Premier[e]

At Westchester County Airport (HPN), there are (among others) the following two ads:

Tranquility Spa
Westchester’s premiere day spa.

Dominican Sisters Family Health Service
New York’s premier visiting nurse service.

Never mind, for the moment, the pretentious use of premier — we’re talking about (mostly) affluent Westchester County, NY, after all. But note that the Dominican Sisters got it right, and the day-spa folks blew it:

Premier refers to the best of something, the leading example.

Premiere refers to the first, not the best. And even if premiere were what they meant, its use in this context would be odd. One might refer to a premiere offer for their opening day, but this just doesn’t work.

Someone obviously did not use the premier advertising agency.

The New York Times paywall cometh

Yesterday, the NY Times sent this message by email to all registered users. An excerpt:

This week marks a significant transition for The New York Times as we introduce digital subscriptions. It’s an important step that we hope you will see as an investment in The Times, one that will strengthen our ability to provide high-quality journalism to readers around the world and on any platform. The change will primarily affect those who are heavy consumers of the content on our Web site and on mobile applications.

Here’s their FAQ list and the prices. As you can see, the minimum charge is $15 per month, which comes to $180 per year. That’s a lot, especially compared with free. Part of the charge is for use of smartphone or tablet apps, and they do not offer a subscription that’s web only.

Cory, at BoingBoing, doesn’t think it will work, and I agree with him. There’s bound to be confusion about how much you can see. For instance, while, according to the FAQ, you’ll always be able to read things that someone posts to a blog or that you get from a Google search, they will count against your 20 free articles a month. So if you’re not a subscriber, you can read 20 articles from the Times site, and then read 20 (or 40, or 80) more posted on someone’s blog... if you do it in that order. But if you read the articles from the 20 blog posts first and then want to snag an article directly off the Times site, you’ll have to pay. You gonna keep track of that?

Well, they say they’ll keep track of it for you, but, really, it seems a complicated mess.

Apart from that, I wonder about the links I’ve already posted. I presume that blog links will be identified in a way that the site can recognize, tagged with a token of some sort. It seems unlikely that using the referrer field that the browser sends would be reliable enough for them. But all those old Times links I’ve been posting for the last five years lack any sort of tag, so will those suddenly be blocked by the paywall? Probably, and that will be very irritating.

I also take exception to their characterization of the change as affecting primarily heavy consumers of the content on our Web site. 20 articles a month is nothing, and I would not call someone who reads one article a day a heavy consumer, in any sense. No, this will have a profound effect on the habits of a great many casual Times users, who check out a couple of items a day or so. If I want just 5 articles a month beyond the 20 free ones, I’ll have to pay $15 each month for that.

I likely won’t. I almost assuredly won’t.

So the result will be that the Times will no longer be my go-to news source for background on what I say in these pages. I’ll look to other sources instead. And I’ll do that with sadness and regret, because I think the New York Times is the best source around... and that’s the best reason I can think of for them to look for ways to fund their content other than by charging for it, article by article. They’re a business, yes, but they’re also a public service, and an important one.

Or perhaps it’s that they’re not a public service any longer. Sigh.

Mathematics and advertising

I occasionally post here about abuse of mathematics (such as this post, and this one, and this one). I occasionally post about silly advertising (try here and here). And sometimes I get to combine them in an item about abuse of mathematics in advertising (this is a good example).

The other day, the excellent web comic XKCD covered the combo very nicely, and included some of the things I often whine get huffy kvetch whine and get huffy about:

Hold the mouse over the comic to see Randall Munroe’s extra text, present in most of his drawings. Click the comic to visit his web page. And while you’re at it, you might check out my other favourite XKCD comics: Sandwich (it’s a Unix joke), Snopes, Correlation, Can’t Sleep (warning: only extreme geeks will get this), and Spinal Tap Amps.

Customer service

I’ve recently had to deal with a customer service issue with a large company (from the customer side) that’s worked out like about 80% of the customer service issues I’ve had with large companies. I figure that my customer service experiences go something like this:

• Around 10% are resolved straight away.
• Around 10% are never resolved to my satisfaction.
• Around 80% work out roughly as I’m about to describe.

