It's more common than you'd think. One of my favourite examples was World of Warcraft. My brother wanted me to try it, but they wouldn't let me play on-line until I left the house and found a store somewhere with the box.
So your brother had already given away his free-trial certificate that came with his box?
This is incredibly unethical, but then so is paying workers not on the service the customer enjoys but in how much they make for the company. However paying sales clerks solely by the hour results in sullen, unhelpful staff.
Not necessarily. If you have a good product and good management, you can get people fired up about selling it ethically. The Disney Store (when I worked there, anyway... and that was more than a decade ago) never had any commission. I think you got a $50 gift certificate or something, though, if you got a Tigger Pin... which you got if someone wrote in to the company about your excellent service.
The stores were Mystery-shopped twice a month, and stores that got perfect scores (which was a 101... Dalmatians, anyone?) got little plaques for their walls. I worked at one store that had 16 straight 101s.
But they didn't just tell us "Go give great service!" They had it broken down, and *drilled* us on how to do it. We couldn't say no... if someone asked "Do you have any Bugs Bunny beach towels?" we answered "We only stock Disney characters here; you'll find Bugs down the street at the Warner Brother's Store... but we do have these gorgeous oversized Goofy beach towels that just came in!" And, since the merchandise *was* high-quality, it was easy to say that. A lot of people who came in looking for some random non-Disney character ended up buying something, just because we answered their question in a positive manner, but also showed them things they might be interested in.
Oh, and, we had a way to signal other Cast Members if someone made it clear they did NOT want to be approached, too. The goal really wasn't to annoy people into insanity.;-)
>>>so I asked her if she could manually punch the card number in. She looked at me as if I were accosting her to do such a thing!
I wouldn't blame Sears as a whole. You just got a stupid employee, or a new employee who didn't know about the manual entry option.
Then blame Sears for inadequately training their cashiers. Every retail job I ever had, cashiering was an advanced-practice sort of thing; you worked your way UP to it, and went through a lot of training. You don't want the newbie handling the money... or handling the customer badly at the point they're getting ready to hand over their money.
Anyway lots of cards don't swipe, and it's pretty routine to type in the number directly. In fact prior to ~1992 we had to type ALL the numbers by hand, since handheld wands/scanners didn't exist yet.
Uhhh... when I got my first job in 1990, the card scanners weren't new. It was a PITA to take an Amex because we still had to use the ka-thunk slider carbon copy machine, which seemed terribly primitive to us.
Back in college I worked at some computer retail chain stores, Computer City and CompUSA, as a repair tech. I saw the same thing happening in some of those stores. It wasn't something that upper managment or regional managers or higher said to do. It was something that some low level managers did to improve their sales numbers.
Who structured the low-level manager's compensation? Why did they want to improve their sales numbers?
I think this has been a common feeling ever since cavemen were bartering for "stuff" with each other.
"Can you believe I got Urg to trade me an entire brontosaurus skin for the tusks of a woolly mammoth? What a dingbat!"
It's human nature, it's competitiveness. We can debate the morality of it certainly, but that attitude has always been with us and always will be with us.
But there's a difference between your scenario and "If Urg comes by and says he wants the tusks of that woolly mammoth, but only offers a sabertooth pelt, tell him that Og already gave me a brontosaurus skin for it."
There's trying to get a good deal by gaming what people value... and then there's just flat-out lying. Under current law, the latter is called "fraud."
At one time it didn't. Through common usage however it has come to also serve the purpose of an intensifier, similar to "really," "endlessly," or "to the nth degree."
I don't think it'd bother me so much if he'd said they were really endlessly screwing associates to the nth degree. But due to his unfortunate choice, I am literally picturing CSRs with thumbscrews on.
The problem with the Wal-Mart model is that they also sell the crappiest product. It's not like you can go in and buy the same TV at Wal-Mart that you could at Best Buy. Wal-Mart will only have the equivalent of the Insignia (BB store brand), Olevia, and Sceptre brands, not the Sharp Aquos, Panasonic, etc. So if you want a slightly better model you have to deal with the warranty-pushing jokers at other stores.
Or buy it at Costco. It's a lot cheaper there than at Best Buy, too (we have the two stores separated only by a Toys R Us a few blocks from our house... great for comparison shopping).
Unless all the online stores have even lower margins, then I think that Best Buy, etc., haven't done enough to lower their prices.
Have you seen the bill for air-conditioning a decent DHTML page? Well, no, because it's a ridiculous idea... and now you know why online is cheaper.
