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Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) an

Ron Johnson used to do this when he headed Apple retail. Would just go into a store totally undercover to the customers (obviously staff would recognize him) and work for a bit. Occasionally fairly major changes, both to the staff side and to the customer experience, were made based on his visits. I don't recall ever seeing a press announcement about it. Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic. Then again maybe it's better this way than leaking it to a reporter and pretending that it was discovered organically. Guess we'll have to wait and see if anything actually comes out of it to know if it's just a stunt, but I'd put my money on it.

parker_mountain 4y ago
> Occasionally fairly major changes like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.
- stcroixx 4y ago
  Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.
  - xeromal 4y ago
    Any human in the world will believe someone if they experience for themselves. Sometimes it's necessary.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    People need performance and narrative. Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value. Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but there's a role for the other thing too.
    - feoren 4y ago
      You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.
      - jrumbut 4y ago
        I don't know if toxic is the word for it. No human has infinite capacity for logic or empathy. Being conscientious takes effort almost by definition. All of us need reminders to put that effort in. That's why people talk about "getting a seat at the table." If you are physically in a room with someone and they hear your voice and see your face you become more real to them. We face a choice of either denying the messy parts of human nature (and seeing how that goes) or adapting our processes to account for them.
      - yardie 4y ago
        > Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. You could apply this to literally 99% of any employer in the world.
      - vkou 4y ago
        > You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. That's kind of the problem that Starbucks is having right now. Or rather, it's a symptom of the war its executives are waging on its employees. The former are going to need to do a hell of a lot more then a shift a month to rebuild that trust.
  - daedalus_j 4y ago
    Possibly so, but the man was one of the best salespeople I've ever met. Ice-to-eskimos level, all while being completely genuine. He had a genuine interest in and deep understanding of the customer experience and was easily the equal of any full-time sales staff. When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able. Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.
    - flappyeagle 4y ago
      Reminds me of seeing the chairman of a major fashion label do the same thing - dude was so slick, saw him sell the hell out of the place to 3 women before I left.
  - savanaly 4y ago
    Disagree. Experiencing something yourself is a whole nother ballgame from being told about it. "You can't tell people anything" [0]. Recognizing this applies to oneself shows intellectual humility IMO. [0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
  - madeofpalk 4y ago
    Why not both?
  - gorbachev 4y ago
    That would work, if Starbucks had that kind of a culture, but they don't.
  - jamesliudotcc 4y ago
    It is a good way to get exposed to the baristas once a month. When I was a barista there, I saw my manager's manager a few times. I think I knew the name of that person's manager? I think there's at least 2 more layers before the executive in charge of all of the stores. This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.
- daedalus_j 4y ago
  pricing stuff, metrics stuff, customer flow changes. Real day-to-day stuff. One of the ones I personally witnessed related to the services that salespeople were expected to sell along with the computers. There was some kerfuffle going on about stores not meeting the expected "attach rates". He spent a whole day selling computers, and could not meet the expected attach rates himself. Couple weeks after that changes to pricing and program benefits were announced. I later learned that the need for changes had become a very high priority the same day as his visit.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    There are a whole class of problems that fall into the "seems like a good idea/measure at some management level, based on the data and worldview they have, but fail in reality, due to some detail at the ground level" category. Or, consequences of lossy compression as information gets summarized before being transmitted up the management ladder. And it isn't always a bad management call! Sometimes they're making the right call on the data they have, but they're missing critical data. E.g. Not realizing that 1/5 a store needs to be used for ad hoc inventory because too much product was flooded during holidays, ergo it cannibalizes display space, ergo the sales rates of various SKUs are all out of whack (to come up with a contrived example)
