But the truth is that New Yorkers tolerate some of the most – if not the most – apathetic customer service in the nation. Forget the notion of a New York minute if you need to pick up toiletries or a gourmet coffee – it’ll cost you 15 of those minutes at least. And if you need technical help at a wireless store or, heaven forbid, need to cross a bridge or tunnel? You’ll need to set your watch to count off in quarter-hour increments. Despite what Don Henley may suggest, everything can change in a New York minute … but only if you’re not stuck in line at Duane Reade, Starbucks, or the George Washington Bridge.

I’m always reminded of this myth/reality disconnect whenever I am in San Francisco. California is famous for its slower pace and less stress lifestyle, yet residents here enjoy a prompt level of customer service that far exceeds the standards found in New York City, even at the most everyday of establishments. Generally speaking, there’s an attentiveness to customers and an urgency to help them complete their transactions and get them on their merry way that is in stark contrast to life in the Big Apple. No exaggeration, it’s akin to culture shock to this beaten-down NY consumer. Budgeting extra time to stand in long lines is part of my daily ritual.

Consider the evidence:

Walgreens vs. Duane Reade

Like Duane Reade in New York, there seems to be a Walgreens on every block in San Francisco. That’s where the similarities end.

The managers of San Francisco-based Walgreens seem to realize their customers want to shop in a clean, logically-organized, uncluttered, friendly store, and that they have better things to do than stand aimlessly in line once they’ve found everything they need. If the queue becomes more than three or four people deep, cashiers call for backup without reservation. Employees performing stockwork and other functions drop what they are doing and open a register to move the people through the line quicker.

While there are a few Walgreens in New York, the city is unquestionably dominated by a chain called Duane Reade. Poor customer service is Duane Reade’s hallmark. Forget death and taxes, the only thing you can REALLY bet the house on is that you will never, ever go to a Duane Reade store in New York and not wait in line – even if there are no customers in the store. You’ll simply have to wait while the cashier finishes talking to her colleague, changes the receipt paper, or perhaps fills the coin slots in the till, breaking open the individual coin rolls and counting out every last quarter, dime, nickel and penny packed in them before ringing you up. I am not exaggerating.

Peet’s vs. Starbucks

There is absolutely no debate among coffee aficionados that Peet’s Coffee & Tea, an expanding, locally-based chain whose stores are predominately in California, is far superior to Starbucks when it comes to deep roasted coffee goodness. But their baristas are also worthy of praise.

People who work at Peet’s take great pride in their product – and it shows. They are friendly and energetic, and quick to pleasantly greet you and take your order. The flavor of the coffee is consistent and fresh, and is seemingly made with considerable care rather than with the soulless push of a button. Soothing classical music can be heard in the background. While lines sometimes do form during peak times, it’s not for a lack of hustle on the employees’ parts. It’s simply the popularity of the product. Most important, Peet’s has a pure gourmet coffee shop feel to it. When I walk in there, I don’t put up my guard that they are going to try to cross-sell me 18 other types of products.

Starbucks in New York has essentially become just a fast food chain – minus the “fast” bit. At the store in my neighborhood, the lines move maddeningly slow, they frequently pour coffee that isn’t fully brewed, and on more than one occasion, they actually didn’t have any coffee ready. The baristas like to blast music through tenth-rate quality speakers and while there may indeed be people who truly enjoy “The music of Starbucks,” I’m not one of them. I go to a coffee store just to buy coffee.

Verizon San Francisco vs. Verizon New York

Verizon may be synonymous with bad customer service, but someone forgot to tell Muki, the manager at the company store at 768 Market Street, just off Union Square. I’ve had to visit the store on numerous occasions, and have been impressed with not only the speed of the service but with the knowledge of its tech support people (maybe it has something to do with San Francisco’s proximity to Silicon Valley). I’ve always managed to get in and out of the store within 10 minutes.

Verizon stores in New York are a service nightmare. A while back my colleague Jeff had some problems with his cell phone that required frequent lunchtime visits to the Verizon store near our office. Whenever he announced he was heading over there, we all knew to block out a solid two hours before he would be back and available again for meetings, conference calls, etc.

As an aside, when I casually mentioned to an employee at the Market Street store how much better the service was than Verizon’s New York stores, he remarked, “You know we just had someone else here from New York who told us the same thing.”

Whole Foods on Fourth Street vs. Whole Foods New York City

Whole Foods is a retail delight for anyone who prefers to eat healthy, fresh food. The one on Fourth Street in San Francisco has these wonderfully prepared hot foods and a comfortable seating area to sit and enjoy them. Now here is the best part: I’ve visited the store at peak times and I’ve never had to wait in line. There are plenty of open registers at all times, and cashiers manning them are quick to get you on the move.

