Tag Archives: Money

The Customer is Always Right Bonus

My family and I were eating at a high-quality restaurant today and my Dad wanted a straw. Because our waitress wasn’t in sight, he tried asking one of the clean-up ladies for the straw and was surprised when she actually brought him one. He said that usually when he’d ask someone who wasn’t going to get a tip from him (and thus had no interest in his happiness) to get something, they’d say yes but never be seen again. As I said earlier, this was a high-quality restaurant, so I suggested that maybe they were paid something like what I on-the-spot called a “The Customer is Always Right” bonus.

A “The Customer is Always Right” bonus would be small cash incentive to make any customer happy and not just the ones that are going to tip you. The idea is that if everybody is paid the same flat sum of let’s say a $10 bonus everyday/week (this’ll be cash and not part of the regular salary), they could spare up to $10 worth of time to help customers with random thing like getting a straw for them. This way, those who want to be helpful and give the restaurant a good reputation can be helpful without worrying that they are wasting their time on something that won’t benefit them.

Of course there would still be some who would just pocket the money and still not help customers, and at some point all would start to consider the $10 as part of the salary (not a bonus, just a given), but I still think the idea has promise. For those who just keep the money, perhaps have someone make sure they at least try to do something to help customers sometimes. As for the others, maybe the bonus would be changed each week. It’d retain a constant value of about $10, but what the $10 was spent on would be different from week to week, with things like putt putt tickets or candy or whatever. Since the bonus would change, the employees wouldn’t get used to the bonus and start to ignore it.

~ George

How to Commercialize Thanksgiving (Humor)

Following the conversation mentioned in this post, me and my friends started (jokingly) trying to see what it would take to commercialize Thanksgiving, because it appears that no one else really has. First we thought of lights, like Christmas and sometimes Halloween, then maybe fireworks like 4th of July or New Year, but they didn’t feel like they’d work. (What would you do with brown lights or fireworks? Yuck.) Even candy, which so many other holidays have monopolized on, doesn’t quite work. But then we struck gold when we thought about Easter: We need to start doing Egg Hunts. Turkeys actually lay eggs (unlike a certain animal I could mention *cough cough*), so it’d be perfect! However, as mentioned before, candy doesn’t fit quite right, so we were stumped until someone thought of another brilliant idea: Pie! (After all, everything is better with pie; don’t pretend that you’ve never heard that before, I’ve heard it at least ONE time before writing this post) (Yes, indeed, that one time was myself saying it, but that still counts!) Thus, the Pie Hunt was born! You could manufacture some sort of egg-shaped pie and special plastic eggs that are Thanksgiving themed, then promote things like Church and State Pie hunts, run Pie Hunts in your own backyard/neighborhood, get it into the newspaper, etc. Do that for several years in a row until it starts catching on. Later, while everyone else is trying to catch up with the Pie Hunt trend, you’ll already be raking it in (whatever “it” is, probably leaves ; ) ), and then you’ll be your own millionaire or something.

Up next: Groundhog’s Day!

~ George

Interesting Observation: Thanksgiving isn’t a Money Holiday

Recently I was talking with a few friends about the fact that stores are selling Christmas supplies long before Thanksgiving even started, when one of them pointed out that Thanksgiving isn’t really a money-making holiday. Apart from the famous Turkey and other foods, along with pilgrim supplies, there really isn’t much for the stores to sell you. Easter has eggs and candy; Halloween has costumes, decorations, and candy; valentines day has cards and chocolate; Christmas has decorations, gifts and candy; even 4th of July has fireworks. Thanksgiving has none of those; it is perhaps one of the more “pure” of the widely celebrated (national) holidays, that is, it is not a commercial holiday. Just thought this was something cool to think about.

~ George

(Later the conversation turned more humorous with us discussing ways to make Thanksgiving into a money holiday. You can see my post on that conversation here)

Culture Idea: Chance Based Currency (Part 2)

The next part of my explanation of the Chance Based Currency idea!

(See part 1 here: http://evansforever.com/culture-idea-chance-based-currency-part-1/)

The first problem I’d like to address is that it would be very hard to deal with large sums of money.

