Brand Mix

My printer at home has broken so, today, I had to go to the Fedex Kinkos to print out my boarding pass for my flight tomorrow because one thing I'm definitely not doing at 6:30am in the morning is wait in the ludicrously long United line at SFO for one of those. Security is bad enough.

Anyway, the FedEx computer I was using seemed to take an intermnible amount of time to do anything. As I sat there and waited, and waited, I had plenty of time to think about the fact that they would have little business incentive to invest in anything faster. I was paying by the minute so, the slower the computer, the more money they make. Minutes here and minutes there would add up to a lot of money pretty fast. But what about the brand promise of "The World On Time?" Shouldn't this include speedy computers?

Now, it's quite possible that I was using the only slow computer in the entire FedEx network or that it wasn't a slow computer at all but just a temporary connectivity problem. So this may not, in fact, have been a battle between business and brand at all. Just my bad luck. But, whether it was or wasn't, it is the kind of thing that happens all the time. It's a battle where, too often, the brand loses.