Tinotopia

In July, I wrote about the local grocery store’s practice of promising fresh bread at 5 p.m., and then failing to deliver. I accompanied that complaint with this picture of the bread basket, complete with sign, already filling up with trash at 5:33 p.m.:

Today I happened to be looking for bread at exactly 5:00 p.m.

They’d removed the basket entirely. I don’t think this is a permanent departure; rather I think that they have amended their policy to a far more pragmatic one, which might be expressed as ‘If we have fresh bread at 5 p.m., we’ll have fresh bread at 5 p.m. Otherwise, all bets are off.’ Lovely.

But that’s not all the unpredictability afoot!

We don’t subscribe to any newspapers here at Tino Manor; instead, I buy them on those days when I’m out and about in the morning. There is even a newspaper machine nearby, so I can drop in my thirty-five cents and buy the Washington Post without having to stand in line and get a receipt and a bag by buying at at the grocery store.

Except that it’s not thirty-five cents any more. Now, apparently, the Post is fifty cents:

The tiny print under the price on the front page of the Post says

Prices may vary outside Metropolitan Washington. (See box on A4)

The relevant part of the box on A4 says:

Of course, this all depends on how you define ‘Washington Metropolitan Area’. Tino Manor is out in the boonies, to be sure: but it’s well within the Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV Combined Statistical Area as defined by the census people. We watch Washington TV stations here. Half the town drives into Washington every day to go to work.

Moreover, the paper isn’t fifty cents everywhere; at the grocery store, you can’t get bread but you can get the Post for only thirty-five cents. I’m not sure whether this is because some places haven’t got the memo yet, or because these people have decided that the cost in terms of customer goodwill and trust is greater than the extra fifteen cents to be had by charging more than the price that’s clearly printed on the thing.

Anyway, so some places and some machines are now charging fifty cents for the Washington Post. What annoys me about this isn’t the extra fifteen cents. Even at fifty cents, the paper is a great bargain, and if it’s a little more expensive there’s some possibility that the lone paper machine on my side of town won’t be sold out before 9:00 a.m. every day.

What annoys me is that it’s more unpredictability. The paper is thirty-five cents, unless you’re outside of an area that’s not clearly, consistently, or constantly defined. This is particularly annoying with something this casually purchased. I’m already incurring enough extra cost in trying to find a place where I can buy the Post without standing in line behind lottery fiends, and where it doesn’t sell out before dawn. I don’t also need to keep track of a private definition of ‘Washington Metropolitan Area’.

The lovely and talented Don Boudreaux comments on a letter that appeared in the New York Times. The letter was written by a correspondent in McLean, Virginia, one of the world’s wealthier places and a suburb of Washington, DC.

It’s impossible to really tell how much irony went into the letter, but for the moment we’ll take it at face value. Boudreaux quotes the whole thing, but here’s a short excerpt. It’s in response to a column about super-abundance in the United States, particularly focusing on the startling diversity of dental flosses that are available. The Times‘ reader writes:

Never mind the dental aisle. I can’t get past the orange juice with pulp, some pulp, no pulp, with calcium, without calcium, with calcium and extra vitamin C, with calcium and added vitamin D, low acid, blended with other fruit juices, from concentrate, not from concentrate, low carb.

What happened to just plain orange juice? Only Tropicana and Minute Maid know for certain.

Boudreaux scoffs lightly at the plight of the would-be orange-juice consumer in McLean.

Now, I don’t really care what kind of garbage the O.J. Trusts are selling in their paper containers: I don’t pay attention, because unless it’s fresh-squeezed, it all tastes horrible to me. The goodness of orange juice doesn’t survive pasteurization, and nearly all orange juice is pasteurized these days.

I do, however, pay attention to milk, because I use milk in my tea and on my Grape Nuts (when Grape Nuts are available, that is).

The dairy case, like the dental aisle and the orange-juice department, has exploded in recent years. I have my choice of milk, 2% milk, and skim milk; I can get all of those pasteurized, ultra-pasteurized, or organic (which is usually also ultra-pasteurized).

I can get each of them with regular or low carbs; I can get them with or without enzymes for the lactose-intolerant. I can even get ‘milk’ that actually has no milk at all in it, having been squeezed from the teats of soybeans in a process I don’t care to contemplate.

