I want to come back to the 'greed' and offer something the poster who seems to imply greed is why the EAS did not fire off that night in Minot. The poster claims radio experience and I believe the poster but I question how expansive that experience is. I worked on the air, in programming and finally sales before management. I was lucky. I got to see radio from both sides. That doesn't make me an expert but it does say I know radio from both sides of the business and I live that every day for my paycheck and have for a bit shy of 40 years which in radio years means back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
I cannot use the station I manage now, but at one station we billed just north of $400,000 a year. I used to scratch my head on what the owner claimed the monthly bills were before payroll. It took $24,000 a month plus payroll if there were no problems. I learned that when he offered me a few extra bucks to do postings for the station as tax time neared. To be honest, I thought those figures were inflated greatly by about $10,000. Boy, was I wrong.
Consider property taxes alone on 12 acres. The neighboring acreages are priced at $ per square foot. There are city, state and county taxes on everything you can imagine and then some things you'd never think of (security alarm tax so police respond, a sign tax, business license tax, etc.). Don't forget annual fees to the FCC, music licensing fees and such. Don't forget your employer matches your Social Security share and gets to pay a tax that goes in to a fund to make sure the unemployed can get their unemployment check even if you never had any claim (think paying school tax when you have no children). t's really easy to nickel and dime your way to bankruptcy. I paid $750 every other week to get the tower site mowed 5 months a year. It was the best bid I could find under 4 figures. Our rent where our studio and part-time employee is runs $2,000 a month. My part-timer is $1,600 a month. My contract engineer is $2,000 a month. I'm the full time guy, the manager, but really the everything 7 days a week, no vacation guy. Sure I can take days off but the phone and the laptop go with me. I managed to turn a profit but lightning strikes, replacing an AC unit and stuff like that probably had the annual profit down to an insignificant number. You can tell I was really rolling in the bucks as manager, not. In fact, I had to let a full timer go and a weekender go when the economy tanked and we had to learn how to live on $10,000 less a month. I went from a 5 day week to 7 and an 8 hour day to about 12 to 14. Sure, there's some play time in those hours because I searched until I found a way to do that and maintain my sanity.
My point is greed is not in our vocabulary and almost all stations are in much the same shape, even the big boys except they have it easier because their successful stations can help the struggling.
I have pretty much come to the conclusion America is over-radioed. In fact, I think it is much more than that, it is over-saturated with media competition. In other words, you take 4 companies that each need 5,000 customers to meet their operations model in a market of 10,000 potential customers. Those four try to gain what they can and live within their means.
How many cable TV choices are there? Is it about 250 channels? How do you get a marketable share big enough for advertisers to want to buy? Have you noticed so many cable networks play the same few episodes on an almost constant loop for a week? They do that because they can trim program acquisition fees and lower operating costs in hopes they'll attract enough viewers who tune in for a few hours a week to turn a profit. And the reality shows are everywhere because they are so much cheaper to produce. After all, their customers don't have the budgets they once did, so they're forced to concentrate on this instead of the more expensive shows.
Funny, I hear no mention of TV stations or cable companies failing to have warm bodies on hand in the middle of the night. Did the Minot cable TV system or the town's broadcast TV stations do what radio did not do? Why aren't these EAS participants included?
Another point: EAS is voluntary. You volunteer or you don't get a license. That is the plain truth.
One point I have not mentioned is the big box store. In smaller cities like Minot's 40,000 population, when the Home Depot or Lowes comes to town, they don't buy radio unless it is a major market. That local and strong Building Supply or Appliance Store starts hurting and their ad dollars go to a trickle. When CVS, Walgreens or other chain pharmacy comes to town, the local regular advertiser pharmacy starts hurting and spends less. And that Walmart SuperCenter hurts the local regular advertiser too. In Minot, these nation chains buy zero local advertising. Those dollars get spent in the big market and that big market grabs all the dollars leaving nothing on the table for the ADI (Area of Dominant Influence or surrounding counties included as associated with that market...When I was in Del Rio, Texas, we were part of the San Antonio ADI even though San Antonio was 150 miles away). So, places like Minot are not seeing increases in local advertising spending but decreases. Take a road trip through once thriving towns with more boarded up storefronts than open stores. You can trace some of that to better transportation and then better prices at the big national chain in the next town.
I'll give you an example: I was in one 30,000 town where we brought in about $45,000 a month in 1980 not adjusted for inflation. This was for a daytime AM with separate programming from the fulltime FM. We had about a 40 share on the FM. Still the dominant station 30 years later, it was forced to simulcast AM & FM since it couldn't afford to do separate programming on both stations, dropped the news department and was billing $16,000 but was live and local 6am to Midnight. Why? First, more stations in town, a local TV station, two more newspapers, lots of national chains and the fact format choices are more splintered than ever before meaning finding common ground to reach the masses is really tough. Breakeven was $18,000 and I got it up to $17,500 by the time I left but when the competitors were charging as low as $1 a spot, it wasn't easy.
So, I offer the above real life facts. Sometimes we need some real life because things get so cluttered with information skewed in ways to make you think otherwise. For example, when Walmart shut 5 stores, the real reason was they were losing money at those locations. It had nothing to do with FEMA camps or getting back at protesters wanting a pay raise. If you have a place making money, you don't stop that money flow to try to financially hurt some protesters, you keep bringing in the money. Sewage problems? I doubt that but I wouldn't be surprised to see such work done. A sewage problem is better PR than we were losing money and shut these locations down. And I love Alex's creative talent...FEMA camps at Walmarts. I'm not trying to belittle anyone here just trying to show how easily things can be made out to be exactly what they are not.
