Chapter 6 looks at repurposing a Kmart building in Austin, Minnesota into a combination museum and corporate headquarters/office space. Unlike previous examples in the book, this one was done as a design competition between four architectural firms with relatively open-ended paramaters.
In the end, there has been extensive renovation of the exterior lands and surfaces. Interestingly, however, the lack of exterior light made the interior designs for the museum actually work better — they had total control over the look and feel of the exhibits, including lighting. For the office area though, large windows were cut, and skylights added. And, everything in the office space is movable. Walls, furniture, everything. Giving them a healthy amount of dynamism.
Overall, though, the most interesting part was that while they kept the “building” structure, the resulting look and feel makes it look like anything BUT a big box store. Different roofs with slopes, bricks added to the exterior, etc., all hide the original look and feel. Yet the building is relatively the same place, at least structurally.
Chapter 5 looks at a Head Start program in Hastings, Nebraska. The initial catalyst was unusual — the original location (an old hardware store) was wiped out by a tornado and the local community was growing rapidly through immigration, outstripping the original need. The program needed a new location, and an empty Kmart building was available.
Part of what I found interesting in this chapter were the complicated real estate deals in place…a commercial company owned the building, Kmart owned the lease, and a local man owned the land. So, Kmart would rent the space and pay the company, who would then pay the local man. A tri-partite “ownership” of sorts for the property, making it more complicated if someone wanted to buy. Who is selling to them? All three or just one or two? In the end, it was all three. A local company bought all three components (essentially land, building and tenancy), and then “flipped” it to someone else. In this case, the Head Start program.
The other part that I found interesting was the importance of the location. Just as Kmart wanted a busy intersection, easily accessible, so too does a program that serves the city and county. Like the previous chapter, they want a good location to serve lots of people for ease of access.
And finally, they can rent out extra space to groups that are efficient or effective, or just plain synergistic, for their own mandate — other educational services — while still giving them lots of flexibility in design.
Chapter 4 starts a second section of the book dealing with networks, particularly with the idea that the location is not just the “store shell” so much as the building, a parking lot, and beyond…the whole background.
This Chapter did a quick overview of three Charter schools in Buffalo (NY), Charlotte (NC), and Laramie (WY), most of which want to fly under the radar — two of the spoke only on the question of anonymity, although they were happy to give tours, etc. What I found particularly interesting with these examples was that they started with a relatively new entity — the fledgling school — looking for a site to lease. They didn’t have the money to buy, couldn’t build, etc. and basically didn’t have the full capital to take on the whole project at once. As a startup, they could commit to a lease, and then grow the business and organization towards later purchase.
Some of the aspects that were not immediately obvious:
Repurposing an old vacant school was often an obvious and alternate choice, but with challenges for renovations to bring them up to code for electricity, plumbing, etc.;
The Walmart or Kmart sites were immediately fully accessible for persons with disabilities, with options for everything on a single floor, wide hallways, etc.;
Lighting was often an issue for interior rooms, so design often defaulted to hollow squares where the centre could be a gym or cafeteria, leaving the classrooms around exterior walls where windows could be cut out; and,
While the big box stores were up to code, often the plumbing for washrooms were limited to a couple of areas and the plumbing was buried in concrete, so extra trenches have to be dug early to reach the extra requirements for a school.
I also found the idea of community not an obvious element, not so much of the Big Box, but of the nature of a Charter school. Since they are not limited to geographic catch-basins (like neighbourhoods for typical schools) but rather open to the entire city to attend, transport often becomes incredibly important. Meaning the extra parking spots for drop-off and pick-up make things much easier. Equally, because so many of the kids need transport-by-parents, the Schools need to offer extensive before- and after-school care, way more than normal schools. Which means they need spaces for that to function. However, contrasting that, many “blended” families or non-cohesive families (divorced parents with shared custody for example, living in different areas of the city) find the option great, since they don’t all live in a single “local” neighbourhood.
Overall, though, I think it was the “initial lease” and the ability to build as they grow which made it so interesting. In some cases, walls around the interior school belied the fact that behind was just empty “open” warehouse-like space…ready for the next round of school rooms to be built or a gym or a special area for technology, automotive, or creative arts, all of which can be built and worked on without disrupting the rest of the school — the school can be open while other renovations are going on. Our son’s school has just gone through massive renovations within an existing space, and it really disrupted life around them. But once they reached a certain critical mass, the last areas were empty spaces that could be worked on separately. Unfortunately, that required moving some kids to portables, something that doesn’t need to happen in a Big Box that can just build, build, build inside. Plus they are doing it inside, even when weather is bad. Certainly a totally different project than trying to renovate an old abandoned public school.
