(11-22-2013 05:19 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 03:18 PM)goofus Wrote:  

Its time to go to a 30 hour workweek to increase employment IMO.

Obama care is one upping you by sending everyone to 25 to 28 hour work weeks.

(11-24-2013 02:33 AM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 12:50 AM)miko33 Wrote:  This is where I think the G5 schools have the opportunity to excel and truly help the U.S. economy out in the long term. Instead of trying to compete with the land grant universities and those that have established themselves as the dominant public and private universities out there, complement them instead by moving towards the vocational/technical areas that are sorely lacking today. No offense to G5 alumni, and I truly truly mean this, but many of your universities were not designed to become "just like the dominant state schools". They were originally intended to be complimentary in nature by either 1) offering more access to the less fortunate and/or 2) focusing on those courses of study in the areas of education and technology. I know people will accuse me of saying that it's UnAmerican, socialist, etc to discourage competition between the universities. That's wrong minded thinking IMHO, because we are talking public institutions competing against other public institutions primarily, and there IS no "free market competition" when we're talking about institutions that are objectively gov't entities. With that in mind, it can be argued that it's actually a waste of taxpayer money to have some of these G5 schools trying to duplicate the efforts of its fellow state flagship universities.

Where I think the tax payer resource arguement should come into play is at the level of curtailing federal aid of schools that graduate less than 65% of their students.

That will pool resources among the better state schools and reduce the directionals back down to the 8000 student regional colleges they were always designed to be.

At the graduate level though any school having the resources in place to run an PhD program should be allowed to do so. The more highly educated students the merrier.

If the competition buys down the mean GPA of graduate college from undergraduate schools from a 3.5 to a 3.3 that's just splitting hairs when you are talking 23 year olds who have already graduated college.

The bigger difference is when you're state system goes from accepting anyone out of high school with a 2.0 to a 3.0. That is a huge difference between a 35% and a 70% graduate rate for those students on average.

There is no way directionals are going to be able to compete with For Profit educational institutions that are offering certifications for 2000 dollars. Southern Illinois for example is not going to have 20,000 kids want to go 6 hours from Chicago to pick up an IT certificate they can get right down the street.

I very much disagree with your Phd comment. Those degrees are basically for college professors and researchers. Its a waste of resources and reduces synergies to have every school that wants to offer those degrees. States need to control what their schools are offering, not allowing them to do whatever they want (as Texas basically does and many other states have been unable to avoid mission creep). Schools need to exist to serve different needs. In states with more than a handful of schools, some should be open admission and some should be difficult to get into.

(11-24-2013 08:31 AM)goodknightfl Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 05:19 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 03:18 PM)goofus Wrote:  

Its time to go to a 30 hour workweek to increase employment IMO.

Obama care is one upping you by sending everyone to 25 to 28 hour work weeks.

You might want to read some recent articles regarding Wal-Mart and McDonalds or older stories on Circuit City.

Wal-Mart cut back on staffing presumably to dodge some ACA obligations. The net result was falling same store sales as Wal-Mart was unable to keep shelves stocked and keep checkout lines running efficiently. They have since restored hours for many workers and made a big show of handing out a lot of raises and converting more people to permanent positions.

McDonald's operators have been slicing hours and McDonald's has sent a bulletin to operators noting that customer satisfaction is falling with more customers calling in to report poor service and noting some indications of weakening sales.

Circuit City in a cost-cutting move sliced a lot of higher paid long-term employees and sales fell off the table as customers could no longer get quality help in many stores when experienced employees were replaced with less knowledgeable employees. Many analysts think Circuit City couldn't be saved as it was but the move hastened the chain's collapse.

I've learned from a lot of travel that the best thing you can do when flying is stay away from an airline in bankruptcy or just coming out. Employee dissatisfaction makes flying those airlines a miserable experience.

The biggest risk to American businesses isn't government or taxes or regulations. It's MBA's with an Excel spreadsheet who assume employees are simple inputs in businesses that depends on customer experience

Thinking more about automation of retail.

It's certainly not an impossibility but there are some really big hurdles.

