Today’s Globe story about the delivery disaster of the last week is astounding, even beyond the hilarity of both the Globe and its new delivery company very publicly pointing the finger at one another. (“We warned you things would be terrible!” “Did not!” “Did too!”) Consider:
ACI Media Group, which took over home delivery in Greater Boston last Monday, has yet to hire enough drivers to cover every route.
Uh, what? How is it possible that a new company was allowed to take over delivering the paper without having hired enough people to, you know, deliver the paper? Shouldn’t that have been a pretty basic commitment in the contract between the Globe and ACI?
And many of ACI’s new delivery routes lack any logical sequence, leaving drivers criss-crossing communities and making repeated trips to the same neighborhoods.
Good Lord. Hard to know what to say about that one. Kevin Cullen, who along with many other Globe reporters, columnists, and staff, pitched in to deliver papers yesterday morning, wrote a column about it and his “delivery route that appeared to have been prepared by someone under the influence of methamphetamine,” which lends anecdotal support.
Globe chief executive Mike Sheehan said the newspaper undertook the switch from Publishers Circulation Fulfillment to ACI primarily in an effort to improve service and reduce the number of delivery cancellations due to service complaints.
Mm hmm. How’s that working out.
[ACI CEO Jack Klunder] said in four to six months service will be as good as before the change, and then will continue to improve.
Whoa. Four to six months to get things back to where they were? That cannot possibly be acceptable.
ACI also brings a “material” cost savings, [Globe CEO Mike Sheehan] said, which Globe owner John Henry had intended to put back into the operation.
Ah, well there you go. Apparently, you get what you pay for in newspaper delivery, as in many other areas of human endeavor.
The bottom line, at least from this story, appears to be that both parties (ACI and the Globe) have royally screwed up. ACI was obviously unprepared to take over delivery last Monday. And, given that, the Globe never should have allowed it to happen. The damage is now done, probably cannot be reversed, and poses a serious threat to the Globe’s financial stability if a lot of print customers get fed up and start cancelling.
Four to six months. There’s no way the Globe can allow this level of service disruption to continue for that long.
Please report to CEO Mike Sheehan’s office today to do his job, since the Globe obviously can’t afford to hire a CEO with a brain in his head.
The Globe is like a big family, don’t forget!
they’ve got a couple of reporters on it.
n/t
…have cut turf for campaign canvassing using VAN? I for one can do it in my sleep and it seems like somebody at the Globe needs this skill for drawing paper routes.
If you were cutting turf for a person to use every day going forward, you’d likely spend the time to do a better job than you do cutting turf for a volunteer on a one-off run. As you should.
The routes should be better than what a person can come up with on the fly with limited local knowledge. The routes should be generated by a reasonably sophisticated program.
For years, delivery drivers have called my business in South Overshoe with a complaint that there is no such address. I ask them if they are using GPS, and when they say yes I tell them that they cannot use Overshoe but must input SOUTH Overshoe. I further tell them that there are 5 Elm Streets located inside the municipality of Overshoe – one is South, one in West, one in East, and one in Overshoe proper – but they do not connect with one another. Oh, and while the name of the street in the municipality is Elm, on GPS it is called Old Route 999. After swearing at me, they re-input the address with the proper village and then find us.
Legally, Pocasset is part of Bourne; Woods Hole is part of Falmouth; Hyannis is part of Barnstable, not to be confused with WEST Barnstable, ad infinitum across the state. I cannot help noticing the new company is from California. I wonder to what extent they are directing drivers and their routes, not knowing our Can’t Get There From Here street layouts.
And IMO, GPS and computer programs make this worse instead of better, based on my experiences with UPS/FedEX drivers.
on GPS. My wife teaches piano, and she has students come to the house. Parents use GPS to get here end up at the other end of the street looking for our house because the street is evidently numbered backwards.
Not sure where Overshoe is – I believe not an incorporated name. I know in Boston you need to use for example Dorchester for some addresses.
Overshoe isn’t as far away as BFE, but just as fictitious.