We can quibble about the particular balance, and perhaps yours balance very differently. But here’s what recently happened:

I went to the store with my issue, and talked with an associate. The associate was neither sympathetic nor helpful, and denied that there was a problem. I asked to speak with a manager.

The manager was, in this case, neither sympathetic nor helpful, and treated it the same way the associate did. Usually, the manager is at least sympathetic or apologetic, but not this time. There was nothing, he said, that he could do. I asked to speak with the store manager, who turns out to be out until next week.

I called the chain’s customer service line by phone, the next business day. The customer service representative said she was sorry I wasn’t happy, but, as those at the store did, merely explained why it was not really a problem. I asked for a supervisor.

The supervisor was also sorry I wasn’t happy, but accepted that a problem existed. Nonetheless, he said there was nothing his department could do. He referred me to another department, giving me their phone number.

That department was sorry, acknowledged the problem, and offered to buy me off with a store credit, which I declined. She understood why I declined, and said that she could escalate the problem and have someone call me back. I thanked her for the help and confirmed phone numbers.

The call-back came the same day, and the problem was immediately resolved entirely to my satisfaction, with apology for the inconvenience and thanks for doing business with their store.

Now, on the one hand, I am happy that they sorted things out. But I have too much experience with this sort of thing, and I’m well aware of both why they handle it this way, and what the problem is with that way of handling it.

They do this because they know that most people will stop after one or two levels. Even persistent folks will likely stop by the third, and almost everyone will take the store credit, which mostly guarantees that they’ll come back to the store to spend it. Those who give up (or those who take the store credit and don’t use it) don’t cost them any real money. In other words, for most people who call with these sorts of complaints, the business never has to make it right.

The problem with that is that it creates ill will. It leaves customers feeling angry, frustrated, cheated. They end up with people who are not inclined to go back to the store. Even if one sticks with it, as I did, until someone agrees to resolve the issue, the customer is left with a bad taste and a low opinion of the business.

Of course, exactly because it’s a national chain, they don’t care, at least not at the micro level. The loss of my business means nothing to them, and they will not get enough complaints and enough disaffected customers to amount to anything, really. And because it’s a big store that sells a lot of things, it’s likely that even most of the annoyed customers will be back anyway, despite themselves.

And, so, whenever I have to deal with a real customer service problem — not a simple return (most places handle those just fine), but a problem that one has to explain and get someone to fix — I enter into the process steeled for talks with four or five people. I’m always polite, but firm and clear about what I expect.

And when it turns out to be among the 10% where the first person responds, I’m sorry for the problem, Mr Leiba, and I’ll take care of it for you right away, well... then I’m very happy.

Deep discounts

What a great sale they had going at Sears the other day!:

There were also some wildly misleading signs, like the one that was above the Dockers shirts saying that Dockers neckwear was 40% off. The ties were nowhere nearby, and the shirts were, indeed, selling at full price, no discount.

Caveat emptor.

Marketing: one size doesn't fit all

On the radio program Marketplace, yesterday, was an item about salespeople sending thank you notes to customers:

Sarah Siewert: And as soon as we got there, into the purse section, one of the saleswomen immediately approached us and was really attentive, she pulled purses from the back, she went through different options, different colors.

Marketplace: Typical shopping experience, right? As long as you get an attentive sales person, like Sarah did. She and her mom ended up buying a purse apiece. Then, a couple weeks later they both got letters in the mail from the saleswoman who’d helped them. They were thank you notes.

Sarah Siewert: It was a fully hand written note, referencing the exact bag we purchased. And on my note, she even had a nice reference to our alma mater.

The report went on to note that lots of stores, including JCPenney, are now doing this.

I find it interesting, because I think different customers will have different tolerance for that sort of thing. Perhaps women looking for high-end purses like it. I would not, particularly. And under some circumstances, I’d be very much put off by it.

First, I have to say that the fastest way to get me to leave your store is to be a salesperson who hovers and insists on helping when I’m just looking and don’t want help. I want the staff to be available, to show up just at the moment I’m looking for someone... but to stay out of my way, to disappear into the background and not to be anywhere near me, otherwise.

