Matt Richtel investigates the mystery of why laptops and not iPads need to be pulled out of bags for the X-Ray machine at airport security.

From the New York Times

What’s the distinction between the devices? Similar shapes, many similar functions, the tablet is thinner but not by much. Is the iPad a lower security risk? What about the punier laptop-like gadgets, the netbooks and ultrabooks? What about my smartphone?

Richtel contacts the TSA and security experts, but doesn’t really get a good answer. The TSA said that it had its reasons but declined to share them saying that “the agency didn’t want to betray any secrets.” Another security expert called it “security theater”, implying that making passengers go through some inconvenience makes it look like the government is taking their security seriously!

The problem of course is that electronic devices come in all sizes. Rules are best applied to clearly defined categories. Categorization of devices based upon size is just not practical. There has to be an easy way for TSA and passenger to unambiguously agree on the categorization that then leads to the application of the rule “the device comes outside the bag for the X-Ray machine”.

Is it a laptop? (Y/N) is an easy way to categorize. Is it more than 1 cubic foot? (Y/N) will just not work.

The real world presents a lot of ‘continuous functions’. Sometimes you have rules based upon categories like single/married or male/female that are clearly defined (more in some states than in other). But most of the time you categorize by drawing a line on the graph of a continuously varying function like age. You can vote when you are 18. You can drink when you are 21 etc.

What is the right age at which you can vote? Actually age may not have much to do with it. Education, mental maturity may have more to do with it. But those are harder to measure or indisputably agree on. So age is the best proxy.

The voting age does differ from country to country, so obviously there isn’t one right answer. But once it is in place, a rule like the voting age, just digs itself in. It becomes very difficult to change. Status quo itself has inertia. Additionally, there may be vested interests that are pushing at it from both sides. It becomes very difficult to change. Greece’s early retirement age, for instance (55).

Rules like clean categories. If the real world presents continuous functions, rule makers chop up the continuous function to create clean categories. Once these categories are created, they are very difficult to change.

There is another property of rules. You can always add more. They are very much like things carved in stone. You can’t erase them, but you can always add more.

It’s tax season here in the US. The US tax code is a labyrinth of rules and loopholes and rules to close loopholes that is impossible to deal with. Everyone agrees that it is far too complex. But somehow law makers keep adding more deductions, more rules to the tax code.

The most interesting thing about rules is how they eventually become rituals. Rules endure, and outlive the rule makers. On the way, generations of rule makers keep adding more rules, but they never take anything away. One day the rule makers no longer know why the rules exist. But they keep enforcing them. They have become the priests and the rules, rituals.

Here’s a Zen story that hits home

When the spiritual teacher and his disciples began their evening meditation, the cat who lived in the monastery made such noise that it distracted them. So the teacher ordered that the cat be tied up during the evening practice. Years later, when the teacher died, the cat continued to be tied up during the meditation session. And when the cat eventually died, another cat was brought to the monastery and tied up. Centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teacher wrote scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up a cat for meditation practice.

I recently met the CIO of a leading news media company. He said that over time their Marketing department had added so many “special offers” for their newspaper that they now had 1200 of them in their system. Nobody really understood all of them. But they were afraid to remove them. Why change something that wasn’t broken? Apparently there was a rogue link in some forum which gave readers a free 3 month trial period even if they were current subscribers! But that was a small price to pay.

Businesses, especially big business, has its share of rules and rituals. Some of it is necessary. Some of it isn’t. The cost to business from unnecessary rules is enormous. It slows down progress. It gets in the way of much needed change. It saps the energy of people. They end up spending so much of their passion attacking and defending rules and justifying exceptions, which could be used constructively.

The only way to keep business agile is to constantly subject its rules to the sunlight of logic. Why do we have this rule in place? Did we make this rule when the conditions were different from what they are today? Do we completely understand the costs of this rule and have we weighed them against the benefits? Does anyone even remember why we have this rule?

Like zero based budgeting, we should be talking about zero-based rules.

If such an award existed, Ron Johnson would be a Hall of Famer retailer. He was instrumental in making Apple Stores what they are today – the biggest sales per sq ft of retail space and a wake up call for the rest of the retail industry. Now he is the CEO at J C Penney and he’s shaking things up there.

