Category Corporate Idiocy

Entries 90 Total

Sprint DSL Still Sucks

Dec 8, ’05 12:36 PM

I finally got a resolution of my DSL speed problem today: it turns out that despite being sold to me as 5mbps inbound/3mpbs outbound, and despite that speed having been confirmed by four different Sprint people as I called to try to track down what was wrong, Sprint doesn’t actually offer 5mb/3mb service; it’s 5mbps inbound and 640 kbps outbound.

After long searching, I finally found a list of the speeds they offer on their website:

200512081236

Though I must admit that it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence to see them talk about ‘three speed options’ and then list four options.

5 mpbs inbound is nice, but the real problem I have is that 640 kpbs outbound is totally inadequate. Sprint doesn’t offer anything faster than this though, because… well, because they don’t. Presumably they want to protect their much, much more expensive frame-relay options like T-1 lines and the line.

It’s not just Sprint, though. I say they ‘suck’ in the headline there, but in fact my experience with them has been far, far better than any other technological customer service experience I’ve had lately. Through this whole process, only one person at Sprint started down the path of blaming my computer for the problem; everyone else actually listened to what I said, and didn’t insist that I follow the pointless script.

The problem is with the whole residential and small-business network-service market. We’re seen as consumers, not producers, of data. This is probably true of most residential and small-business network customers, but it’s grating that there aren’t even any practical options for people who need something different.

What is this costing us? What’s the cost to society and to the economy of having a market for Internet connectivity that has a giant hole in it between the low-speed, highly-asymmetrical toy products of DSL and ISDN and the very expensive (and usually symmetric) ‘enterprise-class’ service?

Doc Searls has recently had a few things to say about this (also see here).

He specifically points out the fact the off-site backup — which is to say easy, no-brainer backup — services are essentially a non-starter without high-speed upstream service. I’m also forced to keep a lot of data on my laptop — movies, music, etc. — that would really be best left in the basement here, because if I find myself in need of that data when I’m not in the house, it’s not really practical to push it all up the soda-straw pipe that Sprint is willing to sell me.

But that’s not all. These policies that say that we are all mere consumers of information, and not producers, means that it’s harder than it should be for individuals to offer their information to the world. If you want to offer movies, music, or even just text in large quantities, you have to contract with someone for web-hosting services — there’s a special hurdle you have to jump to put yourself in the ‘producer’ class, rather than the ‘consumer’ class.

I’m normally not one to jump on this particular bandwagon, since it seems to require a view of the world that holds that social mobility is next to impossible. In this case, though, that’s nearly correct.

Imagine a car dealer with four cars for sale:

  1. The first car isn’t even really a car: it’s a scooter that needs a ring job. It might have been useful once, but it certainly isn’t now. And while it’s better than walking, it’s not much better at all. This is roughly analogous to dialup access.

  2. The second car is a 1973 Honda Civic. It’s not very expensive, but it’s not very fast, either, and you can really only fit 2.5 people in it. Some people can make do with this car, but most people need something better. This is roughly analogous to ISDN and low-end DSL service.

  3. The third car is a 1983 Honda Civic. This can actually get up to freeway speeds, and it’s reasonably useful for a lot of people. This is similar to high-end DSL service, something like what I have today.

  4. The fourth car is a gold-plated, rocket-powered Ferrari station wagon with power seats and a wet bar. It is capable of traveling at 740 mph all day long, while carrying six people in perfect comfort. It also costs seventeen million dollars, and you are only allowed to buy it if you live in certain areas. Oh, yeah, and they won’t actually tell you what it costs up front, because they’re not actually willing to sell you the car unless they also sell you all your office chairs, janitor’s carts, and so on as well — anything with wheels. Don’t have janitor’s carts or a large number of office chairs? They’re not really interested in selling it to you, then, even if you’re willing to pay. This is analogous to actual the actual high-speed network offerings available to the ‘enterprise’ (i.e. large business) market.

If you can see that there appears to be a gap in the market between the 1983 Honda and the gold-plated Ferrari, pat yourself on the back: you are smarter than the people who run the telecommunications industry. Which is, admittedly, faint praise. I cannot be the only person out there who needs to move large chunks of data around quickly, but who cannot justify paying thousands of dollars a month (i.e. many multiples of what I’m currently paying) to do it.

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Anatomy of a Customer Service Failure

Oct 30, ’05 1:53 PM

I recently left my phone charger at the Hotel Los Gatos, in Los Gatos, California. I forget things in hotels all the time — probably because I wind up having to use every last electrical outlet in the room, most of which are behind furniture — so I’m used to the procedure: you call them up, describe what you’ve left behind, and then wait for a call back from the hotel.

