Thank You.

 I pulled into the glacial moonscape parking lot.  They gave up plowing weeks ago.  The three attendants weren’t paying much attention, so it was chaos.  People were walking and parking all over.  I did my best to park orderly but the guy parking next to me almost took my door off and left his car running to power his head-banging stereo.  Why is people’s taste in music inversely proportional to the volume of their stereo. ' Have another Red Bull', I said.  I put my boots on and then the attendant came by and asked me to pull my car up 13 inches.  I said it was too late and would be dangerous for me to drive in my ski boots.  He shrugged, in Portuguese. I’m an A-hole, I admitted in broken English. Obrigado.

Getting on the lift, the ticket taker blithely pointed her Japanese scanner at my chest as I pointed to my leg pocket.  She asked if I was ‘Joe Blow from Kokomo’ and I said ‘no I’m Joe Schmidt, the rag man’ so she asked to see my pass.  I begrudgingly dug it out of my pants and she scanned it.  This charade was repeated on every run, with lots of bowing. Arigatou.

 Then on another lap, people were piled up at the entrance to the self-regulating, magic diamond maze so I was forced to enter the ski patrol line.  The Swiss checker warned me against this, and I explained with a smile that I was on the ski patrol in another life, and I thought I was grandfathered in.  He humorlessly persisted and warned I might get yelled at. This discussion was now in the spirit of a friendly negotiation of our Season Pass contract.   After all, being the customer, I am always right, like Nordstrom's in the 1980s.   I said OK but hinted they might want to have a sign out front to say ‘don’t congregate at the Maze entrance’, which everyone does.  Especially people from South America, it’s a cultural thing (like Brazilians who like to wait for their friends while standing on the loading bar up front).  He indicated that no one would heed the Maze sign since they ignore the No Phone Zone signs and besides that, this enforcement was above his pay grade. So I said ‘OK then stop telling me what to do’.  ‘A-hole’, he smiled in German.  Danke Schone, I squinted back.

It was like the ski-school teacher who chased me into the woods one day and told me there were bathrooms at the lodge, even though they smelled like New York City in July. Misplaced or distended authority.  Ya got a problem wit dat.  What’s next, French-Canadian volunteers in yellow telling me to slow down?  I am an A-hole.  Merci Beaucoup.

On my way out I tried to ski to the gondola to go home but it was clogged up with a ski school circus tent and the magic carpet ride.  I took off my skis and walked the extra hundred yards around the ski school on their nice new heated patio, past the walled in Docs Bar and the fenced in Umbrella Bar.  I got on the Cabriolet and went home wondering who was thinking about circulation and marketing here.  I’ve seen more inviting après ski bars on Temple Square.  But then again, they didn't ask me.  I’m an A-hole. Ya betcha, fer sure.

The moral of the story is: don’t be an A-hole like me, no matter how long you’ve lived here or how well you remember how it used to be.  The local and immigrant working folks out there are doing the best they can.  Maybe they need more training and money or better management and corporate support.  They are here for us to enjoy our indulgent lifestyle and pampered pursuits.  Focus your attention rather on the extractive ski industry that is sucking the money and life out our little ski towns, to distribute to shareholders far away, paying low wages and throwing us a bone but leaving us holding the bag for traffic, housing, wages and overcrowding.  I hear they even bought A-Basin just for guys like me.  Because I’m the A-hole? Muchos Gracias.

Saving Money with Living Wages

 

We drove over to the Canyons on a magnificent Tuesday and although the traffic wasn’t too bad, the parking lot was an absolute glacier skating rink with hummocks and seracs because during the last storm they didn’t plow it. This was their Entry Statement?  Parking was a free-for-all for pedestrians and cars, in the mud with only three uninterested parking attendants available.  They needed ten, I thought, but I guess they were saving money. 

We got on the mountain, and it was glorious.  It was a bluebird day and the grooming was magnificent.  The only thing was that there was not enough of it.  Only one or two runs were groomed off every lift and they got skied off quickly from the focus.  I thought they might be saving the snow from overworking it but we were in the middle of another great storm cycle so I concluded that they must be saving money.  

There used to be a variety of groomed runs to choose from on each lift, as recently as last year, when they recovered nicely from the 2020 Covid year debacle of minimum wage and supply chain limitations that closed slopes, lifts and restaurants.  I was told that they can’t find enough snow groomers and I wondered how that could be when grooming is one of the coolest jobs on the mountain, besides throwing bombs, if you can make enough money to eat.  Then I realized that with near zero unemployment, it’s not an employee problem, it’s a wage issue.  No one wants live in the parking lot in their VW van or drive from Nephi to work at night for $20 an hour.  If they paid a living-wage there would be a line of drivers all the way to Heber to help them groom. 

A living wage might be classified as enough money where you wouldn’t need essential worker assisted housing to survive, which is defined at about $80,000 a year in Park City, or about $40 an hour.  Hiring roughly 500 groomers companywide at that rate would cost them less than 1% of their Season Pass income.  A small price to pay for excellence.  Their flagship mountains in Colorado have plenty of groomers, plows, parking lot attendants and lift operators.   What are we, the red headed stepchild, the poor little bastard?  

Deidra and our local mountain management team have done well with what they get but we are clearly not a corporate priority. Then I realized that the company and shareholders don’t care about the ‘product’ once they get our money in September.  It’s like size-flation where you get a smaller box of cereal each year for the same price.  It made me wonder what the product was that we agreed upon and contracted for in September.  Was it the outstanding 2022 ski season or the horrid 2020?  Snow helps but there is a big difference.  You never know, they never say.  Or is it OK for our mountain to be demoted again from Top 10 to Top 50 in the USA rankings.  That affects everyone.   

So, I went in to get a cup of coffee to think about this and I gave the cashier a twenty.  He said we don’t take cash, only credit cards or your Mountain Charge Account, whatever that is.  I looked at him and he looked at me.  I finally stuffed the twenty in his shirt pocket saying ‘trickle-down, stick it to the man’ and we both laughed.  On the way out of the parking lot that day I was swallowed up by a bone crushing, Moon size crater that has been there for 9 years.  Nice Exit statement, I thought, I guess they are saving money.