May 12th 2008
Within the musical Oliver there is a song which contains these lyrics:
There’ll never be a day so sunny. It could not happen twice. Where is the man with all the money? It’s cheap at half the price.
Shouldn’t it be
It’s cheap at twice the price
?
(And just exactly where should I have put that question mark?)
May 11th 2008
Today I am not the online Libertarian, trying to say something insightful and maybe even helpful about our world. Today I am not the rational writer looking to offer perceptions and humor to her readers.
Nope. Today I am the whiny and petulant customer who is being denied a service to which she has become accustomed. Today I don’t care about efficiencies and profits and jobs and overhead expenses and such. Today I just want my machine back.
I do quite a bit of business with the United States Postal Service. I am well aware that I’m not even a blip on their radar screen, but it looks like a significant amount to me. Whenever one of my Senior Ease customers specifies that a shipment is to be sent by USPS mail, I take the package to one of their Topeka offices and send it off.
For the past few years, the two USPS offices that I use have each had a really dandy little machine. You could mail a package there without having to stand in line or even talk to anyone. The machine would weigh your package and ask you a bunch of pretty standard questions: Does this package contain explosives? Liquids? What’s the addressee’s zip code? Do you want regular or priority mail?
Then you would swipe your credit or debit card, and the machine would dispense the correct postage. There was even a receptacle into which you could drop your package.
It worked wonderfully. I cannot tell you how many times I have breezed in and out of the building while others were standing in line waiting to pay for their postage. The only down side to using the machine at the Gage Center office is that I didn’t get to harass my buddies who work there.
Several months ago, the machine was removed from the downtown office. When I asked about it, the clerk told me it had been taken out because it didn’t pay for itself. But then, she added flippantly, they didn’t want it there anyway because it took jobs away from them. That remark, of course, annoyed me no end. I stood there for a minute trying to decide between giving her my opinion and writing an entire column about it. Fortunately, I did neither. There is no way anything good could have come from either one. Besides, I don’t use the downtown office any more than is absolutely necessary.
But one recent morning, trying to send a shipment from the Gage Center office, I discovered that their machine – MY machine – is being removed later this month, too. I am devastated.
Why, oh why, I asked one of my favorite USPS employees. It’s not cost-effective, I was told. It’s supposed to bring in a certain amount of money, and it’s not living up to expectations. It’s being sent to Colorado. I told him I would chain myself to the weighing platform, but he didn’t think that would do any good.
I don’t care. I love that machine – MY machine. So here I am, the whiny customer who cares way more about her personal convenience than about whether the business I patronize makes any money. I don’t care whether it’s cost-effective or not. Isn’t there something to be said for the fact that it was already in place? How about the fact that at least one customer thinks it’s wonderful? Doesn’t it count that it’s pretty low-maintenance once it’s installed? Did anyone figure the cost of ripping it out and putting it in a crate? What about the cost of shipping the thing several hundred miles? It must weigh a ton. What about patching the wall? Doesn’t that count for something? Huh?
I don’t care about the efficiencies.
I just want my machine back.
KsSmallBiz.com, October 11, 2006
May 11th 2008
A few days ago I saw one of the bravest sights I’ve seen in a long time. On a small marquee outside a small business just west of 21st and Gage, the owner had placed the following (I have removed the name to protect everyone involved, including me):
firstNAME lastNAME, I HAVE YOUR BAD CHECK.
Wow.
Now, I’ve seen lists of names of people who consistently write bad checks displayed beside cash registers, but that’s the first time I’ve seen a name displayed like that, right outside, 20 feet in the air, for everyone in Topeka to see. I gasped, literally, out loud. I laughed, partly in amusement but mostly in shock. And then I realized that, if the sign had that strong an effect on me, who has not written a bad check in 30 years, how emphatically would it impress a customer getting ready to walk in there and write a check she didn’t have enough money to cover?
What effect would it have on firstNAME lastNAME?
What the heck kind of customer relations is that, anyway?
In this country we have accepted the myth that the customer is always right. It is just not true. Most businesses understand and tolerate one insufficient-funds episode, especially if the customer makes it good right away. But customers who do not make their bad check good, or who write bad checks over and over, are committing theft, plain and simple. And my guess is that this was not the first bad check that firstNAME lastNAME had written at that little business.
Last time I looked, the message was still up there. Apparently firstNAME lastNAME has not yet got herself in there and forked over enough cash to pay for her previous purchase and to minimize her humiliation. Maybe she doesn’t care. Maybe she skipped town.
I wonder how many other customers, having written bad checks after firstNAME lastNAME shopped there, rushed in to redeem their checks before they were forced to see their own names on display right along with hers.