While the stock selection and prepared foods are equally good in New York, it’s the untraditional one line to check out that earns the Whole Foods stores their demerits. Simply, it takes too long to check out. Literally, the hot bowl of soup you were looking forward to enjoying for lunch is lukewarm by the time you pay for it and grab a seat. I suppose I could try going at an off-peak hour, but it seems more logical to accommodate customers who want to eat lunch at lunchtime. The New York Times did a profile late last June on the advantage to Whole Foods way of queuing people in one main line and then feeding them to registers as they free up – like they do it at Motor Vehicles – but the “longer the line, the shorter the wait” experience they talk about is nothing I’ve ever appreciated first hand.

The Golden Gate Bridge vs. The George Washington Bridge

Okay, I don’t have hard statistics to back this claim up, but the toll booth collectors at the Golden Gate Bridge run circles around their counterparts at the George Washington Bridge. Maybe they have performance goals and better attitudes, and maybe they just get the credit for what’s really a function of better designed roadways to keep the traffic flowing. The bottom line is that crossing the Golden Gate is comparatively quick and easy.

When I travel back from the Napa region, it is usually on a Sunday evening. On occasion there have been some extremely long backups, but it’s never taken me more than 20 minutes to make it through to the tollbooth. Once you get there, the collectors seem decidedly more polished and engaged, focused solely on accurately processing your transaction. A collector told me the working goal is to have cars pass through in ten seconds or less.

Back on the other coast, Sunday night backups on the George Washington Bridge can easily take more than an hour out of your life, especially in the summer. While part of the delay is no doubt due to the sheer volume of cars trying to squeak through, partial blame must lie with the distractions with which the tollbooth operators surround themselves. They chat on their cell phones, converse with each other by yelling across the lanes, and play loud, pulsating music while supposedly doing their jobs. While there are certainly other advantages to signing up for the E-ZPass automated toll payment system, there is none more persuasive than the promise of not having to deal one-on-one with human toll collectors who make you feel like you are an interruption to their fun.

I read somewhere that the expression a “New York minute” was coined by a guy from Texas who described it as “… a nanosecond, or that infinitesimal blink of time in New York after the traffic light turns green and before the ol’ boy behind you honks his horn.” I can only imagine what the definition would have been if he had taken the subway instead and based it on time standing in line at Duane Reade.

2 of 9

• Googling Weak Journalism
• The Irony of the New York Minute
• Out of the City and Into the Woods
• Seeking a Cure for The San Francisco Treat
• Top 10 Ways to Help Hotels Go Greener
• Clearing the San Francisco Air (Part One)
• Clearing the San Francisco Air (Part Two)
• If You Are Going to San Francisco
• A Demonstration We Can Do Without

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And it is on that note that I feel kind of sorry for John Mackey, the embattled CEO of Whole Foods who faces mounting pressure to step aside. Yeah, I know, you have to wonder about the judgment about an executive who publicly questions the integrity of the public servants at the Federal Trade Commission, laces his blog entries with over-the-top rhetoric, promotes his company’s stock on Yahoo message boards using a pseudonym, and waits several days before apologizing for his dimwitted actions. But none of that is why I pity the guy.

Rather, it is because he is clearly surrounded by people who don’t seem to have the stomach, backbone – or any other body part for that matter – to save him from himself.

Then again, maybe I’m too quick to judge. Maybe they’re not mere “yes-men” but rather people whose judgment and counsel he is simply too quick to dismiss. After all, one has to think that someone within Whole Foods’ legal and PR functions must have seen the inherent operational and reputational risks to some of these untraditional CEO behaviors and tried to warn him of the likely fallout. If so, they obviously failed to get his attention.

By all accounts, Mackey is extremely outspoken and impulsive, personality traits I happen to share. But I’m fortunate to be surrounded by strong-willed people who feel free – and don’t hesitate – to challenge my decisions and rescue me before I go off the deep end. I’ve had a lot of good ideas in my time, but have had some synaptic misfires on occasion as well. Truth be told, I have bought my colleagues more than a few rounds of drinks for talking me out of some of the more impulsive things that have crossed my mind over the years.

One of the core reasons that companies retain Starkman & Associates is because they know that they can count on us to give them our best counsel and to tell them honestly when they are veering off course. It is an essential element in the partnership model we pursue with clients. After all, there’s no point or value – ego-stroking aside – to hiring an outside agency to simply rubberstamp ideas thrown out by the internal PR function head.

I expect no less when it comes to our own inner workings. When people ask me what the toughest thing is about building a successful company, the issue that always comes to mind is that notion of creating a real culture of “no-men” instead of “yes-men” – people who are not afraid to speak up, to question prevailing ideas or propose radically new ones. Fortunately, the people here are all quick studies – much to our clients’ benefit.

It’s too bad Mackey isn’t as fortunate. A few rounds of drinks for his team would have been a far, far cheaper price to pay than the final cost he’s now facing.

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In case you haven’t been following the saga, John Mackey wants to buy rival Wild Oats Markets, but the FTC wants to deep-six the deal. Mackey wants to deep-six the FTC. He has questioned the agency’s legitimacy and accused it of being “hostile and adversarial towards Whole Foods.”

