For me, and many other people, it is an extreme inconvenience to deal with shipping an item back, especially if it is defective. If it is defective, I want it replaced today, not next week.
This is the primary reason why I, personally, chose to shop brick-and-mortar unless there is simply no option to buy the item locally. I will drive 75 miles to the nearest Guitar Center, if I can't get what I want local, before I will wait a week for something to show from Musician's Friend, and I will die and go to hell before I will pay for next day shipping. That completely negates any discount that I might get. I order some things from Newegg because there is no other option, and will pay slightly more at the Mark-of-the-BeastBuy to have something in my hand immediately. The only time that I will order 'normal' stuff is if it is something that I really don't care when I get it because it is completely superfluous and I don't have to have it soon. And that is rare.
Some people, on the other hand, prefer to order everything online, and the shipping doesn't bother them. The thing is, when you need or want something now, sometimes next day shipping just doesn't cut it. I have a friend like that, and he is all the time having to borrow shit because the new whatever that he ordered won't arrive for another X days.
He even orders bullets, instead of driving down to the damned gun shop. Seriously. There are two gun shops and a Dick's Sporting Goods on his way to work. When you need to shoot someone, you don't want to tell the rapist/murderer/robber to wait for a few days, because your bullets haven't showed up yet. And he ends up paying the same or more than he would if he bought locally.
I don't understand why anyone compares the internet and social media to addiction.
Understand that one of the hallmarks of addiction is the process of fulfilling the addiction is overwhelming and interferes with other aspects of an individual's life. If you spend every waking moment trying to obtain your next 'fix', whatever that may be, then you suffer from an addiction.
In the fairly recent past, I have had to terminate employees due to sneaking phones into work so they could hide and play with Facebook. I even fired one when I walked into my locked office, the door had been jimmied open, and an employee (aged over 30, by the way) was on my office computer on Facebook. He paid for a new door, too.
The people that were fired for sneaking in the phones were not fired out of hand. They had warning after warning, and had signed acknowledgments of the new handbook policies prohibiting cellular phones for non-management personnel. If anything, I probably was more lenient than I should have been. And lest you think that management got away with it, I fired several members of management, including my assistant manager, over varying degrees of the same thing.
This was during the time period of 2008 - 2010, and the interesting thing is that the majority of employees that required discipline for social media/text messaging issues were over 25, and many over 30. Certainly old enough to know this shit is not acceptable.
No, customers are not rational beings. Despite this, you have a promotion that is either time limited or numerically limited. That is the very definition of a promotion; it is limited and it ends. Despite their general lunacy, most customers understand this. You, as a manager enforcing these limits, are beholden to your superiors, who are beholden to all stakeholders. It is your and your company's job to balance the intent of the promotion with the execution of the discounts. If the intent is to move that product out then, by all means, run a no limit sale. There are plenty of them, and I see nothing wrong with that. Simple examples are dollar or percent off sales on a particular item for a set amount of time, generally to move out the product.
This does not mean that, when the promotion ends, you keep giving the discount out to all and sundry. This is counterproductive. Your normal sales price is set where it is for a reason. Limited promotions are used because of this. As mentioned earlier, there is a set number of discounts that a company decides that it is able to absorb. If number is 100, and you give out 750, this heavily affects the net profit. Also, if you make these kind of exceptions once, you are expected to do it for everyone, every time.
It should also be of note that customer loyalty is not involved when dealing with the 'steep discount' crowd. They are wedded to the discounts and, other than some slight level of brand preference, they will shop where the price is the lowest. It is not possible to sustain a business with the dubious 'loyalty' of these customers unless you are in the business of discounted retail or food. Take a look at the behavior of some people when it comes to gas prices. I have heard it said more than once that gasoline is the only product in which people will go miles out of their way and waste time in order to save pennies.
I own and operate a grocery business, and do not use coupons for all of the reasons that have been brought up. I use limited time targeted price reductions, and these are effective for what I need, which is to move out old product. I do not use sales to encourage people to shop because, when all is said and done, my prices undercut the chain grocery stores by quite a bit. If I go much lower than my regular prices I make no money. Not only do I not make money, but the customers come in to buy the sale items and nothing else, and I never see them again. None of them convert to loyal customers.
