do you feel smarter?

 

I know I don’t.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

 

Lagniappe: A Starter House must be somewhere around $1,000,000.

Amazon Prime And Gigantic Minutiae

Many years ago I created a blog about how easy it was for a modern Internet Company to increase cash flow (make more money)...

Ø A company had subscriptions from 20 Million customers.

Ø If it raised their customer’s Monthly Subscription Cost by $1.

Ø They would have just increased their income by $20 Million a Month or $240 Million a Year.

************************

What follows is not an indictment of Amazon for their recent increase in the Annual Subscription Cost for Amazon Prime. It is just Wow! Interesting!

Ø As of March 2017 it is estimated that there are 80 Million Amazon Prime Subscribers.

Ø This new increase in the subscription cost is $20 per Year.

Ø That calculates out to an increased Cash Flow of $1.6 Billion or 1 Thousand 6 Hundred Million Dollars per Year.

Now you understand why they pay you no never mind if you write them a letter and say you refuse to pay the increase and you are cancelling your subscription. It’s because they still has 79,999,999 Subscribers to fall back on.

************************

A Little Further Analysis...

Ø  A few years ago Amazon did another $20 per Year increase and the Folks Back Home (that’s us) did not blink.

Ø Amazon Prime Subscriptions have been growing dramatically over the years.

Ø In 2014 there were 41 Million Subscribers and March 2017 (as stated above) there are 80 Million.

Ø The average Prime member spends about $1,300 Each Year on Amazon, nearly double the $700 Each Year spent by non-Prime members.

 

Actually, Fella dropped his subscription when they did the last $20 Increase. Later I picked up the subscription again and Amazon proved it did not hold a grudge for my disloyalty because they immediately started taking my money again.

 

Do you think they knew I would be back? ... I do.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

 

Lagniappe: Kitty Kallen sang Little Things Mean A Lot in 1954. They still do. AT&T (and some other carriers) has an Admin Charge on the bottom of their bill listed near Federal and State Taxes (which makes some of us think the Administrative Fee is also a Government-Mandated Charge but it is simply an extra charge by AT&T). The fee was just raised $.76 a Month. This Small Increase will generate about $970 a Year to AT&T.

Potato and Potatoe and Going Down In Flames

This is not a defense of Vice President Dan Quayle’s infamous correction of that student spelling of “potato”...Or is it?

 

He was wrong...Or was he?

 

Potato is not spelled with an “e”...Or is it?

 

This is the same mistake a whole bunch of the people who were laughing at him would have made.

 

Personkind has gone through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Age of Enlightenment, the Dark Ages and a bunch of Other Ages I could list, if I took the time to Google It.

 

Today we find ourselves in the Age of Unceasing Political Attack. If you make the slightest error, you are toast!

 

I’m not saying Dan Quayle is the American equivalent of Winston Churchill but allow you mind to wander with me for a Foolish Moment. The scene is the Conference to Find World Peace before We Blow All of Us to Smithereens Tomorrow.

 

The panel consists of the three smartest men who have ever lived and Foolishness...Or Is It joined the conference as the obviously disappointed moderator sums up the results of the conference with these words...

Ø Mr. Albert Genius the world appreciates your Herculean Efforts to save it but it is obvious that what you have proposed will not work in a thousand years much less will it work by tomorrow.

Ø Mr. Smartfella you are acknowledged by the entire world a the foremost expert on Foolishness and its fellow traveler Silliness. The world appreciates your getting serious in the face of tomorrow’s World Ending Calamity. We all agree that you are one smart fella and you are probably smarter that Mr. Albert Genius but your plan to save the world is also definitely unworkable.

Ø Mr. Dan Quayle, the world owes you a Gargantuan Thank You for the plan you have presented here today. We all agree that there is no way your plan will not work and, if it were implemented, it is certain to save the world from destruction. However, since you can’t spell “potato”, we are hereby rejecting your Plan of Certain Prevention and we have decided that we are just going to resign ourselves to the reality that tomorrow is the End of the World.

 

It was nice knowing you.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

 

A Very Long Lagniappe:

Oxford Dictionary

Spelling potato ‘potatoe’

In the modern era, no gaffe of the spoken word quite reaches the heights of Dan Quayle’s misspelling of a certain tuber. And it also occasioned one of the most unfair responses; Dan Quayle got a bad rap (for potato, at least).

 

Potato P-O-T-A-T-O Potato

In June of 1992 Quayle was still the vice-president of George H. W. Bush, and as vice-presidents often find themselves performing tasks that no one else wants to do, he was officiating at a spelling bee. There are various reports on whether he was reading a cue card with erroneous information supplied by the school, or made the mistake on his own, but what is incontrovertible (and posted on You Tube for posterity) is that Quayle incorrectly corrected a student’s spelling of potato.

