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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 26, No. 2. 1963.

Cappicade Tangle

Cappicade Tangle

Now that the tumult and the shouting over the Cappicade fiasco has died away to a dull murmuring of pre-campaign speeches, we would like to take our turn, along with everybody else, at being wise after the event.

The predicament that last year's Cappicade organisers' found themselves in was not entirely unforeseeable. The patent faults of organisation did not occur through any conscious attempt of the people concerned to defraud the Students Association—that was made sufficiently obvious by the exhaustive and painful investigation at the last Exec meeting. The difficulties arise from an attitude which only becomes magnified into a full-scale foul-up when student organisations with inadequate staffing experience attempt to handle management problems with budgets running into the thousands.

The average student project can struggle through with the usual nucleus of two or three people handling most of the work, and the hangers-on organising themselves elsewhere when the jobs are being dished out, but a job the size of Cappicade, a magazine with a large circulation by any New Zealand standards, requires exhaustive planning and careful estimates. It also needs, as Mr. Robb wearily pointed out, "about ten or fifteen more people," which would be about ten or fifteen times Mr. Robb's distribution staff.

How can Cappicade '63 be improved? The first obvious point is that a more conservative estimate of sales must be made, and that estimate be stuck to. Granted that gales of any publication are subject to increasing returns, there is no need for the wildly hopeful stabs in the dark that characterised last year's ordering.

The Cappicade budget seems to indicate that a reasonable profit can be made if last year's sales are taken as a basis for this year's production.

The second point, which hardly needs elaboration, is that however rough-and-ready the accounting system, sales must be kept under control. But this is one area where this year's Business Manager can learn from last year's mistakes, and that even if it means cutting down the speed of distribution it is better to lose possible sales through slowness than those marginal thousands through the wide gaps that appeared in last year's tallies.

But finally the success of Cappicade depends upon a competent enthusiastic and numerically stronger distribution staff, and unless there is some drastic change in the dark curtain of apathy that hangs over it all, the 1963 Cappicade Business Manager may find himself, through no fault of his own, with exactly the same outsize burden.—

R.G.L.