Back to the coupon example from Hardee's. This was a real example which, unfortunately, was more common than you might think. I spent 12 to 15 hours in the store 5 days a week. Do you think that my regular customers tried that? No, they did not. Do you think that, even if I gave that massive discount that I would ever see them again? No, I would not. People that try this sort of thing are generally people that found a stack of coupons and wanted something for nothing. Now, though the coupons were limited to 1 per customer, I had a policy to let them use multiple coupons in the order as long as they did not stack. They are going to use them at some point, so why not let them use them all at once. My hard line stance came from the stacking of multiple coupons affecting the same item and people wanting the limited BOGO coupon discount constantly with no coupons.
Something else to think about, and this applies to retail as well as fast food. As a manager, your allowable payroll generally derives from the sales. This often does not take excess coupons into account. If you turn in $250.00 in coupons and you actually gave $1000.00 in discounts, your allowable payroll takes a hit. This affects your ability to properly serve your customers.
Naturally, I am not any more likely to change your mind than your are to change mine. We are on opposite sides of the fence, and there is certainly room for both opinions. I would, however, like to do something that is rare here. I would like to thank you for an interesting and thought provoking discussion.
No, you don't grant as many discounts as the customers want. You certainly do not offer the discount to anyone who walks in the door, whether they have the coupon or not. Offering the discount without the coupon should be used as a last resort, and at the discretion of a manager or owner, in order to keep a repeat customer.
There is generally a set amount of profit that a company is either willing or able to leave on the table when designing a discount campaign. With coupons, for example, a company will generally set a certain number of discounts. This is because the executives, owners, or whoever makes the decisions, has decided that there is a specific number of discounts that can be given out before the cost of the promotion gets out of hand. Though you may not think so, in many cases coupon discounts bring an item close to cost.
In my earlier example, that $1.99 hamburger coupon actually cost me about $1.85 to make. This accounts for its proper share of costs, including food cost, labor, utilities, insurance, advertising, and so forth. The only thing that figure does not include is the taxes. Retail can be similar, depending on the item being sold. Something with an MSRP of $50.00 may have a wholesale cost of $15.00. That may sound like a lot of profit, but overhead and other costs can quickly send the actual cost well upwards of $30.00. Giving everyone that walks in the door that 30% off coupon doesn't sound so pleasant now, does it?
I am not trying to be an asshole, nor am I trying to personally attack anyone. Unfortunately, you probably either 1.) have never been in a high enough level management position to understand certain aspects of business and/or 2.) have never taken bachelor's or masters level business administration courses, in particular, cost accounting, supply chain management, and applicable marketing courses. I have. I left my restaurant to finish my MBA. I have held several senior management positions in my life, and dealing with these issues was my bread and butter for years.
Actually, I used to be the General Manager for an extremely high volume Hardee's. One of those nice 24 hour jobs off of a major interstate. We had the problem with people trying to fuck us over with coupons and getting aggressive about it. For example, we had shit like people trying to combine a BOGO Thickburger coupon with a $1.99 Thickburger coupon, and then with a free fries with purchase of Thickburger coupon, and then trying to use a free drink coupon. NO! NO! Fuck you very much. Not happening. Period. You do not get two big bags of food for two bucks.
They would try to bully their way with the coupons with my crew and my management staff. I started throwing them out on their asses, and sometimes not in a pleasant way, depending on how pissy they were getting. Coupons plainly state the limits on them and that they can not be combined with any other offer. This includes combo pricing, assholes. The other thing that they would try is to keep the coupons. Sorry. No coupon, no discount. Fuck you very much for coming in. Expired coupon? No. Fuck you!
You know what the funny thing was? This didn't affect my customer count and sales. Most people trying to screw businesses over with coupons and discounts are not regular customers. You will not see them unless they can get something free or highly discounted.
Thank these Extreme Couponers for this shit. Fuck them.
Do not feed the copyright troll. This is interesting. I have a feeling that very soon, the court system is going to start getting sick of the abuses of the copyright system, which may spur some changes. Of course, this has been said many times before.
I was always taught that, in the case of a proper name in a case like this, it would be Priuses. If you had a brand name called Fungus, for instance, the plural would be Funguses and not Fungi, and similarly the Ford Focus would be Focuses and not Foci. I could be wrong, but I don't feel like getting out a textbook.
