Goodbye, Saturn

The collapse of a deal between General Motors and the Penske automotive group spells the end of car maker Saturn, according to the Detroit Free-Press. The deal apparently fell apart almost immediately after it rolled off the assembly line, when the cardboard and aluminum foil that held it together disintegrated in a light rain.

Penske blames the collapse on its failure to secure a separate deal with a third party (Renault-Nissan) to manufacture more Saturns in the future. Industry analysts point out that most Saturn models are held together by baling wire, wood glue, and empty McDonalds wrappers — materials not readily accessible outside of Saturn’s unique supply chain.

The demise of Saturn could cost 13,000 jobs, though insiders say many of those employees will be able to survive for months by consuming the cars themselves — approximately 22% of every Saturn is made of compressed lima beans and other organic matter.

“This is very disappointing news and comes after months of hard work by hundreds of dedicated employees and Saturn retailers who tried to make the new Saturn a reality,” Fritz Henderson, GM chief executive officer, said.

The old Saturn was a reality since 1985, when General Motors decided to compete with small, attractive, high-quality Japanese cars by manufacturing cars made of old stapler parts. The first Saturn models were sold out of the trunks of larger cars. No one is really sure why they couldn’t sell enough to stay in business.

Penske-Saturn deal collapses after Renault-Nissan backs out [Detroit Free-Press]

Your phone calls are expensive

Pax Arcana

The L.A. Times has an interesting story about one of the fundamental underpinnings of consumer economics, a framework that I call the “Math is Like a Blender in My Brain” corollary.

Here’s the deal. When you choose your cell phone plan, you are likely to be all “Wow! I get 1500 minutes for $45 a month! That’s like 3 cents a minute!”

Wrong. Because the chances are you aren’t using all those minutes you’re paying for. In fact, if you divide the total amount you pay by the total amount of minutes you use, chances are you’re spending a lot more per minute than you think.

The Times reports on a study of the phone bills of 700 San Diego residents, found that dividing the amount paid by the amount used showed that residents were actually paying about $3 a minute to their cell providers:

“We knew it was a myth that wireless costs were going down,” said Michael Shames, UCAN’s executive director. “But we were blown away by the actual costs.”

That $3-per-minute figure is skewed by the relatively small percentage of people who pay for a lot of minutes but barely use any. But even when those folk are taken out of the mix, most wireless customers still pay between 50 cents and $1 per minute, the study found.

Some would argue that the disparity between what people are paying and what people think they are paying is the fault of the cell phone providers, who have engineered this situation by concocting increasingly labyrinthine contract terms that prey on our vulnerabilities. Others say fuck that it’s your fault, dummy:

“We encourage people to look at their bill, question their bill, and call us if they see anything that’s not right,” said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman.

Ken Muche, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, echoed this sentiment. “If you’re not using the total amount of minutes in the bucket, we’ll work with you to get you on the right plan,” he said.

All I know is it’s bullshit that they charge extra for the lightsaber function on my iPhone. Oh wait, it’s free? Consider yourselves warned, Sith lords.

Talk isn’t cheap? For cellphone users, not talking is costly too [LA Times]

This is the way the industry ends, not with a bong but with a plink

Pax Arcana

Jay Leno is America’s foremost unfunny late night talk show host, but did you also know that he knows stuff about cars? It’s true! He owns lots of them!

As such, Leno is uniquely suited to be doling out advice to the U.S. automotive industry — which is undergoing a seismic shift thanks to plummeting sales of gas-hording SUVs and light trucks:

The problem with what’s happened over the past few decades is that you have a whole generation of kids who have no brand loyalty. They’ve grown up on Honda, Hyundai, Kia and Toyota. To lure them to the American brand, you’ve got to give them something exciting, something bold, something different. America does technology well, and I think this is how the companies will bring those buyers back. I think cars like the Chevy Volt, which is entirely battery-powered, or hydrogen cars from Chrysler, Ford, and G.M. will take off.

Like most people, Leno seems oblivious to the difficulties of altering product lines on such a massive scale. Think about how hard it is for you to rent a U-Haul truck for an afternoon — calling the rental place, confirming your rental, arguing with the guy at the shop about your reservation, paying, etc… Now imagine trying to renegotiate contracts with thousands of independent parts suppliers, outfitting hundreds of manufacturing centers with new equipment for producing more light cars, realigning the global shipping routes of hundreds of thousands of 2,000 pound packages, calculating product distribution charts among dealerships in hundreds of countries, and rolling out brand-new multimillion dollar sales, accounting, human resources, and supply chain software to support it all. And that’s before you consider how to market your new cars or, you know, figure out what they should look like. [Yes, I write about shit like this for a living. Bored? Deal with it.]