I have never actually lost anything this way, probably because hotels have to be on the lookout anyway against staff pinching guests’ valuables. If you’re the kind of person who’s likely to steal cheap things left behind by guests, I’d assume you’re more trouble than you’re worth and you don’t last long in the hospitality business.

Anyway, so we called them and described the thing, and they called back saying they’d found it. We told them to ship it back to us ground service, no priority, etc. We have had the experience in the past, more than once, of something that costs $10 being sent back to us via the double-express, overnight, Federal-Express-waking-you-up, very expensive service, and we wanted to head this off.

The Hotel Los Gatos complied, I suppose, as best they could, and they sent it to us as a FedEx Express Saver letter.

Fedex Envelope

However.

Los Gatos is in California, and Tino Manor is in Virginia, 2362 miles away in a straight line. This means that from Los Gatos, Tino Manor is in ‘Zone 8′ for FedEx rate calculation purposes — ‘Zone 8′ being as expensive as things get in the United States: there is no ‘Zone 9′ (though there are a whole raft of surcharges for shipments to Alaska or Hawaii).

So a FedEx Express Saver envelope from Los Gatos to Front Royal costs $10.05. There is, strictly speaking, no Express Saver envelope rate: the FedEx envelope just gets charged the one-pound rate.

There’s then a fuel surcharge of 15.5%, or about $1.55.

Then, since Tino Manor is a residence, and since FedEx hates delivering to residences because it takes them longer, there’s an additional $2.00 charge for that.

Then, because while Tino Manor is not quite in the middle of nowhere, but still not in the city or the suburbs, there’s an additional $2.00 surcharge.

Then, if the hotel had FedEx pick up the package rather than dropping it in a box or handing it over to them on a regular stop, there’s an additional $4.00 charge. I have no way of knowing what they did here.

All together, shipping this $10 charger from California to Virginia via FedEx cost between $16 and $20. We won’t know for sure until FedEx gets around to charging the credit card.

The customer service failure here? There are two or three of them.

The most serious failure is FedEx’s. It’s difficult to determine in advance just what a FedEx shipment is going to cost. Three or four surcharges applied to this shipment; if all four of them were applied, the surcharges nearly doubled the price. I can understand the logic of applying ‘fuel surcharges’ rather than changing your base price every month, but when the surcharges start to get close to 100% of the base price, these aren’t surcharges so much as the ‘base’ price is a lowball price.

FedEx is in possession of a quite valuable brand, though, and they exploit it to stay in business while providing what is frankly crap service; I tend to avoid FedEx whenever I have a chance, because that $2 surcharge for boonies delivery — we are all of 50 miles from Dulles Airport — typically comes with a day or two of delay as well. And don’t get me started on ‘FedEx Ground’; I’m lucky if that stuff shows up at all.

The other customer service failure is on the head of the Hotel Los Gatos. I have no doubt that they do all of their shipping via FedEx; if you sign a blanket deal, you get a discount — though the cost is still hidden from the employee holding an envelope in his hand and trying to decide what it’s worth to ship it. When they ship a lost-and-found item to a customer, they tell FedEx to bill it to the customer’s credit card, though, and so no discounts apply. As a result, the best they appear to be able to do for this kind of shipping is absurdly expensive. If they’re paying anything like these rates themselves, it leads to the Hotel Los Gatos growing more expensive or possibly losing money, which would be a shame because it’s quite a nice place and is recommended by Tino.

The U.S. Postal Service will ship an 8-ounce package overnight, with tracking and delivery confirmation, between almost any two addresses in the United States for $13.65. If you are in less of a hurry and need it there in three days (à la FedEx Express Saver), it’s $3.85 via Priority Mail. If you are even more casual and sure of the weight, you can send it via First Class Mail for $1.85 (First Class Mail is essentially the same service as Priority Mail but with different marketing).

So the markup, essentially, on the FedEx shipment over the USPS shipment, is anywhere from 146% to about 2000%: that’s higher than the hotel’s markup on room-service booze, and in the case of the shipping charges, the hotel is not itself getting any of that money.

Why do they do this? Why on Earth doesn’t the hotel charge a flat rate of $15 to return small lost items and then ship them Priority Mail or Express Mail and thus make a profit? The Hotel Los Gatos is the kind of place where you have to tip someone to get a bucket of ice (see more on this here), so I know they’re well attuned to the many and varied opportunities for wringing small sums out of their guests.

My theory is that while FedEx is widely seen as one of the engines of America’s productivity revolution, and while they are regularly touted as an example of industrial efficiency, they are in fact a huge efficiency sink. FedEx and its competitors do business largely by encouraging companies to sign corporate-wide shipping contracts at negotiated rates. Individual departments — the people who actually ship things — then have little or no visibility into, or say about, how things are to be shipped. (I have even seen some companies where departments that shipped things had their budgets charged internally for the full retail cost of the shipping — in an attempt to turn the mail room into a profit center for the company. These companies have all since gone out of business, since that kind of voodoo accounting doesn’t produce actual revenue.)

