Are Lobsters Ambidextrous?

by David Feldman

  Welcome to the wonderful world of what the lodging industry calls “amenities.” In the 1950s and 1960s, patrons of all but the most luxurious hotels were satisfied with a few basic amenities: free soap, a color television, ice, air conditioning, a telephone, and perhaps a swimming pool.

  But in the 1980s, when lodging chains overbuilt and the economy turned sour, hotels were faced with severe overcapacity and a true dilemma: how to gain market share without dropping prices? Most decided that the answer was to increase amenities. In most cases, the price differentials among hotels within the same class are small, and business travelers, in particular, are not extremely sensitive to price. As James McCauley, executive director of the International Association of Holiday Inns, told us, the task of the smart hotelier in the 1980s was to attract loyalty among customers by offering amenities that would “impress and attract customers from competitive hotels.”

  In many cases, the strategy worked. Adding amenities to what were originally budget motels (e.g., Holiday Inns and Ramadas) allowed them to charge more for rooms. Hyatt became identified with their nightly turndown service (including a free mint on the pillow), and Stouffer gained fans for their complimentary coffee and newspaper with wake-up calls. These amenities came at a price to the providers. That little mint on the pillow (along with the labor costs of the turndown service) cost Hyatt more than five million dollars a year.

  Still, the list of amenities now offered in hotels is mind-boggling. Some have: business centers; health clubs; two-line telephones; special concierge floors with lounges; in-room movies, VCRs, CD players, safes, coffee makers, and hair dryers; free local telephone calls, breakfast, and airport limousines; shoe polishers; voice mail; and nonsmoking rooms.

  How do all these amenities spring up at the same time?

  1. Amenities are often pitched to many hotels simultaneously. As Raymond Ellis, of the American Hotel & Motel Association, put it:

  the more effective sales representative is going to be presenting an amenity as the ultimate item or service for attracting the guest, without, of course, indicating that the same article or service has just been sold to three or four other competing properties within the community.

  2. Richard Brooks, vice-president of room management at Stouffer Hotels & Resorts, mentioned that outside rating services often act as stimuli to add certain features.

  [AAA, Mobil, and Zagat and other rating services] freely tell us of new amenity items or services they have seen, and often tell us they believe they are appropriate for the ratings we hope to achieve.

  3. Spies. The big chains can afford inspectors to scrutinize not only their own units but those of competitors.

  4. Trade magazines. The American Hotel & Motel Association was kind enough to send us more information about amenities, just from trade magazines, than we ever imagined. There aren’t many secrets in the hotel field.

  5. Market research. The biggest hotel chains might employ focus groups or written and telephone surveys. Smaller groups might use guest comment cards (yes, they really do read those things) or simply chat with guests about their needs. Richard Brooks indicated that some of Stouffer’s most popular amenities, such as two-line telephones, in-room movies, no charge for incoming facsimiles, and complimentary coffee and newspaper with wake-up call, all started with guest requests. Many such guest requests are inspired by seeing the same amenity provided at another hotel, another reason why amenities spread so quickly.

  Market research also helps hoteliers avoid costly mistakes. Research shows that the vast majority of patrons expect a swimming pool but fewer than one in five ever use it. One chain contemplated putting color TVs in their bathrooms until research indicated that guests would much prefer a decidedly less costly offering—an ironing board and iron. Any amenity that doesn’t add market share is wasteful. In fact, most surveys we persued indicate that low-cost items are among the most popular: in-room coffeemakers, TV remote control, and facial tissues were the favored amenities in one study.

  Occasionally, an amenity may be turned into a profit center. The minibar is such an attempt. Contrary to popular opinion, soft drinks and snacks are consumed much more than hard liquor or beer, but the minibars still turn a profit, since they charge more for the same products than vending machines could. One of the secrets of the success of the minibar: For business travelers, the cost is added to the room charge. Coke machines in the hallway don’t take company credit cards or give receipts.

  Amenity creep is so pervasive that budget hotels have tried to create a backlash. Days Inn based an advertising campaign around the slogan, “We don’t have it because you don’t want it.” At one time, Motel 6 forced you to pump in quarters if you wanted light to emit from the television in your room. The truth is—most patrons “want it,” but only if they don’t think they are paying for it.

  Of course, amenities can also foster goodwill. On our last tour, we encountered our all-time favorite amenity at Chicago’s Ambassador East Hotel. As we entered our beautiful room, there above the fireplace, on the mantel, was a spanking new copy of Do Penguins Have Knees?, with a request for an autograph from the manager. Guess where we are staying the next time we’re in Chicago?

  Is there any difference between men’s and women’s razors?

  Our examination of this issue, conducted with the naked eye, reveals that the main difference between men’s and women’s razors, at least the disposable type, is their pigment. Women’s razors are usually pink; men’s razors are found in more macho colors, like royal blue and yellow.

