Aug
5
“There’s always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.” — Mark Twain.
“The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.” –Chinese saying, popular in Hawaii.
It’s interesting how many people, not personally connected to the tourism industry, seem actually to be HAPPY hotels are hurting.
Not because they want all the tourists to go home — some do, but that’s not why — because they resent the hotels’ high rates.
Room rates over $300 a night? Outrageous! They brought this on themselves! No wonder fewer people are coming!
What fascinates me about this is the psychology of bile.
Maybe hoteliers would be flying fuller right now if they had only cut rates as the economy cooled, made a public-spirited thing of it — we know you’re trying to save, we feel your pain, come stay for a mere $270 a night, we’ll manage somehow. Forgive us if the proteas haven’t been watered.
But it’s one thing to calmly suggest that efforts to maintain “rate integrity” (two years ago Smith Travel Research scolded our local hoteliers for discounting and admonished them to hold the line because it’s hard to get rates back up after slashing them) are wrong and another to seem so HAPPY that they’re losing some business.
When Wal-Mart came to Hawaii, the public discourse included much about supporting your local retailers, but here and there came discordant tones from people who felt they had been ripped off by those local stores, that they made “too much” money, and they hoped Wal-Mart wiped the floor with some of them.
When June Jones was criticized for leaving us, and when Evan Dobelle was criticized for being a windbag, some people kept bringing up their big salaries, not because the salaries justified higher expectations necessarily, but more like the salaries were additional transgressions.
As I write this, Hawaii Tourism Authority CEO Rex Johnson is wondering whether he will survive the discovery by an auditor that he had some x-rated emails in his computer, the kind people forward to each other in lieu of actually writing a note.
The matter is cluttered with side issues:
- Whatever you do or don’t do to Johnson could affect future cases involving other state workers. (Like anyone will ever try to fire a regular state worker over racy emails they never showed anyone.)
- We have a tourism crisis and it’s a bad time to replace the head of the state tourism authority. (The crisis is real, and Johnson knows his job, but he’s not the only competent marketer in the state.)
- It’s the last straw after what Tony Vericella did. (What Tony Vericella did, as head of the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau, was expense traffic tickets and x-rated hotel movies, a far greater transgression that actually involved misuse of public funds.)
- Have you seen what Rex Johnson MAKES?
Here we go again — resenting success. Johnson makes a lot of money, and some people keep bringing it up as they discuss these blue emails.
It’s against state policy to store x-rated materials in your office computer even if a fishing buddy emailed it to you. Johnson should get a written reprimand in his file.
You may feel he should get more — suspended for a week without pay, maybe, or even dismissed — but I hope that if you feel that way it is not simply because he makes more than you do (or I).
What would happen to him if he were someone we never heard of, processing hunting licenses at the Department of Land & Natural Resources?
Would an auditor, working on something else entirely, have bothered to report an x-rated email that was never shown to anyone in the office?
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2 Responses to “Success, failure and the psychology of bile”
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Aloha Howard,
I certainly hope that Mr. Johnson is not crucified for this simple error. I get a few of those now and again from Ron’s cousin and most of the time I don’t open them (mostly because he’s the “Virus King of British Columbis) and they lay dormant and forgotten amid the Viagra and Nigerian pleas for money.
One thing I have noticed in Hawaii (with a sense of humor) is that “How much did you pay for that?” will undoubtedly pop into the conversation. Mr. Johnson’s salary may just be another one of those moments and, hopefully, all of this will pass out of the news without too much damage to his reputation or his sense of humor.
Jen
Wow…why do we have this backward? Success is hard to come by and when success is achieved, it must be celebrated with lots
of cheers! All businesses need to charge what they need to cover overhead and to make money…that’s why they are in business!