When I’m in looking mode, I want to be able to look at many items, pick some of them up, scrutinize them, check out the prices, put them down, maybe pick them up again, with no one interjecting choice bits about where this one is made, how good the quality of that one is, and so on. If I’m with someone, I want to be able to talk about the items with my companion, out of earshot of a sales rep.

When I’m ready for help, it’ll be obvious, as long as someone is paying attention. I’ll look around, trying to catch someone’s eye. I’ll have receptive body language, and I’ll be ready to ask questions and to listen to the answers.

And after the purchase, I don’t want follow-ups and junk mail. If you want me to come back to your store, do the right thing at the time of the sale, and then make sure you have things available that I want, at good prices. Do that, and I’ll be back, without anyone’s having to spend the time on a personal thank you note. Fail in that, and all the thank yous you care to send will do nothing.

Oh, and don’t call me by my first name, just because you saw it on my credit card. Very off-putting, indeed.

Abusive, misleading paper-mail spam

I got something in the mail last week that I found interesting, in a sleazy way. The return address said United Airlines Awards Processing Center, and emblazoned on the envelope was this:

URGENT NOTICE:

Your Mileage Plus® Miles
are expiring. Use by
October 19, 2010.

Looks alarming, with urgent in bold, red letters, no? Well, but the return address used a P.O. box in Utah, and the postage payment area showed a pre-sort permit. Bulk mail.

Inside were the following:

1. An envelope, pre-addressed to Processing Center (another bulk-mail flag), with the same Utah P.O. box number.
2. A yellow sheet telling me that I can get faster service by making my redemption online. But not at united.com nor mileageplus.com; the URL is at magsformiles.com, and includes a code that will let them track the specific mailing.
3. A letter, repeating the URGENT NOTICE, and bearing a date of 24 September — two weeks before I received this.

The letter is, in fact, a solicitation for me to use my miles to buy magazine subscriptions, and does not come from the United Mileage Plus program, but from a vendor (Synapse Group, Inc, in Stamford, CT) that wants my purchase for absolutely no cash cost.

United has a policy that if you have no transactions on your account for 18 months, your miles expire. But as long as you have at least one transaction, however small, within 18 months, you keep your miles forever. This promotion is presented as a way to use small transactions (a few hundred miles) to buy magazine subscriptions, thus keeping tens of thousands of miles from expiring.

The sleazy part is that it’s meant to make me think that my miles will expire next week if I don’t do something quickly. And that’s not true at all: my miles won’t be expiring any time soon, and there’s no reason for me to worry about it (though I did check, just to be sure).

Scumbag business practices are everywhere, and the spam isn’t just online.

Now to go to United’s web page and see if there’s some new we may share your address bit that I haven’t (yet) opted out of.

Evil toys

The Los Angeles Times reports about a planned lawsuit against McDonald’s, seeking to make them remove toys from kids’ meals:

Weeks after a Silicon Valley county in California became the first in the nation to ban toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals and other food promotions aimed at children, a public health watchdog group called on the fast food giant to remove the playthings from all its meal packages.

Citing toys aimed at promoting the latest Shrek movie, the Center for Science in the Public Interest said that the plastic promotions lure children into McDonald’s restaurants where they are then likely to order food that is too high in calories, fat and salt.

The group’s litigation director says, with steaming hyperbole, McDonald’s is the stranger in the playground handing out candy to children. No, that’s a very inapt metaphor. McDonald’s is no stranger, and it’s the parents who are buying the meals for the kids. Children of the ages that these toys appeal to are not going by themselves into McDonald’s, and are not themselves ordering food.

Libertarian blogger Amy Alkon doesn’t like what the group is doing on two counts: she knows that it’s the carbs, not the fat and salt, that’s bad for the kids (would that it were that simple and straightforward, one way or the other), and she doesn’t like the laws and the courts interfering with our lives this way. On that latter count, I have to agree with Ms Alkon, especially when she says this:

My neighbor, likewise, does not feed her kids McDonald’s. I’ll have to ask how many times they’ve had it. I bet it’s fewer than five times in their little lifetimes. Yes, parenting...still practiced in some corners of the USA. For everybody else, there’s litigating against the free market.