As a result, the vast majority of the shipping companies’ poor service and high prices are not subject to the normal checks of the market, and people like FedEx and UPS can stay in business.

Comments (1)

Sell Your Gap Stock Now

Oct 4, ’05 11:39 PM

The Gap has been struggling for weeks now with a bad re-implementation of its website. The site was down all together for most of the month, and while now it’s ‘up’, that’s being charitable.

Imagine you are using an Apple Macintosh computer, and further that you are using Safari, the only web browser that’s shipped with the Mac. What do you think you’re likely to see then?

Maybe this foghorn will answer your question: Wah-Waaahhh.

Gap-1

And what if you try to visit the website of Banana Republic, the Gap’s ‘upscale’ store?

Wah-Waaahhh.

Banana

Both sites — they appear to be run from the same code — do a few pointless redirects, and then continue to reload the same script, forever. This movie shows what happens with the Gap, and this very similar movie shows bananarepublic.com in ‘action’.

The sites appear to work fine in Internet Explorer on Windows, and in Firefox on both Windows and the Mac. Still, though: you would think that after a long outage officially for the purpose of ‘updating our site with innovative new features’ to bring me ‘an extraordinary shopping experience’, they’d be able to, if not get it right, at least not get it so incredibly wrong.

Gap-Closed

I will say one thing: this is an ‘extraordinary’ shopping experience, in that most stores, whether online or in the real world, tend to do everything they can to attract as many customers as possible.

What makes this so annoying is that there’s no reason for it. There are a lot of things that don’t work on the Macintosh, even if you only consider web things. Google Maps didn’t work on Safari at first, and even today it’s much slower and crappier on Safari than on Internet Explorer for Windows. Ditto for Gmail.

These were because of genuine challenges, because of differences in the way certain things are implemented in Safari and in other web browsers.

In the case of the Gap, though, it’s entirely because of a stupid bug in their software. The Gap’s website attempts to detect what browser you are using, and to vary the content based on this.

There’s a bug in this code, though, and if you’re using Safari you wind up getting thrown into the endless loop.

But it’s possible to tell Safari to identify itself to web servers as Internet Explorer running on Windows:

Useragent-Menu

And if you do this, the site happily loads, and it appears to work just fine:

Gap-Msie

In other words, because the rocket scientists Gap hired to build this thing are doing something they don’t need to do and doing it badly, the site is inaccessible to anywhere to people who use the most popular web browser on the Macintosh.

It’s pointless to argue about the Mac’s market share; either it’s 1.8%, or 2.5%, or 4.5%, or 16%. In any case, the average Mac user is wealthier (not to mention better looking) than the average Windows user, and Macs are less likely to be in use behind corporate firewalls that block things like online-shopping websites. All those Windows PCs at the Bank of America are part of Windows’ ‘market share’, but the tellers can’t order their Wide Leg Ultra Low Rise Flare Pants from there.

And, remember: whatever they’re actually doing here is not something that needs doing; it’s sheer incompetence that’s behind this failure. I sure hope that the Gap isn’t paying these developers a lot — but experience tells me that they probably are.

Comments (4)

Back to Circuit City

Sep 3, ’05 6:52 PM

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a mildly unpleasant experience I had at Circuit City, when they asked for a phone number and would not take ‘no’ for an answer (eventually they settled for entering the store’s own phone number, because their computer system apparently won’t take an obviously bogus number).

I was back at Circuit City again today. I wouldn’t shop there at all, because it’s always like pulling teeth. All the alternatives involve driving forty miles and then pulling retail teeth. I needed a big UPS, and Circuit City were the only people nearby with even a semi-big UPS.

Anyway, today I was again asked for my phone number, and I again politely declined. The guy behind the counter again said that he ‘needed’ it.

Rather than going through the whole argument again — because it’s not that guy’s fault that his employer has its head up its corporate ass — I just gave my number as 382-5968. Har, har, har, har.

I think that this accurately expresses my feelings toward these companies that demand my personal information, in addition to my money, in exchange for their merchandise.

So here’s an exercise for anyone who assembles phone-number databases this way: how often do you get 382-5968? What does it say about your business if your customers are sending you this message? How long do you think those people will remain your customers, if they have other options?

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When Marketing Takes Over

Jul 19, ’05 5:20 PM

I saw this sticker inside a household freezer door this weekend:

Whirlpool Brand Promise

Note the wording:

The Whirlpool Brand is committed to designing quality products that consistently perform for you to make your life easier

Er, no. The Whirlpool brand is a wholly conceptual and imaginary thing, dreamt up and managed by the marketing department.