Retail space is INCREDIBLY expensive. If you've worked in a retail store, you know the dramatic difference between the sales floor (carpet or tile on the floor, painted walls, finished ceilings, artful lighting and accents) and the stockroom (bare concrete, metal shelves, pipes, fluorescents). That's because it costs a LOT to create and maintain the look of the retail environment.
Costco and Aldi have addressed this by dispensing with all the pretties on the sales floor, and that does lower their costs considerably. An online store, though, is ALL stockroom, and doesn't even have to deal with the security concerns of having strangers walking in and out all day. You can also arrange things such that equipment is required to retrieve a large portion of the stock, because all your employees are trained to use it... you don't have bumbling lawsuits waiting to happen (I mean, customers) trying to fill their own carts.
An online store can also be located wherever the total cost of labor and land is cheapest, whereas a B&M needs to consider whether anyone is willing to *go* there.
But this all really should be obvious to the casual observer, and it was discussed to death around 1999 (when Amazon.com was going to kill B&M completely by three years ago). So next guess: parent post is a subtle troll. Well played.
Every time we talk about computer retail the "custom boxes" argument comes up. Either people pay extra for them or build them, but in both cases laptops (easily the largest growing sector of computer sales) are ignored. You can't build custom laptops and almost no small companies make them. I don't travel as much as I used to when I was a field engineer, but I still travel often enough to prefer a laptop as my primary machine. Road Warriors who drive (and fly) more miles in a week than I currently do in a year need them even more than I do. I could probably switch back to a desktop if I chose, but for a lot of people they aren't even really options. That as much as anything is what is causing the death of custom built computers.
Yep yep. That's why I didn't have a laptop for YEARS, until I literally* inherited one from my cousin. I just couldn't fathom paying for someone else to build me a computer. I even looked into what it would take to build my own, but it's simply not practical.
* I'm using the word "literally" literally, here. She died, and I was entitled to 1/3 of her estate. I got the laptop, another cousin got the $900 Bernina professional sewing machine.
So I take it you don't worship at the/. shrine of "Free Market Economics". We should seek out the higher prices, every time.
Well, no. But we should look at what we get for our money, every time... and buy the most *economical* product, not necessarily the lowest ticket price.
When I buy stuff at Costco instead of at Target, I'm also paying for relatively well-paying retail jobs with decent benefits in my neighborhood. Raises property values, reduces crime, and increases the standard of living for the kids my son goes to school with, which means that they'll be less disruptive in class (kids with less home stress are better able to comply with school rules etc.)
No one would buy the 12 oz. size instead of the 24 oz. just because it was 25% cheaper... but we aren't always so good at really looking at what we're paying for.
It's a lot like how people bitch and moan about Wal-Mart strangling out small mom and pop shops that had that friendly atmosphere and great service. They're dead because they weren't willing to pay for that service; they'd rather save a few bucks by going to that Wal-Mart. So be it, it's their right as consumers--but let's not be naive about the choices being made.
Are there really a lot of people who do both, though? I certainly bitch plenty about how WalMart is destroying the world, but I also refuse to buy from them, ever. Haven't set foot in one yet.
Granted, our family is upper-middle-class to affluent depending on how you calibrate... but I also know families who are barely scraping by, but accept that their food bill will be higher because they refuse to shop at WalMart on principle.
In the place I work for, we tell users ALWAYS put your files on your network shares. We don't back up your data before we reimage it because you went to a website that is not work relevant or got a virus for plugging in your brothers thumb drive with virus embedded in U3. It's proven to work well here, and if they do tell me that they need something backed up, I pop in my Knoppix thumbdrive, back it up, and then reimage it.
Yeah, well. It's nice that your users do what you tell them. Last time I was in a place that had such a sensible policy, we told all our users the same thing. Most of them did it, too. But a couple lost a month's work when they didn't, and then their laptops got infested with a virus that destroyed all the data on their C: drive.
Now, if we'd had a policy of regularly re-imaging drives with the latest OS hardening, and *we* wiped their data through deliberate action, rather than the data getting wiped by something they did accidentally (getting a virus)... wow. How fast can you clean out your desk?
I once used Windows XP in that mode. Where everything and its dog was locked down by the ACLs. It was pretty nice to know that a virus could really only frag my (backuped) user account.
I know you meant "backed-up," but now I'm picturing a creature that walks with its back.
"...the nation will spend $30 billion on Health IT..."
Couldn't people just make medical reports with vi and latex? That would be cheaper I think.