Similarly, the food industry, according to the L.A. Times, urges parents to take responsibility for what their kids order. And yes, that’s absolutely the point: parents need to be in control of this, and the way they’re asking the courts and the legislature to help them is betraying a lack of control — perhaps a lack of willingness to exert control. The foods they don’t want their kids eating will still be there, with or without the plastic toys, and they will still have to have the strength to say no to their children.

But there is a part of this that I sympathize with: I don’t like the way companies market directly to children, in a way that they didn’t when I was a child.

There was a time when most of the marketing was aimed at the parents: buy this for your children, take your children there, and so on. But more and more, we’ve started aiming it directly at the children, encouraging them to tell their parents what they want them to buy and where they want to be taken. It’s not entirely new, of course, and the toys have been there all along — there were toys in sweet breakfast cereals marketed for children when I was young (I used to empty the box on the kitchen table in order to get at the toy sooner), and Cracker Jack boxes have had a prize in them since at least the War of 1812.^[1]

That it’s been done for a long time doesn’t make it right, and the increase over the years has made it worse. I wouldn’t mind prohibitions against marketing to small children. Companies will clearly do it, because it works, and free-market forces won’t stop it. Legislation may be the only way.

But toys in the boxes? Nah... they’re fun, and they’re harmless. Except when they’re choking hazards....

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^[1] Yes, yes, I’m being silly. It was actually 100 years later.

Free Internet access

About a week ago (I’m behind, but I’m catching up) Xeni, at BoingBoing, reported on a Starbucks announcement that they’ll be giving free WiFi in the U.S. starting in July:

We’re very excited to announce that coming July 1st: Free. 1 click. No registration WIFI at all US locations!

The BoingBoing post has a comment thread filled with Starbucks sucks stuff^[1], so check that out if you’re so inclined; I recommend avoiding the noise. Other comments note that WiFi is often free in libraries, so one doesn’t need Starbucks for it. More on that later.

Anyway, Starbucks has supposedly been offering free WiFi for some time now, to people who get a Starbucks card and use it to pay for their coffee. That deal has some disadvantages, though, including that you have to click through their setup/login system, and that having a Starbucks card basically means you’re buying your coffee in advance, so you’re paying for your WiFi by giving them your coffee money ahead of time. The New York Times article about the change also says that the free access was limited to two hours, which I hadn’t known.

But the bottom line is that Starbucks is behind the curve, at least in my area. On the point about libraries, Starbucks is not competing with libraries. There’re certainly people who just need a WiFi connection and will go where they have to in order to get it. For them, a library might be fine. But in most cases, libraries aren’t what one is looking for, and they aren’t are as readily available as cafes.

What seems to have broken things open where I live is the Panera chain, which is competition for Starbucks. Panera expanded into these parts within the last year or two, and immediately came with free WiFi in a market that was used to having to pay for it. Very quickly, the places that had been charging, such as Barnes and Noble, switched to free WiFi also, in apparent response to the competition. Atlanta Bread Company went one better and provided WiFi that’s not only free, but that just works — no click-through, no registration or login.

So I can already go to a number of comfortable places to get on the Internet. Starbucks? OK, well, it’ll be nice to have one more choice. But as I said, they’re behind. More so than I.

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^[1] Those folks need to get with the program and remember that it’s K-Mart that sucks.

An unbelievable deal!

I took the photo on the right (click to enlarge) with my BlackBerry’s camera (so please forgive its being somewhat blurry) at the local Whole Foods store. It depicts an incredibly good^[1] sale price on some one-quart packages of almond milk:

Sale!   3 for $6.00
Regularly   $1.99 [each]

The unit pricing helpfully tells us that 3 one-quart boxes for 6 dollars makes it $2.00 per quart. We don’t need the unit pricing to compute that the regular, non-“Sale!” price comes to $1.99 per quart.

One wonders whether it’s possible to decline the sale price at the register.

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^[1] Yes, that’s “unbelievable” as in not believable, and “incredible” as in not credible.