To this third world waiter this 120.00 may have had the rough equivalent in buying power of a month or more worth of wages, whereas even the 599.00 in the United States is just a couple of weeks even at low wages. If you live on 50.00 per month, the 120.00 is a hell of a lot.
Anarchy Online is still going, Tabula Rasa is dead. I beg to differ that Anarchy Online is worse. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Of course, Anarchy Online looks quite a bit dated, but then again, there are a few things more important than graphics. Like beer. And hookers. And cocaine.
Honestly, I take very little stock in these bullshit personality tests at work. I typically have made up my mind to hire you or not in less than a minute after I started talking with you. Some of my best and most reliable employees are homeless scumbags that I let take showers in the chemical sink when we are closed, and some of my worst employees, and the ones that I fire the most, are 'normal' people who would have scored well on the test.
So how about going with fines instead of taxes. Traffic offences penalties, should be charged as a percentage of annual income so that all people, including visitors, pay a penalty that reflects equal suffering and that is specifically being used to manipulate behaviour.
Some really nice big fines for the rich and greedy. A lot of the current penalties represent a fairly large percentage of the minimum wage and using those percentages as a basis, people earning more than $100,000 per year will end up paying fines in the tens of thousands of dollars. So double benefit, taxation income shortfall fulfilled and the wealthy finally are being motivated to adhere to the law upon the same 'in reality' basis as the poor.
Actually, if I am not mistaken, Germany or some other northern European countries actually have had a system like that. I was reading somewhere about some rich guy getting a $20,000.00 speeding ticket because he had a multimillion dollar income. Not sure what the country is, though.
Your comment brings up a valid point, though you made it in humor.
Chances are that the legs that he is using are lighter weight than that of normal legs. This would make him significantly lighter than someone else of the same height and roughly equivalent body mass. Biomechanics aside, this would give an advantage.
Not to be a dick, but generally when you send something for warranty work you are
1) not guaranteed to get the exact same item back. When discussing the legal aspects of a situation like this, it is generally a type of bailment known as a mutuum. Essentially, you are not guaranteed the return of the exact system that you sent in, in the same way that if you borrow a cigarette from a friend and pay him back, he might reasonably expect that you replace his Marlboro Red with a Marlboro Red and not a Camel, but he knows not to expect the return of the exact same cigarette. Also, you can consider a neighbor borrowing sugar from you. The exact wording of the warranty contract will determine whether this is the case.
2) often advised in the wording to the warranty that any aftermarket enhancements will not be returned to you. In this case things like faceplates, stickers, and such. When sending in systems for warranty repair you are generally advised not to send any memory cards, cabling, or controllers, or you will not get them back. When dealing with warranty work with cellular phones, often you are asked to remove your battery, battery cover, and faceplate, because you will not get it back.
Without having a copy of the warranty contract in front of me, I have no way of knowing, but chances are this guy doesn't have a leg to stand on.
We don't have those here, for a while my street had an automated radar gun display, which showed drivers how fast they were going. It didn't hook up to a database, or at least identify the people that were speeding. I'm not actually sure whether it was just a reminder to people that were speeding, or if they were using it as a part of traffic planning, to decide whether to install speed bumps or post traffic cops there to write tickets.
Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer! I only know this information to be applicable to the United States of America. It is likely the same in the UK, but I can not guarantee it.
The particular type of display that this post is referring to is generally not used as an aid to give tickets. It is also not meant to be a reminder of how fast the drivers are going, strictly speaking. Typically, the main use is in determining what the average speed of the road, and is used to determine if there need to be any changes to the speed.
Now, an interesting thing happens at this point.
People send in complaints in regards to a speed limit. Often it is the all too common situation of a straight 2 or 4 lane road with no intersections. It will have a 35mph speed limit, when it would be perfectly safe at 50 or 55. Any prudent driver would have no problems on this road at these speeds.
So they complain, and the county, or city, or state, or whomever, decides to send out the little automated speed detection unit. The purpose is to determine what the average speed is on the particular part of the road. You can read that as 'the speed that is actually driven at' if you want to.
Often, depending on the municipality, they will require that police do not park along the side of that road in avoid skewed results.
End result: people think that the automated device is something that will catch them speeding, or they think that it is made to get them to slow down, so they slam on the brakes. Then the speed limit either stays the same or is actually lowered.
