Take me out to the experience.

Taking the experience out of the experience. That is what this blog will partially be about. It's also about a trend or mindset that has been building for many years in our society, but now it is wildly out of control. It might even be irreversible at this stage. That remains to be seen.

Take me out to the ball game. The seventh inning stretch. It was part of the live game experience at every park that had baseball. How did Harry Caray know that?

"There's a sense of integrity and honesty in telling the people what you actually see and feel and I think if there's any difference at all...some announcers may be more interesting than others because of their style and style is personality, whatever your personality might be. I'm a people guy and I think everywhere I go I look for people to talk to....I go to bars because who do you see there, baseball fans. You find out firsthand what they like and what they dont like. You can't learn that any other way. Unless you have an occasion to talk to the true fan."

-Harry Caray

I remember very clearly when I would go to baseball games with my grandmother, she would always sing along with the seventh inning stretch. She would also always buy a beer, and get a bag of peanuts. It was part of the experience. The live baseball game experience.

When I was growing up, we had season tickets to the Montreal Expos, at Jarry Park, from their first season in 1969 until we moved away to another city in 1977. I dont remember much about the 1969 season, but I know we went to games. I was only 4 years old that first season. The Expos had special days once a year, where the players and their children would be on the field before the game and if you were a season ticket holder and were interested, you could let your kids come on the field with the players and their kids. I was one of those lucky ones that got to do that and in the family scrapbook, I have pictures of that experience to prove it and look back on. Through the years, part of the experience was getting fries between innings, and always a soda pop to go with it. It was little things like that. Like the sun shining in our eyes for the first few innings of a night game because of how the park was constructed and the seats we had. Many other things like that also come to my mind. Too many to mention for this blog. I will take on that memory treasure chest in another blog on another day.
Safe to say, while Jarry Park was not a great field to host Major League baseball, it did have that Wrigley Field and Fenway Park ambiance that cant be replaced or described. When the Expos finally moved to the Olympic Stadium in 1976, that was the beginning of the end for the franchise. It was a terrible place to watch a game. It was easier to stay home and watch the game on TV if you could. And that is what we did. There was not much experience left in the game experience.

You can't convince a fool against his will.

-Ernie Banks

Ernie Banks played 24 big league seasons, all with the Chicago Cubs. There was never even a remote chance he would play with any other team, even though most of those Cubs teams were terrible and he was a superstar. He was a Cub. Simple as that. He was their brand. He was actually known as "Mr. Cub" and "Mr. Sunshine". He was a sensation in his first season, then went on to be an All Star for 11 straight seasons. He is considered one of the greatest players of all time. He was a shortstop, yet he hit more than 500 home runs in his career. Most shortstops would be considered power hitters if they hit more than 200 home runs for their careers. He hit 512.

More than anything, Ernie Banks just loved to play baseball. He was well known to say that he wished he could play more. "Let's Play Two" was his famous saying. He loved playing baseball so much he would have loved to play a doubleheader, where most players would not like that sort of thing. Because of all of the above, the fans loved him. And they loved the Cubs, even though they were a bad team almost every year Banks was a professional.
In today's game, a player like Banks in his prime would almost certainly be traded, or, he would leave due to free agency. It's the business of baseball, not the sport and fun of baseball. It's how the game has changed. Not for the better.
In Banks last season, 1971, I was only 6 years old. By then, I was already a massive baseball fan. Although I was more a Montreal Expos fanatic, I did love baseball. Playing it, watching it, cheering for my team. Even at that young age, and Banks advanced age and in the last year of his career, I understood what a big deal Ernie Banks was. In a time now where the word legend is tossed around way too loosely, Ernie Banks was about as legendary as a legend can be. During one game I watched on TV, the announcers talked about Banks as though he were the messiah. And he was, to baseball fans. Harry Caray understood that.