But Leno does raise a good point here:

When you get into a high-priced, well-made American car today and the key is in the ignition, you hear a melodic bong, bong. But when you get in a cheap American car, like a rental, and the key is left in, it goes plink, plink, plink. It’s just horrible. Every time you use the turn signal, it’s like breaking a chicken leg. In order to make the more expensive car more appealing, U.S. companies feel as though they have to dumb down the cheaper car.

In other words, automakers have to recognize that buying wisely is a virtue and not a sin — and they have to design cars accordingly. Also, would it kill them to make the cup holders bigger? I can hardly fit my magnums of Cristal in most of them.

Jay Leno’s Serious Advice to the U.S. Auto Industry [Wired]

UPS drivers go all Zoolander to save gas

Pax Arcana

Rising gas prices are more than just an inconvenience for companies that rely on the stuff. That’s why UPS instructs its drivers to conserve gas as much as possible by never, ever turning left.

I’m not kidding. Look:

Instead of wasting gas sitting in traffic, avoiding left turns keeps trucks moving and drivers have found they make deliveries faster by going right. It’s also good news for UPS’ bottom line. By turning right, the company says it saved over 3.3 million gallons of gasoline in 2007 alone.

“It’s a huge amount, and we also shaved off a total of over 30 million travel miles for our drivers,” according to Laura James, UPS’ industrial engineering manager.

When asked if he would require drivers to reverse direction to conserve more fuel (they currently race around the track counter-clockwise), NASCAR president Booger-Bob “Bubba” McCracker said “Helllllls no, sugartitties! They’s only one way to drive a race car — and that’s to the left! Besides, we already got all these left-facing tracks. Just what do you s’pose we goin’ do with dem once we build the right-facing ones, Mr. Norman Einstein?”

Also, did you guys know that the tops of UPS trucks are white? It’s true — which makes them exactly the opposite color scheme of Father Scott’s underpants (yes I will keep making fun of you until you start posting again you lazy asshole).

Right turns only! [Tampa Bay 10]

The baristas need to get learnt

Pax Arcana

Don’t bother hitting your local Starbucks next Tuesday evening. Chances are pretty good they’ll be closed down so senior management can swoop in and remind the baristas how to make coffee. Because they forgot or something. Via WSJ:

The company plans to retrain more than 135,000 employees in an effort to create “a renewed focus on espresso standards,” it said.

The nation’s 7,100 company-operated stores across the U.S. will close at 5:30 p.m. local time and reopen at 8:30 p.m., Starbucks said. Locations in places such as airports and supermarkets will retrain workers, but not necessarily at the same time.

Consumerist takes a deep whiff, blinks a few times, and points out the obvious:

The training session is another move by re-instated CEO Howard Schultz to demonstrate a renewed focus on product quality, although it also sounds a little bit like a PR stunt.

Look, I’m all for continuing education for people who run hot water through burnt beans all day, but I’m a bit terrified of what’s going to happen if the Marbury v. Madison Ave lady can’t get her fix. We’re talking real weeping and gnashing of teeth, here, and quite possibly lawsuits.

Starbucks stores to close for espresso training [WSJ]
Starbucks Retraining Employees At 7,100 Stores Next Week [Consumerist]

When turning down Wal-Mart isn’t cool

While Perry hunts through his 45 collection for some old Barry Manilow tunes and Pax tries to be all intellectual, Father Scott hunted down an interesting story that’s probably supposed to thrill hipster indie music fans, but is actually kind of lame.

Paste points us to indie rock group Band of Horses, who are severing their advertising arrangement with Wal-Mart. The Paste piece is filled with your typical anti-Wal-Mart rhetoric, which is fine, and the headline (Band of Horses dumps Wal-Mart, lives better) applauds the band.

Band of Horses and the amazing fern-sprouting chest

But there is an underlying lameness to this story if you read lead singer Ben Bridwell’s comments. Bridwell and Band of Horses started the campaign with online advertising and were poised to include a song in a television spot before changing their minds.

“I called my family, talked to my girlfriend about it, talked to the guys in the band and decided it’s no big deal,” [Bridwell] said. “We tested it with that Web site thing that I figured nobody would really even see. But in the Internet age, you can’t do anything without someone catching wind of it.”

“Some fans, they don’t even give a crap. They’re like, ‘Whatever, bands got to get paid.’ But at the same time, I was reluctant to do it in the back of my mind, and some fans reminded me there is a reason to feel that way about it,” Bridwell said. “So once I saw our fans were let down by it, I nixed the TV commercial, and said, ‘You know what, this isn’t for me. Keep your money.’”

Rival agents agree with Pax Arcana

Buster Olney earns his money this time of year, with excellent blog posts from the GM meetings with all kinds of good hot stove stuff (ESPN Insider, subscription-based).

