E-mail from Greyhound's CFO

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Tonight I received an e-mail from Andy Kaplinsky, Greyhound's CFO. Andy wants to talk to me next week about the Gift Ticket Fee.
I'm excited. I anticipate a robust and professional conversation. It would help the petition cause if we had hundreds of people sign the petition over the weekend.
Thank you for your support - I am amazed at we had over 8200 people sign this. You are all awesome; lets all push this petition hard over the next few days. This weekend could make or break the cause to end the $18 Gift Ticket Fee!
Shawn

Just got off the phone with Andy Kaplinsky - Greyhound's CFO

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First off, I want to publicly thank Andy Kaplinsky for taking time to call me today. We had a good free-flowing conversation on several topics relating to Greyhound, customer service, etc. He apologized for the long delay in getting back to me, and took a great deal of time to thank me and the petition signers for their concerns.

According to Andy, 80 - 90% of their charge backs are related to the "gift tickets." Charge backs for gift tickets primarily fall into 2 categories: 1) Fraud - someone steals a credit card and buys a bus ticket; 2) A person buys a ticket for someone else, the person doesn't show up, and the purchaser wants their money back. Andy freely admitted that the gift ticket fee has been a topic of discussion off and on at Greyhound for the last couple of years, and while "Greyhound is exploring ways we can address the issue," that due to the large amount of charge backs, the company just isn't comfortable with that. Andy also admitted that the fee is a convenience fee as well.

In addition, according to Andy, the company is looking at ways to invest in the technology to better "sniff out" fraudulent purchases, however, from an operational standpoint, Greyhound has chosen to first invest in new buses, and investing in customer service training. (Note - Andy was very clear in saying that Greyhound needs to improve  in customer service - he compared it to turning a freighter in the ocean).

I made a couple of suggestions to Andy for some "short -term fixes" which would help with the chargebacks:

1. When someone purchases a "gift ticket" - have an additional screen stating that gift tickets are nonrefundable if the person does not show up, etc. with a check box stating that the user agrees to these terms and conditions, etc. This would provide Greyhound with evidence that the purchaser knew that the ticker was a non-refundable ticket, etc.

2. On fraud, I asked Andy if Greyhound would consider charging the gift ticket fee for bus ticket purchases made within 14 days of travel. In other words, 3rd party tickets purchased more than 14 days out would not be subject to the fee. This should reduce fraud exposure to Greyhound.

Andy wanted to express his appreciation for the feedback and response to the 8,000+ plus people who have signed the petition. It was a great conversation.

So...where do we go from here?

I let Andy know that I was going to continue the petition drive. IMHO, I gave Greyhound some steps to begin eliminating this fee. By singing the petition, you can send a clear message that you want Greyhound to implement the steps I just recommended, and to invest in the technology needed to reduce fraudulent purchases for bus tickets.

Thanks to all of you for signing! We are making a difference. Please sign, share, and post a link to the petition on your Facebook or Twitter Walls. You are all awesome!

Best,

Shawn

http://www.change.org/petitions/greyhound-eliminate-the-18-gift-ticket-fee

Pittsburgh Isn't Dying

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Aside from a few metros in Texas, you would struggle to find a place doing as well as Pittsburgh. This fact is hard for the libertarian crowd to swallow. Taxes are high. Pennsylvania isn't a right to work state. The population is in decline. I expect Jack Welch to rush in at any moment and claim the federal government is cooking the books. Reluctant confessions from the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy:

In terms of job growth, the Pittsburgh region‘s long-dominant education and health care sectors have a new challenger: professional, technical and financial services, recent employment data show.

“Eds and meds” institutions still employ the biggest slice of the seven-county region‘s 1.18 million jobs, say economic experts, but “pros and techs” are gaining.

“The leadership in job growth has changed from eds and meds to financial services and professional and technical services,” said Jake Haulk, economist and president of the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy, a think tank in Castle Shannon.

Eds and meds isn't the only game in town. Along with the tech boom, there's a glut in financial services job openings. Heck, according to the same article, there's a glut in eds and meds job openings. Pittsburgh is hiring!

