by Jacob Taylor
“I have a confession, Mr. X,” I said quietly. “I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but my original plan with accepting this project was to dig up dirt on you. I wanted to write a takedown series about you and the evils of capitalism.”
“I thought that might be the case,” he said. “But I had a good feeling I’d win you over, and there isn’t much dirt for you to dig up. I’ve always lived my life as if anything I did would be shared on the front page of the newspaper with everyone I cared about.”
What... the... eff? This whole time I thought I was working my way into Mr. X’s good graces to write the ultimate business takedown piece. Yet all along I was the one being played. He was playing chess, I was playing checkers. I would have thought that I’d feel angry, but I was strangely relieved. Like I had been meandering along the edge of a cliff and Mr. X had pulled me back just before plunging over.
“I’m sorry that I accepted this assignment under false pretenses, Mr. X,” I said with as much humility as I could muster. “Can you ever forgive me?”
“Of course, Nick,” he said. “And I’m sorry if you felt like I was playing puppet master. But I knew all along that you’d come out of this with new perspectives and hopefully glad you were selected.”
“You have no idea how thankful I am,” I said.
“That’s probably enough for today,” he said. “It’s too cold out here for an old man. I’ll see you in a few weeks.”
“Thank you, Mr. X,” I said. It was cold outside, yet inside I felt the warm glow of genuine appreciation for my elderly mentor. Maybe even love?
CHAPTER 29
It had been six months since my first date with Stephanie. I was so busy spinning plates I almost missed the milestone. I planned a nice dinner and bought her a pair of zirconium diamond earrings with literally all of the money I had in my bank account. No more credit cards for this guy! My humble offering was vital to laying the groundwork for a major ask: I wanted to move in together.
I had never breached this relationship Maginot Line. This was real adult relationship stuff. Way over my head. I was sure she was going to think I was crazy. Maybe even break up with me for asking so soon.
At dinner, after the presentation of the earrings, I screwed up my courage. Being a natural romantic, I lead with the idea that we’d save money by moving in together. We’d only pay one rent, share the utilities, our food bills likely reduced. It made sense economically. Every girl’s fairytale.
She hesitated; my pitch was going off the rails. Time for a Hail Mary. I said, “And besides all that, I just like spending time with you and this will give us a chance to share those little moments between life’s happening that make it magical. I know it seems kinda quick, but when you know, you just know.” Thanks for the assist, Mr. X. She lit up like a Christmas tree.
“You’re right,” she said. “We should move in together. My lease is up pretty soon and I was considering moving anyway. And like you said, we’ll both be able to save more money. Let’s do it.” She beamed; I just stared. I wanted to sear this memory into my consciousness forever. Making her happy swelled my heart.
After a diligent search, we found an apartment. It was slightly nicer than either of the studio apartment hovels we were currently inhabiting. It had two tiny bedrooms--fancy times! The only downside was it was located near the light-rail tracks. As in, right below the tracks. We got to know the light-rail schedule intimately, but you get used to the noise faster than you might expect. Some odd part of you even starts to crave it. It didn’t take long for it to feel like home.
We weren’t far from the light-rail stop, which meant we had an easy jump off point to adventure around the city. The local baseball team had cheap tickets and even cheaper hot dogs on Tuesday nights. I didn’t have class that evening, so game night quickly became our weekly ritual. Light-rail home meant we could drink all the beer we wanted, or until my wallet was empty, usually the latter. The team had a young batch of rising stars who were delivering ahead of schedule. The future held so much promise.
This isn’t a fairytale. My own insecurities started rearing their ugly heads. You probably knew they would eventually. Why was she so friendly with that good-looking guy in her lab? Who is she texting with? Everyone has their own brand of crazy that they can mostly hide from the rest of the world. But when you live with someone, eventually the armor cracks. Cohabitation is a whole different ball of wax from dating. It’s hard not to lose a little of the magic when you peek behind the curtain. There are so many small opportunities to pick at the edges of the relationship, loosening the threads.
Inevitably both Steph and I started to let our demons out, and it wasn't always pretty. Our good times together were amazing. I’d never been in a relationship where I cared this much. But our bad times raised real doubts, at least inside my noisy head.
Didn’t you say you were going to vacuum while I was gone?
The clothes are clean in the basket--just put them away!
Am I the only one who ever cleans out the fridge?
Gross, don’t leave your hair in the sink.
It’s fine. (Definitely not fine.)
Her most biting remarks were around how busy I always was. To be fair, I had a lot going on between work, school, and Wichita. When any unexpected deadline would come up, my time with Steph was the shock absorber to take the hit. I could tell she was feeling neglected.
It was a confusing time for me. Mr. X was chipping the scales from my eyes every few weeks. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up anymore. When we’d visit Steph’s parents for dinner, I could feel her dad shooting icy daggers my way. He didn’t like me; my hunch was he thought his daughter could do better. He might have been right.