A Globe reporter who was on WBUR this afternoon said her route had streets grouped alphabetically. Not entirely in alpha order, but “all the W streets were together, all the B streets were together…” etc. That’s just a complete fail in setting up the route. It would fail as badly in the grid-layout suburb of Detroit where I grew up (where all the street names are unique and even the house numbers are unique) as it would here.
from LA to Atlanta. I’m sure that there are street name peculiarities in all places they service. Blaming street names is no excuse. They should have known better and prepared better.
This “name isn’t the name of the town” nonsense drives me nuts. Yes, it’s rooted in history, but it’s unnecessarily confusing. NYC has ~10 million people and five boroughs which, in fairness, are generally in different counties. Boston has ~800 thousand people and over a dozen neighborhood names. Now look, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use Hyde Park (or Red Hook) when describing where you live to a local, but it shouldn’t be a legal address. Only wait — when Boston annexed these communities, it didn’t rename streets. So you’ve got all these streets in different parts of the city with the same name. This is dumb. I’m not saying it should be fixed all at once, but would it really be that hard to review the streets for redundant names and start renaming some of them? Do 5 percent a year or something.
Another example that drives me mad: 02467. That’s the ZIP for Chestnut Hill. You mean the one in Newton or Brookline? So wait, which city or town do you live in?
Gah. Stupid old school parochialism and refusal to change to hell with the newbies who moved into town in the 1800s. Just pull a youie where the Dunkies used to be.
Good point about Chestnut Hill.
Your New York example is not ideal, because of Queens, where you still use neighborhood names in addresses. But more to the point, if I live on, say, 10 Park Street, how is it better if I have to write “Boston” in my address instead of “Boston” (i.e., “Boston Proper”) or “West Roxbury” as the case may be? If the answer is, “rename the streets,” I think the cure is worse than the disease.
And another thing: why are we putting lane lines in the roads all of a sudden? Sheesh.
Why is that worse? Having multiple roads with the same name in the same municipality isn’t something we choose to do going forward — so why do we leave the old confusion around?
When I first moved to Boston, I lived on a dead-end street in Chestnut Hill zipcode. I had thought I lived in Newton, but when I went to vote I discovered I actually lived in West Roxbury. Go figure.
In any case, I don’t think you are thinking your street renaming proposal through. Many people who live on those streets are going to be really pissed if you try to rename them. They are going to call their City Councilors and State Reps and the renaming will end up going nowhere. The fact is, this was a much, much bigger problem before the advent of GPS and Google Maps. If it wasn’t a problem worth fixing twenty years ago, it definitely is not now.
I agree that it would take awfully strong leadership to pull this off on anything but the smallest streets in non-voting neighborhoods.
porcupine’s comments above suggest the opposite — that modern day GPS and nav software lacks the nuance to handle exactly these sorts of problems.
which provided locations to dispatcher for 911 callers. My town renamed 10 streets, including ones that were similar- there was West Drive and Westside Dr. and one was renamed. It could be done. People lived, and Bostonians would as well.
and if you rename the streets then many people’s GPS boxes won’t know the new street names. Of course anyone with a printed map or atlas will also lose.
No one is going to bother to exert such “strong leadership” because this really isn’t a serious problem that needs to be solved. There have been three Washington Streets in Boston for over 100 years, all three are fairly significant thoroughfares, and yet people seem to figure it out ok.
Yes, streets could be renamed, but there is very little demand for it in Boston so it is mostly a waste of time to talk about it. There are literally hundreds of issues in the City that need more attention than street names.
…for anyone on the affected streets to change all the stationery, contact information, etc.
They don’t: they are designed by the Postal Service for postal routes strictly for the convenience of mail delivery.
I’ve had to deal with this every time this crops up during redistricting.
(As an aside, this inaccurate conflation of zip codes with neighborhoods also contributes to inequities in insurance premiums (and property values) when a given zip code counts more than the income, credit rating, or history of a given policy holder.)
Back to Globe delivery problems: Had the Globe used off-the-shelf geographic information system software to input its subscription base and generate delivery routes, this problem would have never happened.
n/t
This is a crucial observation.
While it is true that most zipcodes do correspond to geographic regions, the exceptions are frequent enough that they cause enormous issues.
Many colleges and universities, for example, have one zipcode for any mail addressed to any student, faculty member, or staff member. Many of those have multiple campuses. Similarly, many government agencies have one or more zipcodes for the entire agency. Those offices are scattered throughout the nation.