You got a coupon?

The New York Times “Bits” blog carried an item a few weeks ago about electronic coupons, sent to your mobile device at appropriate times:

How many times have you heard the prediction that one day, businesses like coffee shops will send us coupons on our mobile phones when we walk by?

That has long been the dream of mobile marketers. Still, only 9 percent of people have received a coupon or discount code on their phones based on where they were standing, according to new data from Compete, a Web analytics firm.

This could be the year that changes. People are increasingly interested in receiving coupons on their phones, especially at the grocery store, Compete found. On Wednesday, Target announced that it would start sending mobile coupons.

When I worked at IBM Research, several of my co-workers did a project involving a retail establishment and customers’ mobile devices. They dealt with electronic coupons, as well as other uses of the mobile technology, and they wrote a paper about the project. The abstract:

Toward a Mobile Digital Wallet

Mobile phones have now made their way into a large fraction of pockets and handbags worldwide. An intriguing question is whether such phones will eventually replace the physical wallets we carry. We believe the answer is in the affirmative, though plenty of challenges abound in overcoming entrenched personal and business practices and processes. In this paper, we explore the changes that need to ripple through the ecosystem to build a vibrant set of digital wallet services that potentially interact with each other to provide users both with increased convenience and a level of functionality hitherto unrealized. We describe our initial mobile wallet prototypes on web-enabled smart phones, designed to explore some of the challenges in creating the architecture and infrastructure necessary to make this vision a reality. Feedback from users and experts across a range of industries such as retail, banking, telecommunications, and healthcare indicate that we have just scratched the surface and a substantial wave of innovation is necessary to make the digital wallet a full-fledged reality.

Would consumers want to receive coupons and other offers on their phones, or would the interruptions just annoy them, seeming to be spam? My colleagues found that customers in the pilot program liked getting the coupons, and used them. In their paper, they note these results:

1. The frequency of in-store visits was greater than the visit rate of the baseline loyalty program.
2. The electronic coupon redemption rate was several times higher than traditional paper coupon redemption rates.

Indeed, going back to the Bits blog in the Times:

Thirty-six percent of consumers said they would like to receive mobile grocery coupons, 29 percent said they want cellphone apps that scan product barcodes for an offer or discount, and 26 percent want coupons from movie theaters.

Are electronic coupons the wave of the future? What about the general concept of an electronic wallet? If we could solve the privacy and security problems, would people like using their mobile devices at points of sale, in lieu of money or credit/debit cards?

I think I would.

Slimy advertising

My business domain name, internetmessagingtechnology.org, is registered by my hosting service, and the registration is included in the fee I pay them for hosting. They automatically renew it each year, as long as my account is paid up. It’s something I don’t have to worry about.

As it happens, it expires on 3 Feb each year. But, as I said, I don’t care; it’s automatically renewed.

The folks at Domain Registry of America would have me care. They want to take my business. And that would be fine — that’s what businesses do. Except they’re not being straight about it.

If they were being straight, they’d send me a flyer that tells me why their hosting service is better than what I have. They’d sell their service to me and give me an incentive to switch.

That’s not what they did. Instead, they sent me a “Domain Name Expiration Notice”, warning me that my “domain name registration is due to expire”, and that “failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity making it difficult for your customers and friends to locate you on the Web.”

Yes, sprinkled throughout the text are other things that say — if you read it carefully — that they’re asking me to switch from my current registrar to them. But this is intentionally laid out and worded to look like a bill from my registrar for a simple renewal. It’s misleading, and that’s not an accident. (And, to boot, their “Registration Agreement” is printed on the back of the “notice”, a solid 8 inches by 8 inches of four-point, low-contrast type! (Click the image on the right to see it.))

No, I won’t be doing business with them, because I don’t like their marketing choices. They remind me of spammers.

Does this really work for anybody?

There aren’t many billboards around where I live, and I do my best to avoid advertisements. A result of that is that I’m often among the last to know about a particular advertising campaign. I’ve only recently seen the current abomination advertisement for the Droid, pictured on the right. In case you’re one of the six other people who hasn’t seen it, it says

a bare-knuckled
bucket of does.

