Whap! Whap!

I run a company that carries people and freight to Hawaii.
Way back when, people used boats to haul all this cargo. But then came a new-fangled invention called railroads. Back then, hauling people and cargo to Hawaii was so lucrative that my grandfather and some of the other cargo companies bought railroad trains and even built bridges to Hawaii to haul stuff over there.
Now railroads are expensive to run, and very capital-intensive, so soon most of our competitors failed, leaving us with all the business.
Our customer base became very diverse. There were the people. They wanted to be entertained and kept informed of events back home on their way to Hawaii, so we hired people to report the news. We also hired entertainers. Mostly comics.
We carried freight of various classifications. So many classifications in fact that eventually we came to call the freight “Classifieds.”
We also carried chickens, because Hawaiians wanted eggs and livestock. We built tables for the livestock to perch on so we could collect the eggs without bending over. We eventually came to refer to these as livestock tables, and then simply as “stock tables.”

The crown jewel, however, remained our bridge, The Express, which we refer to now as the ’Press (we just love jargon in my industry).
Then along came propeller-driven airplanes, and many people said “Well that makes those railroads obsolete!” But they were wrong. Many people couldn’t afford to fly and most of the classifieds were too heavy to ship by air. Do I even have to tell you what people thought about being stuck with stock tables on board a flight to Hawaii? Sheesh. No, we survived just fine.
Another problem for the airplane companies was that their planes were fast. “Why is that a problem?” you ask. Well, you see, people who ride the railroad love the long, rambling news reports and comedy sets we provide. Airplane rides were too short for that, so the airplane companies just gave their customers very brief routines. We did just fine.
Still, young people loved the airplanes, so our audience on the railroad got progressively older and more conservative. We gave our audience what they wanted: news about stuff younger people found boring and comics with a conservative edge.
After a time, however, we realized that we were going to have to attract younger riders. We tinkered a bit. Even hired a couple rock and roll singers and something called the Def Jam Comedy Tour. Whoa, Nellie, that didn’t work! Our older riders were offended and the changes didn’t attract many young people anyway, so we went back to the conservative old comics. In fact, as our ridership kept aging, we found it wanted ever-more conservative commentary on the events of the day.
We weren’t growing by attracting riders, so we started buying up other railroads. The downside was that we took on a huge amount of debt buying these companies, replacing old engines and so on. And the cost of all those dead trees we burned to fuel our locomotives! Driving a train to Hawaii was very expensive indeed. It could have been even worse, but we were smart and never upgraded to diesel.
So we were forced to raise prices every year. Shippers and riders who didn’t like it could just go use boats or airplanes as far as we were concerned. We had a railroad to run.
We also reduced the size of our trains to save money. We had fewer and fewer riders, so they didn‘t care. We had to let some of the classified cargo go, but shippers found other sources. Fortunately, by now they had plenty of options, including new jet-powered airplanes.
We even reluctantly bought a couple airplanes ourselves, but we were smart and kept our prices so high the plane division won’t ever be any competition to our trains. Besides, we have only two planes (and they’re propeller-driven), so they’ll never generate enough revenue to replace our core business.
We toyed with the idea of dropping the stock tables altogether when the Hawaiians started saying “Enough of the damned chickens! Their poop is piling up in the garage and we can go to Wal-Mart now and get all the fresh eggs you can imagine!”
But Grandpa and Aunt Gertrude didn’t like going to these fancy new supermarkets. They liked the old fashioned way and didn’t care that their eggs were stale by the time they got them. Besides, we had always carried the stock tables, so we kept them even though it meant they crowded out some of the things that people really wanted.
Costs kept rising, so we kept running shorter trains. We even had to start laying off the news reporters. Boy, that was hard. I cried when I had to make the announcement. Good thing I had a private corporate jet so I didn’t have to ride home with all those laid off people. Whew.
We’re still doing OK, but now we have a real dilemma. Our railroad bridge, the good old ’Press, is falling apart. We don’t think we can fix it, so we’re going to have to replace it. That ’Press used to be our biggest advantage. No one could possibly afford to build a new one from scratch, so we had the railroad business all to ourselves. In fact, you would have to be insane to build a railroad bridge to Hawaii in this day and age!
But what had been our advantage is becoming our biggest burden. Building a new ’Press will cost billions of dollars, so we’re going to have to raise prices again, go much deeper into debt and make deeper cuts. We just had to lay off a lot more employees and tell the remaining ones to look for ways to save more money.
I don’t hold out much hope for help from the employees, however. In one of the meetings the other day, a staffer from our little airplane division suggested that instead of building a new bridge we should buy a fleet of bigger, more fuel-efficient jets.
Good God. What does that have to do with being a railroad? Besides, that would cost millions of dollars. Cute kid, but no head for business. I think she’ll be my next reduction in force.
No, we’ll stick with what we do best and build that new billion-dollar ’Press. In this day and age we would be insane not to.
Wouldn’t we?