This makes as much sense as saying, ‘The Coca-Cola Dynamic Ribbon Device is refreshing as hell’, or ‘Reddy Kilowatt keeps your lights on!’ The D.R.D. and Mr. Kilowatt do nothing of the sort. They are merely marketing tools.

The Whirlpool Company — which is to say a group of people — are committed to designing etc., etc.

Unfortunately, their communications to the outside world seem to be run by the marketing department, which sees things exclusively through the lens of their own work.

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Adventures (not) In The Cinema

Jul 1, ’05 1:39 PM

Gizmodo observes:

In an era of portable instant gratification, the process of movie-going is expensive—logistically and monetarily—and the payoff is dinky. [...] Short of strip-searching us, there can’t be any way the movie houses could make the process any more grating.

I can’t remember the last time I actually went to a cinema. Every time I think about seeing something there — usually during rush hour, when I’d like to let the traffic die down a bit — the expense and the expectation of a crap experience put me off. That’s right, I choose I-66 over seeing a movie.

And Gizmodo’s rant doesn’t even deal with the fact that nobody seems to know how to behave in a movie theater any more, i.e. Shut The Hell Up. Last week, at the museum under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, I saw ‘Monument to the Dream‘ (the documentary about the Arch’s construction) once again. It was just as I remembered it from childhood, except back then there weren’t some boorish assholes sitting behind me and talking in normal voices through the whole thing.

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Adventures As A Retail Consumer

Jun 30, ’05 11:16 PM

So this morning, while drinking the tea and eating the croissants etc., I saw in the Wall Street Journal that the Slingbox is out, and that it’s apparently good.

If you’ve never heard of the thing, the Slingbox is a device that plugs in, on one end, to your TV signal, and on the other to the Internet. You can then watch TV — your TV, with your normal channels, your Tivo recordings, anything you normally have at home — from anywhere in the world where you have a decent network connection.

This morning’s review was written by Walt Mossberg, the Journal‘s technology guy. What makes this important is that Mossberg is one of the very few technology reviewers who can be relied upon to write bad reviews when the products deserve it.

Anyway, Mossberg said the thing was great, so I went out to buy one. The review specifically said:

Starting today, it will be available at CompUSA and Best Buy stores, and at those companies’ Web sites.

Well, that’s easy enough. When I was passing Best Buy, I stopped in and was soon asked by one of their computer-department guys whether I was finding everything I needed. I said no, actually, that I was having a hard time finding this Slingbox thing.

This produced an immediate reaction. “What is that?” he said. “You’re the fifth person who’s asked me about that thing today.”

I handed him the copy of the Journal that I was carrying. He skimmed the column, and then told me he’d never heard anything about the device.

Another win for Best Buy! The Mossberg column very favorably reviews a product and says that it’s available starting today at Best Buy, and the Best Buy people have never heard of it! You just can’t buy advertising like that. Lovely, but not surprising.

I checked the CompUSA website, which said that they had the thing in stock in all of their Northern Virginia stores. I stopped by there in the afternoon, looked at all of the likely shelves, and came up empty.

I found a CompUSA guy and asked him whether they had this thing, and I got the same flash of recognition that I’d seen earlier at Best Buy. “Slingbox!” the guy said. “I think we probably have those.”

He led us over to a mirrored door and went in. He returned a few seconds later with a man with spectacularly bad hair; he looked like he was ready to attend a 1970s-themed party later tonight. I mean, it was bad.

The guy with the amazing coif was apparently the manager, because he had the keys to the Room Full Of Expensive Stuff, the same room that my laptop came out of a couple years ago.

He and the CompUSA foot-soldier disappeared into the Room, and stayed there for quite a while, considering the small size of the space.

Compusa Door

They were in there so long that I had time to get out my phone, screw around with switching it to camera mode, and take a picture of the door.

After a while they came back out and said that they indeed had one.

It was then up to us to tell them that we were not just asking out of curiosity, but that we were interested in buying the thing. The manager went back into the Room and produced a Slingbox, which we then bought.

I will have video of the device in action tomorrow, but for now let me just say that it is Teh Awesome. The only problem is that the client software requires the use of some bizarre operating system (“Windows XP”), and that the installation procedure is as bad and annoying as most installations on that painful OS.

For now, I’d just like to record the idiocy of these two companies, Best Buy and CompUSA. They had free publicity in the Wall Street Journal for a product that is, for the moment, available only from those two retailers. One of them had never even heard of the product, and the other had carefully hidden the things in the stockroom, lest someone buy them.

Is there no one at CompUSA and Best Buy headquarters who reads the Wall Street Journal? Wouldn’t it seem obvious that when your company is specifically mentioned as one of two exclusive sellers of a product that’s well-reviewed by one of America’s most-respected technology writers, in the newspaper with the country’s biggest circulation, that you might just send and e-mail to all the store managers, telling them to prepare to actually, you know, sell the thing?