Do you have any idea how much it would cost to teach all the doctors to type, though?;-)
Even the "free text" EHR solutions I've seen have a prompt system that saves folks from doing most of the typing. Which is good, because our Chief Medical Officer still prefers plotting out his schedule on blank paper with a ruler and pencil.
The privacy laws aren't anywhere close to where they need to be before this step is taken. Your data is going to be stolen/lost and resold.
That *is* illegal... extremely so. What laws do you propose that would somehow make it impossible?
It is only a matter of time until it ends up in the hands of off-shore brokers who are beyond the reach of US "regulators".
The only way in which electronic health records are less secure than paper records is that they are easier to duplicate and carry. Paper records are more difficult to secure, because by necessity you have to give complete access to low-rung clerical staff, who pull, file, and run charts from one place to another. There is no effective way to log their activities, either; if something turns up where it shouldn't be, you have no way of knowing who did it.
One question: Where would you like to be if you were a 60+ year old that needed a kidney transplant?
At the top of the transplant list. But at 60 years old, I'm going to get deferred for younger, healthier people better able to tolerate surgery and with more years of life left. I may luck out, though, and a kidney may come along that matches me better than those younger, healthier people above me.
If I'm in the US, I may be able to bribe my way up the list or to buy a kidney from Asia, *if* I have the money. Of course, if I have that kind of money, it doesn't matter where I am, I can go where there's a kidney for me.
Slashdot Mirror
A few months ago, my nanny asked for extra hours and to borrow $3000, so they could meet their monthly expenses (three kids, mortgage, etc.)
Why? Because her husband quit his new job after one day.
Why was that? Because a customer wanted to bribe him to falsify results (he's a smog check technician) and his management told him to do it.
I lent them the money, and gave her the hours. I also told her how much I respected her husband's decision.
They found a way. A lot of people do.
I have to agree, Dell warranties are worth the cost. That's about the only company I recommend buying an electronics warranty for, though.
I read your links. Seriously? "100% of Circuit City's profits are from warranties"
I seriously doubt that claim. It sounds a little like irresponsible journalism.
I wouldn't even say that 100% of the extended warranty is profit for Circuit City.
Ok, while I also have trouble believing that they make no profit at all on the smaller items in the store...
Please, PLEASE tell me you understand the difference between the statements:
"100% of Circuit City's profit is from extended warranties"
and
"100% of extended warranties are profit for Circuit City."
How much did you sell it for, though? And how did that compare to the present value of your $1400?
A former employer of mine discovered our office supplies company had been charging us a hidden 2% "insurance" on all our purchases...
Were you ordering your office supplies from Office Depot?
It's more common than you'd think. One of my favourite examples was World of Warcraft. My brother wanted me to try it, but they wouldn't let me play on-line until I left the house and found a store somewhere with the box.
So your brother had already given away his free-trial certificate that came with his box?
This is incredibly unethical, but then so is paying workers not on the service the customer enjoys but in how much they make for the company.
However paying sales clerks solely by the hour results in sullen, unhelpful staff.
Not necessarily. If you have a good product and good management, you can get people fired up about selling it ethically. The Disney Store (when I worked there, anyway... and that was more than a decade ago) never had any commission. I think you got a $50 gift certificate or something, though, if you got a Tigger Pin... which you got if someone wrote in to the company about your excellent service.
The stores were Mystery-shopped twice a month, and stores that got perfect scores (which was a 101... Dalmatians, anyone?) got little plaques for their walls. I worked at one store that had 16 straight 101s.
But they didn't just tell us "Go give great service!" They had it broken down, and *drilled* us on how to do it. We couldn't say no... if someone asked "Do you have any Bugs Bunny beach towels?" we answered "We only stock Disney characters here; you'll find Bugs down the street at the Warner Brother's Store... but we do have these gorgeous oversized Goofy beach towels that just came in!" And, since the merchandise *was* high-quality, it was easy to say that. A lot of people who came in looking for some random non-Disney character ended up buying something, just because we answered their question in a positive manner, but also showed them things they might be interested in.
Oh, and, we had a way to signal other Cast Members if someone made it clear they did NOT want to be approached, too. The goal really wasn't to annoy people into insanity. ;-)
>>>so I asked her if she could manually punch the card number in. She looked at me as if I were accosting her to do such a thing!
I wouldn't blame Sears as a whole. You just got a stupid employee, or a new employee who didn't know about the manual entry option.
Then blame Sears for inadequately training their cashiers. Every retail job I ever had, cashiering was an advanced-practice sort of thing; you worked your way UP to it, and went through a lot of training. You don't want the newbie handling the money... or handling the customer badly at the point they're getting ready to hand over their money.
