Discussion of Marsha's Industry Standard: Dear (Papa) John

HE definitely put himself out there by saying his franchisees would likely be forced to do so. If he, which I'm sure is true, legally has no control over his franchisees' actions, what's he doing spouting off about them?

Well I'm not sure anyone in the investment community would chooose the phrase "spouting off". More like -> performing his duty to shareholders i.e. answering their questions in a forthright mannner and effectively communicating to them any information relevant to the company's sales and earnings potential which is, of course, something that all shareholders want and need for the process of price discovery. This is investor relations 101. But if "spouting off" works for you, that's fine.

Dan, I think you're trying to have it both ways. The conversation with his shareholders was in August, in which he mentioned the price increase, which I had no problem with. The comments about franchisees being likely forced to reduce hours was a different forum, a seminar about entrepreneurship at a university, at which he characterized hour reduction due to ACA as a "lose-lose", and "just common sense". His own words.

Marsha I think you covered all the bases. Only thing left to say is very nice job. (Turning to Mr. Schnatter - "Well? Isn't there something you want to do now?")

Marsha, I have to wonder what problem you have with his statements. It is, without doubt, common sense to assume franchisees at every fast food chain in America will be cutting hours in response to Obamacare, including PJs franchisees. That's a straight forward answer to what his best guess was on the near term outcome. I'm not sure what else you expect him to say. He called it a lose-lose situation i.e. PJ franchisees lose and their employees lose too. For the life of me I can't figure out what you find wrong with that.

Otherwise you're doing a bang-up job of ruining any chances your charity had to get donations from Schnatter, PJs corporation, or any of it's well-paid management types who call Louisville home. If your intention really was to get more money for your charity, you could have done a bit of networking, got the name of his executive secretary, sent a very nice lettter, perhaps even alluding discreetly to his recent PR problems, and then asking very nicely for a donation (hint, hint this could help you John). Instead, you're insulting him publicly, thereby screwing your charity out of any chance to get donations from his camp. Seems to me you're a lot less interested in getting donations from him than you are in simply "calling him out" in public.

I'm sorry Dan, I don't see how, for an additional 25 cents a pizza, every employee of Pappa Johns getting health care is a lose-lose situation. Seems like a pretty minimal investment in your work force to me.

This was interesting...

Papa John's pizza is tolerable. @PapaJohns "facts" are completely inedible. (via @Upworthy) http://www.upworthy.com/papa-johns-deli ... g=2&c=upw1

Carla, the lose-lose comment was regarding franchisees cutting hours.

My mistake Dan. Given that correction you may want to view the link I posted previously.

I did have a look. It looks like bad reporting with no real analysis (even as it pretends to analyze). I don't want to come off like I'm Papa John's big defender. I haven't had one of his pies in probably 20 years. I just dislike intellectually dishonest bullshit and/or sloppy work. The CNN video tells us nothing. It doesn't say whether the 11c-14c is over or understated. It claims that it thinks the number is wrong, without any substantiation of what the right number might look like. For some reason, CNN makes a big deal of doing some sort of hocus pocus number crunch around the $28 million figure which is completely extraneous to the conversation (since PJs will never ever pay 45% of net profits in federal fines). Why do CNN do this? Because they're baffling people with bullshit.

$5 – 8 million was the number PJ's estimated, not 28mn. That CNN chose not to attempt to analyze the relevant number is telling. I suspect a junior equity analyst could crunch the numbers to within a few degrees of reality in about 20 minutes. But CNN is mass market crap and doesn't hire those kind of people. I have no idea if John's figures are reasonable. But if it turns out they're not, his shareholders might just decide to punish him.

Not to change up the conversation, nor am I for/or against ObamaCare yet, but these would be my concerns:

a) What would be the impact of socialized healthcare on R & D spending in the US? We produce the lion's share of new medicines, worldwide.

b) What would be the economic impact on small businesses, many who are hanging on for dear life in the current economy? Yeah- you have heathcare, but you now you have no job.

c) How would we handle the impact of such regulation with regards to staffing of doctor's offices? (we're lean, anyways.)

d) How do we handle the effect upon litigation? Any knucklehead could claim 'malpractice' trying to hit the lottery, so to speak. Or indeed, with increased volume, what would happen to the instances of verifyable malpractice? And what does that do to our court system?

There's a lot of moving parts to this issue- I simply want us to have our ducks in a row...

PS. I should also say that I've worked all my life in the restaurant business without insurance. I haven't been for a checkup since I was 23. So the idea of having state-sponsored insurance is quite attractive.

Good question Stephen. Another good question is what would be the impact on public health with socialized medicine? I find it inexcusable that while we lead in the development of new medicines, have more neo- natal specialists and more neonatal / pediatric doctors and more bed space availability than anywhere else in the world but we rank more than 51st in child mortality. That means more than 50other countries ( like Cuba, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Singapore) do a better job keeping infants alive than the US does. What's up with that? How can that be? What can possibly be our excuse?

Carla, these are very valid points that I bring up. They should be serious concerns for any American considering ObamaCare.

As far as Cuba outranking us on infant mortality- I find that one jumps the credibility gap. Babies aren't turned away in any hospital in this nation, by law. My child is insured under Passport- and I have a damn fine Pediatrician.

Besides, go to any hospital in the world and take out all of the equipment, medicines and knoweledge paid for by America and we'd be back in the dark ages.

Now take that money and the economic system that drives it away and you might as well shut this machine off.

So if we tread here, I still believe we tread with great purpose and consideration.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publication ... 1rank.html

Above is the link my info came from. The US GOVERNMENT CIA link.

I think Dan's being in Germany has led to his not realizing two key points in this whole discussion; in brief, many if not most people would have treated Schnatter's comments very differently had he not committed two major public relations blunders:

1. His initial conference call was held not from his office, but from his $40M house in Florida. It seems just a tad ingenuous to complain how in order to maintain his profits he has to raise prices 14 cents/pizza when one is sitting in a $40M vacation home. Had he made the call from his corporate headquarters, the response would have been much more measured!

2. His second comment, regarding cutting hours to save the company money, came the same week (maybe a day or two after) the national rollout of Papa John's new campaign featuring the give-away of two million free pizzas. The national media jumped on this, calculating that if he only gave away one million free pizzas he'd much more than make up all additional expenses for health care, for both company owned and franchise stores. Again, it was the juxtaposition that opened the door to the uproar.

Marsha's excellent comments appear to mean something different to those aware of the public relations gaffes associated with the comments.

[quote="Carla G"]Good question Stephen. Another good question is what would be the impact on public health with socialized medicine? I find it inexcusable that while we lead in the development of new medicines, have more neo- natal specialists and more neonatal / pediatric doctors and more bed space availability than anywhere else in the world but we rank more than 51st in child mortality.means That more than 50other countries ( like Cuba, the Czech Republic, South Korea and Singapore) do a better job keeping infants alive than the US does. What's up with that? How can that be? What can possibly be our excuse?[/quote]

Was that based on total number of deaths or a population percentage ?