    - justin_oaks 4y ago
      Sure, the decisions by management may make sense based on the data they have, but how stupid are management that they trust information filtered through layers of underlings? I get it, at some point you have to admit that you're not going to get 100% truth from people. But that doesn't mean you don't talk to different people at different layers of the company.
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        It's not 100% truth -- it's that you can't even get 100% detail. This clip always resonated with me, re: high level leadership: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 (as context, one subordinate he's talking about is presented as a terrible leader, the other as a great one) Specifically, the point being made that all information is... uncertain. And how a good leader makes good decisions within that uncertainty, instead of picking winners. It's easy to make the right decision when you have all the facts, but you can't have all the facts when you need to make 15+ decisions in a day.
tssva 4y ago
I wonder if he did the same thing at JC Penny when he was running it into the ground.
- wnevets 4y ago
  In his defense shoppers wanting stuff to appear to be on sale is pretty dumb.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Using an incorrect model of your clientele’s behavior and emotional responses is even dumber. Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.
  - agloe_dreams 4y ago
    The hardest thing for that was that for him to succeed he really needed to play the long game. JCP was and still is eternally screwed. Mall retail is pretty much doomed to die and the ever increasing sale ratios are a side effect of attempts to 'growth hack' their way out of the inevitable. The fact of the matter was that JCP was more expensive than Walmart for, effectively most of their main brands, the same product. Sales allowed JCP to pretend their product is 'worth more'. The problem became a race to the bottom though. Once you say a store-brand Polo should cost '$69.99' but is on sale for $24.99, you start to tell your customer "Our products are overpriced." As ultimately, your product still is more expensive than the $14.99 Walmart product. By removing the price war, pricing their product at value. You now can compete on a more simple message of quality: "Our product is worth $10 more because X". The best part of this is...that's exactly what Walmart is actually doing. Walmart is actually rather sale-resistant and they frame it as a 'rollback' rather than X% off. Walmart's message is purely the regular price, not the value. The issue you of course run into for JCP though, is in the interm, as the market changes, you need to throw a bunch quarters made up of that built up growth hacking debt of ever increasing sales in the trash. That just won't fly on Wall st. What JCP really need is a reboot though, they are doomed either way due to their leases. Organizationally, I would be trying to get rid of those as fast as possible and get into outdoors small-medium retail. They have a great brand but have insanely expensive locations.
ksec 4y ago
Why is why the user experience of Apple Retail has gone downhill after he left and Steve Jobs passed away. From CEO of Dixon, to CEO of Burberry and finally Apple veteran, Deirdre O'Brien. The improvement she made was like many of the recent Mac changes, reverting back to old design.
- pembrook 4y ago
  Ahrendts (of Burberry) was such a weird choice, unless Apple's goal at the time was to maximize in-person watch band sales. Seems Tim eventually realized selling luxury trench coats isn't very similar to premium computer hardware/software. Meanwhile investors had to pay nearly $200 Million in comp for the privilege of her leading this "town square" fantasy (not sure I'd ever consider a store in the mall a community fixture) while ignoring the internet exists. Would have rather put ChatGPT in charge of the stores and spent that $200M on improving the software that a Billion Apple users spend time with every day.
- kernal 4y ago
  Form over function. It's what Apple does.
tiffanyh 4y ago
> “Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic.” Starbucks doesn’t have a good track record for replacement CEO for Howard Schultz (founder/CEO). So I’m sure these kind of announcements is to instill confidence with Wall Street that this CEO will work out.
favaq 4y ago
>obviously staff would recognize him I think it's probable that they wouldn't.
- daedalus_j 4y ago
  In the bay area, where "oh god, corporate is in the building" is a way of life and common thing you bet they would. Outside the bay area, eh, 50/50, you're right.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    100% chance that the regional corporate staff gets notice this is happening and goes on a panicked 48-hour cleanup drill to make sure the store is spotless for the incoming exec and make sure the grumpier members of staff are given the weekend off.