I was pretty sure Stephanie was special. I knew I was usually a better version of myself around her. But it was my first serious relationship. Where was the third-party independent assessment to tell us we were a good match? I wondered if I had time for a serious relationship. I wondered if we were too young and things had progressed too far, too fast. Like somehow the relationship had taken on a life and momentum of its own independent of either of us. I felt swept along in it. Like I said, I was confused.
I’d ask myself everyday: had I met the right girl, but maybe just at the wrong time?
CHAPTER 30
Cathy called to tell me that Mr. X was not doing well and he might need to cancel my next trip out. At the last minute, she said I should come out just in case. Perhaps reflecting Mr. X’s fading vitality, this week’s quote was short.
“Start with the customer and work backwards.”
-- Jeff Bezos
Cathy set it up for me to meet Mr. X near the riverwalk in downtown Wichita. His doctors had advised him to get more outdoor fresh air. Seeing him appear with the walker last time had been jarring, but this time was much worse. Cathy appeared pushing Mr. X in a wheelchair. His hair was a messy thicket, and not just from the continual light breeze that was blowing. He looked like he might have just woken up.
“Nice wheels,” I said.
“At least I can still sit up,” he shot back with an unexpected vigor. His mind was still sharp, imprisoned in the crumbling architecture of his body. Ugh, what an awful thing to happen to someone.
“OK, boys,” Cathy said. “I’m going to take advantage of this time downtown to do some shopping. Do you think you can handle this thing?”
“The old man or the wheelchair?” I said.
“You’re lucky I can’t stand up, sonny.”
“Call me if you need anything,” Cathy said over her shoulder as she beelined for a dose of retail therapy.
Mr. X and I walked for a while, reconnecting with small talk. He asked how Stephanie was doing. Good, I said. When I was around to see her. I asked for the latest on his medical conditions. He didn’t share a lot of details except to say that it was getting worse. Ya think? We walked passed a giant art installation, a statue of a Native American in full headdress. He was wielding a toma
hawk in both hands, about to land a blow that would never fall. Behind the statue in the near distance were thick black threads attached to aluminum towers carrying high voltage electricity. I marvelled at the juxtaposition between the old and new symbols of power.
“Did you like the Jeff Bezos quote?” Mr. X said. Schools in.
“I liked that it was short,” I said.
“Figures,” he said. “Let’s unpack what he’s saying. I’ll start by giving you a thought experiment that can be applied to any business. At Cootie, we call it the Eleven-Star Experience Exercise. Kind of a mouthful, but the name doesn’t matter.”
“I thought you could only go up to five stars?”
Before he could reply, he shook violently in a fit of coughing. He settled down and continued, “I think that’s true, but you’ll see why we have eleven. Have you ever stayed at a five-star hotel?”
“No, I’m not a billionaire, remember,” I said. “But I’ve seen enough movies to have a pretty good idea what it might be like.”
“This shouldn’t surprise you, but I hardly ever stay at fancy hotels. I feel out of place and just don’t need that kind of luxury... my poor Kansas roots, I guess?”
“Anything better than dirt floors and an outhouse would be an upgrade,” I said.
“Back to our thought experiment. What would you expect a six-star experience to be like?” he said.
I thought for a moment, “Well, I’d want my own private butler, that’s for sure.” I pictured myself as Lloyd Christmas from Dumb and Dumber handing out wads of cash to attentive servants. “There you go… there you go…”
Mr. X snapped me out of my daydream, “How about a seven-star experience?”
“Let’s see, they’d know all of my favorite foods. And the TV would only show the channels I liked.”
We continued the conversation like this through three more stars of increasing ridiculousness. Eventually, Mr. X asked, “Finally, what would an eleven-star experience look like?”
“For me, it’d be on the moon. There’d be an elaborate production where I was James Bond and we’d re-enact Moonraker. And just like Bond, I’d defeat the bad guy and get the girl.” Mr. X smiled at the ludicrous idea of my perfect experience.
“So other than some fun daydreaming, what is the point of this thought exercise?” he asked rhetorically. “Obviously a hotel couldn’t afford to send you to the moon and make you James Bond for any reasonable price. But if we can anchor our mindsets upward to an eleven-star experience, it really opens up what might be feasible and innovative at a lower level to make the customer feel fantastic. Every business will be different. It’s about cracking our minds open to find the obvious improvements that are hiding in plain sight.”
“Interesting,” I said. “If you go ridiculously far in one direction, other ideas don’t seem so crazy. You change the reference point.”
I pushed the wheelchair along the river walk. We were both quiet with our thoughts. Something occurred to me. “Mr. X,” I said. “If you’re trying to deliver maximum value to Cootie Burger customers, shouldn’t you offer more than just burgers, fries, and shakes? What about someone who wants a chicken sandwich? Or a salad? If you gave customers more choices, they could pick what they wanted and would maximize their subjective experience. They could shift their own Value straws out farther if they got to pick, right?”