Anyway lots of cards don't swipe, and it's pretty routine to type in the number directly. In fact prior to ~1992 we had to type ALL the numbers by hand, since handheld wands/scanners didn't exist yet.
Uhhh... when I got my first job in 1990, the card scanners weren't new. It was a PITA to take an Amex because we still had to use the ka-thunk slider carbon copy machine, which seemed terribly primitive to us.
Back in college I worked at some computer retail chain stores, Computer City and CompUSA, as a repair tech. I saw the same thing happening in some of those stores. It wasn't something that upper managment or regional managers or higher said to do. It was something that some low level managers did to improve their sales numbers.
Who structured the low-level manager's compensation? Why did they want to improve their sales numbers?
I think this has been a common feeling ever since cavemen were bartering for "stuff" with each other.
"Can you believe I got Urg to trade me an entire brontosaurus skin for the tusks of a woolly mammoth? What a dingbat!"
It's human nature, it's competitiveness. We can debate the morality of it certainly, but that attitude has always been with us and always will be with us.
But there's a difference between your scenario and "If Urg comes by and says he wants the tusks of that woolly mammoth, but only offers a sabertooth pelt, tell him that Og already gave me a brontosaurus skin for it."
There's trying to get a good deal by gaming what people value... and then there's just flat-out lying. Under current law, the latter is called "fraud."
Americas success of capitalization is dependent on smart consumers. Brainwashed consumers are not good for capitalization and could cause it to fail.
In which case, we'd be doomed to forever after live in america. *shudder*
(Ok, sorry sorry, good post, I totally agree... but I couldn't resist.)
Then how did Best Buy survive? Nobody has worse customer service. I always got screwed more at Best Buy than Circuit City.
I think the operative phrase is "not dead yet."
At one time it didn't. Through common usage however it has come to also serve the purpose of an intensifier, similar to "really," "endlessly," or "to the nth degree."
I don't think it'd bother me so much if he'd said they were really endlessly screwing associates to the nth degree. But due to his unfortunate choice, I am literally picturing CSRs with thumbscrews on.
The problem with the Wal-Mart model is that they also sell the crappiest product. It's not like you can go in and buy the same TV at Wal-Mart that you could at Best Buy. Wal-Mart will only have the equivalent of the Insignia (BB store brand), Olevia, and Sceptre brands, not the Sharp Aquos, Panasonic, etc. So if you want a slightly better model you have to deal with the warranty-pushing jokers at other stores.
Or buy it at Costco. It's a lot cheaper there than at Best Buy, too (we have the two stores separated only by a Toys R Us a few blocks from our house... great for comparison shopping).
Unless all the online stores have even lower margins, then I think that Best Buy, etc., haven't done enough to lower their prices.
Have you seen the bill for air-conditioning a decent DHTML page? Well, no, because it's a ridiculous idea... and now you know why online is cheaper.
Retail space is INCREDIBLY expensive. If you've worked in a retail store, you know the dramatic difference between the sales floor (carpet or tile on the floor, painted walls, finished ceilings, artful lighting and accents) and the stockroom (bare concrete, metal shelves, pipes, fluorescents). That's because it costs a LOT to create and maintain the look of the retail environment.
Costco and Aldi have addressed this by dispensing with all the pretties on the sales floor, and that does lower their costs considerably. An online store, though, is ALL stockroom, and doesn't even have to deal with the security concerns of having strangers walking in and out all day. You can also arrange things such that equipment is required to retrieve a large portion of the stock, because all your employees are trained to use it... you don't have bumbling lawsuits waiting to happen (I mean, customers) trying to fill their own carts.
An online store can also be located wherever the total cost of labor and land is cheapest, whereas a B&M needs to consider whether anyone is willing to *go* there.
But this all really should be obvious to the casual observer, and it was discussed to death around 1999 (when Amazon.com was going to kill B&M completely by three years ago). So next guess: parent post is a subtle troll. Well played.
Every time we talk about computer retail the "custom boxes" argument comes up. Either people pay extra for them or build them, but in both cases laptops (easily the largest growing sector of computer sales) are ignored. You can't build custom laptops and almost no small companies make them. I don't travel as much as I used to when I was a field engineer, but I still travel often enough to prefer a laptop as my primary machine. Road Warriors who drive (and fly) more miles in a week than I currently do in a year need them even more than I do. I could probably switch back to a desktop if I chose, but for a lot of people they aren't even really options. That as much as anything is what is causing the death of custom built computers.