I can get them in regular, chocolate, or strawberry flavors, and I can get them all in half-pints, pints, quarts, half-gallons, or gallons. And despite the government’s price supports, I can get all of them for remarkably low prices.

When I can get them at all, that is.

I prefer quarts of whole non-ultra-pasteurized milk. The ultra-pasteurization cooks all the flavor out of the stuff, and when you use a couple ounces of milk a day it doesn’t pay to buy it more than a quart at a time.

Unfortunately, whole milk in quarts seems to be almost totally unavailable here. There’s room for it on the shelf, but there’s only something there about one in five times that I look.

The milk cooler at my local supermarket is about 30 feet long, meaning that it’s got 150 linear feet is shelving for products, but the only things that are reliably available there are the soy milk (which is not in much demand) and the gallons of whole milk (which are something of a commodity and are thus stocked in enormous quantities).

I’ve written before about the unreliability of my supermarket, and this is just another example.

I’m all for an abundance of choice, but I am alarmed at what seems to be the usual practice of neglecting the tried-and-true classic choices that have a proven market in favor of something new. We need the new! We want the new! Bring on the choco-strawberry low-carb, no-fat, semi-gelatinous non-dairy soy-based beverage with added calcium! Suspend globs of candy in the stuff if you like! See whether people will buy the stuff, and congratulations to you if they do. You deserve your marketing-department bonus, because you have made the world a better place.

In the process, however, it’s important not to over-extend your company to the point where you cannot manage to supply those products that sell consistently and in volume with no expenditure on research or advertising.

If you have twenty different kinds of dental floss but only twice the shelf space you used for two kinds of dental floss back in the Dark Ages of only Mint and Unflavored, you are ten times more likely — assuming perfect distribution of both supply and demand — to run out of any one variety before you restock. Looked at this way, this abundance of minutely differentiated products doesn’t look like such a great idea unless you can inexpensively and competently manage to supply or sell a greater number of individual products than before. It’s a pity that few companies seem to be able to do this.

My comments on McDonalds’ (McDonald’s’? How do you do a possessive of a registered trademark that is itself already a possessive? McDonald’s themselves seem to prefer the ungrammatical ‘McDonald’s’ as the possessive, e.g. the large section about ‘McDonald’s commitment to diversity’ on their website. This is unpalatable because it seems to refer to something or someone called ‘McDonald’ and its or his commitment: Old McDonald had a diversity-enhancing, ‘minority’-boosting program, E I E I O. And through this program he hoped to avoid being sued, E I E I O. With a set-aside here, and a sensitivity initiative there, Old McDonald had his ass covered, E I E I O.)

Now where was I? Oh, yeah: my comments on some of McDonalds’ (damn them, I’ll do it my way) customer-service issues being rooted in their procedures’ inherent conflicts with logic and grammar seemed to strike a chord with a bunch of people, so I’m going to shamelessly attempt a repeat performance: Bart by the barrelful, I always say. Today, I will explain why my grocery store is always sold out of so many items.

Now, maybe your experience is different, but I find grocery shopping pretty frustrating. I generally patronize Martin’s in Front Royal. The Front Royal Martin’s is run by a guy who always wears a tie (so you can tell he’s the manager) but who seems to spend quite a bit of time in the store itself, rather than in his manager’s aerie counting doubloons or whatever it is most grocery-store managers do. Rarely do I go there and not see this guy in the aisles, stocking shelves, giving advice, or at least running around and giving a strong impression of Purpose.

This could just be a ruse, a George-Costanzian scheme of always appearing incredibly busy while actually doing nothing, but the odds are against it. I assume that this guy is at least an above-average grocery store manager, partly because of his visibility, and largely because the store itself is above average.

Oh, sure, there are some things that could use work: the salad bar’s closing seems tied mainly to the needs and desires of the staff, and not the needs and desires of Commerce; everything on the bottom layer in the fancy-cheese cooler tends to have been frozen at some point; the newspapers are badly placed; and the do-it-yourself tills are the inferior kind with the scales instead of the better (but larger) kind with the belts. These are, though, mainly minor things, and the store is, on the whole, good enough that I cannot understand how the competition (Food Lion) stays in business. The parking lots at both stores will attest to the fact that I am hardly the only person in Front Royal who prefers Martin’s to Food Lion.

