Regular readers of this blog will have noticed by now that my blogging has been mostly dormant for a while. This is partly because I’ve been working on multiple book projects (e.g. this one), partly because I felt so disillusioned after the outcome of the election season, and partly because I’ve felt like I’ve already said much of what I have to say. But sometimes you can’t resist.
This is the City Mattress store on Monroe Avenue in Brighton, New York:
My wife recently wanted to buy a mattress, drove by the store, and noticed that there were no hours posted in the window. The next day, she guessed at the opening time, happened to get it right, went into the store, and mentioned to the friendly manager that it would be nice if they could post their hours. The manager agreed that being able to post their hours would be very nice indeed, but that the town of Brighton had forbidden them to do so on the grounds that it would “make the store look like a sub shop”.
Question 1: Please study the picture above. How probable do you think it is that you’d mistake it for a sub shop? (Your answer should be a number between 0% and 100%).
Question 1A: By how much would your answer to Question 1 change if this store had its hours posted in the window?
Question 2: If you did happen to mistake this store for a sub shop, how much damage would you feel you’d incurred? (Your answer should be the number of dollars you’d have to lose to feel equivalently damaged.)
Incidentally, the lack of an hours sign inconveniences not only people like my wife, who wasn’t sure when to show up. The manager mentioned that every night at closing time, they have to turn away new arrivals who, due to the lack of a sign, were unaware of the store hours.
The Brighton Town Supervisor is Mr. William Moehle. This is a picture of his house:
As you can see, he has an outward facing garage door, creating the possibility that his house will be mistaken for a fire station. This in turn could lead to crucial delays in the correct reporting of fires. Lives are at stake. Please join me in demanding that Mr. Moehle demolish his garage.
It is said that power corrupts. In this case, it is probably more accurate to say that power breeds a certain sort of giddiness that displaces all common sense. I do not pay enough attention to local politics to know the names of all the political powers-that-be in Brighton but please, please, please, if you live there, vote against every one of them.
Update, May 21, 2018: A blog reader whose name I am omitting because I’m not sure whether he’d want to see it here (but which I will add if/when he tells me it’s okay to) did the homework that I should have done and ran this past William Moehle, the Brighton Town Supervisor. Mr. Moehle replied:
I have had a chance to review this allegation, and I can tell you that there is no restriction on the ability of City Mattress, or any other store in Brighton, to post their hours of operation on their door. We are pleased to have City mattress here in Brighton and are excited about the economic revitalization of that section of Monroe Ave. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and you are free and in fact, welcome, to post my response on the blog.
It appears, then, that I got this wrong.
Answer to all questions is 0.
To be fair, a sub is like a mattress for all the meat inside.
Voting against incumbents is generally good policy. Of course that’s what voters did in 2016 …
Does the Town Supervisor have a relative with a competing mattress store across town?
Steve, I totally agree about the stupid regulation.
I notice, though, you can get the opening times on the web – so at least technology allows that such a silly law needn’t be a huge inconvenience.
https://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/city-mattress-rochester-3
Jim W K:
I notice, though, you can get the opening times on the web
Wait, now I’m all confused. So you’re saying it is a sub shop?
Some of the best sandwiches involve a mattress.
1: 0%
1A: None.
2: N/A, but let us assume I did mistake it for a sub shop. If I had to park and walk up to the store and look inside before noticing it was something else, we are talking maybe 4 minutes of lost time, max. If we assume my time is worth $15/hour, that would be $1 of loss.
If it was the other way around and I was looking for a mattress store and missed this one, the potential loss is bigger, since I would have to drive to another mattress store. Probably the one Bill refers to in #4.
Is this taking the phrase “look like a sub shop” a bit too literally? Perhaps the phrase was intended to mean “look like a tacky retail store in a strip center,” or more generally, “look tacky”. When I say “you look like something the cat dragged in”, I don’t literally mean that you look like a dead mouse, and there is zero probability someone would mistake you for a dead mouse, but it is a legitimate metaphor.
On the other hand, why would posting store hours be tacky? Many fancy stores post their hours and I’ve never thought it was tacky. I have never heard of someone complaining about a tacky store hours sign.
The whole thing sounds ridiculous. Is there an actual city ordinance against posting store hours? What were the circumstances when this “policy” was communicated to the store? Do other stores in the area post hours?
The tacky strip center down the road has store hours posted: https://www.google.com/maps/@43.1267873,-77.5646511,3a,75.3y,60.54h,76.8t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sNLMITFgONQhqeOD2RAN3Ig!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
Could this anecdote have been corrupted in the telling and retelling?
1: <0.1%
1A: <0.1%
2: <$1
The potential inconvenience of visiting the store when it isn't open, or having to find an alternative store greatly outweighs that of mistaking it for a sub shop.
