Marriot is very environmentally friendly (or should we say: finding ways to cut costs pitched as environmentally friendly?). You have to throw your towels on the floor to get clean ones in bathrooms where towels never dry because the vent fans are either disabled or nonexistent...
Typical sequence of events for a USA Today when I find it outside my hotel room door. Pick up paper and briefly glance at headlines, place paper on desk. Do whatever I am doing for the day. In the evening move paper to the wastebasket to make way for the next day’s paper.
I will spend some time with the WSJ if it shows up.
I stay at the Marriott quite a bit and am a Silver Elite member and have been signed up for the WSJ for three years and have NEVER gotten the damned thing. They ask you what paper you’d like and then ignore your choice. Every morning it’s USA Today. I’ve stopped picking it up and throwing it away, I now just step over it in the morning.
Since the Clintoon days, I have informed the front desk of any motel, hotel, inn, lodge, or resort as I check in two things:
A. I don’t want USA LIES TODAY.
B. I want the cost of the fishwrap deducted from my bill as I know it isn’t free.
The USA Today, America’s most SHALLOW paper, is good to have, in case the toilet paper runs out!
A better option for hotels, that might even help their bottom line while improving their business atmosphere, is already being done to some extent in high volume medical waiting rooms.
It is a wide screen TV with a looping morning news and information program and live feed on it. Those I’ve seen use the Reuters news feed.
Thus, the hotel chain could set up a small TV studio to record its chain wide broadcasts, then torrent them to all their franchises late at night for the next day.
The idea would be to encourage people to leave their rooms and come to the hotels lounge and restaurant for breakfast, yet get higher quality news than they could get on their room television.
The chain might even hire a news web-surfer to find news not carried by the news wires or major news sources, then plug in a headline and a web link.
Another contribution to the MSM/Dinosaur death watch!
Thank God Marriot is taking steps to put that paper out of business. USA Today is one of the most blatantly left-wing papers I have read. And reading the thing only requires maybe a grade level above the Weekly Reader.