I suppose not. Which is why I don’t work in retail management: clearly I don’t understand what the business is about, naively believing that it’s about selling products.

Tomorrow: video of the Slingbox in action!

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Cell Phones On Planes

Jun 16, ’05 9:05 PM

In a Boston Globe story today about the griping of people who are against allowing people to use their cell phones in airplanes, one particular quote stands out:

Keith Owens, a pilot for Comair, which handles regional flights for Delta Air Lines out of Logan International Airport, worries that the noise from passengers chattering on phones could distract the crew. ”Safety of a flight would be a big issue. I’m 100 percent against it,” he said.

Mr. Owens is represented as a pilot, so we may assume that he has been in an airplane.

Yet he thinks that the incredible noise of people talking on cell phones will distract the crew. Apparently the mind-numbing wind and engine noise you already have inside an airplane isn’t a problem. I see.

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How Not To Do It: Customer Service In An Age Of Fraud

Jun 3, ’05 2:25 PM

Apple’s .Mac service says they want me back, but they have a funny way of showing it.

Mac-We-Want-You-Back

I like to consider that I’m a pretty savvy person, without being paranoid. I’ve been abused of a couple of times by sleazy online merchants, but I’ve never actually been ripped off, nor have I ever been the victim of ‘identity theft’. I have never used any anti-virus software on Windows, and yet I have never actually had a virus infection on any of my computers. If you pay just a little bit of attention, you can get through life mostly unscathed.

On Tuesday, though, I was very busy: I was up to my ears in work, and literally talking on two phones at once like a tycoon in an old movie: ‘Buy Steel!’ ‘Sell Radio!’ ‘Get Wilkins in here with the Schenectady numbers!’ etc.

While all this tycooning was going on, my cell phone rang with ‘Unknown’ showing on the caller ID. I’m now on three phones at once. The guy on the other end said that he was Steve, from Apple Computer, and he asked whether I’d like to renew my recently-expired trial .Mac account.

It’s hard to explain just what .Mac is; mainly, it’s a scheme by which Apple can get $99 a year out of you. For your money you get an e-mail account, space on a web server, private online storage space for your files, and a few other things. It’s actually a good deal if you make use of all of it: as it is, I need almost none of this. I already have my own e-mail and web server, and over a terabyte of on-line storage in the basement.

A few features, though, are difficult to duplicate. Macintoshes come with a program called iSync, which is superficially a utility to sync your phone or your PDA with the information on your computer.

iSync also can sync the information on multiple computers, which is what I’m interested in. I have a laptop and a desktop computer, and I use them pretty interchangeably. The challenge is keeping the web browser bookmarks, address books, an calendars on each machine in sync. With some programs, this wouldn’t be a problem: you could just send files around. Apple’s Safari web browser, Address Book, and iCal programs — which I use because they don’t annoy me, which is something like high praise — deliberately make this difficult, because Apple wants that $99 a year. It’s hard to do unless you pay $99 a year to use all of iSync’s features, in which case it becomes incredibly easy.

Apple’s products are of such a high quality, and please their users so much, that Apple can afford to occasionally throw a monkey wrench like this into the experience. After all, what am I going to do if I don’t like it? Use Windows or Linux on the desktop? In order to save $99 a year, I’m going to screw around with Windows? I hardly think so.

So I got a free 60-day trial of .Mac when I bought my most recent computer, and the time had come either to pay or to give it up. I hadn’t made a decision.

Until that guy called on the phone, that is. What the hell, I’d renew. But I asked: is there any advantage to renewing with the phone solicitor rather than online? I’d get three times the on-line storage (1 GB vs. 250 MB), he said. I don’t consider that much of a bonus — 25% off the price would be a bonus — but all right, fine, I’ll pay. I had tired of trying to roll my own .Mac.

I gave the guy my credit card number, the (mis)spelling of my name as it appears on the card, and my billing address.

He then told me that the charge would appear on my card as ‘Apple Computer’, that a confirmation e-mail would be sent to my .Mac e-mail address, and that tomorrow afternoon — that is, Wednesday — I should log in to the .Mac service via the mac.com web site, and that my password would be changed to ‘password’ to facilitate this.

After I’d got off all the phone calls, I thought about this for a while. It smelled fishy.

To begin with, why on earth would this process take more than 24 hours? And why should it involve resetting my password, particularly to something so predictable? I already had a password; all they’d have to do is set my account status to ‘active’ after charging my card. And why on earth would they send a confirmation e-mail to an address that I wouldn’t have access to unless the transaction succeeded? I can think of plausible answers for all of these questions that don’t involve attempted fraud, but I can also think of plausible answers that do involve fraud.