  • Using high felix dice, like a 100 felix die, would make the seller risk gaining only 1 F in exchange for an item. On the other hand, the purchaser is also risking paying 100 F for the item. On average, the seller would make about 50 F per sell, but that’d only be after a while.
    • As said in the first post, all the seller can do to decrease the risk of having a low F roll is to refuse to accept high felix dice. However, if the government is like ours (the US), then it’d be against the law to not accept currency the government has decided has value.
      • In the US, if someone tries to pay you with legitimate US currency (and you’re in the US), unless you accept the currency the buyer has the right to take whatever it was that he was purchasing without paying you. The dice government might have similar laws, or they might only have laws for specific dice types, or maybe none at all
  • Another problem would be having to make a 100 sided die. Perhaps the government would make dice that go up in intervals greater than 1. If so, then a 100 felix die could be ten sided, going up by ten, or 20 sided going up by five, or maybe even 5 sided, going up by 20. This would clearly affect the formula to calculate average F, which would become as follows: Divide the max felix of the die by two, then add (the lowest value it can roll*1/2).
  • This would put the 10 sided 100 felix die’s average F at 55, the 20 sided 100 felix die’s average F at 52.5, and the 5 sided 100 felix die’s value at 60! Wow, and I thought this system was interesting already, but with accounting for minimum values as  well  as  maximum values makes this all the more fascinating
    • And what if the die didn’t go up by the same interval each time? What if you had a 100 felix die, but it had only 6 sides, which were 1,2,3,4,5, and 100? It’s still 100 felix, because felix is the potential roll, but it would have nowhere near the purchasing power as the other examples given.
    • If this were the case, the way you’d calculate the average F is by adding together all the sides and dividing that number by the number of sides on the dice. For example, 1+2+3+4+5+100 =115, 115/6=19.1666667, which is the average F of that die.
    • This method could work with other dice, for example 1+2+3+4+5=15, 15/5=3, which we already know is the average F for a 5 sided 5 felix die (man, now I have to say how many sides it has also…), but it’s harder and more time-consuming than the normal calculation.
    • Another thing I thought of about this idea is that it’d provide another way to gamble without any felix loss; roll an “x” sided die which has all of its faces equal to zero but one, which would be some high number. Perhaps the government would earn extra money by selling dice such as these to gambling houses.

That’s all for now

~ George

Culture Idea: Chance Based Currency (Part 1)

What if there was an economy which had legal tinder that was made of dice? I’m going to call the currency Felix (“lucky” in Latin). For example, a two felix “bill” would be a two-sided coin, a six felix “bill” would be a normal 6-sided dice, and I don’t know how they would work with hundred felix “bill”‘s. When you pay for something, you pull out your dice and roll them. Whatever value they land on is how much they are worth for that transaction; you could have a 100 sided die, but if it lands on 1 then it’s only worth one dollar. Perhaps when paying something, you have to bring out enough dice to have the price be halfway between the minimum you could roll and the maximum you could roll (I’ll explain that more later), and after the cashier checks to make sure that everything adds up properly you roll the dice. You pay whatever value that comes up is, whether cheaper than or more expensive than the original price.

This could lead to an interesting treatment of the value of money. Here’s some math to explain: You’re buying a new hammer that is worth 5 F [F is absolute money (after the die has been rolled), and felix is potential money (pre-roll), e.g. a 10 felix die rolls 5 F]. If you have a 5 felix die, you still probably wouldn’t be able to afford it. This is because, on average, the die wouldn’t roll a five, and thus, on average, the seller would lose money. The seller doesn’t want to lose money, so he wouldn’t sell the hammer for a 5 felix die.

The way you’d calculate the average value of a die is to divide the top value it could roll in half and add 0.5. The additional 0.5 is because the die can’t ever roll zero, so it’s not the halfway point between the top value and zero that you’re looking for, it’s the halfway point between the top value and one. This would place the average value of the 5 felix die at 3 F. To get you’re hammer you need an average of 2 more F, so if subtract 0.5 from 2 and double the outcome you see that you’d need a 3 felix die to complete the transaction (I assume that a culture based on this currency would figure out how to make a three-sided die).

So now you have two dice which have an average F of 5, enough to satisfy the shopkeeper. You roll your dice. The 3 felix die lands on one, good for you, but the 5 felix die lands on 5, for a total of 6 F. Your heart sinks. The shopkeeper happily pockets the dice, having earned an extra F, and gives you the hammer.

Later, your friend sees the nice quality of your hammer and gives you a 9 felix die to buy him one. The interesting thing about this situation is that a 9 felix die also has an average value of 5 F, even though a 5 felix die + a 3 felix die = 8 felix. The difference is that every die has a minimum roll of 1, so the minimum F for two dice is 2, meanwhile the minimum F for one die is 1. The added price of 1 felix accounts for the added risk to the shopkeeper of 1 felix.

You visit the shopkeeper again, and he seems a bit worried about your 9 felix die, but doesn’t stop you from using it to pay. You roll, and his fears are confirmed. The die landed on 2, giving it a value of 2 F, 3 F less than the asking price! You can see that the shopkeeper is upset at being shortchanged as he pockets the die, but you’re elated. You can’t wait to get the hammer to your friend so that you can tell him what a steal you got it for.

In this system, most sellers would always want to be paid in the highest number of the lowest denomination dice they could get, at least for the more important deals,  so that they are guaranteed at least a certain amount of F, even though the fewer dice that are used the higher the felix value is. Some shopkeepers wouldn’t allow dice with too high of a felix value to be used to purchase items, meanwhile others might make a sale by requiring the average F to be less than halfway between the top value and one. Gambling would be easy in this culture; simply have both players roll a 100 sided die (or whatever they use instead) and switch dice. One might roll 50, and the other might roll 20, who gets 30 F while maintaining the same amount of felix.

After all that though, the only more flawed currency system that I’ve seen anywhere (not that I’ve looked for any) was this one:

Alternate Currency

(Source: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/512:_Alternate_Currency)

I can’t decide which flaws I should go over first, but this post is too long already, so I’m going to split it into a number of smaller parts focusing on specific problems with this system and addressing them. These I will write and publish those parts until I’ve gone over this idea thoroughly, or I’m tired of it.

~ George