I might be looking for another phone carrier

In 1980, General Motors had enough cash on its books to have bought both Toyota and Honda AND the magazine Consumers Reports.

And while it might be entertaining to consider how events might have unfolded if GM had the foresight to buy those two competitors and the thorn-in-its-side, it seems highly probable that it still would have gone bankrupt in 2009.

The major piece of evidence supporting bankruptcy-anyway is that GM had a joint venture with Toyota in California. Part of the deal was that GM executives and rising-stars would cycle through the California plant and bring Toyota's expertise in manufacturing back to the mother-ship.

Which they did, in bits-and-pieces. They did not bring back the parts that made people uncomfortable.

It was like stealing the plans for a great engine and transmission but deciding that the nuts-and-bolts that held them together were optional.

One minor example: To rise to mid-management in Toyota required a stint as production supervisor. Not just two-weeks. Not some random job in the factory. You had to supervise workers on the main-chain for a year. And before you got that job you had to be able to perform at least one job in every team in that section of line at the level of mastery. You had six months to be able to perform every job (for eight hours if necessary) at that level of mastery or you got bounced out of your job (a black-mark in your portfolio) and YOUR boss was disciplined for not making it happen.

Extremely demanding. And the jobs were very competitively sought because your career went nowhere at Toyota unless you had tagged that base.

GM decided that was unnecessary. GM figured it only hired "really smart people" who could watch the jobs for a couple of minutes and understand everything they needed to know. The top-management in the Plants supported GM's decision that management working production jobs was not important.

I suspect that the real reason is that rising-stars are identified very early in their careers and their paths are made smooth. It would be a major disruption for those fair-haired boys to have to run back and tag first-base and many would balk at spending a year of their time in a dirty factory. Top management was sure that GM would fail if THEIR protege left the company.

From the Plant management standpoint, the Toyota system also required that every manager who worked in the plant work one-day-a-month in a production job. The jobs are physical and people who are not work-hardened have a lot of muscle-pain the next couple of days. People who have let themselves go are hammered by having to perform physical work for eight or ten hours. Many of the people in top management in GM Plants were in poor physical shape. They did not want the pain. They did not want to lose a day of work a month. They did not want the headache of having every person on the support-staff learn production jobs.

Cellphone carriers

So the fact that Tracfone was purchased by Verizon does not fill me with awe and wonder.

Will Verizon's bloat and cost-structure poison Tracfone? Will Tracfone be Verizon's red-headed step-child that gets sucked dry as a cash-cow?

Maybe time to look for another carrier. Lots of carriers have solid coverage in south-central Michigan.