Posts Tagged → sales
How’d that go? PA begins online hunting license & tag sales
Today at 8:00 AM marked the first day of the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s true entry into the modern world of home computers and the Internet. This probably sounds like an unnecessarily harsh or even a commonly outlandish criticism of the venerable PGC, but it is a technological fact that today marks the very first step by the 1895-founded-and-minded wildlife agency into directly integrating with its customer base.
And it has not gone well, although it could have gone a lot worse. Monday end-of-business hours analysis shows the PGC website processing about 7,090 license purchases per hour. That is about 118 per minute, which is a lot faster than the roughly 1,900 licenses per hour purchased in the early time frame I operated in. Given all of the little moving parts involved, especially that carefully measured doe tag purchase, I guess I can see why this is taking longer than the two to three minutes total that each person expected to spend on it. It still frustrated me and others who are not at war with PGC.
The process has been marred by exceptionally long waits, both in-person at brick and mortar retailers and online, with lots of “system crashes” and people standing in line for hours, spawning humorous memes like the old and now former pink doe tag envelope saying “Miss Me Yet?” I like the meme of the skeleton passed out over the desktop computer “Waiting for my 21st century Internet purchase from the PA Game Commission.”
The truth is that this day had to come, sooner or later. The old double-stamped pink envelope US Mail process was increasingly marred by the US Postal Service’s incredibly ever worse performance, to the point where people were photographing piles of time-sensitive pink envelopes sitting in heaps in some post office rooms, waiting for who knows what or who knows who. No one likes to be treated differently than everyone else, and the pink envelope lottery was an idea from 1945 that worked when postal employees did their jobs. These days, the Postal Service is notoriously unreliable. We can’t have a doe tag distribution process that relies on unreliable people and institutions. Even when the applying hunter does everything correctly, his or her pink doe tag envelope might take a wrong turn at Albuquerque and arrive days or weeks after the last doe tag was distributed. Which greatly impacts the hunter’s plans and prospects for that upcoming hunting season.
My own experience today had me first sleeping fitfully all night like it was hunting season, and finally dragging myself out of bed and hunkering down by the laptop well before the 8:00 AM beginning of the online purchase process at www.huntfishpa.gov. Almost like opening day of deer season and sitting down at an ambush site. Except this process revealed itself as having actually started well before the appointed 8:00 AM hour, as I was number 7,023 in line when I signed into my PGC huntfishpa account. With barely any coffee in my veins to buffer this unhappy revelation, an ice cold shock ran through me as I realized I was both early and yet already very late to the process. Thousands of hunters were ahead of me in an online process that was unknown, untested, and sure to have its ups and downs and delays.
The big ticket item for most of us early applicants is getting the doe tag of our first choice Wildlife Management Unit. It is why we stayed in the game til the very end. And the numbers tell the tale: My own first choice, WMU 2G, sold 17,000 doe tags by 5:00 PM today, about twice as many doe tags as any other WMU. There is a strong fear in a lot of guys that if you don’t get in line early either online or at a store, you won’t get your coveted doe tag in your primary hunt region. Fact is, with the ever popular northern “Big Woods” WMU 2G, that fear is well founded. There are many more hunters wanting WMU 2G doe tags than there are WMU 2G doe tags to hand out. The early bird gets this worm, every year.
[UPDATE: At 9:42PM I looked at the doe tag numbers and 23,502 WMU 2G doe tags out of the 35,000 total allocation for that WMU have been sold so far. A sale rate far beyond any other WMU. This means that 2G will be sold out by Tuesday early morning hours. The hunter demand for Big Woods 2G tags has always been high, we knew it, and now we get to see how that demand plays out when the hunters themselves are put in direct control of their tag orders]
Four hours and ten minutes later, having obsessively hovered over my laptop screen the entire time while emailing and bitchfest-texting with friends in both better and worse positions than I, I finally had ordered my general hunting license plus all of the additional license and permits I get, like furtaker (trapping), the annual elk application (I will take anything ya got anywhere ya got it), muzzleloader, archery, spear, atl-atl, sling, blowgun, black bear, fisher, bobcat, armadillo, hog, dog, rat, bat, and zinjanthropus tags. And yes, I got my WMU 2G doe tag, which enables me to hunt the way I enjoy most – solo pack and rifle and maybe an overnight and campfire somewhere way off the beaten path and far from roads and people, and the promise of a long and heavy pack-out of boned-out meat with a single doe’s ear and a completed tag attached. This kind of hunt is the most rewarding among big game hunters everywhere. Guys sitting in warmed box blinds overlooking fields and ravines have no idea.
So yeah, I waited and waited to ensure I got that 2G doe tag. A lot of my Big Woods hunting depends on it.