Now that I’ve had a few days to digest the situation, I’ve decided I admire that business owner with all my heart. I believe that sign was one of the best examples of customer relations I’ve ever seen. It will almost certainly not deter honest buyers from shopping there. They are, after all, in no danger of being humiliated as firstNAME lastNAME was, and as she deserved to be. The only people that sign will scare away are people who are driving up the price of products and services because you and I have to pay more to cover their theft. That brave sign will, in the long run, hold prices down for the rest of us.
Now, that’s great customer service. I think I may just stop by there on my way home and spend a little money.
KsSmallBiz.com, November 1, 2006
May 9th 2008
Once upon a time there were three Native American women. They each lived in a different teepee, and each slept on a different animal hide. One slept on a deer skin, one slept on an elk skin, and one slept on a hippopotamus skin.
They were all pregnant, and when it came time for them to have their babies the one who slept on the deer skin had a little boy, the one who slept on the elk skin had a little boy, and the one who slept on the hippopotamus skin had twin boys.
That proves that the squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides.
May 9th 2008
The year 2002 should have been entitled the Year of Obligation.
Aught two. Ought to.
Har.
May 9th 2008
In the middle of a (temporarily) successful diet, I have realized I was delighted to be down to what at one time I had been horrified to be up to.
May 6th 2008
It is better that some state has an oppressive government that we can escape by crossing the state line, rather than have an oppressive federal government we can escape only by leaving America.
– Harry Browne, Liberty A to Z
“Balkanization” is a word I’ve see in print a lot lately, so I finally looked it up. It refers to the geopolitical fragmentation of an area into smaller regions, and takes its name from the Balkan region of Europe. These schisms usually occur along cultural, linguistic, religious, or ethnic lines. One source defined it as the opposite of globalization.
It was clear from every source I used that the term has been generally negative, implying hostility, animosity, and non-cooperation. However, recent usage of the word has been more positive, sometimes implying the need for sustenance of a group, or the revival of group identities.
~~~~~
I read of a study in which children were observed at play. Some of the kids – generally, but not always, the boys — would set up rules and insist that everyone had to follow them. If you wouldn’t follow the rules, you were out of the game. They wanted to play by law.
Another group – usually, but not always, the girls — would keep changing the rules until everyone was as happy as possible. They wanted to play by consensus.
I cannot remember anything else about this study – where I read of it, where and when and why it was conducted, and by whom – so I do not offer it as proof or evidence of anything. The validity of the study is immaterial. We all know people in our own lives, adults, on each side of that line. Some people want to run the nation by law and some people want to run the nation by consensus.
The fact is, consensus is probably a pretty good way to govern a small group of people. If your group consists of 12 or 23 or 37 or, maybe, 54 people, it’s not hard to hear from everyone on every issue. More importantly, it’s not hard to CARE about everyone. The well-being of every member of the group is right there in your face all the time.
I recommend to you an engrossing book by Malcolm Gladwell entitled The Tipping Point. In it, Gladwell discusses research done by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar into the maximum social group size of various primates. For humans, the number 150 seems to be the “maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.” This number shows up time after time as the average size of hunter-gatherer societies in Australia, New Guinea, Greenland, and Tierra del Fuego. It is the preferred size for military companies. The Hutterites, who “live in self-sufficient agricultural colonies…have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one.” Bill Gross, a leader of a Hutterite community in Washington (state) is quoted as saying, “When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another…. What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan…. You get two or three groups within the larger group.”
That just feels right, doesn’t it? I cannot imagine a group of people any larger than that trying to govern itself by consensus. Anything bigger than that, and there just have to be some laws in place.
And yet, and yet…we insist on trying.
We insist on believing that our federal government is capable of producing policies and programs that will work for every state, every county, every city and town, and, sometimes, every family, in the nation. And all this despite the fact that our founders clearly meant for the greatest governmental power to be left as close to the people as possible. They intended the concentration of power to be out here where we know the people around us, out here where we can see how the rules we make affect every person under the jurisdiction of those laws.
Out here where there’s a chance of consensus.
Did the Founding Fathers trust state politicians more than federal politicians? Of course not. But they knew the states would compete with one another. Any state that went too far could lose population (and tax sources) to its neighbors. People could move easily from state to state without leaving America.
– Harry Browne, Liberty A to Z
Maybe Balkanizations isn’t such a bad idea after all.
KsSmallBiz.com, April 26, 2006
May 6th 2008
There are two grocery stores in what I consider my neighborhood, and I patronize both of them. Not surprisingly, the frequency of my visits is about inversely proportional to the distance of the two stores from my home.
Some years ago, I succumbed to the lure of an in-store presentation at the one farther away from me, and accepted one of their shopper cards. I had to fill in a form with my name and address and I-can’t-remember-what-all-else to get it. Now when I shop there I get an occasional discount on a bag of grapes or a can of Italian-seasoned tomatoes, and they get a ton of information on my buying habits. I’m sure they lump me together with a lot of other people by age and gender and zip code, and produce massive amounts data for market researchers.