Slashdot Mirror
For me, and many other people, it is an extreme inconvenience to deal with shipping an item back, especially if it is defective. If it is defective, I want it replaced today, not next week. This is the primary reason why I, personally, chose to shop brick-and-mortar unless there is simply no option to buy the item locally. I will drive 75 miles to the nearest Guitar Center, if I can't get what I want local, before I will wait a week for something to show from Musician's Friend, and I will die and go to hell before I will pay for next day shipping. That completely negates any discount that I might get. I order some things from Newegg because there is no other option, and will pay slightly more at the Mark-of-the-BeastBuy to have something in my hand immediately. The only time that I will order 'normal' stuff is if it is something that I really don't care when I get it because it is completely superfluous and I don't have to have it soon. And that is rare.
Some people, on the other hand, prefer to order everything online, and the shipping doesn't bother them. The thing is, when you need or want something now, sometimes next day shipping just doesn't cut it. I have a friend like that, and he is all the time having to borrow shit because the new whatever that he ordered won't arrive for another X days.
He even orders bullets, instead of driving down to the damned gun shop. Seriously. There are two gun shops and a Dick's Sporting Goods on his way to work. When you need to shoot someone, you don't want to tell the rapist/murderer/robber to wait for a few days, because your bullets haven't showed up yet. And he ends up paying the same or more than he would if he bought locally.
I don't understand why anyone compares the internet and social media to addiction.
Understand that one of the hallmarks of addiction is the process of fulfilling the addiction is overwhelming and interferes with other aspects of an individual's life. If you spend every waking moment trying to obtain your next 'fix', whatever that may be, then you suffer from an addiction.
In the fairly recent past, I have had to terminate employees due to sneaking phones into work so they could hide and play with Facebook. I even fired one when I walked into my locked office, the door had been jimmied open, and an employee (aged over 30, by the way) was on my office computer on Facebook. He paid for a new door, too.
The people that were fired for sneaking in the phones were not fired out of hand. They had warning after warning, and had signed acknowledgments of the new handbook policies prohibiting cellular phones for non-management personnel. If anything, I probably was more lenient than I should have been. And lest you think that management got away with it, I fired several members of management, including my assistant manager, over varying degrees of the same thing.
This was during the time period of 2008 - 2010, and the interesting thing is that the majority of employees that required discipline for social media/text messaging issues were over 25, and many over 30. Certainly old enough to know this shit is not acceptable.
No, customers are not rational beings. Despite this, you have a promotion that is either time limited or numerically limited. That is the very definition of a promotion; it is limited and it ends. Despite their general lunacy, most customers understand this. You, as a manager enforcing these limits, are beholden to your superiors, who are beholden to all stakeholders. It is your and your company's job to balance the intent of the promotion with the execution of the discounts. If the intent is to move that product out then, by all means, run a no limit sale. There are plenty of them, and I see nothing wrong with that. Simple examples are dollar or percent off sales on a particular item for a set amount of time, generally to move out the product.
This does not mean that, when the promotion ends, you keep giving the discount out to all and sundry. This is counterproductive. Your normal sales price is set where it is for a reason. Limited promotions are used because of this. As mentioned earlier, there is a set number of discounts that a company decides that it is able to absorb. If number is 100, and you give out 750, this heavily affects the net profit. Also, if you make these kind of exceptions once, you are expected to do it for everyone, every time.
It should also be of note that customer loyalty is not involved when dealing with the 'steep discount' crowd. They are wedded to the discounts and, other than some slight level of brand preference, they will shop where the price is the lowest. It is not possible to sustain a business with the dubious 'loyalty' of these customers unless you are in the business of discounted retail or food. Take a look at the behavior of some people when it comes to gas prices. I have heard it said more than once that gasoline is the only product in which people will go miles out of their way and waste time in order to save pennies.
I own and operate a grocery business, and do not use coupons for all of the reasons that have been brought up. I use limited time targeted price reductions, and these are effective for what I need, which is to move out old product. I do not use sales to encourage people to shop because, when all is said and done, my prices undercut the chain grocery stores by quite a bit. If I go much lower than my regular prices I make no money. Not only do I not make money, but the customers come in to buy the sale items and nothing else, and I never see them again. None of them convert to loyal customers.