On a trip I took about 10 years ago, I made it a point to stop at certain parks. Parks that had that aura of experience. Fenway Park in Boston was one of those. It didn't disappoint. I had already been to Dodger Stadium in the 1980s on another trip, and to this day, that is the palace of all stadiums I have ever been to, and that number of parks is many. You just have to be there to soak in that atmosphere. There is just no way I can explain that feeling to you if you haven't been there. Even just approaching it from the highway to park my car and being able to see the entire park because the highway was far elevated relative to the stadium. It is just breathtaking. When I was very young and the Expos would play there, it felt like watching a game from Fantasy Island.
But on that recent trip I also stopped in to Wrigley Field in Chicago. If I had a bucket list, which I dont, but if I did, that would have been on the list. It is another that didn't disappoint. It was like walking into a time machine. Where time was frozen. Where baseball was still baseball. Played on grass and not at a cookie cutter stadium with advertising all over the field but with Ivy covered outfield walls, seats that were so old they were timeless, where the smell of beer and hot dogs was everywhere. Where you could hear the crack of the bat from any seat and you might even catch a foul ball. I still have 10 or so foul balls we caught back in the day. One of those was from Wrigley, which my father caught, but I was too young to remember that trip. I think I was only 5 at that time.

People will come, Ray. They come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up the driveway, not knowing for sure why they are doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.
"Of course, we won't mind if you look around," you'll say. "It's only $20 per person."
They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For its money they have, and peace they lack. Then they will walk off to the bleachers and sit in their shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines. Where they sat with their children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it will be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces.
People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers.
It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that was once good. And it could be again.

Can it be that again? I doubt it. The trend of society and the people who control that variable says no. They dont want it to. They have lost their moral compass, and they are the tour guides.

Tim Horton (1930-1974) is a name almost exclusively known with donut shops now. But that wasn't the case when I was growing up. Tim Horton was a great hockey player for a long time who died tragically in a car accident back in 1974. At the time, like Banks, he was an older player, but still viable. These days, you would be hard pressed to find a baseball or hockey player still playing at the age of 44.
In spite of his longevity and success, like most hockey players of his day, Tim Hortons would barely make enough money to live off of as a hockey player. Many, including Ernie Banks and others had day jobs in the summer and off season to make ends meet. Ernie Banks in fact worked at a bank. Tim Horton took another route.
Horton opened his first donut shop in 1964 while he was still a star player in the NHL in Hamilton, which is about 1 hour from both Toronto and Buffalo, two teams he played for in his NHL career. By 1968, he had created a franchise of many shops and was well off. Horton died travelling from Toronto to Buffalo, which can be a very dangerous drive in the winter. I have done it many times. It is known as a snow belt. Horton liked fast cars and he liked to drive fast. He also was a drinker and all those factors played into the single car crash that took his life that night in February 1974.
While Horton had franchised out his original donut shop, which he also ran when he was able to in the early days, he co owned almost if not all the franchises and had a hands on approach to making sure it stayed true to the brand which he had built. He had name value, and he used that wisely, not loosely and flippantly.
Once he died, all that changed.
Like Ernie Banks, as soon as he was eligible, he was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. In fact, both were inducted in 1977. Without Horton around, the franchise was now just a coffee and donut shop chain, without its founder. That is where the trouble started.

What a lot of people dont know is that Tim Horton and his partner Ron Joyce built that first location. I dont mean built the business, they physically built the actual building brick by brick. In addition, in the early days, if you wanted a franchise, you had to go to Donut School, learn how to make the products and then work a certain amount of hours before you could have a location. As the brand built out, they were very careful to make sure they were operated to the same standard as the first location.
When Tim Horton died, his partner Ron Joyce bought out Hortons widow in 1974. He operated and expanded the franchise and he did that until 1995, when he sold the chain to Wendys. I used to travel a lot in those days, and if you went into any rest stop plaza off the highway, there would be a Wendys and Tim Hortons side by side. It was almost like they were operated as one restaurant. Around that time, Tim Hortons started selling bagels and sandwiches, and as the years have passed, now it is considered a restaurant, not a donut shop. In 2014, the entire chain was bought by Restaurant Brands, which also operates Burger King and Popeyes Chicken among their large stable of brands.
These days, if you go into a Tim Hortons it's nothing like the ambiance of the early chain of stores. It's an assembly line of service, the prices are sky high, the workers barely speak english and dont understand the product, and the offering is very little donuts and mostly higher end items. It has become a big chain with no ambiance period. Many dont even bother going into the store, but line up 30 deep at the drive thru window. There is very little experience left to the entire experience. If you watch the video above, you will see how that experience was described by those who worked there or operated the earlier franchises. That is ancient history now.
As well, because Tim Hortons in the early days was associated with a famous and respected hockey player, and then as a Canadian meeting place and it now has tried to expand into other countries, with very few exceptions, it is failing in that endeavor. Tim Horton as an icon means nothing to Americans, and Tim Hortons as a donut shop doesnt have any cache at all. Dunkin Donuts would mean more to an American. As a Canadian, Tim Hortons is like how baseball used to be. It meant something. Now, it's just a massive chain restaurant like many others. As it has scaled up, as a massive operation like Restaurant Brands would be expected to do with it, it has lost the core reason it was so popular in the first place.
Those reasons were simple. It was a relatively inexpensive place to get some comfort food and a coffee, and it was a nice place to do that, and in many instances you might even make a few friends because the customers were very loyal. Many would travel to just one location. It had a family feel to it. As well, the servers in many cases had worked years at the same location. I can say with certainty that that is now not the case.
Why is there such a difference now?
There is a big difference between those who build a business and those who buy a business to strictly make a profit. One watches the details, the other watches the numbers.