    - daedalus_j 4y ago
      Once again, outside the bay area: absolutely true. In the bay area though, that was just Thursday. No warning, could and did happen any time. The difference was incredibly stark. I wonder if that's true for Starbucks in Seattle.
- sharkweek 4y ago
  Reminds me when I was a bank teller - the area manager would come into our branch sometimes trying to like disguise himself...? But it was always SO obvious after about 10 seconds that it was him while he'd sit in the lobby and observe. It was also impressive how fast word would go down the teller line that "corporate" was in the branch and everyone would sort of shape up for the hour they were around.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions. However, there's a real smell of something going wrong from them as well. The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Why? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem? Did they have no way to report it? Did those reports not get evaluated properly? Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem? Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.
- MrGilbert 4y ago
  Your last paragraph has a valid point, and the outcome of such a visit can simply be that: There are ideas, but for some reasons, they don't make it to the higher levels. Let's find out why!
  - daedalus_j 4y ago
    That problem is exacerbated in this case by the difference between "retail", "retail corporate" and "corporate". The fact the that anything coming from the frontline employees not only had to work it's way up to retail leadership, but then to essentially an entirely different corporation's leadership makes it nearly impossible for ideas that require action by "corporate" to trickle all the way up.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems. For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.
wintogreen74 4y ago
WestJet, Canada's second largest airline, used to do this a lot. I remember handing my coffee cup and trash to Clive Beddoe, one of the original founders, with a double take. They were largely employee-owned and it showed. Then they went public, grew on the backs of shareholders and were taken private again by PE. Now they're worse than Air Canada, the former poster child for terrible airlines. When a company is young and wants to engage employees I think this type of signaling can work great. When you're the established, mature incumbent and your employees feel they need to unionize to get fair treatment, this is a stunt for the public and not going to change anything internal.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  AC gets a lot of undeserved hate. They're better than all the US airlines, without exception and they're on par with a lot of continental European airlines. Much better than BA. There's things they could do better for sure, but onboard service, seats, lounges, ground staff - all solid. Huge improvements to Aeroplan after they bought it back. After a lot of bouncing around the US it's a treat to fly. I feel like hating on them is something of a Canadian pastime.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Reverse Anecdote: I've had a lot of bad experiences w/ AC, though they generally do better than AA or Delta. I'll also give AC credit: they have to fly a lot of not great routes as a national mandate, and that means cutting corners to make things profitable; the challenges of flag carriers, etc. etc.
Twirrim 4y ago
Jeff Bezos used to do similar with Customer Support. He'd meet up with someone in customer support, and shadow their calls for the day. A number of features came out from it, like the ability for customer support to "pull an andon cord" and immediately yank a product from sale pending investigation by senior support staff. It came about because the customer support rep anticipated all of the problems a customer was having with a particular product on a call. "We see this all the time with that product". That annoyed Jeff. There was wisdom, people seeing ways customers were having a bad experience, and they were powerless to do anything about it.
danielodievich 4y ago
Many years ago I did a few short weeks on an engagement at Wynn casino in Vegas. It overlapped with Christmas time and I was invited to a holiday dinner, which had several thousand people rotate through the huge conference room ballroom over an entire day. Everyone from casino from the dealers to cleaners and cashiers - and even us contractors - rotated through. It was very nice while also yet another unmemorable catered event. It would have remained unmemorable for me except for this part. Someone later asked me if I had some cake, and I said yeah, I went by the cake table and some guy in pink shirt served me a slice, I asked for a small one and he took care of it. Well, apparently that was Steve Wynn, the owners, he I guess did that at the holiday dinner, meeting everyone in a marathon session. I don't know if that is still true but I thought that was a nice way to meet everyone eye to eye.