The rub is that the local labor supply can't keep up and all those naysayers have built up a formidable barrier to inmigration. Pittsburgh is on the national mental map, in a negative light. The city is in the Rust Belt. It is dying. That puts an upward pressure on wages, which is a lot scarier to a business than the red herring of high taxes.

Germany's Ann Arbor Dilemma

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I'm fond of saying, "You go where you know."  It's a catch phrase that conveys an important migration concept and fleshes out rational choice theory, "Move to improve." A migrant has a number of places he or she could go for better economic opportunity. As a rule, most relocations cover short distances. Proximity is a good predictor of destination because people are risk averse. For someone in Cleveland, the economy might be better in Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. Because Pittsburgh is closer and likely more familiar, it is the more typical choice. You go where you know.

Conversely, you don't go where you know if you have a negative perception of a place. You've seen all the Detroit ruin porn. There is no way you are moving there for a job, even if there are thousands of positions available in your field. Detroit's black mark extends to Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan. Despite being a lovely college town with a fantastic quality of life, Ann Arbor struggles to attract talent. I call this the "Ann Arbor Dilemma". Ann Arbor is cursed with the geographic stereotype (i.e. ruin porn) of Detroit.

Germany is cursed with its own Ann Arbor Dilemma. The OECD claims that the country desperately needs immigrants for economic growth. The relatively liberal immigration laws aren't helping:

The problem is perception, particularly on the part of employers reluctant to hire from abroad, as well as the notoriously difficult German language. Barriers include dwindling numbers of German speakers in the European Union – and fewer institutions offering German language training compared to English, Spanish, or French. ...

... But it’s not just highly-trained personnel the country needs. Drivers, laborers and hotel staff are also in demand. So why aren’t they coming in droves from euro-zone countries with high unemployment?

The short answer is they perceive the barriers – linguistic, regulatory, or cultural, as too high. And small to medium-sized enterprises lack awareness about how to hire them.

Instead of heading to Germany, young adults are heading from high-employment Spain to low-unemployment Mexico. This migration pattern is unexpected because the legal barriers are much lower within the European Union. Perceived barriers are more formidable than actual fences. Just ask Ann Arbor.

Germany has already lost the war for talent. Mesofacts are notoriously difficult to change. Mexico or Brazil are where it's at for the young and unemployed in Europe, particularly Spain. Where a few pioneers have ventured, thousands will follow.

Density And Talent Supermarket Metros

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We know cities make talent more productive. Concisely put, better to work in an urban area than a rural one. The returns are so much greater in a city. The density dividend:

In 1993, James Rauch wrote a seminal paper showing that holding individual education constant, wages rise with the skills of metropolitan areas. Enrico Moretti has taken over this topic and written sophisticated papers that look both across metropolitan areas and within firms, showing that supermarket workers get more productive when better workers are in their shift.

If you read that paragraph carefully, you should note there is no mention of a density dividend. The quality of the workers in the room or neighborhood makes all the difference. Yes, proximity matters. But that is a function of distance, not density.

If you are looking for better workers, hire international migrants. Just so happens that dense cities do a great job of attracting talent from a bigger geographic cache. That's the birthplace diversity dividend. The movers are the shakers.

Such observations lend themselves to natural experiments. Take a dense city, such as Nairobi, Kenya, and find the neighborhood with the most migrants. That's the urban economic engine:

Depending on whom you're talking to, the Eastleigh market is either a tangle of back alleys where Islamist terrorists and pirates go to launder money, or it's one of the brightest spots of African capitalism, a dynamic 24-hour shopping center that's the only place for hundreds of miles where you can buy new jeans and sneakers at 2 in the morning.

Part of the reason Eastleigh attracts such investment, and such suspicion, is that Somalis make up the majority of people doing business there.

"When you come to Eastleigh, you feel that you are in Mogadishu or in other parts of Somalia, so you don't feel that you are an outsider," says Mohammed Shakul. "You feel at home." ...