The only, or at least the chief, fly in the ointment is that Martin’s is often out of things. Very, very rarely — if ever — can we get through a full shopping trip without at least one item on the list being out of stock. Most recently, it was Grape Nuts cereal.

I like Grape Nuts: so full of grapey and nutty goodness, they are. Eating Grape Nuts is like eating a bowl full of rocks, which is sometimes precisely what you need first thing in the morning. They make me feel like some kind of cartoon giant: I have been known to say ‘Fee Fie Fo Fum’ and to cackle maniacally while eating them.

But, the last time I bought Grape Nuts, it was at the hated Food Lion, because they were out of them at Martin’s — they were out of them for weeks.

And it’s not just Grape Nuts that they run out of. I went to the store today, and I took pictures of just some of the things that were out of stock:

Note that today they did have Grape Nuts: but they’re well on their way to running out. They have plenty of South Beach Diet ‘wheats’, though.

I didn’t get pictures of everything they were out of, partly because I didn’t want to get thrown out, and partly because after a while I didn’t have enough memory in my camera to get a picture of every last thing that was out of stock: I only had 1GB in there.

I’m not really sure what Grape Nuts are made of, but I don’t think there are any particularly rare materials involved. I used to see a bumper sticker all the time, put out by the Mining Industry Council of Missouri, that said ‘If it can’t be grown, it has to be mined’. I have never seen a Grape Nuts bush, so I have to assume that the things are dug out of the ground by giant yellow machines somewhere in Michigan. (Similarly, as I can identify no vegetation or animal obviously associated with Cool Whip or Miracle Whip, I assume that these things are cracked out of some substance that’s pumped out of the ground in the Dakotas: Crude Whip. The Tino Universe is a very orderly, if inaccurate, place.)

My point, anyway, is that there is not and was no shortage of Grape Nuts: Martin’s was just out of them.

Things run out: I understand that. But what’s bizarre is that they were out of Grape Nuts for weeks, during which time — I went back every couple of days before I broke down and went to Food Lion — there were about a dozen boxes of something called ‘Grape Nuts Flakes’ on the shelf next to the bare spot where the Grape Nuts, in happier times, were to be found. (Much of the space formerly taken up by Grape Nuts Flakes has now been taken over by South Beach Diet ‘wheats’.)

Nobody wants Grape Nuts Flakes. I know this intuitively: Grape Nuts and Flakes are polar opposites in the cereal world. If you want flakes, you don’t want Grape Nuts, and if you want Grape Nuts, you don’t want flakes. You want flakes, you buy Corn Flakes; if you’re a Post partisan, you buy Post Toasties (but not at Martin’s, because they don’t sell Post Toasties at all there).

I don’t have to rely entirely on intuition, though: during the entire Grape Nut Drought, not one of those boxes of G.N. Flakes moved.

How can this be? How can a store with a diligent and hard-working manager be sold out of a very basic and popular item for weeks while having twice the shelf space devoted to a similar item that not only doesn’t sell out, but that doesn’t sell at all?

I’ll tell you how: it’s because supermarkets don’t, for the most part, actually function as markets any more. Or, at least, they don’t function as markets in the way you’d expect.

The grocery business is famous for its very low margins. The food that Martins sells me for $100 they probably paid at least $90 for. That 10% margin — and I’m being generous — has to pay for the building, the staff, the electric bill, and the profit. How do they do it? Well, yes, volume is part of it, thanks for asking. But they also effectively increase their margins while at the same time reducing their costs by farming out part of their operations to their vendors, and charging those vendors for the privilege.

Modern supermarkets are therefore less like ordinary shops, where the proprietor chooses a selection of goods, purchases them, and then offers them for sale, than they are like farmer’s markets, where individual vendors lease space from whoever owns the building.

In the cereal aisle, it works this way: assume that Martin’s has 100 linear feet of shelving that they decide to dedicate to breakfast cereals. They hold onto, say, 10% of this for themselves, for their twenty-pound bags of crumbly and slightly off-tasting things with carefully non-infringing names like Froonkenberry, Cheer-Os, and Corm Flakes. They then charge General Mills some amount of money for the right to put their products on 20% of the shelf space, and Post and Kellogg’s some other amounts for 35% each.