parker_mountain 4y ago

> Occasionally fairly major changes like what? I'm curious. There's nothing that shows the flaws of a process like running it yourself.

stcroixx 4y ago
Probably better to just listen to the people that do it all day than to think you pop in as an outsider and have some special insight.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Any human in the world will believe someone if they experience for themselves. Sometimes it's necessary.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  People need performance and narrative. Spending one day a month so you can say to fellow executives "I actually went and touched the problem, we need to fix it" and so employees can say to each other "he actually came and touched the problem, he must be working on fixing it" has real value. Actually learning about the problem and coming up with a solution is best done by listening to the people like you said, but there's a role for the other thing too.
  - feoren 4y ago
    You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. Yes, I realize this toxic environment is present in 95% of all companies in the U.S. That makes it worse, not better.
    - jrumbut 4y ago
      I don't know if toxic is the word for it. No human has infinite capacity for logic or empathy. Being conscientious takes effort almost by definition. All of us need reminders to put that effort in. That's why people talk about "getting a seat at the table." If you are physically in a room with someone and they hear your voice and see your face you become more real to them. We face a choice of either denying the messy parts of human nature (and seeing how that goes) or adapting our processes to account for them.
    - yardie 4y ago
      > Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. You could apply this to literally 99% of any employer in the world.
    - vkou 4y ago
      > You're describing an incredibly toxic environment. Executives blowing each other off, employees not trusting executives, executives not considering a problem real until they've seen it themselves. All of this is a crutch in place of actual trust. That's kind of the problem that Starbucks is having right now. Or rather, it's a symptom of the war its executives are waging on its employees. The former are going to need to do a hell of a lot more then a shift a month to rebuild that trust.
- daedalus_j 4y ago
  Possibly so, but the man was one of the best salespeople I've ever met. Ice-to-eskimos level, all while being completely genuine. He had a genuine interest in and deep understanding of the customer experience and was easily the equal of any full-time sales staff. When it came to the areas he wasn't as comfortable in, say the genius bar, he still deeply understood the customer experience, but never tried to do the job if he wasn't able. Boy, I'm coming off like a fanboy here... It was just a truly impressive and inspiring thing to see as one of the regular employees. If I worked at Starbucks it's what I'd want to see, not some propped-up press tour.
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    Reminds me of seeing the chairman of a major fashion label do the same thing - dude was so slick, saw him sell the hell out of the place to 3 women before I left.
- savanaly 4y ago
  Disagree. Experiencing something yourself is a whole nother ballgame from being told about it. "You can't tell people anything" [0]. Recognizing this applies to oneself shows intellectual humility IMO. [0] http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-anything/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-an...
- madeofpalk 4y ago
  Why not both?
- gorbachev 4y ago
  That would work, if Starbucks had that kind of a culture, but they don't.
- jamesliudotcc 4y ago
  It is a good way to get exposed to the baristas once a month. When I was a barista there, I saw my manager's manager a few times. I think I knew the name of that person's manager? I think there's at least 2 more layers before the executive in charge of all of the stores. This is the most direct way of accomplishing that.
daedalus_j 4y ago
pricing stuff, metrics stuff, customer flow changes. Real day-to-day stuff. One of the ones I personally witnessed related to the services that salespeople were expected to sell along with the computers. There was some kerfuffle going on about stores not meeting the expected "attach rates". He spent a whole day selling computers, and could not meet the expected attach rates himself. Couple weeks after that changes to pricing and program benefits were announced. I later learned that the need for changes had become a very high priority the same day as his visit.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  There are a whole class of problems that fall into the "seems like a good idea/measure at some management level, based on the data and worldview they have, but fail in reality, due to some detail at the ground level" category. Or, consequences of lossy compression as information gets summarized before being transmitted up the management ladder. And it isn't always a bad management call! Sometimes they're making the right call on the data they have, but they're missing critical data. E.g. Not realizing that 1/5 a store needs to be used for ad hoc inventory because too much product was flooded during holidays, ergo it cannibalizes display space, ergo the sales rates of various SKUs are all out of whack (to come up with a contrived example)
  - justin_oaks 4y ago
    Sure, the decisions by management may make sense based on the data they have, but how stupid are management that they trust information filtered through layers of underlings? I get it, at some point you have to admit that you're not going to get 100% truth from people. But that doesn't mean you don't talk to different people at different layers of the company.
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      It's not 100% truth -- it's that you can't even get 100% detail. This clip always resonated with me, re: high level leadership: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 (as context, one subordinate he's talking about is presented as a terrible leader, the other as a great one) Specifically, the point being made that all information is... uncertain. And how a good leader makes good decisions within that uncertainty, instead of picking winners. It's easy to make the right decision when you have all the facts, but you can't have all the facts when you need to make 15+ decisions in a day.

