Going Non-Smoking – For The Record

Today marks the first day that the lounge that is located inside the hotel I work at goes “Non-Smoking”. I’ve only known that they had decided to do this for about a week. When I first heard about it, I thought that it was the worst decision I had ever heard of. There’s no law that required the owner to make this decision, but since she had been “talking to people” and those people happened to think it was a good idea, she decided to ban smoking in the bar.

The owner is a smoker. In the past, she had circulated a petition before the decision was made on a previous smoking law. Right now, I respect the decision that she has made, and I am thankful that she was actually “able to make the decision”, rather than it being some law that “forced” her to do it. I would rather that any owner of a business make decisions about what can and can’t happen in their own business.

That being said, after I’ve had a week to think about it, I still think that this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of… maybe not “the” worst idea, but it definitely ranks up there.

There are about 8 or 9 bars, here in our small town. One of the busiest bars in town has only been open for a little less than a year. Ever since they opened, they have been a “smoking” bar. When they first opened, the place became very popular, and it continues to be the most popular bar in town. A wide variety of people regularly visit the bar… everyone from kids that go to college to the “biker” types to business people and even farmers that drive into town from the country. Ever since they opened, their business has not slowed down. It’s always busy, and most nights, there’s always some sort of fight… good times!

The bar in our hotel does not run any kind of specials (that I know of) and they don’t seem to do a whole lot to reach out into the community to pull customers in. Now, they are going to not allow people to smoke inside their bar. Last Monday night, there was a person that sat in the bar until about 9:30pm. He told me that “every single regular customer” that came in that night was a smoker. At this point in time, I can only imagine how this is going to turn out for them. I actually do not have access to their financial numbers, so I have no honest way to know how this will affect them in that section, but I have been working in the hotel for almost 8 years, so I should be able to notice any sort of differences in actual traffic.

They have already announced to all of their Facebook followers that they will be turning into a non-smoking bar as of April 1st (not a joke, by the way). They have talked to various people in the community, and the feedback that they have received has been positive. They have said things like “Great, now I’ll be able to go in there. It used to be way too smoky for me.” Honestly, unless it was a “really” busy night, the ventilation system handled the smoke pretty well, and it never actually smelled like smoke to the point of being even noticeable.

Here’s what I’m guessing will happen. For the first week or two, the traffic will stay about the same. It will not increase or decrease any noticeable amount. The people that the owner had talked to before making her decision will come in and have a few drinks. Over the next couple weeks, they will visit once or twice, each. After that, most of them will only visit the bar once or twice a year. After the first couple of weeks, there will be a noticeable drop in actual traffic. People that were “regulars” (the ones that were smokers) may come in to have a drink, but as soon as they realize that they will have to go outside of the hotel to smoke a cigarette, they will keep on walking. There will be a few smokers that may not have heard about the change that will light up a cigarette, and start looking for an ashtray. They will be told about the new policy, and they will become upset to the point of yelling. After about three or four months, the owner will realize that she may have made a mistake, and she will start having serious thoughts about changing it back to a smoking bar. That’s all they will amount to, though, is just “thoughts”. There is no way that she will admit to having made a mistake, much less admit that she is having those thoughts.

Like I said, I can only imagine, at this point, what will actually happen. I actually hope, for the owner’s sake, that I’m wrong, and that business really does improve like she hopes. I know that I’ll be keeping an eye on what I see, though.

Doing A Little Updating

I was actually planning on buying another domain, and try to move away from using the username that I’ve used for years. I decided against it, however, and will continue with the “webfeed” username. I will also begin to expand on the domain, and start including other categories and subdomains, here. I will still use the WordPress.com site for the main blog, but I will run others on my own server.

It may take some time, but I think I’ll be able to post a lot more often, from now on.

The reason that I wanted to move away from the username is because of all of the old crap that is out there when you do a search for it. Most of the things that show up on a Google search are no longer available. I figure that, in time, that will all get filtered out, and head to the bottom of the results.

For now, as I set some more things up, some of the links may not work correctly. Soon, I’ll get all of the subdomains listed, and we’ll be up and running, again. I know that it’s been a while, but life and stress has taken its toll on me, and I think that I’m ready to get back into it, now that things have settled down, a bit.

Keep watching.

Summer Vacation 2012

We’ll be taking a little trip to Selkirk, this coming summer, to kick someone’s ass. Expect us!

A Black President? Muhammad Ali’s comments…

Too Pretty For Homework

On August 31st at 5am, I saw something in my G+ stream that I decided to take action on. A shirt that was being sold online by JC Penny had been mentioned by one of the people I have circled. The shirt read, “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me”. Obviously, the message that the shirt is sending has a big problem… I won’t get into that, here.

Rather than re-posting what Anna had written, or writing anything about it on my own, I immediately went to the JC Penny website and looked for their contact information. I called a toll-free number and was talking to a customer service person rather quickly (it was 5 in the morning, so I really didn’t have to hold, at all).

I told her that I was calling about the shirt. She had me describe the shirt to her. I could tell that she was looking it up, writing stuff down, or something. I explained to her that I “personally” didn’t have a problem with them selling the shirt. I also explained how I found the shirt, though, and was concerned that this could spread into a PR nightmare (I referred to it as a “shitstorm”) for them, once this started spreading out to Twitter and Facebook. She took my name and phone number and said that somebody would get back to me about this.

Right after I got off the phone, I did a search to see how far this had gone, already, and came up with hardly anything about it. There were a few links to the products page at jcpenny.com and not much else.

Well, within about three hours of me calling them, the shirt had been removed from their website. Of course, I’m not sure about how many other calls they received, but that was pretty quick. This morning (September 1st), I received a call from them, just after 9am. They thanked me for letting them know about it, and informed me that they were no longer selling the shirt.

Within the last hour, I decided to see just how far the “shitstorm” went, so I did a search for “too pretty for homework” on Google. To my surprise, there were over 300 results. Everything from large media sites to personal blogs had been in an uproar over this. There were 170 news articles mentioning this on Google News. An online petition had even been started, and had gathered more than 1000 signatures. JC Penny’s Facebook page was loaded with comments (both good and bad) about the shirt.

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to write this post. I have a couple different thoughts about this.

Was the shirt sending a bad message? In my opinion, it was.

Should the problem have been noticed before the shirt was ever sold? Yes, unless JC Penny only has pretty girls working for them (j/k).

If social media was not a deciding factor in whether the shirt should remain for sale (if social media didn’t exist) would the shirt have remained on their website, for sale? Possibly.

If JC Penny was never directly called, would the shirt have been removed as fast as it was? How long would it have taken them to discover that they were the center of a shitstorm if nobody actually contacted them, and only used social media to voice their opinions?

Like I said, before, I don’t know how many other people directly called and contacted JC Penny about this. I only contacted them because I knew where this would go, once it hit Twitter and Facebook. I don’t have any loyalty to JC Penny, at all, except that they are the only place I can still seem to find Levi’s 501′s. I just hate to see anybody (a company or a person) blasted online for small mistakes, though. In the scope of everything, this was actually a pretty small mistake… too pretty!