Would they be permitted to post their opening hours if they also opened a sub shop inside the mattress store?
” The manager mentioned that every night at closing time, they have to turn away new arrivals who, due to the lack of a sign, were unaware of the store hours.”
they may have different expectations in Brighton, bt the store is open until 9pm most nights of the week. How many people turn up on spec after 9pm to buy a mattress?
On the other hand it does not open until 10am, so I would have thought there would be a few early arrivals expecting 9am opening. Maybe there are but these are never seen by the staff.
Banning the posting of opening hours on a shop is stupid. Maybe posting paper signs in windows is banned, so they would need a more elaborate sign. Even that seems a bit stupid. Sometimes these stupid stories turn out to just be stories – maybe the store manager was making an excuse.
#3: “Voting against incumbents is generally good policy. Of course that’s what voters did in 2016 …”
Is it?
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/political_commentary/commentary_by_kyle_kondik/incumbent_reelection_rates_higher_than_average_in_2016
http://www.fairvote.org/2016_a_stronger_year_for_incumbents
On a completely related note, I remember a Freakonomics podcast about matress stores that was quite interesting.
“Are we in a matress-store bubble?”
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/mattress-store-bubble/
The Brighton Post reports a new ordinance, which prohibits sub providers from posting their name plates on the store front, as it could mislead one into mistaking them for mattress stores.
As Confucius taught, for every yin, there’s a yang…
Oh sure, laugh it up. But when it’s YOU who ends up eating the footlong Posturpedic pillowtop covered in Sriracha sauce, don’t look for sympathy from me. (I cringe just thinking about all those carbs….)
Didn’t you see Darkest Hour and Dunkurk? Hitler was on the verge of launching his invasion of England across the English Channel, but needed additional sea power to fend off the British Navy. Thus he set out to order more submarines–and ended up squandering an afternoon trying to determine his exact Sleep Number. (And people give Churchill all the credit….)
Question 0: How likely do you think it is that the manager was telling the truth?
Hi to your wife. Please have her email me. Look forward to you new books.
JMB 17 has a point.
The manager may very well have been lying/mistaken.
I have another question. What in the hell is wrong with sub shops? I love sub shops! Dibella’s building are much more attractive than all the goofy looking buildings lining Monroe Ave between City Mattress and 12 Corners.
Some of these local regulations make me wish the feds really did jusy control everything instead of having local and state governments. But then we couldn’t vote with our feet as easily or have as many natural experiments to analyze. Oh well.
Brian
I was taking a swipe at Steve’s comment. The vote for Trump was essentially an anti incumbent vote. He’s not happy with it though.
Rather routinely and depressingly incumbents win almost all elections. A few years ago 99% (!) of incumbents won.
Steve,
This is off-topic, but maybe you can clear something up. Pierre Lemieux quoted Joan Robinson’s remark that for a country to retaliate against tariffs with tariffs of its own is like putting rocks in its harbors because other countries have rocky coasts. I commented that I thought Joan Robinson stole that line from Bastiat. Someone else commented that he couldn’t find that analogy in Bastiat’s works. Paul Krugman attributed that analogy to Bastiat in his book Peddling Prosperity. So now I don’t know. Can you settle this?
Rick
Rick Samborski: I always thought this came from Bastiat, but cannot remember whether I thought that because a) I heard it from Krugman or b) it sounds so typically Bastiatian or c) I actually saw it in Bastiat’s writings. I’ll be glad if someone else chimes in with the answer.
“What protection teaches us is to do to ourselves in time of peace what enemies seek to do to us in time of war.” Henry George, Protection or Free Trade? (1886), chap. 6.
But I don’t know the “rocks in the harbor” quote.
The Online Library of Liberty (oll.libertyfund.org) lets you do FTS by author. I searched ‘harbor’ in Bastiat’s writings, and did not see the rocks quote come up. Unfortunately, they don’t have Joan Robinson.
For what it’s worth: I went to Project Gutenberg and searched the seven volumes of Oeuvres Complètes de Frédéric Bastiat for “port(s)” and “rocher.” The closest result I found was “poussons la protection jusqu’au bout … comblons nos ports et nos rivières,” “advocating” the blocking of ports as a protectionist measure. But this is explicitly mentioned as a unilateral measure, and thus very different from the retaliatory context mentioned here.
Did you try “harbour”?
Good call, Harold, but ‘harbour’ did not return anything for me.
Not looking too good for Bastiat as the original source. Yet Krugman made that attribution and we all know he cannot be wrong.
What’s the punishment (in fines and/or jail time?) for the horrific crime of posting hours?
This may be worth fighting for certain businesses. Think of the free publicity. And the chance to see Brighton Government Freak Shows publicly defend this crap.
Yogi Berra too said a lot of things he didn’t say.
I for one am appalled they would allow the blatant display of a street number…as if this were a gas station or something