 

The vice-president averred that the correct spelling had an –e at the end, a statement which engendered no small amount of ridicule. In fact, he is still being mocked for it to this day. After all, the fact that ‘potato’ has no –e at the end of it is something that we all pride ourselves on knowing with every fiber of our being. Isn’t it?

 

Not the only one

But why do we know this so well? Is it perhaps because Quayle was so relentlessly excoriated that this particular spelling lesson has become learned on a national level? The spelling of potatoe, while not terribly common, existed for almost the entire 20th century. For example, the New York Times was still occasionally spelling potato with an –e in 1988. In fact, one can easily find spellings of potatoe all the way up to 15 June of 1992, at which point they suddenly drop off or become used in an ironic way, referencing this incident. Quayle may have misspelled the word, but in doing so perhaps he taught the rest of us how to not make his error.

 

It happens to the best of us

It has always seemed to me that there was an overreaction to this flub. We all make such mistakes, obviously, and potato is a bit of a tricky word (the Oxford English Dictionary lists 64 variant spellings that have existed over the ages, including pittayatee, pertaayter, and pertater).

 

Why is the former vice-president still being teased over his failure to spell a word on the spot, while the New York Times, Washington Post and others are escaping censure for routinely printing the plural incorrectly (spelling it without an –e)? (Examples of this can be found here NYT, here Washington Post, and here The Oregonian). This improper spelling of ‘potatoes’ is so entrenched in our spelling brains, that what is needed is for one of the current presidential hopefuls to spell it improperly on television, so that the public can then publicly mock this failure, and in years to come we can say to each other “everyone knows that potatoes has an –e in it”.

 

The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

 

How Would You Like To Go To The Moon Depending On The Guidance Capabilities Of A Commodore 64?

In preparing for this bit of Foolishness, I found these 4 paragraphs...

 

On September 12, 1962, in front of a packed crowd in Rice University’s football stadium, President Kennedy was willing to propose the building of a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of a football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch.

 

In 1969 at the top of the Saturn Rocket was the Apollo spacecraft. One of the most important components inside of the Saturn was its guidance computer. The computer capacity of the mainframes in the Control Center [of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston] was smaller than that of the desktop systems of the 1980s, and the onboard computers in the command and lunar modules had less capacity than some pocket calculators.

 

The Apollo Guidance Computer, which weighed 70 pounds, had only 36K of RAM and 2K of ROM. But it was able to guide 27 men to the moon’s orbit and bring them back safely.

 

These billion-dollar satellites and spacecraft went into space with computational power that’s the equivalent of a Commodore 64 Home Computer (introduced in January 1982).

How Big Is Big?

 

A Million is big (a thousand thousand). Congress loves to spend Billions of Dollars (a thousand million). They are getting all too familiar with how easy it is to throw around Trillions of Dollars (a thousand billion). Once they find out that there is such a thing as a Quadrillion (a thousand trillion) all is lost.

 

In the world of computing there a measure of computing speed called a Petaflop or the equivalent to One Thousand Trillion Calculations Each Second.

 

The Italian Oil Company ENI has a Supercomputer (the HPC4) that has capacity to do 18.6 Petaflops, and when combined with the existing HPC3, the system reaches a computational peak capacity of 22.4 Petaflops.

 

I may have lost you. Allow me to bring you back…

That’s 22.4 Thousand Trillion Calculations Each Second

 

If Apollo 11 had this kind of computing capacity it could have gone to the moon and back without leaving the launch pad.

 

Would I kid u?

Smartfella

Lagniappe: This Blog Posting was first published in July, 2018. If we would say to a 2023 Computer Smart Guy, "Man O Man, 22.4 Thousand Trillion Calculations Each Second! That's really fast!", he would probably come back at you and say to you, "That's nothing. Let me tell you about today's computers..."

 

The Fella’s Business Hall of Fame

In Case You Forgot, I’m A Noticer.

In the world of business there are many Champions of Commerce. Since you are not as observant as Fella, you probably have not noticed some of the ones I consider obvious.

There are two kinds of categories of people that make it into the Fella Business Hall of Fame

Makes A Lot of Money For Their Employers Category...

Ø Shallow Soup Bowls... > The guys who came up with the Shallow Soup Bowl was responsible for Millions of Soup Bowls being sold into the restaurants of the world which already had (except for breakage) all the soup bowls they would ever have needed.
> When a Shallow Soup Bowl is placed in front of a diner, that diner is really impressed.
>He thinks to himself, “Wow! What a big bowl of soup! I really like this restaurant!”
>Then he gets into eating and talking with his fellow diners and he takes no note of the fact that the bowl stops being a bowl right below the surface of the soup.
>The diner eats his soup, pays $7.95 for $0.27 worth of soup, goes away a little confused (but he does not know why he is confused) and he returns to the Shallow Soup Bowl restaurant again and again.