So, as this post’s title says, does this really work for anybody? I absolutely can’t make myself turn the third-person singular of the verb “to do” into a noun that fits at the end of that sentence fragment. I know what they mean, but I just keep reading it as a group of female deer, which kind of blunts their message.

And the image that I am about to be mugged by the ladies who hang out on my front lawn... well, it just does not prompt me to go out and buy what they’re advertising.

I can cope with the slogan in the corner: “In a world of doesn’t, Droid does.” But overall, I find this to be one of the worst ads I’ve seen in a long time. It just... well, it “doesn’t.”

Is it really working? Or should they fire their ad company?

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[Image courtesy of Chris Devers.]

Touchy-Feely Hotel

I recently made a hotel reservation for an upcoming business trip. Here’s what the hotel’s confirmation email said:

Welcome Barry,

Renewal awaits. We’ve received your reservation. Thank you for choosing to experience The [hotel name]. Your mind, body, and spirit will be energized. If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more rewarding, please ask.

Be Well,

[hotel name]

Oy.

Update, 9:30: It’s been pointed out to me that a quick Google search will reveal the hotel chain to be Westin, so there’s no point in hiding it.

TV: content vs service

As 2009 came to a close, Time Warner Cable narrowly averted the removal of Fox channels (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) from its channel lineup, and Cablevision failed to do the same for Scripps Networks’ Food Network and HGTV channels. The issue, of course, is money: the content providers want to raise the fees for their channels, and the service providers want to avoid passing on yet another round of higher fees to their subscribers. (See also here, and here.)

These sorts of disputes amount to a form of extortion, where the consumer winds up as the victim. We could say that it’s a free market, and we should let free-market economics decide the matter, but that would be ignoring the monopoly situations that exist here. Whether you like Fox News or not, it’s clear that it’s a unique service, and that lovers of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and their ilk can find that programming from no other source. The Fox channels also carry popular programs such as The Simpsons and American Idol. Similarly, if one wants to watch Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Emeril, one finds them on The Food Network... or not.

The content providers know that, and use the power they get from the popularity of their programming to make demands of the service providers, knowing they have them over a barrel, but the service providers are not innocent either. There’s little choice of service providers even in large markets, and no choice at all in the smaller markets. Where I live, I choose between Cablevision and Verizon... or I can switch to satellite, which is not an appealing option.

The result is that the service providers can charge pretty much what they want to, and can set up their packages as they please... and we, the consumers, are stuck with what they offer, or nothing.

And what they offer is designed to have us pay dearly for what we don’t want, in order to get what we do. A few years ago, the New York Yankees demanded that Cablevision carry their YES channels on the basic cable service, ostensibly “making them available to all subscribers,” rather than having only subscribers who wanted those channels pay the extra fee. The Yankees won, and the result was that all subscribers had to pay $2 more per month, whether we wanted the YES channels or not (I do not).

The same is true with many of the other price hikes that go on: ESPN, Fox, the Scripps channels... increased rates on these force rates up for all subscribers, because we don’t have the option to choose to take one, but not the others. And that is dictated by the service providers (and by the contracts that they agree to for the content). The content providers feel they have to hike up their charges to make up for lost advertising revenue, which has been on the wane for a while.

I can’t tell you how many channels I get on my Cablevision system now — the number has gone up from “a bunch”, to “a boatload”, to “more than one can imagine”, over time. But I can tell you how many I ever watch: sixteen. There are eight I use regularly, and eight more occasionally. And that’s it. I am paying for Fox, for sports (at least a dozen sports channels, and maybe more), for children’s programming, for old sitcoms, for music videos, and for the credulous garbage aired by “Discovery” and its sisters, all without wanting to.

And it’s no small amount. When I first got cable TV, I paid $30 a month for it, and even that seemed like a lot when I compared it to getting free TV over the airwaves, paid for by advertising. I’m now paying over $80 a month, when you add everything up — the basic fee, the rental on the cable box, the rental on the remote control for the cable box, the taxes and extra charges, and so on — and the next price hike comes at the whim of Scripps (or Fox, or ESPN, or the New York Yankees).