The IRS has different zipcodes for tax returns with and without refunds.
As Paul observes, the purpose of a zipcode is to improve the efficiency of postal routes.
Is there another instance like in Chestnut Hill where it sounds like you’re saying one zip code straddles the Newton/Boston line? I can vouch for your point about insurance. I got a new (to me) car about the same time I moved from Dracut barely into Lowell a few years ago. When I called my insurance to inform them of the car switch the increase in premium came mostly not from the change of car, but the change of zip code. My complex straddles the line and I can literally look out my window and see my former zip code (or as I like to put it in political conversations – Sarah Palin couldn’t see Russia from her house, but I really can see Dracut from mine!)
the paper was successfully delivered by the previous contractor, finding the same streets, in the same neighborhoods. There was no need to reinvent the wheel. It’s a failure to execute on the part of the new contractor.
..but from what was described it sounded like what I could do with VAN would be an improvement.
How many of their 230,000 print subscribers, who pay $754 per year or so, will they lose due to cancellations?
Let’s say 2%. Feels conservative. I assume a bunch of subscribers exist “always on the cusp” of cancelling, thanks to the Net.
So 4,600 * $754 = $3.5 million.
Wonder how long it takes The Globe to recoup that with cheaper delivery vendor.
I stand by my “slow walk to digital” comment in the other thread. Somehow this is related to that. Maybe the existing vendor wanted a longer deal, ACI came in at lower dollars and a shorter number of years, I don’t know … but I am sure they are thinking about getting away from print and delivery and all that that entails.
Or, they screwed up royally. That can never be ruled out in human endeavor, no matter how smart the people running the ship.
If they just wanted to bump people over to digital it would have made a lot more sense to just keep raising the prices of the print edition (which they had been doing). This way they are getting people pissed off enough to fully cancel their subscription.
Furthermore, both from what has been publicly reported and from what I have heard from someone whose family member works at the Globe, the internal perception is that this has been an utter disaster.
But how did their eyes come off the ball so badly? I don’t know, obviously, but my theory is that they’re distracted by trying to reinvent the paper as a profitable digital vehicle.
about getting away from print, or what that would even look like, the fact remains that the vast majority of almost any newspaper’s income (and profits) comes from print.
So this was definitely a screw up.
is in real trouble here. This reeks of total disdain for anyone who relies on these services. How many delivery drivers are getting laid off & how many subscribers are getting shafted so John Henry (net worth $1.58 billion) can add to his profits? And let’s not forget Derrick Z. Jackson getting shown the door while Jeff Jacoby stays on the payroll.
What this reminds me of most is the Philly school district’s disastrous decision to privatize substitute teaching. Screw the workers, screw the public, but the rich guys get a few extra bucks so who cares what else happens to the little people.
What the Globe is doing to itself is pretty much what it wants to do to public schools through charters. I don’t expect the editors to perceive this parallel, but it serves right those who worship at the altar of the private sector.
when you make promises you can’t deliver, and it’s easier to think you saved money by making decisions that are penny sound, pound foolish, than it is to actually save money.
The Globe should have thought longer and harder before it decided to jump ship on something as important as the delivery of their own paper, and unfortunately huge swaths of corporations have learned they can earn contracts with false promises without much punishment.
What’s happening with the Globe right now is very, very emblematic for the way our economy and delivery of services has shifted over the past 30 years — one where it doesn’t work so hot for most regular people, but makes some small number of people lots and lots of money in the process.
From my own 25 + years experience in business (when working for an organization enmeshed in a public relations crisis), John Henry’s response (or lack there of) to the complete failure of his distribution function is pretty typical. It is a leadership approach that is not only exasperating the crisis but, more importantly, one that is likely to cause long term and pervasive damage to the Boston Globe’s credibility and future sales.
Public relations experts who handled crises threatening to destroy a company’s public image will tell you that when a CEO fades from view, stonewalls the public, and refuses to comment about how the problem is going to be fixed, it is exactly the wrong way to handle the problem. Concealing facts regarding the crisis will also, in most cases, backfire because the media will eventually uncover them, report them widely and more damage will be done to an already damaged company.