Yep yep. That's why I didn't have a laptop for YEARS, until I literally* inherited one from my cousin. I just couldn't fathom paying for someone else to build me a computer. I even looked into what it would take to build my own, but it's simply not practical.
* I'm using the word "literally" literally, here. She died, and I was entitled to 1/3 of her estate. I got the laptop, another cousin got the $900 Bernina professional sewing machine.
So I take it you don't worship at the /. shrine of "Free Market Economics". We should seek out the higher prices, every time.
Well, no. But we should look at what we get for our money, every time... and buy the most *economical* product, not necessarily the lowest ticket price.
When I buy stuff at Costco instead of at Target, I'm also paying for relatively well-paying retail jobs with decent benefits in my neighborhood. Raises property values, reduces crime, and increases the standard of living for the kids my son goes to school with, which means that they'll be less disruptive in class (kids with less home stress are better able to comply with school rules etc.)
No one would buy the 12 oz. size instead of the 24 oz. just because it was 25% cheaper... but we aren't always so good at really looking at what we're paying for.
one man's shoddy crap is another's affordable dinner
Where "affordable" isn't, after you take into account the effects on the global economy.
People wouldn't need WalMart's low low prices so much if they didn't have WalMart's low low pay rates.
It's a lot like how people bitch and moan about Wal-Mart strangling out small mom and pop shops that had that friendly atmosphere and great service. They're dead because they weren't willing to pay for that service; they'd rather save a few bucks by going to that Wal-Mart. So be it, it's their right as consumers--but let's not be naive about the choices being made.
Are there really a lot of people who do both, though? I certainly bitch plenty about how WalMart is destroying the world, but I also refuse to buy from them, ever. Haven't set foot in one yet.
Granted, our family is upper-middle-class to affluent depending on how you calibrate... but I also know families who are barely scraping by, but accept that their food bill will be higher because they refuse to shop at WalMart on principle.
In the place I work for, we tell users ALWAYS put your files on your network shares. We don't back up your data before we reimage it because you went to a website that is not work relevant or got a virus for plugging in your brothers thumb drive with virus embedded in U3. It's proven to work well here, and if they do tell me that they need something backed up, I pop in my Knoppix thumbdrive, back it up, and then reimage it.
Yeah, well. It's nice that your users do what you tell them. Last time I was in a place that had such a sensible policy, we told all our users the same thing. Most of them did it, too. But a couple lost a month's work when they didn't, and then their laptops got infested with a virus that destroyed all the data on their C: drive.
Now, if we'd had a policy of regularly re-imaging drives with the latest OS hardening, and *we* wiped their data through deliberate action, rather than the data getting wiped by something they did accidentally (getting a virus)... wow. How fast can you clean out your desk?
I once used Windows XP in that mode. Where everything and its dog was locked down by the ACLs. It was pretty nice to know that a virus could really only frag my (backuped) user account.
I know you meant "backed-up," but now I'm picturing a creature that walks with its back.
Fascinating. Great link. I need to send that demo page to a few people in my organization. ;-)
"...the nation will spend $30 billion on Health IT..."
Couldn't people just make medical reports with vi and latex? That would be cheaper I think.
Do you have any idea how much it would cost to teach all the doctors to type, though? ;-)
Even the "free text" EHR solutions I've seen have a prompt system that saves folks from doing most of the typing. Which is good, because our Chief Medical Officer still prefers plotting out his schedule on blank paper with a ruler and pencil.
The privacy laws aren't anywhere close to where they need to be before this step is taken. Your data is going to be stolen/lost and resold.
That *is* illegal... extremely so. What laws do you propose that would somehow make it impossible?
It is only a matter of time until it ends up in the hands of off-shore brokers who are beyond the reach of US "regulators".
The only way in which electronic health records are less secure than paper records is that they are easier to duplicate and carry. Paper records are more difficult to secure, because by necessity you have to give complete access to low-rung clerical staff, who pull, file, and run charts from one place to another. There is no effective way to log their activities, either; if something turns up where it shouldn't be, you have no way of knowing who did it.
One question: Where would you like to be if you were a 60+ year old that needed a kidney transplant?
At the top of the transplant list. But at 60 years old, I'm going to get deferred for younger, healthier people better able to tolerate surgery and with more years of life left. I may luck out, though, and a kidney may come along that matches me better than those younger, healthier people above me.
If I'm in the US, I may be able to bribe my way up the list or to buy a kidney from Asia, *if* I have the money. Of course, if I have that kind of money, it doesn't matter where I am, I can go where there's a kidney for me.