Before I get to the article I like, I’ll talk a little about the context of why I like it.
Economics and psychology together, i.e. behavioural economics, has long known that post-facto “rewards” for behaviour is usually only effective if the person knows in advance what the reward is going to be. So, if you set a goal, and the person values it, they will engage in the behaviour required to “win” or “earn” the reward. Gamification only works if the person knows the rules and has some say in the reward, i.e. it isn’t random chance.
Yet around the world, “tipping” doesn’t follow that pattern. It is an unknown reward provided after the transaction (i.e. the meal, for the restaurant world), and is supposed to reflect the customer’s view of how well they were served. Better service, better tip. Poorer service, poorer (or no) tip. Yet people rarely deviate from the norms — they often will pay 10% or 15% or 20% all of the time, by their personal comfort levels, for the wide “middle” ground for the level of service. And in some cases, they do it not because they think it is the “approximate” value of the service, but simply because it is the recommended norm for “good” (often average) service.
So some people balk. They get poor service, they stiff the server. Maybe the food was cold, maybe it was late, maybe it was the wrong order. Interestingly, speaking to experienced servers, one of those events (late) isn’t even their fault (if it is cold, it’s because it was sitting somewhere waiting to come out; if it is wrong, it is because the server didn’t check the order before bringing it out, according to those experienced in the industry). They also don’t control staffing levels…so if it is normally a 6:1 ratio for tables: servers, and because two servers are away or they haven’t been able to staff the spots, and suddenly it is 9 or 10:1, that’s not really the server’s fault either. Yet it is their tips that will suffer. A variable reward, random chance in some cases, having little to do with their performance. Most people don’t have any idea if their server was good, they just know if the overall experience was satisfying. Maybe they were sitting next to a cold window or a fan, maybe they’re sensitive to bright lights, maybe they’re fighting with their spouse, and it affects their view of the meal. Or they wanted more veggie options than the restaurant has on the menu.
I have some problems with tipping as a norm, I confess, for four reasons.
First, in Canada at least, with the automated payment machines, when you type in your amount of say “15%” for it to calculate for you, it does so on top of the tax. Why would I pay a server “extra” for the restaurant collecting tax? That makes no sense. Is it a big amount? No, of course not. But if the harmonized tax rate is 15%, and you assume no alcohol to keep it simple, then your 15% tax adds 2.25% to the tip. So they get 17.25% instead of 15.
Second, I don’t like flat-rate commissions with no top end. I don’t really like it with real estate, I don’t like it with any commissioned sales, really. If I go out for dinner with my wife and son, and we go to a simple restaurant, and the bill for dinner is $60, then the “standard” of 15% is $9. If it is a nicer restaurant, the bill might be $100, and the standard tip would be $15. Did the server who served me the more expensive food do any more work than the server who served me cheaper food? Why am I paying him/her 2/3 more in tip? Perhaps their costs are higher (better clothes and shoes, etc.), but a 2/3 increase in tip? People object on the same basis for paying commissions on house transactions — is there more work involved if the house is $700,000 than $200,000? Should the agent get an extra $12,500 for helping with a more expensive home? Taxes might be proportional, but why are the commissions, separate from the perverse incentives that are created?
Third, the hourly wage for the server varies dramatically across a shift, and generally for no real reason other than the equivalent of “piece work”. When they’re busy, their tips are high, and their hourly wage soars; when it’s dead, they make nothing, even though they’re still at work. Piece-work in factories is generally viewed as highly exploitative, particularly when the “pieces” are not all made by one person i.e. an attribution problem. Similar to the comments above, the server doesn’t buy, prepare, or cook the food, nor clean up afterwards. Yet they are the “face” of the service, so they get tipped accordingly (good food, good tip; bad food, bad tip). But let’s ignore base wages for a second and look at a restaurant shift from 5 to 10 p.m. at night. From 5-6, the server might have 3 tables. From 6-7, perhaps that goes up to 6 tables, 7-8 goes back to 4, 8-9 is 3, 9-10 is 1. If we assume all the tables were tables of four with bills of $80, and they all tipped 15%, then the server would get:
5-6, 3 tables, $36 in tips;
6-7, 6 tables, $72 in tips;
7-8, 4 tables, $48 in tips;
8-9, 3 tables, $36 in tips;
9-10, 1 table, $12 in tips.
