About to head home after two weeks in Southeast Asia…off the grid for much of it.

Here’s the good stuff that happened whilst I was floating down the Mekong River.

Wages are up…

and have been rising steadily for the last 3 years…outpacing inflation.

And will keep going up…

From The Economist – “A blue-collar bonanza is under way…three forces that shape labour markets—demand, demography and digitisation—have each shifted in ways that benefit workers.”

If you’ve had to hire a plumber, carpenter, or electrician recently, you know what they’re talking about.

Implication – higher wages = higher premiums.

While inflation continues to drop…

One economist got this right, while many just endlessly caterwauled about the imminent rise in unemployment and drop in wages necessary to tame inflation.

Gotta love economists…or not.

Fuel prices continue to drop…leaving more dollars in our pockets

All this good economic news – consumers have more money to spend, employment remains very strong, and prices are moderating means there will be…

More dollars in your investment portfolio

You’ll likely see your investment portfolio rise in value…BofA, RBC, and Deutsche Bank are among the firms predicting record returns in 2024.

What does this mean for you?

As you start your week, don’t buy into the “economy is awful” nonsense. 

Finally – -one of the keenest observers of trends in business and the body politic is Scott Galloway of NYU. I highly recommend his weekly newsletter.

During another holiday week a few years back I penned a terrific post on customer service. If I do say so myself, and I do.

Customer service comes to mind as I sit on a transcontinental flight from NYC to Singapore to attend our son’s wedding.

For once I did the smart thing…my lovely bride and I are on Singapore Air, consistently the top-rated airline for customer service. Oh my what a difference between this airline and any other I’ve flown in the past several decades. And I’ve flown a LOT.

Singapore Airlines is…fabulously wonderfully totally about its customers.

One incredibly tiny example…I got up to use the restroom, and an impeccably polite steward very diplomatically noted that cabin service had been halted due to turbulence and perhaps I should stay in my seat unless my sojourn was of utmost importance. I aborted the trip and returned to my seat.

Five minutes later anther flight attendant came by to inform me that things were back to normal and I could safely walk about the cabin. A tiny thing, totally insignificant and yet a blindingly clear demonstration of how serious these people take customer service.

Management clearly gets it. And I will fly Singapore whenever I possibly can. Because any time a flight attendant is that focused on customer service, it is because the entire enterprise is – most importantly top management.

Allow me to reprise the post from 2018, as it is even more topical today.

To that point, here’s an example of a huge business that completely misses the point.

This summer (back in 2018) American Airlines allowed flight attendants to give little things to passengers upset about delays or other problems. Frequent flyer miles, drink coupons, seat upgrades, stuff that didn’t cost AA anything but made angry passengers feel that AA cared about the problems the airline caused.

Then, some genius at HQ decided this was a bad idea.

This from Forbes:

Every time some bright young marketing executive tried to make American (or some other airline) more responsive, and more quickly responsive to passengers’ dissatisfaction by empowering front-line workers to offer some form of compensation, the bean counters back at headquarters quickly noticed that the cost of such empowerment escalated rapidly. The result, alas, always has been the dramatic reduction or elimination of front-line workers’ authority to solve customer service issues at the point of contact.

Instead of fixing the problem, the corporate knuckleheads tried to deal with the fallout – but stopped when it cost too much. 

update – American is currently rated #82 out of the world’s best airlines. Well behind RyanAir (!!!), Air Mauritius and Azerbaijan Airlines, This isn’t due to American’s front line workers, rather management decided service is about #82 on their list of important things.

This is exactly what killed US manufacturing, autos, and many other businesses. At the end of their assembly lines, GM, Ford, and Chrysler diverted many just-built cars with manufacturing defects to another mini-factory.

Auto worker using hammers to straighten a hood on a just-built car…

There, very skilled and very expensive workers diagnosed and fixed cars that had just been built. These guys are yesterday’s American Airlines flight attendants, tasked with fixing problems caused by management.