Today he had an interesting aside in the A-Rod discussions pertinent to Pax’s post. He notes that it will be interesting to see if Scott Boras can get an offer to match the Yankees’ opening offer to A-Rod, which at the time was $100 million less than what it would take to get to the negotiating table. The observation comes on the heels of the assumptions that Mike Lowell will re-sign with Boston, which Newsday says the Yankees believe, and that the Angels might try to fill their hole through a trade for Miguel Tejada or Miguel Cabrera. Then Olney offers us this:

What is particularly stunning is how much some other agents are rooting against Boras, rooting for the possibility that he will be embarrassed in the end, and hoping that for once, he has gone out too far on a negotiating limb. “If I were another team,” said one agent, “I would proceed very cautiously and not assume he has any offers. When he says he has offers from other teams, if I were representing a team negotiating with him, I would say this: ‘I want to see the faxed offer. Show me the fax.’ “

Now, I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising or interesting that rival agents don’t want Boras to succeed. He is a rival, after all. However, Olney’s subtext is different: the aim seems to be to embarrass Boras rather than see him fail financially. You get the sense that the whole community is tiring of his act. It’s become personal, similar to Pax’s comment about how fanbases hate A-Rod in a different way than other baseball villains.

Will A-Rod be the tipping point for Boras to be propelled down from superagent status to just a regular slimy douchebag? Hard to say, but before you get too excited, remember that Boras was universally panned in the Daisuke Matsuzaka negotiations, with all commentators saying the Red Sox played it brilliantly and got Dice-K below value. Immediately after this “loss,” Boras got the Sox to bid against themselves to overpay JD Drew for 5 years and $70 million.

-Father Scott

No surprises on Radiohead sales numbers

Much was made of Radiohead’s surprise release of In Rainbows last month, offering fans the opportunity to buy the album for a price of their choosing, down to simply downloading the album for nothing.

Professional site, blokes.

There’s been a lot of speculation as to how effective this would be, or what kind of impact it would have on the music industry. Father Scott’s official music magazine, Paste, relays the sales numbers, which indicate that 62% of users (sorry, I’m a technical editor…I say “user” when I don’t know what else to use) acquired the album for nothing, while the average price paid among the 38% who doled out some cash was $6 a pop.

Shocker: A-Rod not classy, all about the money

Deadspin‘s got a handful of links of commentary regarding Alex Rodriguez’s tactless announcement of his impending free agency during the last night’s final game of the World Series.

I understand baseball is a business and that A-Rod is, in terms of talent, the best player in the game. But at some point, somebody needs to have some sense of morality, or at least understand when something isn’t in good taste (as it happened I wanted to cry out “bad form” like the kid in Hook). Sure, it was a strong strategy (Joe Buck and Tim McCarver jumped on this like A-Rod on a Canadian she-male hooker), but it turned the focus from a dominating performance by the best team in baseball in a close game to whether this douchebag will make $35 million a year for the next 10 years, or just $30 million.

Nice swing, dick

Theo, John Henry, et al: Set a precedent. Don’t even negotiate with him. Overpay Mike Lowell–World Series MVP, class act, fan favorite–just like you did with Tek a few years ago, because he means more than his (already excellent) production. He’s not selfish like Pedro, or self-aggrandizing like Johnny Damon. He’s a great player with great character whose skills should diminish terribly over the course of his mid-30s. And most importantly, he’s not a guy who turns every team he plays for, and every fanbase who roots for him, starkly against him even as he’s putting up MVP numbers.

-Father Scott

Craft brewer says the days of big beer are numbered

The New York Times posted a curious op-ed today by Garrett Oliver, founder of the Brooklyn Brewery, one of the most successful craft breweries (we used to call them microbreweries) in the country.

Basically Oliver waves the giant flag of the underdog upstart and promises to topple the oppressive forces of “big beer,” as represented by the Miller/Coors/A-B types:

But by 1970, almost everyone shopped at the supermarket, frozen food and “TV dinners” were godsends, and we had about 40 breweries left in the entire country, all making the same bland beer.

Now Americans are moving away from spongy industrial bread, watery coffee, plasticized “cheese” and other wonders of modern food science. The top maker of white supermarket bread went bankrupt a few years ago.

That may well be true, but Oliver doesn’t seem very concerned about, you know, backing up his contention that “[t]he age of American industrial brewing is over” with, you know, facts and stuff. He says “industrial beers suffer flat or declining sales, craft brewers are experiencing double-digit growth,” but doesn’t offer any more than that.

That’s not even a lie, damn lie, or statistic.

We question why the New York Times lets a business owner take a gratuitous swipe at his competition without offering any hard evidence of the ascendancy of craft brewing, even in an op-ed piece.

Don’t Fear Big Beer [New York Times]