First issue is I don't think there are real savings to be found in real estate unless you go to a delivery model rather than a stop by and pick it up on the way home model. Delivery is expensive to offer and most retail segments operate on very thin margins.

There are indications that suburbanization has run its course with many projecting shifting population to urban centers by the middle class. That means fewer square feet of storage space and orders from retailers that are smaller. Take coffee for example. Shipping efficiency means you want to sell a 36 count package of K cups but the customer likely wants only a 12 count package if the customer lives in a small apartment or condo.

As I've mentioned previously the current retail model relies on the profitability of impulse buys. The cost of goods has to rise if you aren't selling a $1 candy bar or $1.50 soda or $3 magazine to someone in the checkout line.

Packaging has to change. Current packaging is designed to market the product but the lack of standardization will make it harder for a robot or whatever you want to call the automation device to identify the product and pull it from inventory. Packaging designed to hang from a rack is less desirable than packaging designed to sit on a shelf. This creates a high entry barrier for manufacturers who will need to ship product in packaging to designed to attract consumers as well as packaging designed to be efficient for automation during the years of transition. It also creates an inefficiency as manufacturers will still need to hire creatives to design attractive packaging but then only use it for part of their shipping.

There are few gains of efficiency of scale to be had because the big retailers are already so large. Amazon this morning sent me an email offering my favorite brand of coffee in K cups in a large box that will be shipped to my door. Normally I buy coffee when I make a cup in the morning and see I've only got a few K cups left. I stop at a store that is on my route home from work. Amazon offers me the chance to make fewer stops but I need to plan ahead unless they start offering same day delivery. The rub though is that with their efficiency of scale they are offering me my favorite Community Club coffee for two cents per cup more than the cost of buying it at my local grocery store with my loyalty card and that's before I reap the benefit of discounted gasoline purchased with my loyalty card points.

Delivery presents its own problems. I cannot easily receive packages at work since I'm only in my office about 30 weeks of the year. Other people work in environments where accepting delivery at work isn't possible. Delivery to home presents its own issues. If you have signed for delivery then delivery times have to be tightly coordinated. We commonly see knock and drop delivery today. The driver knocks if there is no answer the package is left by the door. You can get away with that in my neighborhood but if knock and drop becomes even more widespread that creates a whole new crime opportunity and the struggle of who loses if your package disappears off your porch before you get home.

I'm not about to say that the obstacles cannot be overcome but I think this going t be a tougher nut to crack than books, music and movies that had high mark-ups and luckily for Amazon, Apple, and Netflix lent themselves to being moved to a digital format disrupting brick and mortar retailers.

(11-24-2013 02:11 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  Thinking more about automation of retail.

It's certainly not an impossibility but there are some really big hurdles.

First issue is I don't think there are real savings to be found in real estate unless you go to a delivery model rather than a stop by and pick it up on the way home model. Delivery is expensive to offer and most retail segments operate on very thin margins.

There are indications that suburbanization has run its course with many projecting shifting population to urban centers by the middle class. That means fewer square feet of storage space and orders from retailers that are smaller. Take coffee for example. Shipping efficiency means you want to sell a 36 count package of K cups but the customer likely wants only a 12 count package if the customer lives in a small apartment or condo.

As I've mentioned previously the current retail model relies on the profitability of impulse buys. The cost of goods has to rise if you aren't selling a $1 candy bar or $1.50 soda or $3 magazine to someone in the checkout line.

Packaging has to change. Current packaging is designed to market the product but the lack of standardization will make it harder for a robot or whatever you want to call the automation device to identify the product and pull it from inventory. Packaging designed to hang from a rack is less desirable than packaging designed to sit on a shelf. This creates a high entry barrier for manufacturers who will need to ship product in packaging to designed to attract consumers as well as packaging designed to be efficient for automation during the years of transition. It also creates an inefficiency as manufacturers will still need to hire creatives to design attractive packaging but then only use it for part of their shipping.