Many remember the classic scene in the movie Wall Street. In case you dont, I will put it above. In the clip, Gordon Gekko lists both the problems that people like him create, and the reasons that the business will fail because of it. What he did not do, is acknowledge his part in all of that. We all know the Greed is Good part, but there is much more in there many forget.

A few excerpts.

"The men who built this great industrial empire made sure of it because it was their money at stake. Today, management has no stake in the company."

"Teldar paper has 33 different Vice Presidents each, earning over $200,000 a year." (This was in the mid 80s.)

"The new law of evolution in Corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest."

"I am not a destroyer of companies, I am a liberator of them."

Here is what the character didn't say. He only has a stake so he can destroy the parts and sell them off. That is his skin in the game. His law was killing the unfit so he could eat them. He had no interest in survival for anybody but himself. He didn't actually destroy companies. He found companies on life support and he pulled the plug when he got the last breath out of them. He did not liberate anything.

It sounds odd to say it but greed was not the worst part. The motivation of the action and the actions they take to get there are the far bigger issue. In fact, while the word Greed got the headline, and now the hits on You Tube, it's not even the right word for what Gekko was describing. He was describing productivity and accountability, and yes, drive to be successful. Survival of the fittest but only in a scenario where he survives and they dont. He had no interest in making anything better for anybody but himself. In his way, he was a vulture.
Here is what the average person wouldnt know about the Gordon Gekko character. He is based on Ivan Boesky.
Who was Ivan Boesky? He was known as an insider trading moneymaker. What he would do is buy into the company's stock with the sole intention of selling that stock if the company was to get bought out by a much larger corporation. Because that is a very dangerous thing to try and win at, he would find insiders who could give him illegal information on the chances of those deals happening and closing. They call that arbitrage. There is nothing wrong with it if you just use your own research to figure that out, but when you do it like Boesky did, it's a crime and you go to jail for acting in that matter. Which he did. In other words, a fair arbitrage player is like a sharp poker player. He makes the right bet based on his skills. A dirty criminal one only play poker in a game where he knows exactly the cards his opponents have even though they are theoretically not showing. He cheats.
While Gekkos character was based on the offensive and brash Boesky, they actually operated in different ways. Boesky, as mentioned, simply was out to buy stock and sell it if and when it rose in value. Gekko, on the other hand, in spite of what he said in that speech, was one who bought distressed companies at a massive discount, then broke them up, sold off the parts for a huge profit and ruined any chance they had at success going forward.
But Gekko and Boesky did share one common trait and strategy. Neither had started any of those companies nor had they any interest in making them viable or better. In the below clip, he lays out exactly what he was.

How much is enough, Gordon?
It's not a question of enough pal. It's a zero sum game. Somebody wins, somebody loses....capitalism at its finest.
What I do. Stock and real estate speculation.
Why do you need to wreck this company? Because it's wreckable.

Not once does he mention making it work better. Nor does he even try.
So, the impetus for this blog was the current The Container Store bankruptcy. It is everything that this blog is about.
While reading up about that on LinkedIn, I came across a piece written by a woman named Nicole Eisdorfer. She lays out much of the situation with The Container Store and why it has failed, in her view of course. She also relates that she worked in the store many years ago, and what that culture was like. I will summarize all of that, but I encourage you to read her piece. It's very well written and well thought out.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/from-crown-jewel-cultures-common-commodity-harsh-eisdorfer-phd-bx11c/

