PSoTD

Have a Meetup Group.

I just can't bring myself to call it camping, but we had a great time the past two days at Twin Grove Park Campground outside of Pine Grove. And the cabins were pretty darn nice!

Sounds good to me.

For fliers, this is a winning plan. When new airlines join the mix, especially discount carriers, fares generally go down. In Philadelphia, for example, a year after Southwest Airlines entered the market in 2004, fares had dropped by 25%. Airlines paying for slots would want to get the most for their money: They might switch to larger jetliners, instead of smaller regional jets, to maximize profit. Fewer planes, carrying more people, could cut delays.

I have been supporting the same local coffee shop for over 4 years. During that period of time, it has had 4 different owners, and it is commonly thought amongst current and former regulars of the shop that the shop's overall quality has diminished over each owner.

One of the things that has annoyed me about this particular shop, and the past three owners that have run it, is that I have offered good business advice to each owner, and none have taken me up on it. To me, a coffee shop has to offer a few things to be successful, at least one that runs in a competitive marketplace in a smaller suburb:

1 - quality product at reasonable prices
2 - a comfortable environment to consumer said product
3 - a sense of community

The community is key - coffee shops succeed, or fail, on the basis of their volume and return rate of "regulars".

I've watched the current ownership of this coffee shop fail for over a year now in at first maintaining the existing regular base, and now in building a new one. It is clear to me that the shop isn't going to make it under current ownership. What they need to do - immediately - is outreach to the most likely people that can become regulars for their shop - the people that live and work within a 1 mile radius or so.

Signs aren't enough, and neither are ads in the Coupon Clipper. I've told the owners that one easy and cost efficient way to go about this is to contact Hampden Township and Camp Hill Borough, and get a list of the homeowners associations in those two entities with contact persons, and find out if they have newsletters or email lists, and advertise that way. Build community through neighborhoods. Is a person more likely to become a regular at a coffee shop where he or she never sees anyone they know, or at a place where they occasionally run into and talk to neighbors and friends?

Outreach to build their customer base from their neighbors is a freakin' no-brainer, and yet they don't do it.

Anyway, even a creature of habit has to do the right thing once in a while, and I'm not going to stop at the old coffee shop haunt any more. Dumb business approaches do not deserve support, especially when hope of change is long past. Bleh.

We went to a baptism a few weeks ago at this tiny church off of St. John's Road in Camp Hill. What a step back in time.

It's a bad sign for the financial industry, when financial institutions that seem healthy have to make room on their web site to explain to customers that although other financial institutions are having big problems, they're doing fine.

On the other hand, it's good to see financial institution marketing messages such as the one below seen as consumer-attractive:

Our net worth (capital) level is strong, the highest category a credit union can achieve from our federal regulator, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA). Our delinquency ratio, an indicator of the quality of our assets, is extremely favorable. Any investment we make is federally insured. We do not take risks in the stock market or make speculative investments.