So I had just given my credit-card details to someone based solely on the fact that he knew three things:

  1. My phone number;
  2. My .Mac username (‘tinotopia’: hardly difficult to guess);
  3. That my trial .Mac subscription had recently expired.

Further, Apple’s own .Mac privacy policy says ‘Apple will not contact you or share your information unless you authorize it’. Now by this they probably mean that they won’t subject me to endless phone spam attempting to sell me other stuff, but the policy doesn’t say that. The policy says ‘Apple will not contact you’, and here was someone representing himself as being from Apple, contacting me.

I tried to find some way to contact Apple about this, but the only way to contact the .Mac people in any way appears to be a web form here. They say that their ‘service experts’ will ‘make every effort to reply’ within 48 hours. I filled out the form, asking whether they actually used phone solicitors to sell account renewals.

For good measure, I then called my bank and cancelled my credit card.

The next afternoon (Wednesday), my cell phone rang again with an ‘Unknown’ caller ID. I answered, and sure enough, it was ‘Steve’ with Apple again. He said that the credit card number I’d given him had been declined, and did I have another one they could use?

I mean, those were very nearly his exact words. I asked him whether there was a phone number at which I could call him back, and he gave me 1-800-385-5172, extension 535. This phone number does not turn up in Google (or at least it won’t until I post this).

I called this number and was met with a recording that said hello from Apple, and said that I should enter an extension number or stay on the line. I stayed on the line, and a few seconds later was talking to a woman who’d answered the phone with something akin to ‘.Mac customer support’.

I asked for extension 535, and in a couple seconds I was talking to Steve again. I then laid out the story for him. I apologized for essentially accusing him of being a scam artist, and said that the whole situation seemed suspect to me, and that I had cancelled the credit card.

I specifically mentioned the extreme fishiness of resetting my password to ‘password’; he defended this practice by saying ‘that’s what we do for everyone’. This is hardly reassuring, to say the least. If you forget your login password for Apple’s online discussion boards there’s better security.

Steve was pretty defensive in general. If he was a scam artist, he asked, how would he know my mother’s maiden name? He told me my mother’s maiden name for verification. I told him that had there been a data security breach at .Mac, all of this information could be readily available to him (and that the mother’s-maiden-name thing is hardly secure anyway). I told him that I could think of no simple way that he could convince me of his legitimacy, and that given the thing with resetting the password to ‘password’, that I wasn’t sure I wanted to have anything to do with .Mac even if he was legitimate. I then wished him a nice day and we parted ways.

On Thursday at 2:51 p.m., I got an e-mail in response from my online .Mac support query. My exact query to them was:

Does .Mac ever employ phone solicitors to entice members with lapsed trial memberships to renew?

I was called this afternoon by someone with my .Mac member name, phone number, and the information that my trial membership had recently expired, and I am beginning to think I was scammed. I was busy and not paying much attention, and the guy obtained from me my credit card number and expiration date as well as my billing address.

He said that ‘tomorrow afternoon’ (i.e. June 1) I should head to mac.com and log in, and that my password would be reset to ‘password’. He also said that I would get a confirmation e-mail to my .Mac account.

It was only later that this began to seem extremely fishy to me. Not only is resetting a password to ‘password’ a serious security risk, but sending confirmation of a purchase to an e-mail address that I won’t have access to unless the purchase is successful doesn’t make any sense, either. And: why on earth should this process take 24 hours?

So: if Apple is employing such inept practices, you really should stop this immediately. If this guy is likely to have been legitimate, though, I’d like to know since I’d rather not go through the hassle of cancelling my credit card for nothing.

I have to present their response to me as a graphic, instead of text. Click on the picture for a bigger version.

Mac-Billing-Support

The headers on this message show that it originated with a computer calling itself snowy.corp.apple.com with an IP address of 17.254.13.36. All IP addresses beginning with 17. are in Apple’s address space, so this probably comes from within an Apple network. (This address actually resolves back to A17-34-112-122.apple.com, not snowy.corp; but that’s not unusual.) Interestingly, the e-mail headers seem to indicate that that computer is running AIX, which is to say IBM Unix. Apple doesn’t eat its own dog food.

So anyway, while the message is probably legitimate, it hardly inspires confidence, what with its strange line breaks and odd high-ASCII garbage (this is how the message displays in Apple’s own Mail.app program, so claims of character set incompatibilities and so forth will hold no water). In fact, if I didn’t know how to read e-mail headers, this message would have absolutely convinced me that I was being set up.