In fact, PR experts urge the opposite: an immediate and full public disclosure. This is the proven method to successfully defuse a crisis and resolve them favorably. An honest and vigorous public relations initiative which includes damage control, and an opportunity to rebuild the public perception of one’s company is the proven way to go.
Given the Globe’s and John Henry’s approach, it seems obvious they are not really interested in dealing with their own self-induced crisis, I suspect they are simply hunkering down hoping the pubic’s outrage will wane.
I personally think there is another way that the public should respond. That is: use a business law that is readily available to Massachusetts citizens when they are being defrauded. The MGL 93A, the Consumer Protection Act s a statute that specifically enables the Attorney General and consumers to take legal action against an organization’s unfair or deceptive conduct in the marketplace.
Some of you may say that “not delivering the newspaper” hardly rises to a violation of the law. While I am not a lawyer nor expert in consumer law, I do think that the Globe has engaged in wide spread deception. Here’s how: if you look at your monthly bill, the Globe “advance bills” its customers for its home delivery services. In effect, you are required to pay in advance (usually 30 days) for newspapers that are to be delivered.
Undoubtedly many people get their bill, pay it and assume the paper will be delivered in the days coming. Well, we (the subscribers), have learned painfully that the Globe has not fulfilled its part of this contractual arrangement. I would also argue that the Globes commercial customers have similarly been defrauded when they contracted with the Globe regarding advertising services (using the newspaper as their marketing and sales vehicle0.
What is particularly interesting about this law is the fact it requires a company to make a good faith offer of settlement in response to a complaint. If they fail to so, a court may award double or triple damages, attorney’s fees and costs if the court finds in your favor.
There are two ways I think subscribers may pursue an action under MGL 93A, First is the traditional way, send a complaint to the the Globe (a 93A “demand” letter) and if they fail to respond, sue them in small claims court. Here is a link providing more information about that process to include samples 93A letters: http://www.mass.gov/ago/consumer-resources/consumer-assistance/93a-demand-letter.html
A second, albeit less traditional way, is to contact the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office directly. They will undoubtedly attempt to dissuade you from being able to make a verbal complaint and will direct you to file a complaint in writing. The strategy here, however, is that if a couple hundred citizens call (better yet thousands of calls) come into their office complaining about the Globe engaging in deceptive, 93A-like, business practices regarding their advance billing for home delivery, they will pay attention. The telephone number and listing for the part of the AG’s office that handles 93A matters is: the Public Inquiry & Assistance Center Hotline at 617-727-8400.
It seemed pretty clear to me from the coverage that they are issuing credits, so the damages suffered by the subscriber is zero.
First, it is not at all clear that people who fail to report a missed delivery will receive a credit. Second, the credit does not pay subscribers back for the time they wasted looking for their paper, reporting it missing, and waiting on hold — often futilely — to talk to customer service.
BTW, I cancelled my subscription when they stopped delivering my paper. They told me I would get a credit, but since I was already paid up in advance the credit is worthless unless they actually cut me a check. It will be interesting to see if they do so.
Whose fault is it if people who don’t report a missed delivery don’t get a credit? Sheesh. And, hey, that’s a good idea: I spent 5 hours on hold and value my time at $700/hour, so the Globe should pay me $3500 forthwith. There’s a reason “lost time” is rarely a compensable injury in these type of things.
NYT took a month or two to issue a credit to my CC when I last moved, and closed the subscription. I’m sure that this train wreck will extend that timeline.
I am not sure that this is really worth suing over, and I doubt the AG is really going to care about this, but it is silly to say that there is “zero” cost to the subscriber. Hey, I don’t mind reporting a missed delivery when it only happens once every six months. But if I am logging into report missed delivery every single day it gets to be a real drag. The amount of time you have to take to report every infraction is out of proportion to the amount of money you will be credited. And if the Globe knows for a fact that every single person on a given route did not get a paper, they really should give affected subscribers credits whether or not they report it. If the Globe or their delivery vendor knows that no one is delivering on a given route, then it is indeed the Globe’s fault if they don’t issue credits. That is the situation we are talking about here, not one or two papers ending up in the bushes.
Of course, you could also make the argument that the Globe has saved me time that I otherwise would have wasted reading it!