There are few gains of efficiency of scale to be had because the big retailers are already so large. Amazon this morning sent me an email offering my favorite brand of coffee in K cups in a large box that will be shipped to my door. Normally I buy coffee when I make a cup in the morning and see I've only got a few K cups left. I stop at a store that is on my route home from work. Amazon offers me the chance to make fewer stops but I need to plan ahead unless they start offering same day delivery. The rub though is that with their efficiency of scale they are offering me my favorite Community Club coffee for two cents per cup more than the cost of buying it at my local grocery store with my loyalty card and that's before I reap the benefit of discounted gasoline purchased with my loyalty card points.

Delivery presents its own problems. I cannot easily receive packages at work since I'm only in my office about 30 weeks of the year. Other people work in environments where accepting delivery at work isn't possible. Delivery to home presents its own issues. If you have signed for delivery then delivery times have to be tightly coordinated. We commonly see knock and drop delivery today. The driver knocks if there is no answer the package is left by the door. You can get away with that in my neighborhood but if knock and drop becomes even more widespread that creates a whole new crime opportunity and the struggle of who loses if your package disappears off your porch before you get home.

I'm not about to say that the obstacles cannot be overcome but I think this going t be a tougher nut to crack than books, music and movies that had high mark-ups and luckily for Amazon, Apple, and Netflix lent themselves to being moved to a digital format disrupting brick and mortar retailers.

The automation is in billing and collecting. The reduced staff is from the need to keep extra persons on the floor to zone and merchandise. The staff does pick and pack. And yes the model I presented was a pick up, not a delivery. The selling point is time and convenience. Point of purchase and impulse items would have to be advertised on the web page for a virtual grocery store. Instead of reading a list of items you would peruse their virtual images to add them to your cart. Some impulse would still apply.

(11-24-2013 03:18 PM)JRsec Wrote:  The automation is in billing and collecting. The reduced staff is from the need to keep extra persons on the floor to zone and merchandise. The staff does pick and pack. And yes the model I presented was a pick up, not a delivery. The selling point is time and convenience. Point of purchase and impulse items would have to be advertised on the web page for a virtual grocery store. Instead of reading a list of items you would peruse their virtual images to add them to your cart. Some impulse would still apply.

Ok I misunderstood you. I thought you were talking about automating pulling from the shelves.

There have been a couple experiments with RFID tagging for checkout carts. Instead of going to a self-serve register the cart serves as the register. It logs what you put in (and take out) and displays a running total. Once you think you are done you swipe your card on the cart or use a near field card.

Don't recall if the customer bagged or they offered bagging.

I can certainly see that sort of automation.

I use square wallet at a local bakery. I was eating lunch at a restaurant in the same strip mall and received a tweet from the owner (who I know well enough to call an acquaintance) asking if I was dropping in for dessert. Went down bought a couple cookies for my support staff and a cup cake for myself. All I had to do to pay was sign their iPad with my finger and had the receipt in my inbox before I made it out the door.

Payment and billing is ripe for improvement.

(11-24-2013 10:36 AM)bullet Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 02:33 AM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 12:50 AM)miko33 Wrote:  This is where I think the G5 schools have the opportunity to excel and truly help the U.S. economy out in the long term. Instead of trying to compete with the land grant universities and those that have established themselves as the dominant public and private universities out there, complement them instead by moving towards the vocational/technical areas that are sorely lacking today. No offense to G5 alumni, and I truly truly mean this, but many of your universities were not designed to become "just like the dominant state schools". They were originally intended to be complimentary in nature by either 1) offering more access to the less fortunate and/or 2) focusing on those courses of study in the areas of education and technology. I know people will accuse me of saying that it's UnAmerican, socialist, etc to discourage competition between the universities. That's wrong minded thinking IMHO, because we are talking public institutions competing against other public institutions primarily, and there IS no "free market competition" when we're talking about institutions that are objectively gov't entities. With that in mind, it can be argued that it's actually a waste of taxpayer money to have some of these G5 schools trying to duplicate the efforts of its fellow state flagship universities.

Where I think the tax payer resource arguement should come into play is at the level of curtailing federal aid of schools that graduate less than 65% of their students.

That will pool resources among the better state schools and reduce the directionals back down to the 8000 student regional colleges they were always designed to be.

At the graduate level though any school having the resources in place to run an PhD program should be allowed to do so. The more highly educated students the merrier.

