Business: America the Inefficient

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Some random cases:

>Rex Reed, writer and sometime actor (Myra Breckinridge), ordered a bed from a Manhattan department store. Three months passed. Then came the long anticipated announcement: the bed will be delivered on Friday. Reed waited all day. No bed. Having disposed of his other bed, he slept on the floor. Next day deliverers brought the bed but could not put it up. No screws. "We have to put in a special order." On Monday, men appeared with the screws. But they could not put in the mattresses. No slats. "That's not our department." Reed hired a carpenter to build them; the department store's slats finally arrived 15 weeks later. Undaunted, Reed went to the store to buy sheets. Two men came up and declared: "You're under arrest." Why? "You're using a stolen credit card. Rex Reed is dead." Great confusion. Reed flashed all his identity cards, the detectives apologized—and then tore up his store charge card. Why? "Our computer has been told that you are dead. And we cannot change this."

>Mrs. L. Hugh Hutchinson, wife of a retired Air Force colonel, ordered a self-cleaning oven for her new Atlanta town house. Workmen jammed the oven into a wall opening that had been cut for a smaller appliance, thereby bending the oven out of shape. They removed it and more carefully installed another that turned out to have a defective thermostat. A repairman pulled out the thermostat and broke it. He summoned a colleague, who arrived with a new thermostat that was 15 inches too short. The two procured yet another thermostat, spent an afternoon trying to install it, and after much hammering and knocking reduced the oven to what Mrs. Hutchinson calls "a basket case—literally. They carried it out in 14 pieces in a basket."

>Edward Bak, a retailer, bought a rundown building at 1719 West Division Street, Chicago, and thoroughly renovated it as a new location for his hardware store. Meanwhile, officials of the city's buildings department sent Bak a letter, which he never got demanding that he make repairs. A process server could not find Bak to notify him of a court hearing for a demolition order because the summons was misaddressed to "Edward Bah" at 1711 West Division. Eventually, inspectors found Bak's building and mailed him a letter saying that it was in good shape, but by the time the letter went out the buildings department had hired wreckers to tear down the structure, and this time they got the address right. Bak's first word came on the telephone from a friend: "Eddie, they're tearing down your building." They did. Bak is suing the city for damages; the city is suing him for the demolition costs.

>Mrs. Jakie McCulloch, wife of a New York journalist, felt stirrings of annoyance when a crew of packers arrived three hours late at her Washington home to crate her family's belongings for a move to Old Greenwich, Conn. She watched anxiously as they tramped mud on the expensive living-room rug and grumbled incessantly about their low pay ($10 an hour). At 3 a.m. on a Friday, the packers were finished and Mrs. McCulloch offered them a $45 tip, which the crew boss pocketed for himself. Then the movers came. They demanded that she list for them the contents of each of the 586 boxes that the packers had filled and sealed. Finally she