You maybe right, however, I was unable to find anything on the Globe’s Customer Support website that speaks, specifically, to the terms of service regarding Home Delivery Services and, more specifically, to “credits and refunds” home deliveries of the nature we have experienced since December 28th. I did find the subject addressed for their eGlobe or digital subscription services but not for the hard copy paper subscription.
Here’s the problem, assuming for the sake of this argument, that the Globe does have a right to give credits instead refunds via their “terms of service” pertaining to subscribing to the paper. This would, seem to imply that the “terms of service” is considered a “contract” between the Globe and the Subscriber. As such then contract law would certainly include consideration of the issue of what constitutes a material breach entails. Consequently, what happens if the subscriber elects to cancel delivery services because the Globe is failing to deliver the paper? More importantly, how is a “credit” equitable for the consumer if he or she decides they no longer chooses to receive the paper due to their material breach of the contract.
Moreover, it would certainly seem that the Globe’s terms of service, if it is, in fact, a contract, would be a “contract of adhesion. That is, the Globe’s subscription terms are extremely one-sided, grossly favoring their interest over the consumers’.
Adhesion contracts typical are subject to a much stricter form of interpretation because of the increased burden on the weaker party. The difference between consent to be contractually bound and consent to the terms of the contract is critical to the interpretation of the contracts since it cannot be determined that whether the consent given is real or not in such contracts. Therefore, the manner in which the terms of the contracts are presented to the other party is an important rule for interpreting the fairness of the contract.
There also comes into play the idea of the “the doctrine of unconscionability” often used for the interpretation of these contracts. Contract in dispute are often subject to scrutiny (after it has been formed) on the basis of evaluating individual terms while looking at the overall impact on the parties and also considering if the agreement is a fair one.
The question to be answered in such cases is whether a careful person or a prudent person would enter into such a contract by agreeing on such terms (e.g. I pay for papers which I don’t receive and the Globe gets to choose whether I should be reimbursed if I no longer what to do business with them).
Contracts of adhesion are forever subject to the never-ending legal struggle between freedom and restraint. In this case the subscriber has no other option available to him but to accept their terms. This raises a question that whether there is freedom of contract available to the parties entering the contract.
The only option available to the party is to either accept the terms of the contract or to go without. Freedom to contract therefore has long been effectuated by governmental forbearance and violated by governmental action which either proscribes or prescribes the terms of a contract.
My sense is that no court would support the Globe’s terms of service posture to deny refunding subscribers for missed deliveries because they were evoking some rather unfair business terms hidden within an obscure “contract’ particularly if the subscriber never agreed to prolonged periods of time without receiving that product and service they have paid to receive.
but seems quite divorced from reality. Dan Kennedy, I believe, copied an email sent to subscribers that specifically states that credits will be issued.
I don’t see terms of service anywhere, so I have no idea what is so onerous about them. People missed a week of papers–that’s $15.
It is clear to me that you disagree with my idea. I don’t have a problem with such a disagreement. Your assertions that a) because the Globe offered a credit subscribers have zero damages and that b) my idea is divorced from reality is simply nothing more than your opinion.
For one thing, subscribers do have damages – you don’t have to agree with it nor is the monetary size of the damages the threshold of whether they exist. The Globe wants to dictate what their penalty is for breaching their fiduciary responsibility to subscribers. Your declarations based are your feelings, interpretation or opinion are not a facts.
Secondly, stating that someone else’s idea is “divorced from reality” is seems to be unprovoked antagonism more than anything else. I will continue to offer my ideas or opinions from time to time on this site, hopefully is a respectfully manner. Perhaps you might consider do the same.
The point I was attempt to make is that if enough subscribers complained under the auspices of a business regulation (without any particular expectation of restitution) the Globe might take notice and understand that their proposed solutions to correcting their failures and restoring service to level contracted for as not their sole purview.
Just to note a couple of terms: I agree that the contract (and that’s what it is) between the Globe and its subscribers is very likely a “contract of adhesion.” You can’t say to the Globe that you’d prefer to subscribe on terms different from what they offer. Or, you can, but they’ll laugh at you. However, I think it unlikely that the doctrine of unconscionability would be in play. Nor do I think it’s accurate to say that there’s any fiduciary relationship between the Globe and its subscribers. The relationship is an ordinary contractual one; nothing more.
Carry on.