I went all @jmartens this afternoon in response to a tweet about the @sarahgilbert-Burgerville kerfuffle. I’m not normally a kneejerk tweeter, and it made me wonder why this in particular had hit some sort of hot button.

I’m not anti-bike at all. It warms my heart that my condo building has fiercer competition for bike berths than for parking spaces. It ticks me off, too, because it means that we can’t actually have bikes right now. I think my rhetorical ire was raised by the one tweet I saw in the aftermath of the incident itself yesterday:

burgerville drivethru policy is for safety of employees. b/c women on bikes carrying gallon of honey, one less minivan stickers are SUSPECT

My first thought? Of course it’s a policy. (Turns out it isn’t, but it is most places.) But it was just one piece of information in the tweetstream, and I can understand the use of Twitter to blow off aggravation at poor or misinformed service. It was when I saw a tweet today about KGW covering the story that I went and checked the Cafe Mama blog post. And that was when I went off all half-cocked. From Sarah’s post:

And here is why this is more important than a few minutes of shame for a cash-poor woman on a cute family bike: It is unethical and senseless. It is profiling. There is no law, statute or ethical standard prohibiting discriminating against customers on the basis of their mode of transportation (and discrimination it is, due to the common practice of having extended hours of operation at a drive-through window; besides the incredulity of only allowing customers in possession of an engine the privilege of convenience). There should be.

It is not unethical, nor senseless.

The reasons are sad and business-y, but they are reasons. Business guests are afforded substantial rights to sue for personal injury, even if they are somewhere they shouldn’t actually be. Many standards exist across the country, but oftentimes even doing something completely idiotic can still get you some money (on the theory that the business in question, while not responsible for your decision to engage in tomfoolery, nonetheless supplied the conditions required to allow you to stand on your head on a window ledge while balancing a bucket and mop on your feet). Insurers expect their clients to get sued, and they charge them accordingly. They also expect to wriggle out of at least 20% of their obligations on the basis that the client violated the terms of the policy. Whether it’s a health/life policy, liability, or what have you, the insurer is always going to investigate the circumstances and behavior of the policy holder to see if they can avoid paying. So you put policies in place. Turns out Burgerville doesn’t have a policy, but you’ll notice that the public statement from the company included a sentence about “looking into bike-thru lanes.” Because they know a risk when they see one.

There is also the crime issue, which is what twanged as insincere in the tweet from Sarah that I linked above. Yes, there’s probably some concern that you expose workers to assault when you allow people to get physically close to the window. I can’t imagine anyone getting up to much in a car, unless it’s an SUV and you’re willing to hang halfway out the window to get into the till. The point is that late-night service to folks has its perils.

It is neither profiling nor discrimination

Calling it profiling and/or discriminatory assumes a great deal, but the biggest assumptions are that bikers are a protected class, and that there is no policy rationale that outweighs the discriminatory effect. These are powerful words rhetorically, but the lawyer in me rankles at their use over an incident involving a bike in a drive through. Bicycle transportation is not a right. You can’t ride skateboards in the mall parking lot, and you can’t ride bikes through the drive through. You’re not on public property, so you don’t get the protection of the free association clause or anything like that. You are submitting yourself to the terms of service.

Try walking into a bank or credit union with a hat and sunglasses on. Odds are extremely good that someone will ask you to remove them. If you’re a chemo patient, or bald and vain, you’re incrementally more likely to wear a hat. Maybe you just had your pupils dilated at your eye appointment, or are light sensitive, or you’re just too cool for school. The bank’s employees do not care – they want a good look at your face, on the off chance you’re here to rob them. They are not profiling. They are not discriminating against a protected class.

My argument is that the bike in the drive through is analogous. They have a valid concern that it’s a lot easier to engage physically if you’re not in a car. They have liability concerns. Businesses can do whatever they want (within reason and statute) to deter crime. That includes actual invasions of privacy, like video surveillance, or ostentatious displays of authority, like big burly guards that follow you through a store if you look shady. You can claim that that’s profiling, but all the company’s actually guilty of is bad customer service. It’s stupid to guard against risk in a way that makes people feel suspected.

And that’s what this is about.

It’s always disappointing when a company we admire lets us down. Unfortunately, in service industries, it happens a lot. People are people. This person in particular got it wrong, and in so doing gave the impression that Burgerville as a chain was acting contrary to its values. That sucks for the customer and it sucks for Burgerville, particularly when the customer in question goes to Defcon 4.

Service is hard. Being of service is hard. I guess it just irked me that a service gaffe (not to mention immediate and thorough service recovery) has been blown this far out of proportion. Nonetheless, the place to have that fit is somewhere larger than 140 characters. Mea culpa.

See what I did there? With the title? That’s Comedy Gold.

You don’t have to be a chicken to start a co-op in Oregon, but if you are a chicken (the proper term is “risk averse”), or you want to have all the Starkadders around you as you wander into the unknown, or you generally like hanging with your peeps, then a cooperative corporation is not the worst way to go.

A cooperative is no more or less than a group of people with a common goal, interest, or profit motive in mind who incorporate under the Oregon Cooperative Corporation Act for that purpose. Cooperatives are not by definition nonprofit (though they can be), nor are they really all that different than regular Corporations, except that they can issue capital stock in exchange for a membership fee. Such stock can create the right to a dividend (see, e.g., REI or that grocery co-op in the NW neighborhood). It can be the only class of stock issued, or can be part of a group of classes, or itself be divisible into classes.

Heady stuff, I know. Here’s the payoff: the cooperative model presents unique opportunities to leverage a distributed workforce of smart people into a cohesive profit sharing enterprise. Rather than bear the burden of your own overhead, you share that burden with others, and under a corporate umbrella. Similarly, work that ends up being substantially above margin benefits everyone. If someone (I’m looking at you, Cubespace) were to, say, bid out, supervise, and administer contracts that various smart people would then work on, they could pay people for work but also have a means of developing and expanding a common warchest for marketing, facilities development, or just plain dividends out to anyone interested. And because they can create classes of stock, they could allow investment by unskilled individuals who may even (gasp) occasionally require the services of the type of people who are in the cooperative. So those people (let’s call them “retail members”) get dividends and discounted services.

That’s worth a membership, right? I mean, people seem happy to pony up a fee to buy a sleeping bag. And the retail members provide an initial capital infusion to cope with some of the expenses of getting the pump primed. The applications are pretty much boundless for the purposes that I’m contemplating, and the ethos of the thing fits right in with Portland’s very unique sense of self.

It’s worth a closer look (much closer than I have, to date, given it).