12 ms·

"I was catching a 7am flight out of Newark to Tampa, Florida, for a lunch meeting in Clearwater, then heading back to Newark on a 5pm flight, getting me in arou

"I was catching a 7am flight out of Newark to Tampa, Florida, for a lunch meeting in Clearwater, then heading back to Newark on a 5pm flight, getting me in around 8:10pm, and with any luck, to my apartment by 9 or so. We all have days like that, they happen from time to time." I don't have days like that, and neither should anyone else. With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. The fact that an expensive steakhouse decided to pull a cheap PR stunt by delivering a free steak to the airport to some well-known Big Shot is less obviously wasteful, but still a repellent manifestation of gratuitous luxury. People within the cocoon of the upper percentiles of wealth often have a sense of how they are perceived by others, and usually take some care to disguise their self-satisfaction. It is always educational to get a glimpse into the mental world of extreme privilege.

antihero 15y ago
This is an utterly wonderful counter to the original yuppie crap that governments tell us indicate a "higher standard of living", and the crap is driven by profit which we routinely give up our rights to protect.
corin_ 15y ago
You don't have to be extremely privileged to have days like that, though I'm not saying that this person isn't (I've never heard of him, but I'd hazard a guess that he is pretty rich.) Is it bad for the environment and a waste of time? Sure. But at the end of the day if flying out for a single meeting is going to be better for your business (or for your personal work if you freelance/etc), then you do it. I've flown from London to California before just for a meeting that will last a few hours - I didn't do it because I'm super rich, I did it because it was a good decision for the company I work for, and therefore they paid for it. (Edit: I suppose a person who has the chance to travel around for free could be called "privileged", but I don't think that's what you meant by it.)
- mycroftiv 15y ago
  I understand that air travel for meetings is still commonplace and I wasn't intending to apply the label of extreme privilege to all business travelers - only to those who are given Free Steak Delivery. I do think the vast majority of business air travel for meetings is completely wasteful, but it is often suffering - not privilege - for the people who are tasked with it! Airports and airplanes are not generally very pleasant environments.
  - corin_ 15y ago
    I can see how "upper percentiles of wealth" could be connected to (some though not all) people who fly around a lot, but having a company deliver you a free steak, that's really related entirely to how well known he is, not his wealth. There are random people with 10,000s of followers who aren't actually rich of it, but could be targets of similar PR stunts. As to air travel, for me I consider it a privilege, I've loved being able to travel the world for free, and add on cheap holidays when I feel like it in whatever country I'm in. But then, I've never really minded sitting in a plane.
matwood 15y ago
I've had days like that and they're horrible. It's certainly not something I would equate with extreme privilege unless I was flying around on my private jet.
Anechoic 15y ago
>With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. Sounds good, but doesn't always work in reality. (and I say this just coming back from a meeting with an architect who flew in for a day to check on a million dollar school renovation we're working on). I've done meetings via teleconference, conference calls and face-to-face, and the face-to-face meetings have always been the most productive, especially when needing to review engineering documents. Things move faster because we're not all trying to talk over one another and we can observe body language to see who is paying attention or to confirm than someone understands what it being discussed. Remote meetings have their place, but when the cost of a face-to-face day meeting can pale in comparison to screwing up a capital project, it's worth doing.
shin_lao 15y ago
The difference of quality between meeting face to face and through a webcam is so high that it's sometimes worth taking a plane just for one lunch. For example, I like to shake the hand of people I do business with. Additionally, I think it's generally better to refrain from commenting on how people spend their time and money, because you certainly don't want them to reciprocate.
- onemoreact 15y ago
  It's not a waste of resources because there is no upside. It's a waste of resource because you limit the effectiveness of anyone who travels as a significant portion of their job. A single lunch meeting courtship between executives can easily add up to well over 100,000$ for that single handshake. So, it's not a question of shaky webcam or face to face because the price gap quickly covers maintaining a high-end video conferencing room with support staff with the occasional corporate retreat / week in Tahiti.
  - sjs 15y ago
    I think talking about dollar amounts is a bit silly. What's the maximum acceptable dollar value for a lunch meeting, per person? $100? $200? $500? Further, what if those who pay for the lunch meetings feel that it was worth any price? How are you going to convince them they are wasting their money if a webcam chat wouldn't actually be a replacement in their eyes, and if they don't care about the dollar amount spent on lunch?
    - onemoreact 15y ago
      Let's suppose your talking about an executive making 20 million a year who spends 2 days traveling for that lunch. 20,000,000 * 2 / 365 = 109,589$. Granted he can get some stuff done while traveling, but it's also far less than what he could do in the office and it will ofen take more than 2 days once you include jetlag etc. I have no problem saying that handshake could be worth 10k, but once the numbers start growing you start talking about someone’s full time salary for a year and I have trouble thinking that handshake is of that magnitude.
napierzaza 15y ago
Well it depends on how much money is at stake. If you're looking at enough you will indeed do everything you can to get it done.
ellyagg 15y ago
