SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTERBALTIMORE, Maryland — Racial protests supposed to be peaceful quickly turned into violent riots on Saturday evening, closing down the city of Baltimore for some time—and creating a panic for thousands of people as just 50 miles away elites in Washington partied with President Barack Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.SIGN UP FOR OUR NEWSLETTER
Personally, I wasn’t supposed to be on the job tonight as a reporter. After a long news week and as several of my contemporaries lived high on the hog down in D.C. at the so-called “Nerd Prom,” me and my brother left D.C. to go see our Boston Red Sox play the Baltimore Orioles at Oriole Park at Camden Yards I hate the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—it represents everything I think is wrong with Washington, making celebrities out of news media and politicians—and given the fact I grew up just outside Boston I figured seeing the Red Sox play in Baltimore would be a great reprieve from the political culture. Boy was I wrong.
My brother and I arrived in Baltimore just outside Camden Yards about an hour before the game, and went into Bullpen Bar—one of three iconic all-brick building bars right outside the stadium—for a beer before the Sox took on the O’s. I usually make it up here for a game or two every year, and have always found Orioles fans to be pleasant. We’re united in our hatred of the Yankees.
Bullpen Bar sits between Pickles Pub and Sliders Bar & Grill. Outside each of the brick-faced bars, on the days of Orioles Games, each bar puts out barricades about 20 feet from their front doors. Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of fans from each team—the Orioles, and in the case of Saturday night, the Red Sox—pack into three bars and the barricaded-off space in front before each game. Inside and outside of each, bartenders serve “cheap beer”—or so the $6-per-tall-boy-cans are advertised on big signs—while hotdogs, sausages and other pastime favorites are sold by each and by vendors who set up tents across the street. The blue collar culture—and really friendly people—are what make Baltimore baseball games so much fun, and there’s no better place to kick off an adventure into Camden Yards than here.
But on Saturday night, after my brother and I finished off our beers at Bullpen and began walking across the street to the stadium, planning to make our way to our seats after getting inside, chaos broke out.
Several people across the street from these bars—between there and the stadium, which is less than 100 yards away—were holding signs that said #BlackLivesMatter. They were protesting the death of Freddie Gray, who Agence France Press newswire wrote “died last Sunday from spinal injuries, a week after his arrest in the city’s impoverished west side.”
“In a press conference Friday, officials acknowledged Gray should have received medical help at the moment of his arrest, when he was seen by bystanders — and caught on video — howling in apparent pain,” AFP wrote, providing the background of the simmering tensions in the mid-Atlantic port town. “They also revealed that Gray, contrary to police department policy, was not buckled into his seat in the van, which made at least three unexplained stops on its way to the Western District police station. Gray died Sunday with 80 percent of his spine severed at the neck, lawyers for his family have said. His funeral is scheduled for Monday. Six officers have been suspended with pay as the police investigation inches closer to a May 1 deadline to submit findings to a Maryland state prosecutor, who could decide to press charges.”
All of a sudden—literally as my brother and I walked out of Bullpen—everything went haywire. What were peaceful marchers holding up signs turned into violent rioters. Innocent fans standing by were confronted by the rioters, who physically and verbally threateningly engaged many of them—and then the protesters got even more violent.
All of a sudden, beer bottles and cans, and other projectiles were lobbed by the protesters into the crowds of fans. To get those projectiles, the protesters stole them forcibly from the bartenders and vendors set up outside each of those three bars. One beer can whizzed by my brother’s face, missing him by about six inches, and more flew all over the crowded area.
The crowd of protesters then stopped a blue station wagon carrying a white family as they tried to drive past Pickles, Bullpen and Sliders along a narrow one-way stretch between the bars and the main road. As a horde of them smashed their open and closed fists on the hood of the car—while impeding them by standing in front of them—the driver backed up on the one way pass in a desperate attempt to get out of dodge. Then, stopped on the other side with nowhere to go, protesters ripped open the passenger door of the car and began reaching around inside the vehicle. As hundreds of people looked on, including several police officers who didn’t engage the violent protesters, the white woman in the front seat—middle-aged and a little heavyset with dark hair—was visibly terrified. The group of black men who ripped open the car door suddenly realized they were separated from the larger group of protesters and abandoned their quest to seemingly either carjack the station wagon or rob the people inside in front of hundreds, driving out of the one-way street back onto the main road and presumably out of dodge.
As projectiles continued flying everywhere from each part of the crowd—like a war-zone—another black man then charged into the crowd of Red Sox and Orioles fans standing outside Pickles Pub and tore the metal barricades apart throwing them into the now-crowded one-way pass where the assaulted station wagon was a moment ago.
My brother, at this point, was screaming at the group of five or so police officers. “Why aren’t you doing anything? They’re hurting people! They’re hurting people! They’re violent!” he yelled at them as they continued ignoring him and not engaging or attempting to stop the violence.
I had been trying—unsuccessfully, as I never use my phone for this—to capture some useful videos and photos of what was going on. My reporter gear, including an iPad I specifically use for the purpose of covering this kind of thing, was back in my apartment just outside D.C. and I really never take photos or video with my phone. After I went back through them later, in the middle of the chaos, they all came out blurry and unusable.