Ø Congratulations to Our High School Graduates Signs at the Entrance to Every Subdivision in the Good Ole USofA...
> The Sign Maker who came up with this Sign Selling Idea was a Sign Selling Genius.
>The only people who read the Named Graduates on these signs are the Named Graduates and their Relatives and they already know that the Graduates are Graduating.
>Now the Sign Makers have started putting the Logo of the College the Named Graduates are going to attend next to the Named Graduate’s Names.
>A Missing Logo from the names of those not going to College is humiliating those who are not going to College and puts more pressure on the Not Yet Graduated High School Students to go to College when they just might really be more suited to Trade Schools (if they still exist).
>In the past I have blogged about the fact that we are facing a shortage of Butchers, Bakers and Candle Stick Makers in the Good Ole USofA and are being covered up in an over-supply of 2 Year Drinking-Proficient College Dropout “Students” with huge 2 Year Drinking-Proficient College Dropout “Student” Student Loans.
>The Sign Maker who came up with the Generic High School Graduates Sign (did not have the names of the Graduates Listed but only said “Congratulations To This Year’s Graduates”) which could be used year after year was found floating in a river near his sign shop.

Ø TVs in Restaurants...
>If you Google “TVs in Restaurants” you are will find them referred to as Restaurant Clutter.

>The guy who came up with this Stroke of Genius did not know how large the revenue bonanza he was creating truly was.
>He hoped he was going to sell a single TV to every restaurant.
>Little did he know that the restaurants of the Good Ole USofA were going to be populated with somewhere between 2 (Chinese Take Outs) and 53 (Sports Bars) TVs in each dining place.
>Some of these restaurants used to actually be places of relaxation (Sports Bars never were relaxing).
>Hardly anyone pays any attention to what is playing on the TVs (Sports Bars excluded), but everyone is continually distracted by what’s going on on these TVs.
>No one can hear what the TVs are saying to us but every one of us periodically loses track of the table conversation because we find ourselves staring at the silent TV thinking, “I wonder what he just said?”
>The TVs do an excellent job of destroying what little Person to Person Interaction remains after the Smartphone has had its way with us.
>An example of the few people who are not distracted by the TVs during the meal are those that are telling their fellow diners that, since no one pays any attention to them, they are going to commit suicide when they go home tonight because they feel so utterly ignored.
>The people who are told about the impending suicide do not get alarmed because they are distracted by the TV they are not watching and, therefore, are not listening to the future suicidee (yea, I know that’s not a word).

Ø Porch Chairs On Porches...    
>This is a hold-over useful idea from the Good Ole Days when people used to actually sit in porch chairs and talk to their neighbors who were out for their nightly strolls.
> Today every porch has several porch chairs stationed on them but no one ever sits in them because the potential sitters are all inside their Air-Conditioned Houses sleeping in front of their Big-Screen TVs.

Ø Bottled Water...
>The person who came up with the idea to sell something that people already had an unlimited supply of in their kitchen faucet was probably the Greatest Look Into the Future Guy of all time.
>Actually the first guy to come up with this idea died penniless because he never got over being fired for wasting his company’s Board of Directors’ Valuable Time by presenting to them such a Hair-Brained Scheme.
>The second guy (the Chairman of the Board’s son who presented his Brilliant Bottled Water Idea 20 minutes after the Future Penniless Look Into the Future Guy had presented his Stupid Idea) has a Statue Dedicated to him in the Altoona National Marketing Hall of Fame.

Stupid Idea But Now We Are Stuck With It Category...

These are the ideas that at first seemed to be the Work of Genius but turned out to be a humongous waste of money because, as soon as the idea was implemented, the competition duplicated it and no competitive advantage was obtained.

Ø Frequent Flyers Programs... What airline does not wish that the Frequent Flyer Program had never been invented?
>Any airline that would have had the Frequent Flyer Program all to itself would have been in the Catbird Seat but no Cats or Birds are anywhere to be seen.
>This has turned into a tremendous business expense since a huge number of personnel had to be hired to administer the program.
>The airline’s customers are now in a continual state of anger at the airline because of the mind boggling number of rules and regulations that have been implemented to keep the customers from taking advantage of the airline.
>If the word “confusion” was not in the dictionary before the Frequent Flyer Program was invented, it certainly would have been put there by the Frequent Flyer Program.

Ø Children Play Areas at Fast Food Restaurants... >These Fun Play Areas were envisioned to be the reason why Children and their Parents would flock to any fast food restaurant that had them.
>Now every restaurant has them (except the new fast food restaurants which are now being constructed without them) and all competitive advantage has been lost.
>Actually they are now seen as a competitive disadvantage since restaurants started putting up signs that read,“Parents, if your child licks anything inside this enclosure, your child will not survive the next 24 hours”.
>Now parents are wrapping their children in plastic bags, duct taping their mouths shut and shoving their terrified offspring into the Fun Enclosure in order to keep them protected from the filthy in there.

I told you I was a Noticer.

I bet you are glad you are not me.

Would I kid u?

Smartfella