It's sad that this sour grapes is the highest voted comment on the story. Just to reduce the sentiment to its most absurd, should Obama stay inside the White House for his whole term? Would it ever be appropriate for him to fly to another city and only spend a day or afternoon there? If so, can we now imagine other people less exalted than the current POTUS who may also do the same? For example, I bet Al Gore makes one-day trips to cities all year long, and he's quite a champion of not wasting resources. Without knowing the social and economic implications of this man's trip, you're simply in no position to weigh its merits. What I find repellent is your narrow-mindedness.
- ANH 15y ago
  I don't have much of a problem with the occasional day trip across the country. I know folks who have to do that on occasion, and it can be appropriate. The whole blog entry, though, represents a wastefulness that I couldn't myself condone. "Sour grapes" implies winners and losers. Maybe you feel like running that race, but I don't want any part of it.
  - masterzora 15y ago
    "Sour grapes" implies winners and losers. Did we read the same fable? Sour grapes is about something you don't have, which does not imply winners or losers.
    - AretNCarlsen 15y ago
      That's true, in the original fable the grapes were inaccessible to the sole character (the fox) and the moral was just that "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET." Colloquially, however, "sour grapes" is often repurposed to describe the rationalizations of a sore loser, that is, when someone else CAN get the grapes but you cannot. That is clearly ellyagg's usage, and as in the cognitive dissonance of the original fable, there is an implication that the loser would change his tune if he were to gain access to the "grapes". ANH disagrees, asserting that the grapes are genuinely sour in this case. From http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/31.html http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/31.html (and it's well into the public domain): ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour." "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET."
philwelch 15y ago
It's sad to see the "eat-the-rich" crowd made it over from Reddit.
- exit 15y ago
  ha, his post still has a lot more substance than your pithy dismissal
- erikig 15y ago
  I don't see anything wrong...with a little steak sauce and a nice fresh salad, I'm sure they taste the same as a good Morton's steak.
crikli 15y ago
You're making a whole pile of assumptions to arrive at judgement. You're assuming that because you don't have days where you've got to travel several hundred miles an then back that nobody else does...or should. You're assuming that you know the context of the meeting in order to judge the trip as frivolous. You're assuming that without the OP getting on the jet, it doesn't make the trip. You're assuming that you know the decision stack that led to Morton's showing up with the steak.
- starwed 15y ago
  >You're assuming that because you don't have days where you've got to travel several hundred miles an then back that nobody else does...or should. The initial statement in the blog was that everyone has days like that.
  - MortenK 15y ago
    It shouldn't be taken literal. He doesn't mean that everyone has days where they fly at 7am from Newark to Tampa and back, or between any other cities for that matter. It's that everybody has days from time to that that are jam-packed from morning till evening, doing whatever.
    - starwed 15y ago
      I didn't take it literally -- I was pointing out that the grandparent poster had.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
run4yourlives 15y ago
If you don't understand that there is a huge difference in a face to face meeting or a web conference or telephone call, you are frankly missing a huge part of the human experience.
rickdale 15y ago
It takes money to make money. To assume this is wasteful when the author states the lunch meeting was successful is idiotic. GoToMeeting and Skype are a certain type of communication, but in todays economy you have to go out of your way to secure certain clients and that can mean meetings in person. Plus, aren't you downplaying the old technology of flight and the simple fact that it is amazing that someone can get to Florida from NYC and then back in less than 20 hours?
bhartzer 15y ago
With so many people caught up in technology nowadays, it's actually refreshing to see someone wanting to take the time to actually meet in person over lunch.
chernevik 15y ago
Imagine you are CFO of mid-sized public company, raising capital to get you through an industry downturn you expect to last several years. It's generally agreed the financing markets will close up at any moment. The financing is an important cushion against bankruptcy, and mass layoffs, 18 months from now. Your deal is almost lined up, but a key investor has raised important and tricky but answerable legal questions about the structure. At 3pm, you schedule a 7:30am meeting to allay their concerns. You will want your attorney physically present, and never mind that they live in another city. When your attorney lands at 9:30pm, you will want them to eat something better than Olive Garden. Good food relieves stresses and refreshes body and spirit. You will care a great deal more about the quantity of wine drunk than you will the money spent on it. Now, imagine you are hiring for that attorney one month previous to this easily-imagined scenario. You are meeting with a candidate. You will care about their dedication, their thorough familiarity with your situation, their ability to confront make or break problems on short notice. Are you satisfied with a video-conference? Or do you maybe want them to fly down for lunch? This is about your imagination. You can imagine "the upper percentile of wealth" is populated entirely by greedy, stupid people, paid only for structural position and spending only to indulge their ego and appetite. Note, this belief doesn't leave much scope for the reason and ability and pride of the people beneath them. Or you can generate some curiosity about the world beyond _your_ cocoon.
- abcd_f 15y ago
  Don't know about States, but Canadian version of Olive Garden is not bad at all food-wise.
  - MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
    I might not mind Olive Garden, but part of being a gracious and generous host is ensuring that your guests are well-fed with the best you can offer. It's admittedly a very ancient and possibly wasteful ritual, but one which persists culturally. How many lawyers do you think actually enjoy playing golf? :3
    - jonknee 15y ago