Scripps, of course, for its part, says that they’re not being paid what their content is worth, and they have to take a stand and demand proper compensation for it. It’s hard to argue with that, particularly since the subscribers (the customers, us) can’t weigh in, at least not in a meaningful way. Not with our wallets.

Here’s where regulation needs to step in... but not to force accommodation one way or another, as the courts did with the YES situation. The service providers should be required to offer channel selections à la carte. Subscribers should be able to pay for exactly the channels we want, and not to pay for those we don’t want. The service providers may certainly offer discounted packages for channel groupings, as they do today. But unlike today, customers should have a choice, channel by channel.

And then if Scripps wants to make Cablevision customers pay a few dollars per month more, we will have the option of saying “No,” by simply dropping those channels from our subscriptions, no longer forced to keep them in order to be able to watch PBS and CNN.

There are dire warnings going around that setting up channel selection that way will kill all the small channels, aimed a specific markets — that channels such as BET and Lifetime will disappear because not enough households will pay for them, when they have to pay directly. I don’t agree with that assessment, and neither does Consumers Union, which has been pushing for this for years.

À la carte pricing won’t happen unless we demand it, loudly, both to our service providers and to our regulators. So let’s go!

Buy the jar by the jar

I like to freshly grind a peppercorn mix, with black and red and green peppercorns together, and I go through a lot of it. I’ve found a brand that I can readily get, which isn’t too expensive, and which comes in a large enough bottle that I don’t have to buy it too often.

I just bought a new bottle, and to the right is a photo of the old bottle, on the left, and the new one, on the right (click to enlarge). It’s the same brand — they’ve changed the label, as they tend to do. But that’s not all they’ve changed. It’s hard to tell, even with them side by side, but the new bottle is ever so slightly smaller. And look at the labels: on the left, net weight 286 grams; on the right, 276 grams. They’ve given me 3.5% less product, along with some 5% increase in the price of the package — an effective price increase of 8.8%.

I wrote about this sort of thing before, a little more than two years ago, but that’s long enough that I thought I’d mention it again. I find the ethics of it questionable, especially when the manufacturers seek to hide the reduction. Technically, they’re being honest: the package lists the weight of the contents, and they’re not lying about that. But they’re relying on people not looking at the numbers too closely, and they’ve designed the container so that you can’t tell it’s gotten smaller.

Indeed, when I bought the new bottle I was pleased that the price hadn’t gone up more than it had. It was only when I compared the bottles (and labels) that I realized it had gone up by more than I’d thought.

The world is black; the world is white

There’s perhaps nowhere that companies want to be more careful about how a message comes across than in advertisements. In general, ads are carefully scrutinized to ensure that they cause no offense and make people think positively about the product or service they’re touting, and there’s a long history of ads that were rescinded because they violated those points in one way or another.

That’s why I’ve been pleased with ones like a billboard I saw this week. It was a credit-card ad, the normal sort of thing that reminds you what you can buy with the card. In this one, a black woman was showing off her new clothes to a white man, and the implication from the context was that they’re a couple. Nothing’s made of it; it’s just there.

A few years ago, a provider of satellite television service ran a TV ad depicting a family that had switched from cable to their satellite service. The family was very happy with the change. The family: white mother, black father, and a brace of bi-racial kids.

Nothing’s made of it; it’s just there.

What’s great about this is exactly that the ads are presenting it as unremarkable. When I was a child, in the early 1960s, seeing a black and a white holding hands certainly was remarkable. It was unusual enough that even if you thought it a perfectly acceptable situation, as we did, you noticed it, you pointed it out... you remarked on it. And no company would have even considered putting an interracial couple in one of their ads.

Now, one sees such couples on the streets — of major cities, at least — every day. My early training still has me noticing, though I don’t remark on it any more, unless there’s a particular reason to. The simple fact that they’re interracial is no longer a reason. And, so, the ads are just reflecting reality.

But, significantly, that such couples and families are being used in ads means they’re reflecting a reality that’s sufficiently socially accepted that conservative advertisers aren’t afraid of its putting customers off. It’s OK, now, to have an interracial family advertising your service on prime-time television. It’s fine, today, to display an interracial couple above the commuters at a major-city train station.