Clearly senior management didn’t understand that if they spent the time and energy and dollars to do it right the first time, they wouldn’t have to a) fix problems with cars they just built, and b) deal with pissed-off customers.

Yes, it takes that time and energy and dollars. But the results are measured in customers kept, service problems eliminated, and extra costs avoided.

Or, you can just wait for your businesses’ version of Honda to come in and eat your lunch.

What does this mean for you?

Find out what your customers want, and do it right the first time. They will love you and reward you for it.

In what can only be described as excellent news, inflation is down to 3.2%.

Further good news – ahead of the heavy Thanksgiving travel week fuel prices are continuing to drop… in 11 states average prices are below $3 a gallon.

And there’s this really wonderful story about a gay professional hockey player’s journey...the response to his coming out announcement has been overwhelmingly positive – especially from other pros.

Gotta love the love.

Some think we should not be helping Ukraine protect itself and its people from Russia and the Russian invasion.

They note it is expensive, the battle is far from our shores, it isn’t any of our business, we have other priorities.

Here’s why it is most definitely in our best interest to help Ukraine.

1. The world is a dangerous place, and enemies large and small – Iran, North Korea, the Taliban, jihadists, and frenemy China – are always looking for signs of American weakness.
   
   If we had not provided aid and arms to Ukraine, Russia would have taken Kyiv (the capital of Ukraine) and own Ukraine today…and Iran, North Korea, the Taliban, jihadists and their ilk would be plotting attacks on us. 

   Instead, those enemies are watching a large and once-powerful country – Russia – get its ass kicked by a much smaller country, in no small part because we are supporting Ukraine. That ass kicking is most certainly giving would-be attackers nightmares… thanking whatever entity they worship they didn’t do something as blindingly stupid as taking on an ally of the US. 

2. War prevention – specifically Taiwan. As very/extremely conservative commentator Marc Thiessen notes:

   how much…would U.S. weakness in Ukraine embolden Chinese dictator Xi Jinping? The risk of war over Taiwan would skyrocket. And, unlike the war in Ukraine, it could very well involve U.S. troops. [emphasis added]

   Think of Xi’s calculation: If the United States won’t stand fast for Ukraine, an internationally recognized sovereign state, how likely is a stalwart defense of Taiwan, which is not? And if the United States is not willing to spend money to defend Ukraine, is it really going to risk American lives to defend Taiwan?

   China’s military is massive, has thousands of missiles, will soon have the largest navy in the world, and is increasingly belligerent.

   Chinese ship attacking Vietnamese coast guard ship
   

   After pushing around small countries like Vietnam and the Philippines and doing its damndest to illegally expand its territory, many of its leaders are were wildly over-confident. Watching as Russia’s battle-tested, quite experienced, once well-equipped and still very large army gets hammered by a much smaller country allied with the US is undoubtedly forcing Xi and his generals to think a lot harder about screwing with America and our allies.

3. The elimination of one of our two most dangerous enemies cost exactly no American lives.
   Putin is an extremely dangerous dictator and Russia is our enemy. Presiding over a country with very serious financial, demographic, ethnic and economic issues, Putin did what most dictators in that situation do – pick a fight with a supposedly weak neighbor.

   For Putin, the result has been catastrophic, eliminating Russia as a threat to  the US and our European allies. More than half of Russia’s armored vehicles and hundreds of aircraft have been destroyed, stocks of missiles and rockets have dramatically shrunk, hundreds of thousands of soldiers have been killed or grievously wounded, its Navy has lost much of its war-fighting capability.

   Russia’s military infrastructure is in deep trouble…every day there are new reports of factories making munitions, armored vehicles, explosives and missiles mysteriously exploding.

   a “fireworks” factory is now rubble…

As brutal and awful as it is, we are much safer because hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have died, millions have lost their homes, and hundreds of towns, villages, and cities have been destroyed.

What does this mean for you?

Thanks to the Ukrainians, the world is less dangerous today – which is a good thing indeed.