antihero 15y ago

This is an utterly wonderful counter to the original yuppie crap that governments tell us indicate a "higher standard of living", and the crap is driven by profit which we routinely give up our rights to protect.

corin_ 15y ago

You don't have to be extremely privileged to have days like that, though I'm not saying that this person isn't (I've never heard of him, but I'd hazard a guess that he is pretty rich.) Is it bad for the environment and a waste of time? Sure. But at the end of the day if flying out for a single meeting is going to be better for your business (or for your personal work if you freelance/etc), then you do it. I've flown from London to California before just for a meeting that will last a few hours - I didn't do it because I'm super rich, I did it because it was a good decision for the company I work for, and therefore they paid for it. (Edit: I suppose a person who has the chance to travel around for free could be called "privileged", but I don't think that's what you meant by it.)

mycroftiv 15y ago
I understand that air travel for meetings is still commonplace and I wasn't intending to apply the label of extreme privilege to all business travelers - only to those who are given Free Steak Delivery. I do think the vast majority of business air travel for meetings is completely wasteful, but it is often suffering - not privilege - for the people who are tasked with it! Airports and airplanes are not generally very pleasant environments.
- corin_ 15y ago
  I can see how "upper percentiles of wealth" could be connected to (some though not all) people who fly around a lot, but having a company deliver you a free steak, that's really related entirely to how well known he is, not his wealth. There are random people with 10,000s of followers who aren't actually rich of it, but could be targets of similar PR stunts. As to air travel, for me I consider it a privilege, I've loved being able to travel the world for free, and add on cheap holidays when I feel like it in whatever country I'm in. But then, I've never really minded sitting in a plane.

matwood 15y ago

I've had days like that and they're horrible. It's certainly not something I would equate with extreme privilege unless I was flying around on my private jet.

