By Fraser P. Seitel
Forget the Oscars, Espys or Tonys. It’s time for the Meanies and the Dumbies, in which we present the single meanest and single dumbest corporation in America.
And the envelopes please …
The “meanest” company in America is a no-brainer.
By now, you’ve heard about Spirit Airline’s refusal to refund the $197 fare of a dying, 76-year-old, Vietnam veteran, whose doctor informed him, after the ticket purchase, that his esophageal cancer wouldn’t allow him to fly. The man, Jerry Meekins, bought the Spirit ticket to fly from Clearwater, Fla. to visit his daughter in Atlantic City – perhaps for the last time.
“Tough toenails,” said Spirit Air, whose non-refundable ticket policy is non-negotiable.
After the turndown, Mr. Meekins went public with his plight. And Spirit CEO Ben Baldanza, like most CEOs, turned to his lawyers for benevolent counsel. The lawyers’ predictable advice: “Spirit has a nonrefundable ticket policy. Refunding Mr. Meekins’ ticket would set a dangerous precedent. He should have bought flight insurance. He didn’t.” Case closed.
Well, not exactly.
Mr. Meekins’ story went viral and then went cable, with Facebook and Fox News pounding Spirit Air in a non-stop barrage, supporting the veteran and castigating the airline.
Things got so bad that Spirit’s CEO headed straight for the Fox and Friends lion’s den, presumably to clear up the matter. But just when you thought the knuckleheaded airline would patch up the problem, CEO Baldanza made things worse.
“We very much feel badly for Mr. Meekins,” CEO Baldanza assured, “and we greatly support the men and women who defend our country, and we are not anti-vet.”
So you’ll give back his money, then?
“No, because it is just a simple case of accountability.”
So rather than coming up with a creative public relations solution – perhaps transferring the ticket to Mr. Meekins’ daughter, so she could fly to him – Spirit held fast to the low road, continued to suffer the ignominy of its callous policy, and ensured its place, no matter what it yet does to remediate the situation, as the “meanest company in America.”
And then there was the “dumbest” company in America – for many years running, in fact – whose names is synonymous with the executives who run it, Yahoo!.
Yahoo!, of course, is the perpetually-underachieving, shareholder-unfriendly (I, alas, am one of those miserable shareholders) corporation, whose fumbling founder Jerry Yang famously refused four years ago to sell the company to Microsoft for $31 a share, a 62% premium over the stock price – which subsequently cratered after Microsoft walked away.
The worthless Yang was finally shown the door, and Yahoo! tried various CEOs, one more hopeless than the next. The current CEO “savior,” Scott Thompson, ex of PayPal, was hired in January and was accused Friday of claiming a fictitious Stonehill College computer science degree on his resume. At the same time, the chairman of the Yahoo! search committee, Patti Hart, was accused of also embellishing her educational record, by claiming she held an Illinois State University degree in marketing and economics, “while in reality her degree is in business administration.”
Yahoo!’s accuser was long-time thorn, Daniel Loeb, a self-acknowledged “genius investor,” whose hedge fund, ThirdPoint, owns 5.8% of the Yahoo company’s stock (some genius!) He made his accusations in an embarrassingly-uncritical New York Times exclusive that quoted Loeb verbatim and yielded no quarter to Yahoo!.
Now if these accusations seem petty, that’s because they are! In fact, Hart’s degree in business administration was, in fact, based on her majoring in marketing and economics, as she purported. And Thompson’s degree was, indeed, from Stonehill College but in accounting, not computer science as he evidently claimed.
So….if you were public relations director of Yahoo!, you would immediately a) set the record straight that Hart’s resume was largely correct and b) find out why Thompson’s degree was wrong. That would be common sense.
But this is Yahoo!, America’s dumbest company.
So Yahoo!’s response was a quick two-step, ignoring the false Hart accusation and trying to sweep the Thompson charge under the rug. Said a spokesman:
"Scott Thompson’s degree at Stonehill College was a bachelor of science in accounting. There was an inadvertent error that stated Mr. Thompson also holds a degree in computer science. This, in no way, alters that fact that Mr. Thompson is a highly qualified executive with a successful track record leading large consumer technology companies. Under Mr. Thompson’s leadership, Yahoo! is moving forward to grow the company and drive shareholder value.”
Predictably, Yahoo!’s dopey response agitated agitator Loeb to demand that Thompson be fired, which may, in fact, happen. If Thompson is canned, chalk it up to just another dumb move on the part of Yahoo!, America’s dumbest company, hands down (with or without that annoying exclamation point!). |