Yes, I’m exaggerating slightly, but some servers have been known to be able to handle 6, 8, 10 tables of 4 in a restaurant with a relatively static menu. In the busiest hour, the wage is $72 / hour. Really? We’re paying someone $70 per HOUR to deliver food to a table? For the night, though, they’re clearing only $204. Which, while not chickenfeed, reduces down to $40 per hour. Before tax, or any tip-sharing that goes on. Most servers I know have said even without tip sharing, they always gave some money to the bus people to incentivize them to clear their tables quickly and get the next group in. Their wage per hour though drops as low as $12 and goes as high as $72, totally based on foot-traffic, not their performance. It is exploitative, stressful, and chaotic for steady income. In the bars that serve food and a lot of drinks, the transaction totals are smaller, but the servers frequently make more. Partly because the “business” is steadier than the pure food totals.
Finally, though, we come to the article. I’ve often felt that I would prefer simply for the tip not so much to be “included” as just that the servers were paid a decent hourly wage. No tipping, or if still done, limited to something like 5%. A token amount to maintain some incentive I suppose. But the article belies all that, because it goes through a bunch of existing US statistics from the Department of Labor to show the reality of the service industry:
Tipping, while practiced around the world, assumes a unique role in America, one to which most diners are obliged, because the United States is one of the only countries that allows businesses to offload the burden of paying workers a fair wage to their customers. And though construed as a fair way to encourage hospitality and reward good service, tipping’s roots are in racialized exploitation, while recent data shows that it continues to be, at its core, racist, sexist, and degrading.
It is exploitative as it creates power plays between employers who control the opportunities without paying a living wage and the employees who earn the tips, but who are left vulnerable to mistreatment and abuse for back wages and pooled tipping managed by employers; it reflects and amplifies racial inequality and profiling (white servers are tipped more, whites get better service than blacks); and it fails to prevent and thus supports sexual harassment from customers, as the server is financially penalized if they push back.
I guess, in some ways, I just like the article as it unpacks the reality that it sucks for everyone, except maybe the employer.
Chapter 3 is an interesting chapter on Wisconsin Rapids. The town profile is basically that of an old mill town, with a huge philanthropy base from two key families in town who owned the mills in days gone by, and a mostly summer tourism influx. Other than that, it is has a strong aging population and huge summer crowd, with upwards of 20% seniors in the general population.
The big box in question is again a former Walmart, and as with the examples that belied my original expectation of “out of business” big box stores, this is another one where the initial store was successful and eventually moved to a bigger store in other location, leaving the previous one sitting empty. What made this a bit unique in my view though is that the Walmart is relatively “downtown”.
So here’s the basic skinny…Walmart left, and a shell remained. It had a leaky roof, but the rest of the place was structurally sound. A community group was trying to build a seniors centre where three large service providers could co-locate to serve mostly shared clientele across their base. Yet their first instinct was not to occupy the old box space but to build something entirely new. When they couldn’t secure funding for that, they looked at the Walmart space and found ways to reconfigure it to attract funding.
For example, one of the regional groups was more likely to fund them if they were revitalizing an existing space than building new. Public support would be key to all the funding options, and a huge effort was made by media, government, advocacy groups to get everyone on board. Many were opposed to it being “Walmart-quality” and the optics, but once the designs were in place, it seemed viable. In the end, they had pretty creative financing.
Reading the chapter, it is obvious that “something” was going to happen, the question really was “where”. In the end, the Walmart space was way more costly than building new, but the redevelopment aspects attracted different sources of money. But for me, I found three really interesting factors to be:
a. The importance of the aesthetic redesign so people would stop seeing it as the Walmart space;
b. The renting out of space to non-retail renters which allow the three core service providers to basically generate some income to cover usage costs for other parts of the building (i.e. sustainability); and,
c. The creative idea to tear down PART of the building so that the remaining space would all be used, and there wouldn’t be the appearance of “empty unused space” as the facility was actually bigger than they needed.
This example comes closest to what I hoped for in the initial premise of the book — examples where an existing SPACE gets repurposed and flourishes (as opposed to simply repurposing land or putting in a different retailer).
