By the time my youngest is old enough to ask me what a bank is, you can bet I won’t have a concise answer. Were I to give it a stab right now, it might go something like this: “That toy pig on your shelf, the one with a cork in its belly, that’s a […]
It’s no wonder that to many consumers a bank is a bank is a bank. A regulated banking environment all but disallows substantial differentiation. Setting apart a financial institution in consumer minds is no easy thing. For a while, rewards programs presented as a would-be panacea, but these days such seem largely to have morphed […]
I worked for a man who stopped by a drive-up coffee hut each morning on his way to the office. Upon seeing his car pull into the lot, the barista set about preparing his coffee so it was ready when he reached the window. The barista greeted him by name. Every eleventh cup was free, […]
Crowing about the need to bring jobs back from across the ocean makes for powerful rhetoric, but technological advances account for the lion’s share of lost jobs in the U.S. Financial Times pointed out: The US did indeed lose about 5.6m manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2010. But according to a study by the Center for Business […]
By the time you see this post, New Yorkers will be covering fares on selected subway routes by means of the city’s new, contactless payment system. In accordance with governments’ propensity to come up with acronyms, the city has named the service OMNY, for One Metro New York. Whether New Yorkers embrace OMNY remains to be […]