Mas Tequila

Well the battle for cost savings is in strongly in our favor. A large group of us went to COSTCO to purchase, breakfast foods, lunch stuff, snack and alcoholic beverages. The total for 6 families was $401.50. That included 2 cases of beer, a gallon of Rum, some mixers and a gallon of tequila….Ooops! Did I say gallon? I guess it might have been a gallon had I not dropped it in the lobby when I opened up the hatch of the mini-van. Yes, that’s right the tequila bottle busted when it hit the cement. The good news is that I saved the Rum with my foot and the mixers were in plastic bottles.

Because of my swift movement in saving the rum, I decided that I should be the one to go and buy another bottle of tequila. So we took all the food down to our room to divvy up and I went to the local ABC Store to pick up tequila. There were a couple different sized bottles, but none the size that we purchased at COSTCO. I did, however, see what appeared to be larger sized bottles in the back of shelf. I reached back to get the bigger one and as luck would have it, my elbow clipped the front bottle and I knocked it off the shelf. Yes, that’s 2 bottles of tequila broken within a matter of minutes. My luck was just awful. Anyway, I apologized, bought some extra stuff, along with the tequila and made my way back to the hotel.

After all the beer was put into our mini-fridge and the food was divvied up and sent off to all of the rooms, I went down to the pool. I had to share my story about the second bottle of tequila that nobody knew about at this point. They were already laughing at me because of the first bottle of tequila, but the second one had them thinking that I should be nowhere near glass. My brother-in-law said, “Look out, those things usually come in three’s. “ Great, just what I needed.

I went into the big pool with the kids while Gina went up to the room to get some lunch for herself. About 30 minutes come by and Gina comes back down to the side of the pool. She is spotted with large patches of blood. She is bleeding from her arm, her foot, her chest and her hand. It looks as if she had been in a bar fight and won… (The winners never have anything on their face.)

I jumped out of the pool wondering what happened and in typical Gina style, she says, “I’m okay, it was nothing.” Excuse me; blood dripping from your arm at an alarming rate isn’t nothing. She then elaborates to tell the story of how she got up to the room and opened the refrigerator and a bottle of beer fell out. It hit the linoleum floor and baseboard just perfect enough that it exploded, hitting her in the arm, chest, hand and foot. Yep, it’s was all glass and cap shrapnel. By the looks of things, it hit her pretty hard too. So there was my “Number 3.” Gina jumped into the pool to have the chlorine clean out the wounds a little bit, and then some big Hawaiian dude came over with plenty of band-aids for her wounds. She now has a couple of large bruises, but it appears she will be okay.So the good news is that there haven’t been any more broken bottles as of yet…

FYI, I am almost relaxed and on Hawaiian time… But not yet!

33% Increase, WHAT??????

I am often amazed by the thinking of managers of service establishments. I can almost understand that if costs go up, those costs are passed on to the consumer. Sometimes there is no choice but to increase the prices if the costs have put you in negative territory, but an average of 33% increase across the board is a little extreme.

This week as our family is on our annual trip to Kauai, we have discovered that we will be making quite a few changes to our normal daily routines that we have experienced for the 10 years.

For the past 10 years we have been coming to the Kauai Marriott in Lihue as part of a large family timeshare group. There are now a total of 22 of us that come every year. We are to the point that this is pretty much a second home for us, albeit only one week per year. We know most of the service staff, we don’t need a map and can pick a good restaurant based upon it’s chef/cooks better than most. There is a certain type of normalcy that takes out the initial awkwardness that accompanies a trip into unfamiliar surroundings.

Our first day here, Saturday, gave a us an initial awkwardness that left us feeling a little bit like, “This is not our place.” Our first day is normally a rush to get to the relaxed state that we like our weekly vacation to be in. We get off the plane, rush to the hotel, put on our swimsuits and go down to our pool. We usually sit at the same place around the same time each year. We order drinks, some with extra shots, to take out that stress that air travel tends to put on a lot of people. This year our flight arrangement was different, so we weren’t able to get lunch at the Honolulu airport, so we figured we would just get it down by the pool. We have our favorites.
Anyway, we get down to the pool, to our table and order food. We didn’t even think to look at the prices, we figured that they would be a little more expensive than normal, but about the same as last year. When my food came, I thought something was a little bit different….NO FRIES!!!!! I asked where the fries were and she said, “Oh, that will be 3 dollars extra for the side of Fries.” I said, “WHAT!” Then I looked at the menu and was completely baffled at the prices of every item. It appears that there is at least 25% increase on most items and if you want things that you’ve come to expect from your meal, expect to pay extra…. Like fries!

A cheeseburger with fries used to be $9.00. It is now $12.00. If you want fries, add $3.00. That’s over 50% increase for the same thing we have gotten for the past 10 years. THAT’s INSANE!!! A Mai Tai used to be $7.50, now it’s $9.75. As I kept looking at the prices, I couldn’t help but think this is not the place we were used to. A quick look around the usually crowded pool area, there were many areas of empty lounge chairs, a sure sign of the economy, gas crisis and Hawaiian air travel problems over the last year. Another sign that should have clued me in was that our room was ready upon our arrival….early. It's never ready until 4pm like they state. My father in law was offered a Presidential Suite upgrade and a largely decreased price. It was obvious that they were hurting a little because of economy and all that’s accompanied it.

So if you manage a service oriented business that is hurting like this, what should you do? My first thought would to be to take care of the people who are at your business and make them not want to leave. For me, it would seem that reducing the prices slightly so they buy more. Apparently, the manager isn’t thinking along the same lines and for the first time, these price increases will have us going to the grocery store to buy snacks, drinks and lunch food. So the $1000.00 per week we normally spend by the pool will be down to about $300.00….at the most. So they may have increased the prices by 33%, but we have decreased our spending by more than twice as much. We are not alone with this either. Our whole party of 22 is doing the same. That’s 5 families decreasing the money spent here. That’s $3500.00 that we won’t be spending at the Lihue Marriott this year.

The good news is that Duke’s, which is next to the hotel managed to keep their same prices. A quick look at the online menus of the restaurants on the island seems to indicate the same thing. We will be happy leave the hotel for food elsewhere.