Kellogg’s, Post, and General Mills then develop marketing strategies and display guidelines, and send their guys in to stock the shelves with their products. Presumably the cereal people like this because they have more control over how their products are displayed: the Corn Flakes, a relative commodity, are always on the bottom shelf. Grape Nuts (and most of the other cereals for masochists) are on the top. In the middle, you find whatever bad ideas the cereal barons are really pushing at the moment: the children’s-movie-themed cereal of the month; Special K Now With Dried Lingonberries; Cheerios With Hollandaise Sauce; Atkins Brand Bacon Os; etc.

The problem is that this puts even more intermediaries between me and the brave men who toil in the cereal mines. We are supposed to be living in an age of disintermediation, but the way it’s generally being carried out, I don’t think we’re reaping any benefits from it.

In the old days, the grocery store bought its cereal from a grocery wholesaler who specialized in serving certain kinds of stores in a certain area; that wholesaler bought his wares from even larger wholesalers who specialized in certain types of goods. That wholesaler bought from the manufacturers and importers of those goods. By the time anything got to me, it had already been bought and sold four times. This is held to have been inefficient.

Today, when I manage to buy a box of cereal, I’m effectively buying it straight from the manufacturer. The grocery store just maintains a large building for the purpose of keeping all of this stuff dry, and they handle the mechanics of the transaction. In many cases, I’d bet they don’t even pay the manufacturer until they sell something off the shelf.

This is supposed to be more efficient, and it undoubtedly is. But it is more efficient at the cost of the most important function of a market — communication.

In those mythical, halcyon Old Days, when I wanted something that was out of stock, I’d tell the guy who ran the store. If he noticed a number of people complaining about (say) the lack of Grape Nuts, he might just come to the realization that he should order more Grape Nuts. He’d tell his supplier to send five more boxes of Grape Nuts in the next order, and the Grape Nuts problem would be solved.

Today, though, the guy wearing the tie at the grocery store doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with what’s on the shelves. The manufacturers determine what’s in demand by conducting surveys and focus groups, and by noticing what gets sold out before it’s restocked. They then apparently ignore most of this information and instead pack the shelves with whatever horrible fad the marketing department has fantasies of selling this week.

There’s nothing wrong with having vendors stock the shelves: but as the grocers have farmed that part of their business out, they have a responsibility to their customers — and to themselves and their stockholders — to see to it that the vendors are acting in everyone’s best interest, and not just in their own.

A lot of people complain about this. Usually, the complaints take the form of ‘Chain stores/restaurants/services stink’: very rarely, though, do people ask themselves why this should be. After all, a McDonald’s restaurant is a burger place with, ultimately, millions upon millions of dollars of capital behind it. Martin’s is part of an international conglomerate with enough volume to allow them, should they so choose, to have a full-time vice-president, with a staff, to do nothing but oversee their cereal aisles.

So why is it, then, that you almost always get better results from a place with maybe a million dollars in mortgaged-to-the-hilt capital, where the owner has to take time out from fine-tuning his inventory to change the light bulbs and mop the floor?

Because that small outfit not only has an actual channel for communication between customers and decision-makers, but it can make small adjustments to its operations. Large operations, despite their many advantages, seem totally unable to do this — and most of their ‘innovations’ have the effect, intended or not, of making communication and fine-tuning even more difficult. So even those items which are purchased and stocked by Martin’s, rather than by the vendors, don’t reflect the actual local demand: they reflect the opinions of someone making decisions with almost no relevant information.

And so they run out of Grape Nuts, and everything else.

Nicole and I recently stayed at the Hotel Allegro in Chicago. It’s at 171 W. Randolph, which, if you’re not familiar with the city, is on the north end of the Loop, very near where the big car chase in The Blues Brothers ends. The hotel is part of the Kimpton chain of funky hotels.

We stayed there entirely on the recommendation of a podcast, of all things. Not long ago, the Church of the Customer Podcast had a segment about Kimpton’s legendary customer service, and we figured that this was for us.

I generally hate hotels. I don’t think I live in the lap of luxury, but I am nearly always appalled by hotel rooms. Maybe there’s something I don’t understand about the economics of hotel operations, but I do not see why it’s not possible to provide comfortable accommodations for under $200 a night — where ‘comfortable’ means ‘equipped with the ordinary amenities that the average guest has at home’. People do not drink out of six-ounce plastic cups; they don’t sleep on foam mattresses (cheaper Marriott properties used to be notorious for this) with rock-hard pillows and under cheap plastic blankets.