... "The Kenyan government started to actively question what is the nature of this money," Kantai says. "And part of the questioning was motivated by the American counterterrorism push in East Africa."

He says what a Kenyan audit uncovered was $2 billion being quietly piped into Eastleigh through Somali channels — this in a year when Kenya's total GDP was about $40 billion.

"In this way, the Kenyan government began to understand the size of Somali capital. And one of the reactions, and this is a natural reaction from any government, was absolute panic," Kantai says. "It's like, how is it possible, that there is this kind of money, floating about, and we don't know about it?"

He says Kenya's reaction did not have to be one of fear — it did, after all, discover that its economy was 5 percent bigger than originally thought.

The Eastleigh neighborhood is more open to global capital flows. That's the "Borderless Economics" dividend. You can find many other similarly dense places in Nairobi. They aren't producing 5% of Kenyan GDP.

However, better to have Eastleigh in a big, dense global city than in one of the globalization backwaters. Somalis are more likely to run into top tier talent from other parts of the world. The quality of collision is much better. The question of density is rather beside the point.

Washington Examiner - 'Gun prosecutions under Obama down more than 45 percent'

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The calls from Liberals for more Gun Control keep growing. Lets forget that basically none of the new proposals would have prevented the last gun crimes. Instead keep in mind that the Government is not even taking violations of existing gun laws very seriously. With that comes the news that 'Gun prosecutions under Obama down more than 45 percent'. From the Washington Examiner:

Despite his calls for greater gun control, including a new assault weapons ban that extends to handguns, President Obama's administration has turned away from enforcing gun laws, cutting weapons prosecutions some 40 percent since a high of about 11,000 under former President Bush.
"If you are not going to enforce the laws on the books, then don't start talking about a whole new wave of new laws," said a gun rights advocate. - Washington Examiner

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Government is barely going after any criminals who violate gun purchasing laws. It's almost as if they want criminals to be out and about committing crime. Unfortunately, all this means is that the Government creates more victims. It seems that the best defense is having a gun and shooting criminals yourself as it appears more and more that the Government is no longer in the business of punishing criminals, other than those who cheat on their taxes and other economic criminals. Take this from 'Project Exile' which was intended to go after gun criminals by using Federal gun laws:

From the left, Project Exile was condemned, as racist, by Families Against Mandatory Minimums, and opposed by several members of the Congressional Black Caucus on the grounds that in targeting its enforcement at inner city communities such as in Richmond and Atlanta, and the disproportionate effects the federal gun laws' "prohibited possessor" categories have on African-Americans. - Wiki

Of course these laws would have a disproportionate effect on African Americans but you can bet that African Americans are also disproportionately effected by gun crimes and end up as victims at a disproportionate rate. And when you look at it that way, it is proportionate. However, since the criminals happen to be black, going after them is racist, so we can't do it. And it is the greater black community that mostly pays for voting soft on crime Democrats into Congress.-------------------- --------------------

Crazy - "40 percent of deadly Illinois crashes involve drivers who don't have a license"

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This is what happens when you do not fairly enforce the laws of our country. First you ignore the immigration laws. They you are forced to abandon enforcing driver licensing laws as well as drunk driving checkpoints, as special interest groups will accuse you of 'unfairly' targeting illegal aliens.

Lawmakers believe there are as many as 250,000 undocumented immigrants on Illinois roads and that more than 40 percent of deadly Illinois crashes involve drivers who don't have a license. - NBC Chicago

You can surely bet that a majority of those drivers did not have insurance either, not that is going to help any dead people. However, just how many accidents overall involve illegal aliens? 
Keep in mind that this is a group that generally has 'broken no laws' except our immigration laws, and driver laws,  and employment laws and taxation laws, and identity theft laws. It's not their fault, really. If you stupid Americans would just give them a little more..... they'll demand something else.
In the case of Illinois, they are going to give illegals drivers licenses. So that that the illegal aliens can be just like you and me, and the 9/11 hijackers.-------------------- --------------------