It's Thursday (10/18/07) and I am in the St. Louis airport waiting for my flight to Hartford.  The plane is not at the gate yet, but the flight leaves in half an hour.

My layover here was 3 hours.  The good news is -- no need to run between gates.  The bad news is that it is a 2 hour 20 minute flight to Hartford, so it is always discouraging to have to wait someplace longer than it takes to get home.

Having said all that, it has been a productive week businesswise.  I spent 2 days in a very intense workshop attended by the CEOs and heads of all the different supply channel partners in the industry, including senior executives at Walmart that mandated our industry change if we want to continue to supply Walmart with magazines.  Generally, what Walmart wants Walmart gets.  In this situation, this is a good thing because there are problems (opportunities) that have been around for years and years and years and our industry talks about fixing things, but never does.  There is no question in my mind that these last 2 days will be looked back on as a reformation of our supply channel, a channel that has not changed significantly in  over 70 years.

The meeting was on the Univ of Arkansas campus and I stayed at a hotel nearby the facility.  Big problems -- air conditioning that did not work consistently, lamps in the room with no place to plug them in and a sleep number bed with no socket to plug in the remote to adjust the sleep number.

One morning there were 20 of us in the restaurant for breakfast and the hotel was ill-prepared.  Understaffed, the food did not arrive in time for all of us before we had leave to catch our shuttle over to the meeting.  The next morning the restaurant was very well prepared and we all received a discount on that morning's breakfast.  (I had a fruit plate).

American Airlines just announced they overbooked the flight and they are looking for volunteers to stay overnight in St. Louis. 

Here comes the plane to the jet way now...