It looks like in this case, I am not alone in finding these things unsatisfying, as I read that much of the hotel industry is upgrading their rooms to get rid of a lot of the nastiest elements.

I must say that the customer service we received at the Hotel Allegro was mostly pretty good: the problem was that we required entirely too much of it, because the customer experience was, well, terrible. I call ‘customer service’ the willingness and ability of a company to solve problems when things go wrong: the ‘customer experience’ is everything about your interaction with them.

My overall impression was an unusual one: that the people actually working in the hotel were actually interested in our comfort and happiness, while the company was not, particularly — at least if the way the hotel is maintained is anything to judge by. Usually the situation is just the opposite: lots of literature from Corporate HQ about how important customer satisfaction is, and dead-eyed zombies behind the counter, looking daggers at you for presuming to spend money in their establishment.

To begin with, we were first put in a smoking room on a floor that smelled like the bottom of an ashtray. As soon as you stepped off the elevator, the smell hit you in the face. A lot of places have done this: because smoking can result in nasty smells, they put all the smoking in a certain area — and then pretend nobody’s smoking there. Smoking areas can be kept perfectly comfortable, if not pleasant, if you ventilate and clean them properly. Unfortunately, these days a lot of people seem to have the attitude that people who smoke should suffer as much as possible, so you rarely see good ventilation and cleaning.

The entire building had no ventilation — about which more later — and this floor really suffered for it. After checking in, we turned on the air conditioning and went out, hoping that this would help by ventilating the room a bit.

On our way out, we stopped at the front desk and mentioned that our bed didn’t have a down blanket on it, and could this please be changed. (The room was also pretty dirty, and we asked that it at least be dusted. I suspect that our room hadn’t been occupied in a while.)

Left to right, top to bottom: Beat-up woodwoork makes the place look seedy; Nasty, filthy switchplates don’t help either; Wallpaper coming off the wall under the window doesn’t make me feel like a valued guest; It’s not good in the corner, either; Minibar door falling off announces indifference; Filthy grout in bathroom is icky. Not pictured: Lumps of dust adhering to main light fixture in bedroom; Banquet-hall chair in front of the desk; Lumpy bed; Comically-small closet; Chipped and banged-up doorframe; Incredibly noisy pressure-flush toilet. Clicking on any of the pictures pops up a bigger version.

The main reason we’d decided to stay in a Kimpton hotel is that they have down blankets on all the beds, instead of the horrible nasty Vellux plastic blankets you usually find in hotels. Our bed, though, in this Kimpton hotel, had a horrible nasty Vellux plastic blanket on it.

When we mentioned this to the desk clerk, he appeared mystified, as he did in all our subsequent interactions with him. If there was any customer service (as opposed to customer experience) failure at this hotel, it was him — unfortunately, I forget his name. He was young, and looked like he might just be starting out in the desk-clerking trade. Nevertheless he wrote down our request for a new blanket and another pillow on a post-it note, and told us he’d have housekeeping look into the issue of dirtiness, and we went on our way.

Bean: closed for Tuesday through May

When we returned (from attempting to see the Millennium Bean, which was closed for polishing), we found another pillow on the bed, and another Vellux blanket in a plastic bag on the floor. The dust was all still there.

Based solely on this room, the Hotel Allegro is a dump, and nobody should ever stay there. This room cost $180 a night; for that price in downtown Chicago I do not expect luxury but I do expect cleanliness, and I expect the hotel to match its advertised description without my prodding. The room wasn’t really dirty in any absolute sense, but as hotel rooms are intimately occupied by a succession of strangers, they must be unimpeachably clean: and this room wasn’t.

I grabbed the new blanket in its plastic bag and headed back downstairs. As I was explaining that another Vellux blanket wasn’t what I was after (see also this), Young Desk Clerk Guy interrupted me and said, ‘I don’t need…’ — presumably he didn’t need me to bring the Vellux blanket down to the lobby. (Or maybe he was winding up for ‘I don’t need this‘ in which case I would have leapt over the counter and started strangling him.) Luckily, at this point the other guy at the desk, named Achim and much more competent, stepped in. A good thing, too: had I been told that I was doing it wrong on the second attempt to get the hotel to bring our room up to the advertised specification, I think I would have been in a cab to the Hyatt five minutes later, after having made a scene in the Allegro lobby.