Well, Mackey’s got that right. The Rahodeb disclosure was contained in a footnote of a document made public by the FTC late Tuesday and reported late yesterday by the Wall Street Journal Online. I can’t imagine where the little birdie came from who told the Journal to look for the footnote. Government bureaucrats can be awfully touchy when a CEO they are challenging publicly questions their ethics and integrity.

But let’s give Mackey his due. Wal-Mart reportedly pays Edelman some $1 million a year to come up with such ideas as the infamous “Wal-Marting Across America.” It appears that Mackey concocted and executed his deception all by his lonesome at no cost. Whole Foods’ shareholders gained further value for the $1 a year Mackey takes in salary.

From a crisis communications prospective, I also give Mackey credit for choosing to post a statement on Whole Foods’ website, rather than granting an interview to the Journal � he would no doubt have dug himself a deeper hole. But his unnamed spokeswoman did him in instead. “(Mackey’s) comments weren’t illegal” she told the Journal. Yes, but that begs the question, “does he still beat his wife?”

Mackey isn’t the only one with egg on his face (organic or otherwise). Ethisphere Magazine, a national magazine “dedicated to illuminating the correlation between ethics and profit” in May named Whole Foods “one of the world’s most ethical companies.” Step seven in the magazine’s methodology is to screen their pared-down list of companies through a Who’s Who of corporate watchdogs including The Business Council for Sustainable Development, The Center for Business Ethics, and several for-profit consultants and investment firms like The New Alternatives Fund, SustainAbility, and Winslow Management Company, among others.

Hmm… I look forward to seeing how a magazine focused on ethics handles its own public relations crisis.

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I’ve always been dubious about the “taken out of context” defense. It’s like the proverbial dog-ate-my-homework excuse. Sure it’s a possible explanation, but nobody really buys it.

Merrill Lynch gave it a shot when it first became public that its once-high-profile analyst Henry Blodgett was singing the praises of certain stocks publicly while privately referring to them in emails as “crap” and “pieces of s***.” Ouch. Merrill, to its credit, came clean a week later and acknowledged that the analyst’s e-mails were “unacceptable” and “inappropriate and well below the standards that Merrill aims to achieve.”

Flash forward to this year and you have former Wal-Mart marketing executive Julie Roehm giving the “taken out of context” defense a whirl. Roehm was fired for various alleged improprieties, including an inappropriate relationship with an underling. She claims that some of the risqué comments in a series of lovelorn emails to subordinate Sean Womack are “easily explainable” and don’t prove that she violated the retailer’s policy against employee fraternization. If that’s the case, I’d love to see the rest of Wal-Mart’s HR manual. I just can’t figure out any scenario under which “I think about us together all the time. Little moments like watching your face when you kiss me…” could possibly be deemed appropriate corporate-speak.

Don’t get me wrong – I am hardly declaring Goliath victor over David in this PR battle. Wal-Mart has had plenty of its own missteps in the public handling of this affair – ahem, no pun intended – but we’ll leave that Monday morning quarterbacking for another day.

So back to current headlines and more people with context issues. This time it is John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market, who is waving the “taken out of context” flag. At issue are some seemingly damaging comments he made in emails and other correspondence that the FTC subsequently cited when issuing its rationale for blocking the retailer’s proposed acquisition of rival Wild Oats Markets. Among the remarks was a discussion about how the acquisition would enable the company to “avoid nasty price wars” that could harm gross margins. Hmmm, that sure smells of antitrust aroma to me.

Here’s the kicker: Turns out Mackey’s comments really were taken out of context and “easily explainable” as well (eat your heart out, Julie Roehm).

How do I know? Rather than ask the general public to blindly take their word for it, Mackey and the folks at Whole Foods took the bold step of posting the alleged damning documents and other related materials – including a confidential memo to the board of directors outlining the rationale for the Wild Oats acquisition – to its website. And you know what? Mackey makes a pretty convincing business argument why the Wild Oats acquisition isn’t anticompetitive.

While Whole Foods certainly gets some positive points for backing up its claims of comments being taken out of context with tangible evidence, they are offset by demerits earned for two negative outcomes generated by their transparency play.

First, Whole Foods’ leadership lets its collective frustration get the better of themselves by launching a highly questionable and very vitriolic attack on the FTC as part of its posted defense. Questioning the legitimacy of the agency and the ethics of government bureaucrats before whom you have significant business dealings is not a smart negotiating tactic.

The second related cringe-inducer is from a PR standpoint: As shared in his blog, Mackey argued that Whole Foods faces formidable competition from mainstream supermarkets, not just ones specializing in natural foods. He is especially passionate about Wegmans Food Markets, an upscale Northeast supermarket chain with legions of fans, including one of my colleagues, who lives for its chocolate chip muffins.

To wit: “Wegman’s (sic) operates huge stores with excellent quality of perishables and low prices and it is difficult for us to effectively compete against them“. (emphasis mine).

If I were Wegmans, I’d have my advertising team working on full-page advertisements with the following headline: “Even Whole Foods Raves about Our Excellent Quality and Low Prices.” John Mackey has already written the ad copy.

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