So this phone-sales guy Steve was probably on the level, and I’ve gone through the hassle of canceling that credit card for nothing. But I think that this experience occasions the establishment of an annex to the Customer Service Rules, specifically for these kinds of situations. If you are in a position of ever calling customers and asking them for information:

  1. Ideally, don’t do this at all. If you need information from a customer, you’re better off asking them to type the information into a web page. This will save you the data-entry costs, and it can reduce certain kinds of errors (you wouldn’t believe how many people think I’m Tina). Further, sending the customer to a web page requires them to contact you, leaving them reasonably certain of the identity of the entity to which they were giving their information.
  2. If you must contact customers and ask them to give you sensitive information over the phone, think ahead of time about how you are going to prove your identity to them. Caller ID can be spoofed, but representing yourself as ‘Unknown’ isn’t customer-friendly anyway. Having a phone number that customers can call you back at is good (you’d be amazed how many companies get this wrong), but ultimately, this proves nothing other than that you have a phone number. The best approach is to route all calls like this through your main, central phone number, the one that you feature prominently on your customer-service web page. You do have a phone number on your customer-service web page, don’t you? If you don’t want your customers calling you, why do you presume to call them?
  3. Using stored ‘secret’ information about the customer to identify yourself to him is pointless. My mother’s maiden name serves (badly) to identify me to you, not the other way around.
  4. If anything you do is in the least way susceptible to exploitation by scam artists and fraudsters, set up a prominent way for customers to report suspected fraud being committed using your name. Then, respond to these reports quickly and with actual information. Had Apple been able to actually answer my question within 24 hours, they would have made a sale.
  5. Ensure that your communications with your customers — particularly your e-mail communications — are of high standard of quality. I get hundreds of e-mails a day from scam artists, and most of them have strange line breaks, misspellings, broken English, garbage characters, or all of the above. You wouldn’t use the Big Chief tablet and a pencil to scrawl paper letters to your customers: take the same care with your e-mail.

And finally, less of a customer-service rule than a general guideline for everyone: never, ever, ever set a password to ‘password’. I mean, really now. Not only do you make yourself look silly by even suggesting such a thing, but you set yourself up for sabotage and, if you’re doing it for your customer (as opposed to for your own account), liability.

Let’s assume for a moment that Steve is a totally legitimate Apple sales guy. Let’s also assume that Steve, or someone like him, develops some sort of animosity toward Apple. After he reset a password to ‘password’, all he’d have to do is communicate the account name to a friend of his, who could go in and replace all the existing data with goatse pictures.

There’s been a lot of online-commerce punditry to the effect that the Internet levels the playing field: Joe’s Cheese Emporium can, if Joe is adept with HTML and a database, ‘look just like’ the web premises of a far larger company. This is a good thing.

But Jimmy The Grifter’s Online Scam Hut can also ‘look just like’ — a lot more like, in fact — a much larger and more trusted company. In the past, Jimmy The Grifter would have had to rent space, furnish it, and spend a whole lot of money on other things in order to rip people off by fooling them into thinking they were dealing with someone else. Today, it’s trivial to pull the same scam online or over the phone.

Companies in the industrial age worked to establish and defend their brand names and trademarks against impostors. Today it’s important to establish and defend your entire corporate identity, and to make sure that every single thing you do can be at least reasonably authoritatively tied back to that identity by your customers. Either you spend the money to do this now, or you spend the money later, after some public-relations disaster, trying to convince people that they can deal with your company in confidence.

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The Woes Of The Newspaper Industry

May 2, ’05 10:34 AM

According to Goldman Sachs as reported in this article in Editor & Publisher, the first quarter of 2005 was the newspaper industry’s ‘weakest quarter in years’.

Now, it must be kept in mind that this was their ‘weakest quarter’ because their revenue only increased by 2.6%, or faster than the official rate of inflation. And it must be kept in mind that in the first quarter of 2005, there were no Christmas sales being advertised by the department stores, and no major elections (or, for that matter, much compelling news of any kind) that would have encouraged people who don’t regularly read the newspaper pick it up. I suspect that the third and fourth quarters of 2004 were some of the newspaper industry’s best quarters in years.

Still, though, the general trend seems to be a downward one, even if it’s still in the range of ‘slowing growth’.

Now, what do you do if you’re selling something and you would like to sell more of it? Or, rather, what don’t you do?

A lot of things, potentially. But one strategy that I’m sure does not lead to increased revenues is making your product harder to purchase. Nevertheless, this is exactly what the newspaper people are doing.

I do not subscribe to any newspapers on actual paper. Not only does this tend to lead to a horrible mess in the house, but ‘home delivery’ here means that the newspaper gets left a little over a mile from the house.

I usually get my news online, but when I eat breakfast or lunch out, I like to buy a newspaper. Using a computer in a public place generally makes me feel like a complete tool, and besides, the hard-copy newspaper is a much, much better method of presenting information than a computer screen. I wind up finding a lot of stories in an actual newspaper that I would have missed online.