Anechoic 15y ago

>With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. Sounds good, but doesn't always work in reality. (and I say this just coming back from a meeting with an architect who flew in for a day to check on a million dollar school renovation we're working on). I've done meetings via teleconference, conference calls and face-to-face, and the face-to-face meetings have always been the most productive, especially when needing to review engineering documents. Things move faster because we're not all trying to talk over one another and we can observe body language to see who is paying attention or to confirm than someone understands what it being discussed. Remote meetings have their place, but when the cost of a face-to-face day meeting can pale in comparison to screwing up a capital project, it's worth doing.

shin_lao 15y ago

The difference of quality between meeting face to face and through a webcam is so high that it's sometimes worth taking a plane just for one lunch. For example, I like to shake the hand of people I do business with. Additionally, I think it's generally better to refrain from commenting on how people spend their time and money, because you certainly don't want them to reciprocate.

onemoreact 15y ago
It's not a waste of resources because there is no upside. It's a waste of resource because you limit the effectiveness of anyone who travels as a significant portion of their job. A single lunch meeting courtship between executives can easily add up to well over 100,000$ for that single handshake. So, it's not a question of shaky webcam or face to face because the price gap quickly covers maintaining a high-end video conferencing room with support staff with the occasional corporate retreat / week in Tahiti.
- sjs 15y ago
  I think talking about dollar amounts is a bit silly. What's the maximum acceptable dollar value for a lunch meeting, per person? $100? $200? $500? Further, what if those who pay for the lunch meetings feel that it was worth any price? How are you going to convince them they are wasting their money if a webcam chat wouldn't actually be a replacement in their eyes, and if they don't care about the dollar amount spent on lunch?
  - onemoreact 15y ago
    Let's suppose your talking about an executive making 20 million a year who spends 2 days traveling for that lunch. 20,000,000 * 2 / 365 = 109,589$. Granted he can get some stuff done while traveling, but it's also far less than what he could do in the office and it will ofen take more than 2 days once you include jetlag etc. I have no problem saying that handshake could be worth 10k, but once the numbers start growing you start talking about someone’s full time salary for a year and I have trouble thinking that handshake is of that magnitude.

napierzaza 15y ago

Well it depends on how much money is at stake. If you're looking at enough you will indeed do everything you can to get it done.

ellyagg 15y ago

It's sad that this sour grapes is the highest voted comment on the story. Just to reduce the sentiment to its most absurd, should Obama stay inside the White House for his whole term? Would it ever be appropriate for him to fly to another city and only spend a day or afternoon there? If so, can we now imagine other people less exalted than the current POTUS who may also do the same? For example, I bet Al Gore makes one-day trips to cities all year long, and he's quite a champion of not wasting resources. Without knowing the social and economic implications of this man's trip, you're simply in no position to weigh its merits. What I find repellent is your narrow-mindedness.

ANH 15y ago
I don't have much of a problem with the occasional day trip across the country. I know folks who have to do that on occasion, and it can be appropriate. The whole blog entry, though, represents a wastefulness that I couldn't myself condone. "Sour grapes" implies winners and losers. Maybe you feel like running that race, but I don't want any part of it.
- masterzora 15y ago
  "Sour grapes" implies winners and losers. Did we read the same fable? Sour grapes is about something you don't have, which does not imply winners or losers.
  - AretNCarlsen 15y ago
    That's true, in the original fable the grapes were inaccessible to the sole character (the fox) and the moral was just that "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET." Colloquially, however, "sour grapes" is often repurposed to describe the rationalizations of a sore loser, that is, when someone else CAN get the grapes but you cannot. That is clearly ellyagg's usage, and as in the cognitive dissonance of the original fable, there is an implication that the loser would change his tune if he were to gain access to the "grapes". ANH disagrees, asserting that the grapes are genuinely sour in this case. From http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/31.html http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/31.html (and it's well into the public domain): ONE hot summer’s day a Fox was strolling through an orchard till he came to a bunch of Grapes just ripening on a vine which had been trained over a lofty branch. "Just the things to quench my thirst," quoth he. Drawing back a few paces, he took a run and a jump, and just missed the bunch. Turning round again with a One, Two, Three, he jumped up, but with no greater success. Again and again he tried after the tempting morsel, but at last had to give it up, and walked away with his nose in the air, saying: "I am sure they are sour." "IT IS EASY TO DESPISE WHAT YOU CANNOT GET."