Anyone old enough to pick up on the Bugs Bunny theme above will understand where I am coming from; it was a loooong and kind of zany morning. In this day and age of Amazon and eBay and Gunbroker one-stop-shop badda bing badda bang badda boom go online and it’s yours two minutes later, Pennsylvania’s entry into the online hunting license world was practically Stone Age. New York has about as many hunters as Pennsylvania, and I have never encountered anything like this when I order my hunting license and tags from NY. It is usually immediate. Even Kentucky’s online hunting license and elk tag application process is faster than ours was today.
I am not picking on Kentucky….but come on, we all know it, Kentucky is not known for being especially technologically advanced. And yet….!
On the one hand, we must must give PGC credit for taking the long step out of 1895 and into the computer and internet age. This step the agency took this morning was one small step for PGC and one giant leap for hunterkind, or maybe the reverse, or whatever….. something like this. It is a big deal and I send you guys three cheers. Three grouchy cheers. Let’s not do this again, OK?
Yes, today’s license purchase has been marred by delays that seem unacceptable, but we all know that the PGC’s public employees have way too much pride to let this situation continue. It is a fact that a lot of employees and contractors will be working all night on this new system, and that by the time 8:00 AM breaks tomorrow, a lot of the glitches and delays we experienced today will be a bad memory for some, and a non-experience for a million others.
The real NFL stats
The other day a political website overflowing with the typical hatred for the current president published a supposedly carefully analyzed essay that boasted the NFL is doing just fine, despite the NFL’s politicization and the current president’s subsequent criticisms of that politicization.
Though supposed to be a careful numbers analysis, the essay was full of personal invective against the president. It is a hint that the numbers argument is not strong enough to stand on its own.
This essay stated that current NFL advertising payments demonstrate the NFL is in full financial health; that there is no measurable financial result from the NFL’s politicization or the public disputes and discourteous behavior many of its employees have shown toward average Americans and the US president.
In short, the NFL is doing fine with the American people and President Trump has no traction.
It was the kind of article that I had to read three times over to ensure that the writer really meant what he wrote. And in fact, he did mean it, and yet it is just another example of how just about everything has been politicized, and how anything that can be politicized to score a point will be so used. Even if it is so obviously factually wrong.
Never mind that this week’s New Yorker magazine has a front cover showing a dead, bleeding Donald Trump at the bottom of an escalator. That is obvious bias and unhinged crazy (imagine if it had been the past president so portrayed). What is more intriguing is when someone reaches into a random numbers hat and tries to make a coherent argument, as the subject essay did, and pass it off as careful logic.
The problem with arguing that the NFL is doing great! fantastic! so there! based on current advertising payments is that those payments are not directly connected to actual league performance. Those ad numbers are heavily indexed and fixed long ago to past data and calculations of expected market performance. Long before Colin Kaepernick started his anti-America kneeling thing. Long before the NFL was politicized.
The cited NFL numbers are heavily lagged, meaning they reflect past, not present or even close to present performance. Also, these ad numbers are relative to other markers/ variables that are either unrelated to NFL performance or are fixed. This means they either cannot or likely will not change due to NFL performance for a long time. This means the market-driven financial fallout from the politicized NFL’s self-inflicted damage is yet to be tallied or measured by the sectors being cited by the essay (unless you are looking at short-term sales of NFL merchandise, which has been yo-yo-ing for the past two years, or half-empty NFL stadiums and unbelievably low game ticket sales, as one would expect as a result of the NFL’s politicization and purposeful alienation of at least half of America).
Using the advertising measures in that political essay in a logical way, an actual analysis in five years would be appropriate. That would catch the standard market-based reevaluation of the NFL’s actual performance. And that probably won’t be a happy situation; certainly nothing for political writers to crow about. I am willing to bet that the NFL will be in real trouble in five years, as a result of openly disrespecting their audience and market.
I conclude this by looking at the most telling, most relevant statistics: Low ticket sales, half-filled stadiums, NFL merchandise sales way down, measurable TV-broadcast NFL game viewership down.
But by then the essay in question will be long forgotten, because almost all such essays are done for their immediate effect. That is, they are trying to create an appearance, a narrative, with the simple goal of damaging and reducing the president’s current polling numbers among his supporters. Accuracy, facts, numbers do not matter. And no one else in the legacy media will call them out on their inaccuracy, anyhow.
Essays based on numbers written by politicos who are ignorant about numbers and markets are not really, truly, meant to persuade people that the numbers are meaningful. Rather, high-churn essays like this are simply meant to score temporary political points. Just like the vast majority of the US establishment legacy media. It is just another angle, that’s all.