tssva 4y ago

I wonder if he did the same thing at JC Penny when he was running it into the ground.

wnevets 4y ago
In his defense shoppers wanting stuff to appear to be on sale is pretty dumb.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  Using an incorrect model of your clientele’s behavior and emotional responses is even dumber. Of course, I would have made the same mistake as Johnson. But it is always a good reminder of how differently people’s brains work.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  The hardest thing for that was that for him to succeed he really needed to play the long game. JCP was and still is eternally screwed. Mall retail is pretty much doomed to die and the ever increasing sale ratios are a side effect of attempts to 'growth hack' their way out of the inevitable. The fact of the matter was that JCP was more expensive than Walmart for, effectively most of their main brands, the same product. Sales allowed JCP to pretend their product is 'worth more'. The problem became a race to the bottom though. Once you say a store-brand Polo should cost '$69.99' but is on sale for $24.99, you start to tell your customer "Our products are overpriced." As ultimately, your product still is more expensive than the $14.99 Walmart product. By removing the price war, pricing their product at value. You now can compete on a more simple message of quality: "Our product is worth $10 more because X". The best part of this is...that's exactly what Walmart is actually doing. Walmart is actually rather sale-resistant and they frame it as a 'rollback' rather than X% off. Walmart's message is purely the regular price, not the value. The issue you of course run into for JCP though, is in the interm, as the market changes, you need to throw a bunch quarters made up of that built up growth hacking debt of ever increasing sales in the trash. That just won't fly on Wall st. What JCP really need is a reboot though, they are doomed either way due to their leases. Organizationally, I would be trying to get rid of those as fast as possible and get into outdoors small-medium retail. They have a great brand but have insanely expensive locations.

ksec 4y ago

Why is why the user experience of Apple Retail has gone downhill after he left and Steve Jobs passed away. From CEO of Dixon, to CEO of Burberry and finally Apple veteran, Deirdre O'Brien. The improvement she made was like many of the recent Mac changes, reverting back to old design.

pembrook 4y ago
Ahrendts (of Burberry) was such a weird choice, unless Apple's goal at the time was to maximize in-person watch band sales. Seems Tim eventually realized selling luxury trench coats isn't very similar to premium computer hardware/software. Meanwhile investors had to pay nearly $200 Million in comp for the privilege of her leading this "town square" fantasy (not sure I'd ever consider a store in the mall a community fixture) while ignoring the internet exists. Would have rather put ChatGPT in charge of the stores and spent that $200M on improving the software that a Billion Apple users spend time with every day.
kernal 4y ago
Form over function. It's what Apple does.

tiffanyh 4y ago

> “Saying you're doing it to win brownie points sure makes it seem inauthentic.” Starbucks doesn’t have a good track record for replacement CEO for Howard Schultz (founder/CEO). So I’m sure these kind of announcements is to instill confidence with Wall Street that this CEO will work out.

favaq 4y ago

>obviously staff would recognize him I think it's probable that they wouldn't.

daedalus_j 4y ago
In the bay area, where "oh god, corporate is in the building" is a way of life and common thing you bet they would. Outside the bay area, eh, 50/50, you're right.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  100% chance that the regional corporate staff gets notice this is happening and goes on a panicked 48-hour cleanup drill to make sure the store is spotless for the incoming exec and make sure the grumpier members of staff are given the weekend off.
  - daedalus_j 4y ago
    Once again, outside the bay area: absolutely true. In the bay area though, that was just Thursday. No warning, could and did happen any time. The difference was incredibly stark. I wonder if that's true for Starbucks in Seattle.
sharkweek 4y ago
Reminds me when I was a bank teller - the area manager would come into our branch sometimes trying to like disguise himself...? But it was always SO obvious after about 10 seconds that it was him while he'd sit in the lobby and observe. It was also impressive how fast word would go down the teller line that "corporate" was in the branch and everyone would sort of shape up for the hour they were around.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago

These "king gets wisdom from dressing as regular person" stories are great, and it's definitely a great idea for higher level folks to sample the ground truth themselves on a regular basis. CEOs are at a real danger of being surrounded by yes-men, and it's very possible that through conditioning and repetition they might actually start believing insane corporate positions. However, there's a real smell of something going wrong from them as well. The CEO working a single shift noticed something that needed to be changed? Why? Did none of the thousands of workers who work those shifts every day notice that problem? Did they have no way to report it? Did those reports not get evaluated properly? Was there a manager in charge of the stores who did not notice the problem? Sure, fixing the problem is great, but if the CEO needs to personally witness the issue for it to get fixed, then there must be thousands of other issues not being fixed.

MrGilbert 4y ago
Your last paragraph has a valid point, and the outcome of such a visit can simply be that: There are ideas, but for some reasons, they don't make it to the higher levels. Let's find out why!
- daedalus_j 4y ago
  That problem is exacerbated in this case by the difference between "retail", "retail corporate" and "corporate". The fact the that anything coming from the frontline employees not only had to work it's way up to retail leadership, but then to essentially an entirely different corporation's leadership makes it nearly impossible for ideas that require action by "corporate" to trickle all the way up.
WalterBright 4y ago
The CEO can easily see problems that the line workers don't see as problems. For example, I happily programmed in C for many years while not even noticing severe problems with the language. Later broader experience with other languages led me to wonder why I didn't see the problems with C before, even though they were negatively affecting my work.

wintogreen74 4y ago

WestJet, Canada's second largest airline, used to do this a lot. I remember handing my coffee cup and trash to Clive Beddoe, one of the original founders, with a double take. They were largely employee-owned and it showed. Then they went public, grew on the backs of shareholders and were taken private again by PE. Now they're worse than Air Canada, the former poster child for terrible airlines. When a company is young and wants to engage employees I think this type of signaling can work great. When you're the established, mature incumbent and your employees feel they need to unionize to get fair treatment, this is a stunt for the public and not going to change anything internal.

arcticbull 4y ago
AC gets a lot of undeserved hate. They're better than all the US airlines, without exception and they're on par with a lot of continental European airlines. Much better than BA. There's things they could do better for sure, but onboard service, seats, lounges, ground staff - all solid. Huge improvements to Aeroplan after they bought it back. After a lot of bouncing around the US it's a treat to fly. I feel like hating on them is something of a Canadian pastime.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Reverse Anecdote: I've had a lot of bad experiences w/ AC, though they generally do better than AA or Delta. I'll also give AC credit: they have to fly a lot of not great routes as a national mandate, and that means cutting corners to make things profitable; the challenges of flag carriers, etc. etc.

Twirrim 4y ago

Jeff Bezos used to do similar with Customer Support. He'd meet up with someone in customer support, and shadow their calls for the day. A number of features came out from it, like the ability for customer support to "pull an andon cord" and immediately yank a product from sale pending investigation by senior support staff. It came about because the customer support rep anticipated all of the problems a customer was having with a particular product on a call. "We see this all the time with that product". That annoyed Jeff. There was wisdom, people seeing ways customers were having a bad experience, and they were powerless to do anything about it.

danielodievich 4y ago

Many years ago I did a few short weeks on an engagement at Wynn casino in Vegas. It overlapped with Christmas time and I was invited to a holiday dinner, which had several thousand people rotate through the huge conference room ballroom over an entire day. Everyone from casino from the dealers to cleaners and cashiers - and even us contractors - rotated through. It was very nice while also yet another unmemorable catered event. It would have remained unmemorable for me except for this part. Someone later asked me if I had some cake, and I said yeah, I went by the cake table and some guy in pink shirt served me a slice, I asked for a small one and he took care of it. Well, apparently that was Steve Wynn, the owners, he I guess did that at the holiday dinner, meeting everyone in a marathon session. I don't know if that is still true but I thought that was a nice way to meet everyone eye to eye.