Vail Does What Corporations Do

Park City ski patrollers are on strike during on of the busiest times of the year:

• A ski patrol strike at Park City Mountain resort has led to complaints of lines and delays at the popular winter sports destination.
• Shares of Vail Resorts, which owns Park City, have dropped more than 5% in the last five trading days.

No one argues that ski patrollers aren’t necessary in a ski resort and therefore expendable. The argument is always about a slippery slope that if “we give into the demands of the little guys then everyone will want a raise”. Maybe the slippery slope argument should be turned around: “if we continue to act as greedy asshats and create horrible working conditions leading to awful customer service experiences than maybe no one will love our product and stay away, leading to lower shareholder value?”

Just over the holidays I read a LinkedIn conversation in which affluent white collar people were bemoaning the state of customer service and wondering about the cause of it all. All these apparent smart businesspeople and no one has figured out that really everyone is motivated by money. A society preaching financial self-reliance for decades finds itself now wondering why people aren’t will to work for nothing.