Mr. Johnson is currently meeting the media, rolling out his new strategy for J C Penney (the video interview is worth watching). There’s a new brand identity, a major redesign of stores which will now be organized around stores-within-stores for major brands. But the thing that struck me as particularly bold and perhaps risky was a fundamental change in pricing strategy.

J C Penney is moving to what they call “Fair and Square” pricing. There will no longer be the deep discount sales that its customers have come to expect.

Why are they doing this? In Mr. Johnson’s words

Pricing is actually a pretty simple and straight forward thing. Customers will not pay literally a penny more than the true value of the product. And as I have been watching the department stores for the past decade, I have been struck by the extraordinary amount of promotional activity, which to me, didn’t feel like it was appropriate for a department store. My instinct was that it wasn’t a good thing.

Last year J C Penney had 590 sales events. A whopping 72% of their sales came from merchandise discounted at least 50%.

From this, they are moving to where there will be only three kinds of prices – Everyday, Month-long Value (back to school type sales) and Best Prices (clearance).

This is a pretty gutsy move.

An HBR blog post is down on the timing of this strategy and thinks Penney should wait for when its new brand and stores vision has been fulfilled.

Quite simply, J.C. Penney lacks the differentiation to make this pricing strategy successful. J.C. Penney’s products are fairly homogenous. When selling a relatively undifferentiated product, the only lever to generate higher sales is discounts. Even worse, if competitors drop prices on comparable products, J.C. Penney’s hands are tied — it is a sitting duck that can’t respond.

In my opinion the new pricing strategy is an inherent part of the new J C Penney strategy and can’t be disassociated from the store makeover and the new brand identity.

Undoubtedly this is a risky gambit. But is it the right strategy? At the heart of it, the new pricing strategy is about simplicity.

Customers like simple, stable pricing. A busy housewife would love to be able to do her shopping at the Penney store near her place of work on weekdays, instead of fighting for parking space at the mall near her home on the weekend when the sales are on. When she is in the store, she can confidently buy any product with the assurance that its price isn’t going to be halved the next sale.

There is another aspect to simple pricing that Penney won’t be able to control and that is to ensure that prices on merchandise are the same everywhere. Apple does this very well on their products. When I buy from Apple online or in an Apple store, I am pretty certain that I don’t need to do any comparison shopping on the internet.

Customers like simple pricing. But they also like low prices. We don’t know where Penney’s prices will end up, but if 72% of merchandise is sold at 50% or more off full price, we can safely say that there is a lot of headroom below full price. Will that be enough to keep their customers or not is the key question. How they withstand the pressure of weekend sales from competing department stores must be giving sleepless nights to Penney executives.

After years of weekend sales, customers now expect them. They expect to see those flyers in their mailboxes with astonishingly low prices. How will Penney pull in the customers? Local marketing will probably have to completely change.

Besides the fact that customers like simple pricing, there are other benefits to having a simple pricing strategy. Highly volatile prices create highly volatile demand. Volatile demand creates its own set of problems. From store work force scheduling to inventory management. High volatility in demand results in either stock outs or higher inventory costs or both.

The fact is that simplicity in product and pricing results in simpler business operations.

Take Southwest Airlines for instance. From an earlier post The Virtue of Simplicity

Southwest Airlines is a company that I truly admire. The genius of SouthwestAirlines is in how they have become the most important airlines in the US by simplifying it for their passengers and for themselves. In the morass of complexity that is the American airlines industry, Southwest Airlines is a shining beacon of hope. Not only is their pricing dead simple, everything about the airlines is that way. They fly only Boeing 737s. This simplifies, crew scheduling, training, aircraft maintenance and spares. They have only one class – coach class. There is no seat assignment. It’s first come first serve [Update: This has changed but in a uniquely Southwest fashion]. And their frequent flier program is a tribute to simplicity – 8 round trips and you get a free roundtrip to anywhere they fly.

I hope J C Penney is successful with ‘Fair and Square’. Taking a leaf out of the book of their neighbor in Dallas – Southwest Airlines – might be just what the retailer needs.

And then we shall hope that this might inspire banks, telcos and cable companies to adopt simpler pricing strategies. And pigs will fly.