If the competition buys down the mean GPA of graduate college from undergraduate schools from a 3.5 to a 3.3 that's just splitting hairs when you are talking 23 year olds who have already graduated college.

The bigger difference is when you're state system goes from accepting anyone out of high school with a 2.0 to a 3.0. That is a huge difference between a 35% and a 70% graduate rate for those students on average.

There is no way directionals are going to be able to compete with For Profit educational institutions that are offering certifications for 2000 dollars. Southern Illinois for example is not going to have 20,000 kids want to go 6 hours from Chicago to pick up an IT certificate they can get right down the street.

I very much disagree with your Phd comment. Those degrees are basically for college professors and researchers. Its a waste of resources and reduces synergies to have every school that wants to offer those degrees. States need to control what their schools are offering, not allowing them to do whatever they want (as Texas basically does and many other states have been unable to avoid mission creep). Schools need to exist to serve different needs. In states with more than a handful of schools, some should be open admission and some should be difficult to get into.

-You would be surprised how much demand there is for PhD's to use applied research methods in the field of finance as one example. The tools used by financial advisors by major banks have a team of PhD's who select algorithms and correlate information and analysts reports behind the scenes.

-Often times its required that any research proposal with federal sources that somebody in the team has a PhD. There are many companies that need PhD's chasing this type of work.

-I agree there is a lot of mission creep out there already. That is exactly what is being proposed with the idea of having "directional" schools offer for profit IT certificates as a way to boost revenue.

-I'm not saying that schools can't continue to be open admissions. What I'm saying is that if schools aren't graduating kids at a clip of say 60% those institutions should be penalized instead of having access to unlimited federally backed loans.

-There are open admission universities that graduate 60% while some "Land Grant" institutions don't. Some of the P5 institutions should be subject to rightsizing.

-The state should have control over approving and authorizing PhD programs. That I agree with. If an institution has for example and engineering school that offers PhD's in Mechanical, Electrical and Civil Engineering along with 50 faculty and its bachelor's degree accredited in Computer Science with 10 faculty in that department why can't that school offer a PhD in Computer Science? The university in this example has the underlying fundamentals and demand to justify the PhD program but ends up blocked by the state legislature.

The same state officials crying "STEM" are the same ones who don't what to approve a PhD program in Computer Science or Molecular Biology at a directional school even if the resources are there and the demand is there from having 100 students major in it at the undergraduate level.

-There is a quality problem at an undergraduate level (not necessarily a directional problem) and access problem at the graduate level dictated by state politics.

(11-24-2013 01:33 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 08:31 AM)goodknightfl Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 05:19 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 03:18 PM)goofus Wrote:  

Its time to go to a 30 hour workweek to increase employment IMO.

Obama care is one upping you by sending everyone to 25 to 28 hour work weeks.

The biggest risk to American businesses isn't government or taxes or regulations. It's MBA's with an Excel spreadsheet who assume employees are simple inputs in businesses that depends on customer experience

You've hit the nail on the head.

The country has got to move away from the MBA/MPA graduate programs where its set up like a boot camp with exams and social networking happy hours designed to "get jobs". Traditional MBA's are also getting undercut by the rise in For Profit degree mills offering MBA's online. Programs that are filled mostly with people who couldn't get jobs out of undergraduate and didn't have the grades to pursue graduate work in their field of study.

If the requirement was to have a PhD in economics to be hired to do market research for a company you're going to have someone who understands how to create surveys and perform evaluations. Someone who knows how to roll up their sleeves instead of shuffling the work over to someone else. The ability to perform the heavy lifting in corporate organizations is just not there.

It's the PhD's, MD's, good lawyers, CEO's ect that have done the heavy lifting in an conceptual or academic context that are in short supply. Mediocre grads from land grant schools are in over supply.

So, P5 vs. G5.....

(11-24-2013 01:33 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 08:31 AM)goodknightfl Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 05:19 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 03:18 PM)goofus Wrote:  

Its time to go to a 30 hour workweek to increase employment IMO.

Obama care is one upping you by sending everyone to 25 to 28 hour work weeks.

