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words have meaning (SCA)
About a year ago the SCA corporation started imposing a $3/person/event fee for people who are not members of the corporation. (Events are produced by local groups at their own expense and are generally designed to roughly break even.) The corporation calls this $3 fee a "non-member surcharge", and some people have argued that that's not sufficiently positive and want to call it a "member discount" instead. I sent the following to the kingdom mailing list, but I wanted to record it here too. The argument comes around frequently; I think I'll probably need these words again in the future. :-)
The $3 fee is not a discount. Technically, it's not really a surcharge either. Discounts and surcharges are price adjustments offered by the entity setting the price. Most events offer discounts for children, and some set surcharges for late reservations. The salient point, though, is that the person or group whose bottom line is affected sets these adjustments and deals with the consequences. (To those who would say "but AAA gives me discounts at hotels!", I say: no, those hotels agreed to grant those discounts to people associated with AAA. AAA does not have the ability to impose a discount on an unwilling hotel.)
The $3 fee is not a discount. Technically, it's not really a surcharge either. Discounts and surcharges are price adjustments offered by the entity setting the price. Most events offer discounts for children, and some set surcharges for late reservations. The salient point, though, is that the person or group whose bottom line is affected sets these adjustments and deals with the consequences. (To those who would say "but AAA gives me discounts at hotels!", I say: no, those hotels agreed to grant those discounts to people associated with AAA. AAA does not have the ability to impose a discount on an unwilling hotel.)
A fee assessed by an outside entity is a tax. Taxes are usually set by governments, of course, but in this case it is set by the corporation. Either way, the taxing authority has no direct involvement in the activity being taxed. It's a fee paid in exchange for permission to do business.
This is not just a point of pedantry. Words have meaning, and if you use an inappropriate word you change people's perceptions of the thing being described. It is misleading to call this fee a "discount", in my opinion, and the corporation was right to avoid that usage. It's unfortunate, but not too surprising, that they didn't acknowledge it as a tax.
The whole membership system is screwy
no subject
A closer parallel would be discounts offered by a chain restaurant like McDonalds, where the local shops have fairly wide latitude on pricing but sometimes have "sales" imposed as part of a chain-wide promotion. You can always open your own burger shop, but the franschise provides enough benefit to (most) store owners that they go along.
(Of course, McDonalds Inc. charges a franschise fee to the local branch, in order cover chain-wide expenses, rather than charging each McDonalds customer a membership fee. I think if the SCA is going to continue to have a central corp - and there are reasonable arguments for that - a model where the local branches buy "franschises" of SCA Inc. makes more sense and would be more efficient to administer. And has the benefit of being a meme people can wrap their heads around to replace "membership". But anyhow.)
Note that this isn't perfect even in business. Witness the Subways around Pittsburgh that can't agree on whether they honor official Subways Frequent Sandwich punchcard promotions. Or the recent flap where one of the big CD labels is trying to drive its stores into a nation-wide sale for certain titles, and is getting pushback from retailers who still have inventory to move from before the wholesale discounts kicked in or aren't large enough to meet the requirements for the wholesale discount. But independent - or semi-independent - local operations have umbrella groups impose discounts or surcharges on them all the time as a condition of the operating relationship. And the locals can always avoid that by ending that operating relationship - that's often a pyrrhic victory, but always an option. Calling these taxes, while it taps into a lot of convenient anti-tax social constructs, muddies the waters because taxes have the power of the State behind them, and I submit that we need to be careful about being informal about exactly what sort of stick the latter is.
Re: The whole membership system is screwy
Here's a question: if you didn't have enough people to form an official shire, what would happen? You'd still be SCA people, subjects of the kingdom of Drachenwald. What support would you get from the kingdom? Would it be less than the support you're getting now? Can you function as a household or just plain unaffiliated group of SCA people for a while, without formally becoming a shire? Would that make it harder for you to put on events, for example?
no subject
One difference between the SCA and McDonald's is that McDonald's doesn't say it owns the hamburger space; it says it owns the McDonald's brand. The SCA isn't really a brand any more; it's too broad and diverse. The big-tent medieval/renaissance re-creation that SCA folks do is the generic form; it hasn't especially been facilitated by the corporation, and I don't think the corporation really has a claim on it. It would have been far better if the corporation had either been created at the very beginning, or much much later. (Had it been later, it would likely have been one of several, presumably cooperating, entities.)
I think "fee" is the most neutral word I can think of for the $3 charge.
Shire-hood
Re: Shire-hood
I know he's in Israel...
Which is why having officers of their own tends to be important. We worked hard for getting shire-hood for a group in Soo Ste. Marie (sp?) because their events kept falling apart when officers from groups would bug out on them.
I'm actually not as concerned about the insurance.
Re: I know he's in Israel...
The alternative approach is for them to focus on "doing med/ren stuff" together now, and worry about organizational affiliation later. Not being an official shire doesn't preclude them from having events; they just had their first feast a couple weeks ago. It might preclude them from advertising events in the kingdom newsletter (I don't know Drachenwald's policies), but for now that probably isn't much of a concern because they know how to reach the locals and the non-locals won't come anyway.
If they go along in this way for a while, people will get somewhat acculturated with the SCA and may come to see the value of corporate affiliation, at which point finding five people to cough up the money won't be such a problem. It's hard to convince people to pay for a membership on top of event fees if they aren't even sure yet if they want to do this whole medieval thing. The benefits of membership to the individual are basically nil; some people will do it for the group once they've grown attached to the group -- but that takes time.
Membership
Re: Membership
Whatever they do, I hope they're able to get the resources they need to have the fun they want to have -- whether that's convincing people to become members, or something else. They're pretty new, and they don't have to decide everything right away.
I wonder if the broader SCA (society and corporation) should be thinking about ways to make things easier for new groups, particularly new groups populated by new people. It must seem pretty overwhelming at times -- get five people to buy memberships, and choose officers according to these rules, and set up your bank account this way, and file these quarterly reports, and so on. If your sponsoring group is close enough that their people can show up at your practices and help you do the year-end financial report and so on, that makes it easier -- but what if you're remote, like these folks or the group you helped set up? What can we do to make this less of a challenge, so they can be up and running with the fun stuff quickly?
Fun
Re: Shire-hood
We are looking at forming a corperation here, the sister of one of our members is a laywer here and we will at some point ask her to look into it for us.
Re: Membership
Re: Shire-hood
Re: Shire-hood
At some point we will get some group in the kingdom to sponsor one of our events so it can be on the kingdom calendar. (probably the Lag'b Omer event) But I still don't expect anyone from outside the shire to show up.