Boiled frog
By Dr. Selim Erhan, TLT Editor | TLT From the Editor July 2023
Rising costs are becoming a bigger threat to society.
On my way back from the 2023 STLE Annual Meeting, I went over the meeting in my mind. It was very nice to see colleagues, engage in conversations and listen to talks. As always it was enlightening, beneficial and invigorating. I think we appreciate the value of in-person meetings much more after the shutdowns. STLE had a very successful virtual conference during the COVID-19 pandemic, but as soon as we were able to travel and had our conference in person, I realized I had missed 90% of the information and exchanges during the virtual meeting. Human beings are social creatures, and they need to interact. Information flows during coffee breaks, dinner meetings and even during short greetings in hallways. It is so much easier to connect with a speaker after a presentation and discuss ideas. Sometimes one sentence opens up new possibilities! These meetings are equally important to marketing and sales teams and to technical people. Most technical people go to one conference a year. They look forward to it. They do get a lot out of these meetings. They get energized to do more research and get new ideas to make inventions that can bring a lot of rewards to their organizations.
That being said, I see a bigger threat to in-person gatherings and information exchange than pandemics—that is, the very rapidly rising costs of everything. There is a race to charge more and more! If a cup of coffee is $5, why not $10 for a beer or $20 for a glass of wine? Why not $30 for a plate of food that used to be $15? Hotels have $8 water bottles! More important than water, hotel prices jumped to over $300 with more taxes and fees as well. Taxi prices went through the roof—of course, why should rental car prices, grocery prices and especially airplane prices fall behind? What is going to happen when travel costs keep rising? Will companies send as many people to conferences? Will participants attend talks? If increased costs result in decreased attendance, this will reduce interactions. These huge price increases are not justified, and we all know that. We have a great incentive to complain because the same huge price increases are affecting our personal travels, too, but we cannot do much as individuals. Although personal travel is out of the scope of this article, huge price increases still affect workers’ downtime and, in turn, affect their productivity. Can someone be very productive at work while worrying about paying day care, health bills, school costs or these days even gas money and food money? These are all hidden losses that hurt society and our business more than we admit.
These are big issues to tackle as individuals, and therefore we need to think all together as an organization and investigate this problem. Even one or two companies cannot do much, but professional societies can have a strong voice. There may be a prevailing thought of increasing the price of products, but that will not address the issues previously mentioned, especially when salaries have not doubled.
In a market economy, it is expected that the market will correct itself, but the way it seems to correct itself is doing more damage than correction. We, the frogs, are slowly boiling!
Dr. Selim Erhan is director of business development for Process Oils Inc. in Trout Valley, Ill. You can reach him at serhan@processoilsinc.com.