-employees weren’t just trained; they were nurtured. The Container Store’s vibrant culture has faded into a robotic, monotone husk.
-their approach — empathetic, thorough, and people-focused
-the founders, made a point to personally visit stores and remember associates by name. You could tell they actually cared.
-employees weren’t seen as expendable resources but as the company’s greatest differentiators.
-what set The Container Store apart was the tenure of its employees. Some associates had been with the company for more than 10 years, some 25.
-the founders weren’t distant executives; they were storytellers and cultural icons whose presence and philosophies shaped daily operations.
-As The Container Store scaled its operations and became a publicly traded company, the pressures of growth and profitability began to erode its cultural foundation.
-the decline in The Container Store’s employee-first philosophy.
-customers who once felt understood and valued began to see The Container Store as just another retailer.

"The Container Store’s journey mirrors a larger trend in corporate America — where the drive for efficiency and scalability often comes at the cost of the very culture that built success in the first place. The story of The Container Store is a cautionary tale for any organization looking to scale. Culture is not a luxury; it is the lifeblood of sustainable success. To preserve what makes them unique."

-Nicole Eisdorfer

I would argue that the nature of scaling up a business, especially when it is taken over by corporate types in of itself is the reason they fail. It is not about the culture, the experience the customer and employees have, but the numbers. And, as Gordon Gekko did get right, if management has no real financial stake in the entire thing, they dont have to care. They apply their principles, techniques and strategies to something that was working just fine, which is why they bought it in the first place, and if that doesnt work, which most of the time it wont, they simply just let it fail and take their loss. While the original owners, like Tim Horton, who started it, nurtured it, and owned it would not have let it get that way. They cared that it would flourish and succeed. It wasn't just numbers. It was an entity. It was an experience. Customers paid gladly to have that, because it gave them peace and a sense that it was worth supporting.
A short example from personal experience. A longtime friend of mine had a father who started a company in the 1970s, from scratch. He started with one store, but as they scaled up, one store at a time, he maintained the culture of every store, and the customer base. When he got to about 30 stores, all pretty much local, it was still that way, and very successful. At that point, K Mart bought him out with a massive overpay for the whole thing, and he sold out. Its the kind of scenario Boesky would have loved. Within two years, the whole thing went bust. The kind of scenario Gekko would have loved. KMart changed all of it to make it more efficient. It may have even been more efficient. But, it wasn't the same business, and it failed horribly. As soon as they buy, they scale it, then they adjust it, and then when it changes, it fails. 

Efficiency is something. It isnt everything. Customer experience can mean a lot more than that. 
Simply, if they had just kept doing the same thing, the same way, and opened a few stores at a time in different cities, and taken the care to make sure they were run properly, it would have kept succeeding. They scaled it and they wrecked it. Not that they cared. KMart was a massive entity back then, and the money lost on that deal was not significant. However, true to their way of doing things, it wasn't long before KMart itself was in big trouble and out of business. If they were smart, they would have enlisted my friend's father to run KMart. He had the right formula. He built it, he managed it, he cared about it. He knew it. He made it work. 
I remember a time when you would go to the grocery store, and some of the cashiers had been there for 30 years or more. They knew three generations of a family. By name. Those days are gone. Sadly, it doesnt seem to matter in the world of buy outs, arbitrage, foolish scaling and stock priced based options compensation.

What is the answer to this situation? Well, I get why everyone has to scale up now. To compete on price and cost of doing business, you have to be large enough to compete with a Walmart, or Amazon, or any big box store. Many smaller hardware stores simply can't compete with Home Depot. They dont have the buying power. But even more importantly, if you can't just stay local, you have to expand out slowly and carefully. Getting larger but losing your core advantage is a good way to go bust faster. In doing that, you will certainly encounter a Gordon Gekko type, who sees the value of your assets, but not your overall business. You have damaged it and he sees it as easily wreckable if he just pushes the right buttons. 

Maybe its just a foolish romantic notion of mine to think that the experience meant as much as it did, or does now. Maybe I'm not romantic about it all, but just nostalgic. I remember what it felt like to experience that experience. That experience that came from that scene in Field of Dreams. It was worth the price we paid for that, and it would be worth the price now if we had to pay more for it. But, that is just a dream now, not a reality.

It seems nobody is playing on that Field of Dreams anymore. Can you convince these fools who think they understand a business better than the builders of that business who made it what it is, what they wanted to buy from them? I dont think so. They dont have the will to see it that way. Not the way we saw it back in the day.