You might want to read some recent articles regarding Wal-Mart and McDonalds or older stories on Circuit City.

Wal-Mart cut back on staffing presumably to dodge some ACA obligations. The net result was falling same store sales as Wal-Mart was unable to keep shelves stocked and keep checkout lines running efficiently. They have since restored hours for many workers and made a big show of handing out a lot of raises and converting more people to permanent positions.

McDonald's operators have been slicing hours and McDonald's has sent a bulletin to operators noting that customer satisfaction is falling with more customers calling in to report poor service and noting some indications of weakening sales.

Circuit City in a cost-cutting move sliced a lot of higher paid long-term employees and sales fell off the table as customers could no longer get quality help in many stores when experienced employees were replaced with less knowledgeable employees. Many analysts think Circuit City couldn't be saved as it was but the move hastened the chain's collapse.

I've learned from a lot of travel that the best thing you can do when flying is stay away from an airline in bankruptcy or just coming out. Employee dissatisfaction makes flying those airlines a miserable experience.

The biggest risk to American businesses isn't government or taxes or regulations. It's MBA's with an Excel spreadsheet who assume employees are simple inputs in businesses that depends on customer experience

Yep, corporations are making record profits and their stocks are doing very well, but they are not creating a bigger market for themselves by hiring more workers and paying their current ones more money to buy the shiny things they make.

(11-25-2013 07:40 AM)TerryD Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 01:33 PM)arkstfan Wrote:  

(11-24-2013 08:31 AM)goodknightfl Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 05:19 PM)Kittonhead Wrote:  

(11-22-2013 03:18 PM)goofus Wrote:  

Its time to go to a 30 hour workweek to increase employment IMO.

Obama care is one upping you by sending everyone to 25 to 28 hour work weeks.

You might want to read some recent articles regarding Wal-Mart and McDonalds or older stories on Circuit City.

Wal-Mart cut back on staffing presumably to dodge some ACA obligations. The net result was falling same store sales as Wal-Mart was unable to keep shelves stocked and keep checkout lines running efficiently. They have since restored hours for many workers and made a big show of handing out a lot of raises and converting more people to permanent positions.

McDonald's operators have been slicing hours and McDonald's has sent a bulletin to operators noting that customer satisfaction is falling with more customers calling in to report poor service and noting some indications of weakening sales.

Circuit City in a cost-cutting move sliced a lot of higher paid long-term employees and sales fell off the table as customers could no longer get quality help in many stores when experienced employees were replaced with less knowledgeable employees. Many analysts think Circuit City couldn't be saved as it was but the move hastened the chain's collapse.

I've learned from a lot of travel that the best thing you can do when flying is stay away from an airline in bankruptcy or just coming out. Employee dissatisfaction makes flying those airlines a miserable experience.

The biggest risk to American businesses isn't government or taxes or regulations. It's MBA's with an Excel spreadsheet who assume employees are simple inputs in businesses that depends on customer experience

Yep, corporations are making record profits and their stocks are doing very well, but they are not creating a bigger market for themselves by hiring more workers and paying their current ones more money to buy the shiny things they make.

And they create a buying experience that creates ill-will and makes it easier for competitors to gain acceptance.

I miss browsing the stacks at Waldenbook or Barnes and Noble (which I can still do) but I hated the customer experience. If I needed to special order a book it was a hassle. The staff was generally indifferent. So I started using Amazon and then once I moved to e-books there was no turning back.

Chick-Fil-A is growing because no one in fast food consistently offers as good of a customer service experience.

A local publication did a story recently about raising the minimum wage. They interviewed the manager of a fast food restaurant who said they hire at minimum, when they identify good workers he tries to get them raises to keep them up to $10 per hour. Then he went off the rails from the storyline he was supposed to stick to and said that if the owners would allow him to pay a few key employees $12 and the mid-levels $10, let them have 40 hours a week and a consistent shift that they could rely on knowing their hours and days off that he could save a lot of time and money in constantly training the waves of part-time employees and getting them uniforms. He would deliver a better customer experience because invariably the customer complaints he has to deal with trace back to either new people cooking or rude treatment by a part-timer.