  But the naked eye can deceive. Chats with representatives at Bic, Schick, and Wilkinson indicate that there are at least three significant differences:

  1. The most important difference to the consumer is the “shave angle” of the two. A man’s razor has a greater angle on the blade, what the razor industry calls “aggressive exposure,” for two reasons. Men’s beards are tougher than women’s leg or underarm hair, and require more effort to be cut and, at least as important, women complain much more than men about nicks and cuts, the inevitable consequence of the aggressive exposure of the men’s blades. Women don’t particularly like putting hosiery over red splotches, while men seem perfectly content walking around their offices in the morning with their faces resembling pepperoni pizzas.

  2. Most women’s razors have a greater arc in the head of the razor, so that they can see the skin on the leg more easily as they shave.

  3. Women don’t shave as frequently as men, especially in the winter, when most wear pants and long-sleeved blouses. Schick offers a “Personal Touch” razor line for women that features guard bars that contain combs, so that longer hair is set up at the proper angle for shaving.

  As far as we can ascertain, all the major manufacturers use the same metallurgy in men’s and women’s razors.

  After enumerating the design features that his company incorporates to differentiate men’s and women’s razors, Fred Wexler, director of research at Schick, offered a rueful parting observation: Despite all of their design efforts, Schick’s research reveals that a solid majority of women use razors designed for men.

  Submitted by Kim MacIntosh of Chinacum, Washington.

  What are the numbers on the bottom right of my canceled checks? Why aren’t those numbers there before the check is canceled?

  You are probably vaguely aware of the preprinted numbers running along the bottom left of your personalized checks. The numbers on the far left identify your bank. The numbers to their immediate right are your bank account number. The right half of the bottom of the check is blank.

  But when the check is returned with your statement, a mysterious ten-digit number appears. If you look carefully, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out to what the numbers refer—they indicate exactly how much your check is for—down to the penny. Any amount up to $99,999,999.99 can be expressed with these numbers. The fact that most folks are not H. Ross Perot explains why most of these codes start with a bunch of z
eros.

  You didn’t think that banks clerks pore over every check individually and add or subtract from your account with a calculator, did you? These funny numbers on the bottom of your checks are called “MICR” (magnetic ink coding) numbers. Brian Smith, executive vice-president of the United States League of Savings Institutions, explains how the amounts of your check are encoded, as well as a personal Imponderable of ours—does anyone ever read the part of the check where we have to write out in words the dollar value of the check?:

  MICR numbers are keyed in very fast, by clerks reading the items and typing them in via special keyboards on the machine that first processes each check. Writing the dollar amount clearly in numbers at the upper right is vital since nobody ever reads the amount in words, beginning in the middle left, though, legally, that is supposedly the controlling description of the amount of the check. All processing is done by the MICR process after the initial coding.

  Why do banks sometimes attach a white piece of paper to the bottom of canceled checks?

  The white strip is affixed to the bottom of a check when the MICR process misfires. Sometimes, a scanner can’t read the MICR numbers. More often, a clerk mistypes the amount of the check.

  John Hall, of the American Banking Association, told Imponderables that there is no way for a clerk to erase or overstrike a typing error on a check. Instead, the MICR numbers are encoded on a plain piece of paper, which is placed on the bottom of the check and is read by the same scanners that decode checks without the white appendage.

  Submitted by Douglas Watkins, Jr. of Hayward, California. Thanks also to Joseph P. McGowan of Glenolden, Pennsylvania.

  Why do the clearest days seem to follow storms?

  Our correspondent wondered whether this phenomenon was an illusion. Perhaps we are so happy to see the storm flee that the next day, without battering winds, threatening clouds, and endless precipitation, seems beautiful in contrast.

  No, it isn’t an illusion. Meteorologists call this phenomenon “scavenging.” The rainwater that soaks your shoes also cleans away haze and pollutants from the atmosphere and sends it to the ground. At the same time, the wind that wrecks your umbrella during the storm diffuses the irritants that are left in the atmosphere, so that neighbors in surrounding areas aren’t subjected to those endless days of boring, pollution-free environments.

  Of course, where the pollutants end up depends upon the direction of the prevailing winds. If you are living in a community with generally bad air quality, the wind is your friend anyway. Chances are, the wind is carrying in air from a region with superior air quality.

  Submitted by Jack Schwager of Goldens Bridge, New York.

  Why are paper and plastic drinking cups wider at the top than the bottom?

  A reader, Chuck Lyons, writes:

  I have never been able to understand why paper and plastic drinking cups are designed with the wide end at the top. That makes them top-heavy and much easier to tip over. Making them with the wide end on the bottom would make the cups more stable and less likely to tip over, with no disadvantage at all that I can see.

  Come to think of it, Chuck’s suggestion has been used for eons in the design of bottles. We certainly never found it difficult drinking from a “bottom-heavy” beer bottle. Most glass bottles and many glass or ceramic drinking cups don’t taper at the bottom, so why should disposable cups? What are we missing?