He smiled, presumably at my reference to his straws. “That’s a very logical observation, Nick. In fact, it was an idea my father fell victim to. While I was away at college, he experimented with all kinds of different menu options. Fried chicken, grits and okra--you name it. It seemed like a good idea, but it nearly destroyed the business. I had to learn the hard way why it didn’t work.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“The problem is, humans aren’t always logical. Our brains evolved for survival, not necessarily logic. Have you ever heard of the paradox of choice?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s a simple enough concept. As you give people more choices, it gets harder for them to make a decision. They start to feel overwhelmed.”
“I’ve had that feeling before at the freezer aisle trying to decide which ice cream to buy.”
“Me, too,” he said. “People end up less happy with their final choice because it seems like they gave up too many other great options to choose just one.”
“Damn you, Cherry Garcia. I knew I should have picked Rocky Road!” I said.
His chuckle devolved into a coughing fit. I felt bad for instigating the attack. “The grass is always greener,” he eventually said. “Especially in today’s modern society when we have so many options. We’re bombarded with constant decisions. One study found that the average adult makes thirty thousand decisions per day. We end up making bad choices on the big stuff because we’ve drained all our decision-making energy on the inconsequential.”
“I might have read about that before,” I said. “Apparently Steve Jobs wore the same black turtleneck all of the time for that reason. He didn’t have to waste any effort picking out what to wear from his closet.”
“I do something similar, but it’s not as extreme. Mostly hospital gowns these days,” he lamented.
“So back to my original question, Mr. X. Why doesn’t Cootie have a bigger menu? Too many choices make people unhappy?”
“We’re doing our customers a favor,” he said. “We’re making their choices more manageable. There are some good business reasons to have a simplified menu. It makes managing inventory much easier. You don’t have to throw away spoiling food because people didn’t want chicken sandwiches that week for some reason. Throwing away food in the restaurant business is akin to throwing away money.”
“Hard to make a profit when you’re throwing money into the garbage,” I said.
“For sure. It also simplifies your operations. You don’t have to train employees on how to make ten different items. They make fewer mistakes, and new hires get up to speed faster. It’s not that big of a deal when we’re talking about making hamburgers, but for other businesses, it can make a real difference.”
“And maybe most importantly,” he continued. “There’s a glitch in the human mind: if you offer only one or two things, people assume you do those few things very well. Maybe even the best. If you took your car in for an oil change and the auto shop also did hair cuts, would you expect them to be very good at either service?”
“Probably not. Though if you wanted one of those greaser haircuts from the 1950s, that’d be the place to go.”
“Maybe that’s an unexplored niche?” he joked. “The important point is people can only remember so many things about your business. They’re busy living their lives. You want to make it easy and unambiguous for them to form associations about what you’re good at.”
“I think one of my professors called that a unique selling proposition. Is that right?”
“Yes,” he said. “Could your customers explain in ten seconds what makes you so great? We do burgers, fries, and shakes at Cootie. Full stop. We happen to do focus on quality and provide great service. Because we don’t offer anything else, it’s very clear what you’re going to get when you visit. People know what to expect, which is comforting. So when one of their friends asks where’s a great place to get a burger, we own that space in their mind and they reflexively think of us. That becomes a form of advertising.”
“Oh, due to the brand that you’ve built through so many customer interactions,” I said, connecting dots with our past conversations. “That fat that you have stored in your customers’ minds.”
“That’s exactly why over-delivering on value is such an important goal for us,” he said. “Someone sharing the best place to get a burger with a friend is worth how many TV or radio advertising spots? Can you name the brand of the last radio commercial you heard?”
“Umm… no,” I said.
“How about the last great restaurant someone told you to check out?”
&
nbsp; I thought for a second, “Yes, a little hole-in-the-wall taqueria near campus. They have amazing salsa.”
“You get my point,” he said. “Let’s think a little more broadly. One of the most important expenses any business has is the cost to find customers and get them in the door. In business school, they probably called it ‘customer acquisition cost.’”
“That sounds familiar,” I said.
“It’s simple enough. Cootie could invest in radio advertising to get people to come eat our burgers. We could advertise on billboards. Or skywriting. Or on the internet. Each medium has a certain cost and expected return in traffic, though it’s usually very difficult to measure that return. There’s an old joke in advertising that fifty percent of ads are massively successful and fifty percent of ads are a total waste.” He paused to build for the punchline. “The problem is, no one knows which half is which!” With this he laughed heartily and spiraled himself into another coughing fit. At least it wasn’t my fault this time.
“I didn’t know there were advertising-specific jokes,” I said.
“There are,” he nodded. “I have another one for you in a minute. I want to make something clear first: there’s nothing wrong with traditional advertising. We use it at Cootie. We just happen to believe focusing on a stellar in-store experience and viral word-of-mouth are more effective for us. What’s really nice is that if a customer refers us to a friend, they’re basically making a public proclamation that they like eating at our restaurant. People have a strong internal desire to appear consistent with what they say to their friends. So by making the referral, they reinforce their own good feelings and commitment to liking Cootie.”