philwelch 15y ago

It's sad to see the "eat-the-rich" crowd made it over from Reddit.

exit 15y ago
ha, his post still has a lot more substance than your pithy dismissal
erikig 15y ago
I don't see anything wrong...with a little steak sauce and a nice fresh salad, I'm sure they taste the same as a good Morton's steak.

crikli 15y ago

You're making a whole pile of assumptions to arrive at judgement. You're assuming that because you don't have days where you've got to travel several hundred miles an then back that nobody else does...or should. You're assuming that you know the context of the meeting in order to judge the trip as frivolous. You're assuming that without the OP getting on the jet, it doesn't make the trip. You're assuming that you know the decision stack that led to Morton's showing up with the steak.

starwed 15y ago
>You're assuming that because you don't have days where you've got to travel several hundred miles an then back that nobody else does...or should. The initial statement in the blog was that everyone has days like that.
- MortenK 15y ago
  It shouldn't be taken literal. He doesn't mean that everyone has days where they fly at 7am from Newark to Tampa and back, or between any other cities for that matter. It's that everybody has days from time to that that are jam-packed from morning till evening, doing whatever.
  - starwed 15y ago
    I didn't take it literally -- I was pointing out that the grandparent poster had.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

run4yourlives 15y ago

If you don't understand that there is a huge difference in a face to face meeting or a web conference or telephone call, you are frankly missing a huge part of the human experience.

rickdale 15y ago

It takes money to make money. To assume this is wasteful when the author states the lunch meeting was successful is idiotic. GoToMeeting and Skype are a certain type of communication, but in todays economy you have to go out of your way to secure certain clients and that can mean meetings in person. Plus, aren't you downplaying the old technology of flight and the simple fact that it is amazing that someone can get to Florida from NYC and then back in less than 20 hours?

bhartzer 15y ago

With so many people caught up in technology nowadays, it's actually refreshing to see someone wanting to take the time to actually meet in person over lunch.

chernevik 15y ago

Imagine you are CFO of mid-sized public company, raising capital to get you through an industry downturn you expect to last several years. It's generally agreed the financing markets will close up at any moment. The financing is an important cushion against bankruptcy, and mass layoffs, 18 months from now. Your deal is almost lined up, but a key investor has raised important and tricky but answerable legal questions about the structure. At 3pm, you schedule a 7:30am meeting to allay their concerns. You will want your attorney physically present, and never mind that they live in another city. When your attorney lands at 9:30pm, you will want them to eat something better than Olive Garden. Good food relieves stresses and refreshes body and spirit. You will care a great deal more about the quantity of wine drunk than you will the money spent on it. Now, imagine you are hiring for that attorney one month previous to this easily-imagined scenario. You are meeting with a candidate. You will care about their dedication, their thorough familiarity with your situation, their ability to confront make or break problems on short notice. Are you satisfied with a video-conference? Or do you maybe want them to fly down for lunch? This is about your imagination. You can imagine "the upper percentile of wealth" is populated entirely by greedy, stupid people, paid only for structural position and spending only to indulge their ego and appetite. Note, this belief doesn't leave much scope for the reason and ability and pride of the people beneath them. Or you can generate some curiosity about the world beyond _your_ cocoon.

abcd_f 15y ago
Don't know about States, but Canadian version of Olive Garden is not bad at all food-wise.
- MostAwesomeDude 15y ago
  I might not mind Olive Garden, but part of being a gracious and generous host is ensuring that your guests are well-fed with the best you can offer. It's admittedly a very ancient and possibly wasteful ritual, but one which persists culturally. How many lawyers do you think actually enjoy playing golf? :3
  - jonknee 15y ago