Back to the coupon example from Hardee's. This was a real example which, unfortunately, was more common than you might think. I spent 12 to 15 hours in the store 5 days a week. Do you think that my regular customers tried that? No, they did not. Do you think that, even if I gave that massive discount that I would ever see them again? No, I would not. People that try this sort of thing are generally people that found a stack of coupons and wanted something for nothing. Now, though the coupons were limited to 1 per customer, I had a policy to let them use multiple coupons in the order as long as they did not stack. They are going to use them at some point, so why not let them use them all at once. My hard line stance came from the stacking of multiple coupons affecting the same item and people wanting the limited BOGO coupon discount constantly with no coupons.
Something else to think about, and this applies to retail as well as fast food. As a manager, your allowable payroll generally derives from the sales. This often does not take excess coupons into account. If you turn in $250.00 in coupons and you actually gave $1000.00 in discounts, your allowable payroll takes a hit. This affects your ability to properly serve your customers.
Naturally, I am not any more likely to change your mind than your are to change mine. We are on opposite sides of the fence, and there is certainly room for both opinions. I would, however, like to do something that is rare here. I would like to thank you for an interesting and thought provoking discussion.
No, you don't grant as many discounts as the customers want. You certainly do not offer the discount to anyone who walks in the door, whether they have the coupon or not. Offering the discount without the coupon should be used as a last resort, and at the discretion of a manager or owner, in order to keep a repeat customer.
There is generally a set amount of profit that a company is either willing or able to leave on the table when designing a discount campaign. With coupons, for example, a company will generally set a certain number of discounts. This is because the executives, owners, or whoever makes the decisions, has decided that there is a specific number of discounts that can be given out before the cost of the promotion gets out of hand. Though you may not think so, in many cases coupon discounts bring an item close to cost.
In my earlier example, that $1.99 hamburger coupon actually cost me about $1.85 to make. This accounts for its proper share of costs, including food cost, labor, utilities, insurance, advertising, and so forth. The only thing that figure does not include is the taxes. Retail can be similar, depending on the item being sold. Something with an MSRP of $50.00 may have a wholesale cost of $15.00. That may sound like a lot of profit, but overhead and other costs can quickly send the actual cost well upwards of $30.00. Giving everyone that walks in the door that 30% off coupon doesn't sound so pleasant now, does it?
I am not trying to be an asshole, nor am I trying to personally attack anyone. Unfortunately, you probably either 1.) have never been in a high enough level management position to understand certain aspects of business and/or 2.) have never taken bachelor's or masters level business administration courses, in particular, cost accounting, supply chain management, and applicable marketing courses. I have. I left my restaurant to finish my MBA. I have held several senior management positions in my life, and dealing with these issues was my bread and butter for years.
Actually, I used to be the General Manager for an extremely high volume Hardee's. One of those nice 24 hour jobs off of a major interstate. We had the problem with people trying to fuck us over with coupons and getting aggressive about it. For example, we had shit like people trying to combine a BOGO Thickburger coupon with a $1.99 Thickburger coupon, and then with a free fries with purchase of Thickburger coupon, and then trying to use a free drink coupon. NO! NO! Fuck you very much. Not happening. Period. You do not get two big bags of food for two bucks.
They would try to bully their way with the coupons with my crew and my management staff. I started throwing them out on their asses, and sometimes not in a pleasant way, depending on how pissy they were getting. Coupons plainly state the limits on them and that they can not be combined with any other offer. This includes combo pricing, assholes. The other thing that they would try is to keep the coupons. Sorry. No coupon, no discount. Fuck you very much for coming in. Expired coupon? No. Fuck you!
You know what the funny thing was? This didn't affect my customer count and sales. Most people trying to screw businesses over with coupons and discounts are not regular customers. You will not see them unless they can get something free or highly discounted.
Thank these Extreme Couponers for this shit. Fuck them.
TFA was down when I was trying to read.
I wonder what the relevence is in regards to intelligence.
Do not feed the copyright troll. This is interesting. I have a feeling that very soon, the court system is going to start getting sick of the abuses of the copyright system, which may spur some changes. Of course, this has been said many times before.
I was always taught that, in the case of a proper name in a case like this, it would be Priuses. If you had a brand name called Fungus, for instance, the plural would be Funguses and not Fungi, and similarly the Ford Focus would be Focuses and not Foci. I could be wrong, but I don't feel like getting out a textbook.