Nonetheless, fearing for my safety and for my brother’s safety, at this point I grabbed him and pulled him aside—and said “we need to go, we need to go into the stadium.”
We moved along as fast as we could around Camden Yards to get inside—Orioles officials had closed down several gates that are normally open so we had to go almost halfway around the place to get in—and got through the gate as I Tweeted updates of what I saw and what went down so hopefully other media would pull through and cover the violence that was going on. Well, I’d find out later, of course they wouldn’t—they were too busy praising themselves at Nerd Prom. But my brother and I made it to our seats and hoped it all would be over soon, and the game would go on as planned.
The game started without a hitch, and while fans buzzed and hissed back and forth in discussion about the insanity going on outside, it all seemed to be fine—and mostly under control—so my brother and I went back to enjoying the Sox face off against the Orioles.
As the game progressed, however, the situation outside throughout Baltimore clearly got worse. All of a sudden, several police helicopters took to the skies and fans sitting around us talked about how they got text messages from friends watching the news at home throughout the Baltimore area warning them to get out of the stadium while they still could.
The game was close, and at about 9:45 p.m.—2 hours and 45 minutes into the game—an announcement came over the loudspeaker in the stadium: The mayor of Baltimore, due to a public safety emergency outside, had “asked” everyone inside to stay in the stadium and not try to leave.
The Red Sox had just tied what was a 3-2 Baltimore lead in the top of the ninth inning. It was headed to at least the bottom of the ninth, and perhaps extra innings, so we went to run to the bathroom together real fast and then found the gate right there—E-1—was locked and several Orioles staffers were standing in front of it. I asked one of them if we were allowed to leave, and they said no. We were, along with the 15,000 or so still in the stadium, being forcibly kept there by the Baltimore mayor’s authority. Several people around us lamented that the Orioles should open the bars back up—they stop serving alcohol after the seventh inning stretch—and give out free beer due to the chaos.
My brother and I got back to our seats in time to see the Orioles blow it in the bottom of the ninth and got ready for extra innings. In the top of the tenth, the Red Sox took the lead 4-3 and the Baltimore mayor’s decision to keep everyone in the stadium remained in effect. If the Orioles didn’t exactly tie in the bottom of the tenth—and the mayor’s decision remained in effect—there would be 15,000 people trying to leave who couldn’t. All of a sudden, then, another announcement came over the loudspeaker and on the big screen at the park: the mayor lifted the ban on people leaving the stadium. Thank God, because the Orioles won it in the bottom of the tenth inning with a walk off home run—and right after they hit it, my brother and I bolted out of the stadium and hopped in a Baltimore city cab, which we took all the way back to our apartment just outside D.C. The cabbie told us the protests that were going on all night were “crazy.” After everything that went down, the Red Sox loss hurt much less than seeing a great city–Baltimore–turn into madness.Ikea delivery nightmare: The business rationale for subpar front-door service.
Ikea Delivery Is a Total Nightmare—and a Great Business Strategy
Ikea Delivery Is a Total Nightmare—and a Great Business Strategy
A woman sits at a model room in an Ikea store.
Courtesy of epsos.de/Flickr
It all started because I wanted the . Not a new, licensed reproduction&I wanted the scuffed-up, 1960-vintage Nelson Swag Leg Desk I found on eBay. It seemed to me mostly irrelevant that I could not afford the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. But my husband suggested a budgetary adjustment: Instead of pairing the Nelson Swag Leg Desk with pricey custom-built bookshelves as planned, we could economize with a jumbo set of Ikea&s , which fit the appointed space almost to the centimeter. At first, I resisted this financially expedient arranged marriage of a modern-design icon to a prosaic dorm-room staple that I associated with beer pong and . Eventually, though, I started talking myself into the compromise. I tried to think of it as a chic high-low flourish, like Anna Wintour
on her first Vogue cover, or Mike D
smack in the middle of his otherwise ultra-customized Brooklyn townhouse. Or something.
We completed the order, absorbing the blunt force of the flat $99 delivery fee. But the odyssey of the Billy bookcase, we discovered, had only just begun.
June 7. We buy the bookcase.
June 13. We receive an email from Ikea: &Your order has departed from the IKEA Distribution Center.&
June 16. We receive an email from a company called UX Logistics stating that our order is ready to deliver.
June 16, Part II. Email from Ikea: &Your IKEA order is ready to be delivered. & You will receive a call within 2 to 3 business days to schedule your delivery date.&
June 17. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 21.
June 21. Another email from Ikea, asking to confirm our order.
June 21, Part II. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 26.
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And on and on and on. Each afternoon, my husband would call UX Logistics, who&d say something like, &We can&t deliver your item because it hasn&t arrived,& then call Ikea, who&d say, &They do have it&you need to call them back and find out why they&re not delivering it,& and so forth. At one point, my husband asked Ikea to cancel the home delivery so we could arrange to pick up the bookcase ourselves. Easy for all concerned, right? Wrong: Ikea claimed that cancelation of the delivery was impossible, because the bookcase had already been delivered&to UX Logistics, who said they didn&t have it. Even if we canceled the order outright, Ikea told us, we&d be on the hook for the delivery to the delivery company who hadn&t yet received the delivery.
