A similar principle is that you cannot make money out of anything that can be easily replicated by your business competitors, as competition will deliver all the benefit to the consumer instead of your bottom line. In the area of customer service, you can try to steal a march on your competitors by kissing the arse of customers, until your competitors start kissing their arses too. At that point you have shit on your lips and nothing extra on your bottom line.

In the wake of a devastating hurricane, it becomes instantly clear which charities are worth their piss, and which ones are clusterfuck black holes for donors’ money… and in EVERY case, without exception, the former are run by men, and the latter by wimminz. Whouda thunk?

So a little while back I was in a cafe in a little liberal-boutiquey town in Northern California, the kind of place that is pleased with itself for not having a Starbucks, and into this cafe walks a well dressed guy in what looked to be his sixties.

Immediately the guy begins going around the place, taking half filled cups from tables and dumping them into bus tubs, taken newspapers away from tables that still have coats on the seats, telling upper class looking girls that the bathroom is “only for customers,” and walking away before they can tell him that they are customers, as obviously they are, they look like customers.

Before I leave, I walk up to him and say, “You must be the owner.” He puffs his chest out and stand a little straighter, and says, “I AM the owner.”

“I thought so,” I say, “only an owner could alienate that many customers that quickly.” I heard him saying “I didn’t alienate anyone” as I walked out the door.

So of course someone (who I’m sure is not a man) decided to lease an expensive piece of commercial space, spend a bunch of money on some over the top cutesy signage, and sell gourmet cupcakes. I’m sure the “economy” will cause them to shut down soon enough and her husband will lose all the money he was stupid enough to sink into it lol.

This skank I was banging, fell out with me over this and prolly still hates me to this day.

She wanted to open what I called a cup cake shop, I shit you not, she had all these ideas about girls from the offices buying fancy cakes for their breaks.

I sat down and went through the numbers on a spreadsheet with her, to make her PROJECTED take, she would literally be having to sell one cupcake every 60 seconds from the moment the place opened at 9 am to the time it closed at 5 pm, she hadn’t figured on getting in at 1 am to start baking that day’s stock.

She hadn’t figured it actually took nearer 90-100 second to make a sale, customer selects cake, pick it up and put in bag, ring up in till, ask customer for payment, now put in pin, now remove card, next please…

So even THEORETICALLY if someone took a gun and made customers queue up all day, she could NEVER make her projected sales, and yet she went ahead, took a lease, borrowed money and all that shit, and ceased trading 8 months later, and oh yeah, it was the fucking economy at fault……….