Achim stepped in an apologized. He said that some of their down blankets were out for dry cleaning, and that they’d been mistakenly replaced with the plastic ones instead of other down blankets. I think that was an artful deception, actually: I doubt they put the expensive and odor-absorbing down blankets on the stinky floor.

In any case, he moved us to another floor, and into a suite. (Or, rather, they gave us new keys and then we schlepped our stuff to the new suite on our own.) This was particularly nice, as the original room hadn’t been renovated aside from having had new wallpaper, carpet, and light fixtures (badly) installed. It would have been reasonable for a cheap hotel room in Manhattan, but this room was neither especially cheap nor in New York. The suite was about three times the size of the original room, and the furniture was all in better condition. There was also a down blanket already on the bed.

We turned the air conditioning down to 63 degrees — we like to sleep in a cold room under a warm blanket — and headed out for dinner to Club Lucky, and then for drinking at Silver Cloud.

Mmmm: Toasty.

We returned at about 9 p.m. to find the room still a balmy 73.6 degrees. We decided to give it a while longer, and so we watched a DVD on the in-room DVD player — and so learned that the easy chair in the living room was built for a pygmy and thus uncomfortable for normal people.

Two hours later, the temperature was 73.4 degrees: at this rate, to get the room down to 68 degrees would take another 54 hours, by which time we would have checked out. I called the front desk and — though this was a different clerk — was again met with incredulity. Too warm? It’s too warm in your room? What do you mean, too warm? Did you turn down the thermostat? Well, we’ll send up an engineer.

The thermostat made some clicking noises and was reset to an even 60 degrees, and a short while later the on-duty engineer appeared. He took the grilles off the radiators and found that one of them had both hot water and cold water flowing through it. He turned off the hot water and said that would help.

He also explained that they didn’t actually have their air-conditioning system turned on yet.

To comprehend what he was saying, you have to understand how large-scale air-conditioning systems work. The rooms themselves are cooled by cold water flowing through radiators, just as they are heated in the winter by hot water or steam flowing through them.

This water is made cold through a number of different means, depending on the outside temperature and humidity, the design of the system, and the need for cooling. If it’s cold enough outside, you can just run the water through a big heat exchanger that cools it down by exposing it to the low temperatures out there; if it’s dry outside, you can cool the water evaporatively; if it’s very hot or humid, you have to use an ordinary refrigeration system like the one you probably use to cool your house.

As it wasn’t very hot outside, the Allegro was probably just using a heat exchanger: they certainly didn’t have the refrigeration system turned on. The water coming through, the engineer told us, was at 50 degrees, which is marginally cool enough to do the job — if the hot-water valve hasn’t also been open. It was actually about 55 degrees outside, so if we’d been able to open the windows even a little bit the problem would have been solved: but all the windows in the hotel had been sealed; the engineer said that their insurance company had made them do this. Presumably a sufficiently misanthropic guest could toss stuff out the window and wreak some serious havoc 18 floors below — such an episode is actually part of the plot in Arthur Hailey’s Hotel (which is quite a good book, by the way).

On the one hand, I have some sympathy for the Allegro. Few places have such variable weather as Chicago in April. On the same day, you might wear both a tank-top and a parka at different times, and be perfectly comfortable in both. That you’d need serious refrigeration in a hotel in the shade in Chicago in April is not a foregone conclusion, and in many systems you can’t run the heating and the air conditioning at the same time.

On the other hand, I don’t really give a shit. I understand the challenges that the hotel faces with this particular situation, but then I expect the hotel to understand these challenges even better than I do, and to meet those challenges. This is why they get paid. If there were no challenges and no complexity to what they’re doing, they wouldn’t be able to charge money for their services.

We were ultimately offered yet a different suite that was already at a lower temperature, but as it was now after midnight and we’d unpacked a lot of our stuff, we decided to tough it out. With the hot-water valve closed, the temperature was dropping, and while it never did get down to what I would have liked, I was able to get to sleep in reasonable comfort.

The suite was, even with the air-conditioning problem, a good value for $180; but then of course the actual price of the suite, if you weren’t moved into it because of a cock-up on the hotel’s part, was a good deal more than $180 a night. It was a lot better than the original room, but it was not without its quirks: and by ‘quirks’, I don’t mean the random funky things like bottles of Mr. Bubble that make the Allegro a ’boutique’ hotel.