Yeah, that warms my heart.

And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land
All the land

The world is black, the world is white
It turns by day, and then by night
A child is black, a child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light

— David Arkin, “Black and White”

Limp telephones

There’s a new series of TV ads for Progresso soups, in which people are depicted talking to kitchen staff using soup-can telephones. The image to the right (click to enlarge) comes from this ad in the series.

Didn’t the people who put the ads together ever actually do this in grade school? Doesn’t everybody know that you have to pull the string tight for it to work? You won’t hear a thing with the string limp, as it is in that image you see there.

Yes, I know it’s just a silly advert. But, well, how hard would it have been for them to get it right?

I ask you....

Can they use those logos?

I was having a burger the other day, and I looked up at the TV above the restaurant’s bar. It was playing a campaign ad for Jon Corzine.

That’s the big New Jersey gubernatorial campaign: incumbent Jon Corzine is being challenge by sleazebucket Chris Christie, and both sides are running hugely negative attack campaigns — politics as even more disgusting than usual. Several of Governor Corzine’s ads use quotes from the newspapers to blast Mr Christie; there’s an example over there on the right, from the ad I saw (click to enlarge).

Earlier in the ad, they took other New York Times quotes, simply tagging them as being from the Times. But for this one, they used the logo. Did they get permission for that? I doubt it. I’m not a lawyer, but I also doubt that it’s covered by fair use.^[1]

It’s unlikely, of course, that the Times would sue Mr Corzine for it, but that fact doesn’t make the use proper.

Lots of people who put together business presentations like to stick in a slide or two with company logos all over them, to represent the companies that use the technology or products or services described, who belong to the subject organization, or whatever. There’s an example on the right (click it to go the page whence it came, as long as the page continues to exist).

Again, they almost always do not have permission to use the logos. Such permission isn’t given lightly, at least not by big companies, and it’s a very different thing to use the company’s name, and to use its logo. IBM, for instance, is very picky about the use of the logo, requiring it to be rendered just so, in the right size, with the right colours, against the right background, and so on. Even employees have to apply for permission to use it except in certain pre-approved manners (as with company-distributed PowerPoint templates).

I’ve always refused to use slides like that — sometimes to the scoffing of my colleagues, who preferred the snazzier, logo-filled slide to my mundane list of names.

Am I just being too much of a good Do-Bee? I don’t think so. I think companies have a right not to have their logos used in someone’s advertising, sales pitches, or even technical presentations.
 

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^[1] This, on the other hand, is.

Make that a double

One of my car’s tail-light bulbs burned out a little while ago, and I replaced it. To the right is a photo of the package I got.

Note that it contains two bulbs — or, it did until I used one of them.

Now, given that my car has almost 180,000 miles on it and just passed its tenth birthday, you can imagine that I’ve replaced others of its tail-lamps, and, indeed, I have. According to my records, I’ve replaced two bulbs before. (That’s all? My, but these guys last a long time!) Each time, I bought a package that contained two bulbs. Each time, I put the package, with the second bulb, somewhere on the shelves in my garage.

If your garage is like my garage, you’ll know that they’re hopelessly lost in there somewhere. Perhaps they became food for a mutant breed of spider. Maybe they’re just hiding in some cranny, to be found by anthropologists in the year 2525. In any case, they’re not likely to find their way into my car.

Do the manufacturers do this on purpose? Do they know that 92.7% of them will disappear into the abyss, and have they planned it that way? “Hey, if we package them in twos, we can sell nearly twice as many! And people won’t mind, ’cause they’re cheap enough that we can get away with it.” (Note the price tag: three dollars for the pair.)

On the other hand, when I buy household bulbs I get them in packages of several — four, usually, or six — and I know where all of them are. This time, I’m stashing the car bulbs with the household ones. The spiders won’t get them there, and when next I need one...

...I have only to remember that I did this.

[Title stolen borrowed from David Sedaris, from my favourite essay in his book Me Talk Pretty One Day. Very funny book. Go buy it.]