Hey! I might be a 28 year old basement dweller, but I get my allowance from the government...
To this third world waiter this 120.00 may have had the rough equivalent in buying power of a month or more worth of wages, whereas even the 599.00 in the United States is just a couple of weeks even at low wages. If you live on 50.00 per month, the 120.00 is a hell of a lot.
Anarchy Online is still going, Tabula Rasa is dead. I beg to differ that Anarchy Online is worse. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Of course, Anarchy Online looks quite a bit dated, but then again, there are a few things more important than graphics. Like beer. And hookers. And cocaine.
Honestly, I take very little stock in these bullshit personality tests at work. I typically have made up my mind to hire you or not in less than a minute after I started talking with you. Some of my best and most reliable employees are homeless scumbags that I let take showers in the chemical sink when we are closed, and some of my worst employees, and the ones that I fire the most, are 'normal' people who would have scored well on the test.
So how about going with fines instead of taxes. Traffic offences penalties, should be charged as a percentage of annual income so that all people, including visitors, pay a penalty that reflects equal suffering and that is specifically being used to manipulate behaviour. Some really nice big fines for the rich and greedy. A lot of the current penalties represent a fairly large percentage of the minimum wage and using those percentages as a basis, people earning more than $100,000 per year will end up paying fines in the tens of thousands of dollars. So double benefit, taxation income shortfall fulfilled and the wealthy finally are being motivated to adhere to the law upon the same 'in reality' basis as the poor.
Actually, if I am not mistaken, Germany or some other northern European countries actually have had a system like that. I was reading somewhere about some rich guy getting a $20,000.00 speeding ticket because he had a multimillion dollar income. Not sure what the country is, though.
All your breasts are belong to us.
Your comment brings up a valid point, though you made it in humor. Chances are that the legs that he is using are lighter weight than that of normal legs. This would make him significantly lighter than someone else of the same height and roughly equivalent body mass. Biomechanics aside, this would give an advantage.
Not to be a dick, but generally when you send something for warranty work you are 1) not guaranteed to get the exact same item back. When discussing the legal aspects of a situation like this, it is generally a type of bailment known as a mutuum. Essentially, you are not guaranteed the return of the exact system that you sent in, in the same way that if you borrow a cigarette from a friend and pay him back, he might reasonably expect that you replace his Marlboro Red with a Marlboro Red and not a Camel, but he knows not to expect the return of the exact same cigarette. Also, you can consider a neighbor borrowing sugar from you. The exact wording of the warranty contract will determine whether this is the case. 2) often advised in the wording to the warranty that any aftermarket enhancements will not be returned to you. In this case things like faceplates, stickers, and such. When sending in systems for warranty repair you are generally advised not to send any memory cards, cabling, or controllers, or you will not get them back. When dealing with warranty work with cellular phones, often you are asked to remove your battery, battery cover, and faceplate, because you will not get it back. Without having a copy of the warranty contract in front of me, I have no way of knowing, but chances are this guy doesn't have a leg to stand on.
Kind of like rednecks...
Disclaimer! Disclaimer! Disclaimer! I only know this information to be applicable to the United States of America. It is likely the same in the UK, but I can not guarantee it.
The particular type of display that this post is referring to is generally not used as an aid to give tickets. It is also not meant to be a reminder of how fast the drivers are going, strictly speaking. Typically, the main use is in determining what the average speed of the road, and is used to determine if there need to be any changes to the speed.
Now, an interesting thing happens at this point. People send in complaints in regards to a speed limit. Often it is the all too common situation of a straight 2 or 4 lane road with no intersections. It will have a 35mph speed limit, when it would be perfectly safe at 50 or 55. Any prudent driver would have no problems on this road at these speeds.
So they complain, and the county, or city, or state, or whomever, decides to send out the little automated speed detection unit. The purpose is to determine what the average speed is on the particular part of the road. You can read that as 'the speed that is actually driven at' if you want to.
Often, depending on the municipality, they will require that police do not park along the side of that road in avoid skewed results. End result: people think that the automated device is something that will catch them speeding, or they think that it is made to get them to slow down, so they slam on the brakes. Then the speed limit either stays the same or is actually lowered.
Just eat Taco Bell. The farts have more thrust than most rockets.