But every once in a while, when I run my card past the scanner at the self-serve checkout, I imagine that I can hear someone somewhere saying, “She’s back! Canned soup again? Wouldn’t you think, if she goes through that many rolls of paper towels, she’d buy the cheaper ones? Not a very smart shopper, is she?”
On the back of the card, it says the card is their property. Not mine, theirs. I’m not sure what to make of that.
The store closer to my home, the one where I shop most often, recently changed their name and parent company and theme colors and the arrangement of their aisles and their in-store brand. I guess they got a new manager, too, because about every third time I go in there, there’s this guy yelling at the employees. Loudly. In front of the customers. I wish he wouldn’t do that.
With their changes, this store is now pushing their own shopper card. And I do mean pushing. I have decided not to get one.
The first time I went through the check-out after all those changes, the checker asked if she could scan my card. When I said I didn’t have one, she asked if I wanted one, I said no, and that was the end of it. On my next trip, when the checker asked if she could scan my card and I said I didn’t have one, she said brightly, “I’ll get you one!” So she affixed a sticker to a card and a matching sticker to a form, ran the card over the scanner to calculate my discount, and handed me both the card and the form. I got a discount, and they got no information.
On my next trip, I loaded my purchases onto the conveyor belt as the customer ahead of me was paying, then stood and waited patiently. After the checker had handed the person in front of me his receipt and change, she turned back to me and just stood there looking at me. I just stood there looking at her. I smiled at her.
“Do you have your shopper card?” she asked.
“Nope,” I replied.
Without a word, she affixed a sticker to a card and a matching sticker to a form, ran the card over the scanner to calculate my discount, and handed me both the card and the form.
That’s when it became a game.
For a while I couldn’t decide on the exact nature of the game. But here’s what I have settled on: I will continue to collect cards until this initial promotional period is over. Then, without ever filling in one of those forms, I will take one of the cards back to the store with me to see what happens when I hand it to the checker. Will I get a discount? Will the computer recognize that they have no data attached to that card number? Will the checker offer me another new card? Another form?
Will that manager come over and yell at me, too?
KsSmallBiz.com, April 19, 2006
May 4th 2008
House. Monk. Lost.
The titles of three of my favorite tv programs are one-syllable word with an “o” as a vowel. Does that mean anything?
May 4th 2008
I think I have too many beepy things.
A lot of the gadgets that beep at me do so at my request. The timer on my stove, for example, will beep when the specified time has elapsed.
My clock radio will beep or buzz or turn on the radio at a time of my choosing. A time of my choosing, that is, assuming I can remember that “AM” is an abbreviation for both “ante meridiem” and “amplitude modulation,” and that those two AMs should not be confused when choosing a time to get up and a radio station to listen to when getting up. I have to confess, also, that I have never asked it to do anything but turn on the radio. But it says right there on the front that it will also beep or buzz, so I count it among my beepy things.
There’s an alarm function on the calendar part of my PDA. When I set it, it beeps insistently every three minutes until I poke it in the face.
My security system is the all-time champion beepy thing. It beeps when I come home to remind me I have 30 seconds to punch in my code (more beeps) before it assumes I’m one of the bad guys and calls the authorities. It beeps when I leave to remind me I have 30 seconds to get out the door before it makes that same assumption.
But many of my gadgets beep at me, not because I have asked them to, but because their designers and manufacturers decided, once the device was in my possession, I would need specific pieces of information. For example, my cell phone beeps mournfully if it needs recharging. My oven beeps when it has reached the set temperature, and is switching from “preheat” to “bake.”
The smoke detector where I used to live would beep when the battery was low; that was, indeed, good information to have. The one I have now was installed when the house was built, and is wired into the electrical system. I used to wonder sometimes, on the rare occasion I thought about it at all, if the builder was ever tempted to put some dummy cardboard thing up there instead of the real thing. After all, it doesn’t have to beep, and the chances of its ever being needed are pretty small. That was before I set my oven to “self clean” with a small puddle of spilled grease in the bottom.
I no longer wonder if my smoke detector is fake. I did learn, however, that I don’t know how to turn off a smoke detector, and I don’t remember where I put the instructions.
About a month ago, walking across my bedroom, I heard a beep from the living room. It was a different pitch and a different beep pattern from any of the beepy things I’m familiar with. I stopped and listened, and the beeping wasn’t repeated. Unless it happens when I’m out of the house, it has never been repeated since.
I have no idea what it was.
Has something died from lack of recharging? If so, I don’t know what it is, since all my beepy things seem to be in working order. Is one of my beepy things programmed to sing a different song and in a key different from the usual when it has something extraordinary to tell me? If so, I don’t know about it. Is ignorance bliss in this case?
I guess I’ll find out.
TK Magazine, November 2007