My trip with junior to Lewis’s in Liverpool today brought to mind a story that was once told to me by the Hungarian IM, Tibor Karolyi.

Lewis’s has a truly ancient lift that requires an operator, which is where Karolyi’s story comes in. During one tournament in the USSR he was in a queue for an upstairs restaurant as people tried to go up in the lift. The problem was that there were two enormous women operating the lift (it didn’t actually require any), which meant that just one or two people could go up with them at any one time. And when he finally got up to the restaurant it was almost empty, many of the waiters standing around doing nothing.

How could such madness possibly arise? That’s simple, just take away the profit incentive and design business to serve the ‘workers’ rather than the consumer.