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It turns out that Ikea is not just a furniture retailer. It is also an epistemological time machine, casting into doubt everything we thought we knew about semantics and the space-time continuum and the ding an sich of particle board.
is a truth so universally acknowledged that even the company cops to it. Chief marketing officer Leontyne Green talked about her own &very frustrating& Ikea delivery experience in , which stressed the firm&s ongoing efforts to improve delivery and overall customer service. But as anyone who has found herself dissolving into the hypnotically well-appointed cattle chute of an Ikea showroom can tell you, this is not a company that does things by accident. The who&s-on-first shambles of Ikea delivery isn&t the flaw in . It&s instead a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. Here are five reasons why.
Ikea has no rational economic motive to offer halfway-decent delivery.
Ikea outsources all its delivery. &With sporadic orders over a wide geographic area, Ikea would need a fleet of trucks that might be idle one day and not able to handle the load the next,& says Robert Shumsky, a professor of operations management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
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Of course, other furniture retailers such as Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn juggle similar logistical challenges, but have nothing like Ikea&s reputation for delivery debacles. Ikea may be OK with this because it doesn&t have much competition in the bargain furniture business&there&s no one else selling couches quite so cheap. The company sees its customers as fundamentally different: thriftier, for sure, but also stronger, more resourceful, stoic in the face of challenge! According to Santiago Gallino, also a professor at the Tuck School, &Ikea&s target customers are consumers who prize &value,& and are willing to spend their own time to save money&&by pulling items from the warehouse, assembling the items themselves, etc. &Asking the customer to spend time to come to the store is consistent with this segmentation strategy,& Gallino says.
Ikea, unlike so many other retailers, has little to fear from Amazon. Consumers are increasingly conditioned to assume that virtually any product&even heavy, unwieldy products&can land on their doorstep 24 hours or less after purchase. Just one case in point: the frighteningly fast and cheap deliveries of heavy bulk purchases available via the Amazon subsidiary . But Ikea is, at least for the time being, immune to these expectations. According to Harvard Business School professor , &Amazon can disrupt anything that doesn&t have to be assembled or curated&&in other words, anything that isn&t Ikea. But heavy flat-pack furniture deliveries are a conundrum even Jeff Bezos hasn&t yet solved, and the most dazzling page of Amazon can&t begin to compete with any given IKEA alcove. &Yesterday, you didn&t know you needed a new strainer,& Frei says, &but today you do, because of how it was curated in the Ikea kitchen. Amazon can&t do that.&
Making you wait might make you happy. The longer we waited for Billy, it seems, the more we pined for Billy, which heightened our satisfaction when Billy did finally arrive. &The advantage of making people wait is that it creates a sense of anticipatory excitement,& says Michael Norton, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. Norton and Elizabeth Dunn&s recent book
makes the case
leads to greater customer satisfaction than the enjoy-now-pay-later logic of, say, Amazon Prime.
Making you work might make you even happier. The 2011 article &written by Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely&argues that successfully
can lead us to value the item more than if the item arrived on our doorstep camera-ready. I jokingly ask Norton if my husband&s unpaid internship as an Ikea fulfillment manager might have created its own Ikea effect. &I&m not so sure the answer is no,& Norton says. &It was a real pain in the butt, but we do misattribute effort to liking, so he might actually like the bookcase more because getting it was such a hassle. There&s something about service recovery that creates a different, more meaningful experience.&
Or not. &Working as Ikea&s fulfillment and transport manager had no impact on my enjoyment of the shelves once they arrived,& my husband said in a statement to Slate.
Being icy and withholding is part of Ikea&s unique alchemy. &Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,& Frei says. &There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency&there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.& Ikea makes great stuff cheap&and that is the draw. Helping you obtain that stuff, or even find it in their store, is not part of their mission, which also explains why you&ll rarely spot an Ikea employee who isn&t either working a register or hauling purchases to the parking lot. &If you come to their showroom seeking out a specific thing and you can&t find it,& Frei says, &you&ll probably just go and buy an adjacent thing.&&
Without meaning to, I recently tested this last hypothesis at my local Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shumsky had mentioned that he&d wanted to purchase a
for his daughter, but Ikea doesn&t deliver this item and his nearest showroom is two and a half hours away. I&m only about five miles from mine, so after checking online that the Spoka was &most likely in stock& in Red Hook, I hopped on my bike to go buy one for him. But once I&d slowly wended through the endless floor displays to the lighting emporium, I couldn&t find the Spoka nightlight, or any nightlights at all, or anyone on the floor to help me find the nightlights, so I bought and ate an
and got back on my bike and rode home. I know that Ikea won&t lose any sleep over me and my failed nightlight quest (which cost them all of $15) or the Billy breakdown. But it&s still a little strange&a little analog, a little pre-Amazon and pre-Apple Store&to realize that a bad customer experience is part of the design of a good business strategy.阅读_百度文库
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