  Plenty, it turns out, according to every cup producer we spoke to. John S. Carlson, marketing director of James River, put it succinctly:

  The cups are wider at the top so that they can be “nested” in a stack during shipping, storage on the grocery store shelf, and in your cupboard at home. If they weren’t tapered slightly, they’d stack like empty soup cans. The current configuration saves space and spills, and is more efficient and cost effective.

  In retailing, not only time but space is money. Better to get more of your product on the shelf and live with the consequences of an extra customer or two tipping over a cupful of Kool-Aid.

  Submitted by Chuck Lyons of Palmyra, New York.

  Why do steak houses always serve such huge baked potatoes?

  The poser of this Imponderable, Gene McBride, advances his own theory to explain the prodigious potatoes we encounter in steak houses. He feels that no home cook would ever buy these elephantine spuds for personal use, so farmers are forced to unload them at bargain basement prices to restaurants, “which is better than using the potatoes for hog feed.”

  We spoke to restaurateurs, meat marketers, and potato marketers to help confirm Gene’s theory, and found only the potato folk eager to speak on the record. Everyone disagreed with our reader, saying that restaurants pay a pretty penny for portly potatoes.

  But that doesn’t mean that economics don’t enter into the equation. Several restaurateurs indicated that a big baked potato adds to the perceived value of a meal, for steak houses, with their macho image, unlike nouvelle cuisine outposts, always would rather send a customer home stuffed to the gills and reaching for the Pepto-Bismol than starving to death and looking for the nearest McDonald’s.

  Don Odiorne, vice-president of food service at the Idaho Potato Commission, gave us a history of the potato’s role in the U.S. steak house and his own theory about the reason for using the huge potatoes:

  Steak houses typically started out serving enormous portions of steaks, bread, and potatoes—steaks so large they wouldn’t fit on the plate. Sometimes to accomplish this claim, the plates an operator ordered were smaller in diameter (the standard 12 to 14 inch plate went down to 9 to 11 inches), but it was generally accepted that the cowboy-size western steak was huge and hard to finish eating in one sitting.

  This quest for “value” evolved over the years as the cost of food, which had been relatively stable for quite some time, began to rise. Food cost pressures reduced portion sizes or increased the selling prices. Both had negative effects on customer counts. As steaks got smaller, the side dishes, such as potatoes, got larger.

  Generally, it is much less expensive to up the size of a potato than to up the size of the meat portion. For example, if an operator serves a 90 count potato (about 9 ounces), and a carton of potatoes cost the restaurant $15.00, the individual serving cost of the potato, not including condiments, would be less than 17 cents. Go up to a 50 count potato (one pound), and the individual cost is 30 cents. Now try and find a cut of steak for 30 cents a pound—it’s impossible.

  As several restaurateurs told us off the record, the baked potato thus becomes one of the cheapest ways to stuff the customer without increasing costs—but not because the restaurant is paying less per pound for the big potato than the small one. Note that the “bargain” chain steak houses, such as Ponderosa and Bonanza, who don’t sell such huge steaks, also downsize their baked potatoes, because their “value” is in their price, not the quantity (or quality) of food.

  Still, not all our sources were willing to lay the tradition of the immense Idaho solely on economic preoccupations. To some, the size of the potato is a matter of aesthetics, of poetry, as it were. For example, Meredith Hughes, managing director of the Potato Museum, in Great Falls, Virginia, weighs in with an explanation that is deeper than anything we ever heard on Kung Fu:

  You would think that habitués of meat and potato palaces would already know the answer to the question you pose. They enter the gates for the biggest piece of dead animal flesh they can get, and by gum, they get a baker to lie parallel to it in perfect symmetry. Symmetry must be the answer. Balance, the harmony of equals, the yin and yang of it all.

  Linda McCashion, director of advertising and public relations for the Potato Board, while acknowledging the perceived “value” added by the hefty potato, also spoke of the “balance to the plate” provided by the vast vegetable. And big potatoes help reinforce the macho image of the steak house. As McCashion puts it, “Real studs eat real spuds.”

  Submitted by Gene McBride of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

/>   Since computer paper is longer than it is wide, why are computer monitors wider than they are long?

  As Robert Probasco, professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Idaho, puts it, the short answer is: “Monitors (video display tubes) and paper sizes evolved at different times for unrelated technologies, so their recent marriage has been a marriage of convenience.” Our personal computer monitors evolved from the round screens of early television; Probasco reminds us that radar screens still retain this efficient shape.

  Many of the early microcomputers were designed so that the user could employ a television as the monitor. Early micros had such poor resolution that only forty legible characters per line could be displayed on the screen; now the number has doubled. Still, the monitors aren’t long enough to display a whole printed page. The average screen displays about twenty-five lines, whereas a printed single-spaced paper holds about fifty-five lines—hence the need for scrolling up and down when drafting a document on-screen.

  But the personal computer configuration is hardly universal in the computer world. For example:

  Newspapers require huge screens capable of displaying an entire page of newsprint. They use monitors that do duplicate the shape of the paper.