By ‘quirks’ I mean the light fixture — the one controlled by the switch just inside the door — that didn’t work. It probably just needed a new light bulb, but why on earth should a guest be the one to discover this? I have no doubt it would have been fixed had I complained, but I had done enough complaining for one visit: when I discovered this, I just didn’t care any more.

Had the Allegro bothered to check out this suite themselves when they were moving us into it, they would (hopefully) have noticed this on their own. In any case, during the two days we occupied this room, housekeeping apparently never noticed the problem, either:

By ‘quirks’ I mean the shower valve installed upside-down:

This is actually dangerous, as the whole point of the strange hotel-shower temperature control thing is to make it difficult or impossible to scald yourself. Normally, when you first turn the handle, you get all cold water: turning it further introduces greater amounts of hot water into the mix, up to a pre-set point that is presumably below a temperature that would seriously injure you. Since nearly all American hotels use the same thing in the shower, too, guests are safer because they don’t have to figure out a new system every time they stay in a different hotel.

At the Allegro, though, the pipes in the wall must have been installed backwards — and then this problem was ‘solved’ by also installing the valve backwards — because as soon as you turned the water on, you got 100% hot water. Turning it further toward ‘hot’ produced cooler water.

I just want to make this absolutely clear: this valve is mislabeled in a way that’s dangerous and potentially life-threatening for particularly inattentive guests. I am not intimately familiar with Chicago building codes, but it’s also almost certainly illegal.

By ‘quirks’ I mean the GFCI receptacle that was falling out of the wall next to the sink:

This isn’t actually particularly dangerous, but it’s certainly inconvenient and probably, again, in violation of the electrical code.

And this was aside from the minor annoyances, like the grimy switchplate in the bathroom (what the heck is their problem with the electrical plates? Motel 6 does a better job), the hole in the wallpaper, the light fixture that was furry with dust, the bathroom vent ditto, and the messy tangle of wires under the desk, in full view of the entire living room:

(All of these, and most of the other pictures here, will pop up bigger versions if you click on them.)

I suppose it really says something about the value of viral marketing that I would be willing to risk staying in a (different) Kimpton hotel again, even after this experience. Random people on the web have no reason to lie about their experiences: if they say Kimpton hotels are good, then it’s not unreasonable to expect that they actually are good. Corporate marketing and advertising types will always say that their product is the cat’s pajamas, because saying that is their job.

However, I’m somewhat reluctant to say that our experience was just an outlier: I had three contacts with front-desk staff who were baffled by simple requests (‘blanket’, ‘cooler’), and we were in two rooms that were definitely not clean or in good condition — though the suite wasn’t absurdly so.

So how does Kimpton live up to their viral reputation for service? One of the links prominently featured on their website is ‘Kimpton Cares’. Aha, I thought. Kimpton cares! That’s impressive — a link to their customer-service people prominently displayed on the front page, instead of hidden behind ‘contact us’ in 9-point type next to the copyright notice. (Those ‘contact us’ links as often as not really just shunt you into a system designed to make sure that you don’t contact them, too.)

So I click on ‘Kimpton Cares‘. What do they care about? ‘Social Responsibility’. Women’s History Month, Dress For Success (i.e. white-collar coaching for poor women who want to get ahead), red ribbons for AIDS, ‘EarthCare’, i.e. environmental causes.

They really only care about customers, at least in the ‘Kimpton Cares’ sense, if those customers are homosexuals. They feature their special gay-magazine ad, and link to their special GLBT homepage that touts their Pride discounts and so forth.

I’m all in favor of these things, too: I’m in favor of women, against AIDS, and pro-Earth. I have nothing against homosexuals, and marketing directly and specifically to the gay community is a good idea. But it turns out that the only customer service link on their site is ‘contact us’, and it is down by the copyright notice — featured less prominently than the link to their ‘diversity’ page — and it does just give their reservations 800 number and a web form to type your comments into.

Perhaps I’m not really in the market for a ‘lifestyle’ hotel: I can bring in da funk by own bad self, thank you very much. I don’t need ‘lifestyle’ from a hotel, I need comfort and cleanliness without my having to stage-manage the experience. Boring is just fine, actually.

But somehow I think that the people for whom boring isn’t fine in a hotel — apparently these people are all gay — want cleanliness etc. as well.