Alas, this really isn’t possible any more. In Front Royal, nearly all of the newspaper machines have now been removed. On the south end of town, there used to be a large cluster of newspaper machines outside the Food Lion, and another centrally located outside the post office. The machines at the post office disappeared a few months ago, and the ones at the Food Lion last week.

Not all that long ago, there were newspaper machines all over the place: on the curb at the grocery store, chained to street signs in the middle of suburban subdivisions, at bus stops, at the post office and near almost any other ‘official’ building, and outside just about all restaurants. No more: the newspaper vending machine is almost entirely extinct outside large urban downtown areas.

There are still a very few machines here and there in Front Royal, but to the best of my knowledge there’s only one machine left in town that sells the Washington Post, and, being the only Post machine in town, it’s generally sold out by 8:30 a.m.

Paper-Box-At-Mcdonalds

This box at McDonald’s sells the Winchester Star. I have no idea how that got picked instead of one of Front Royal’s own two newspapers (only one, admittedly, is a daily), or the Washington Post or the Washington Times or anything else. The McDonald’s used to sell USA Today over the counter, but I have not seen them there for months. I’m not sure whether they have discontinued the practice all together, or whether they just consistently sell out by 8:00 a.m. and have never bothered to increase their order.

Today, if you want to buy a newspaper in Front Royal, you need to go inside somewhere. The best selections are at Martin’s (a grocery store) and a 7-Eleven on the north end of town. Both of them have the Washington Post and Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Post, and Daily News, the Baltimore Sun, USA Today, Baseball Weekly, Sporting News, the local papers from Front Royal, Winchester, etc., and things like the Horsey Set Weekly or whatever the hell those papers are. Everything’s up to date in Front Royal.

If you go to the 7-Eleven, though, you will generally find yourself in line behind half a dozen people buying lottery tickets. Selling lottery tickets is one of the least efficient things the store does; I suspect that the process is deliberately slow in order to impress the rubes and to make the whole thing seem like less of a scam. It’s also phenomenally profitable, so there’s no real push to streamline the operation.

In short, it can easily take five minutes — not counting the time it takes to park your car, walk into the place, walk back to your car, and get out of the parking lot — to buy a newspaper at 7-Eleven.

And Martin’s is even worse, though for entirely different reasons. Like most modern grocery stores, there are two entrances. At Martin’s, these are at the north and the south ends of the store.

The newspapers are all located near the north entrance, oddly placed next to the Rug Doctor machines and the 15%-commission loose-change-sorting machine, beyond the cash registers.

The most efficient way to buy a newspaper at Martin’s is to enter through the north door, grab a paper, walk around the end of the row of tills, walk about 150 feet to the self-service checkouts (which are located next to the south entrance), scan your paper, insert your money at the (loud) prompting of the machine, and collect your receipt. At this point you can walk the 150 feet back to the north entrance and make your way to where you left your car in the parking lot.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t so bad: you have to walk 300 feet! To get news from all over the world for thrity-five cents! The horror!

But it’s incredibly complicated, and it fails utterly to take into account the way that people actually buy and consume newspapers. Few Americans visit the grocery store every day, and fewer still make a detour around the front of the cash registers to see what might be on offer there before they proceed into the store proper. The busy time of day for the grocery store is about 6:30 p.m., by which time the news in the paper is at least 18 hours old: can anybody guess why these newspapers don’t sell in large numbers?

Part of the problem — perhaps all of it — is that the newspaper companies do not actually sell newspapers to people directly.

You may have seen trucks roaming around that say ‘Hometown Star-Herald’ on the side, and the few newspaper boxes that survive outside of downtown areas all carry the same graphics, but these trucks and machines are, with very few exceptions, not owned by the newspaper. They’re owned by independent distributors.

Even if you call the newspaper’s circulation office to order up a subscription, you are not actually buying the newspaper from the publisher directly: they sell the paper to a guy with a van and a supply of long plastic baggies. He then throws the paper on your lawn every morning and sends you a bill. In most places, you will note that you pay your newspaper bill to ‘Hiram J. Bundy’ and not to ‘Hometown Star-Herald Co.’

The thing is, the guy who owns and fills the newspaper machines also sells newspapers to Martin’s and 7-Eleven, who sell them mainly in order to get people into their stores. The stores don’t want the newspaper machines around, and the newspaper distributor is only to glad to be rid of the machines and the headaches of theft, vandalism, and zoning that come with them.

So you wind up with newspapers being sold in ways that make no sense, and the newspaper companies appear to be either unaware of or uninterested in the problem. If I start to see the newspaper people take real steps to make their product simpler to purchase, I’ll suspect that they might be turning themselves around. Not before.

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