I eventually got my shoes, though it did require three trips to the UPS depot for them to actually find the package.
Yesterday, I ordered another gewgaw from Amazon with next-day shipping.
Amazon shipped it on time from Louisville, KY, about 550 miles from here. It appears that it won’t be delivered until tomorrow:
Note that ‘ADVERSE WEATHER CONDITIONS CAUSED THIS DELAY’; presumably this is the delay from 1:00 a.m. until 5:57 a.m, because 73 minutes to get from Louisville to Dulles isn’t long at all. It would seem — though of course the UPS website doesn’t tell me this — that the package arrived at the depot in Front Royal too late to make it onto the truck this morning.
This would actually not be a problem at all if UPS had any way of dealing with this at all gracefully. I’m going to be driving past UPS in about 30 minutes, and it would take me no time at all to pick the package up there. They could have a satisfied customer without having to even go to the effort of delivering the package.
And even with not being able to pick the thing up, the whole experience would be less grating if it didn’t seem that the average shipment is delayed for, in the all-caps language of their website, ‘REASONS BEYOND UPS’ CONTROL’. When they’re all late, it might be worth considering that the problem is that they don’t actually have the resources or capability to deliver the service that they sell.
Hey — I should start a courier service that promises delivery from New York to Los Angeles in a microsecond. Every package would de delayed for ‘REASONS BEYOND TINO’S CONTROL’, as, hey, I don’t choose to not be able to travel at greater than the speed of light.
UPDATE: So I went down to UPS, and the package wasn’t there. They said that when things came in too late for the trucks, that they’d send the packages out, meet the drivers somewhere, etc., etc., and that the package was now on the truck for delivery.
There is, of course, no mention of this in the tracking information. As we drove up the hill to the house just now, we saw the UPSmobile zipping around the neighborhood. Maybe they’ll show up with it yet — or maybe they’ll refuse to deliver it, as the driveway is still covered with snow and UPS won’t consistently leave things at the bottom of the driveway like FedEx and DHL will.
On Sunday night, I ordered some shoes from Zappos. I spent enough that I got free overnight shipping, which would ordinarily have meant that they would get here on Tuesday.
On Tuesday afternoon, we had a snowstorm, and UPS didn’t deliver it:
– though even at 1:49 p.m., when they gave up on it, the roads weren’t very bad.
Today, they didn’t even attempt a delivery:
I can’t say I entirely blame them. The road to the house is fine, but the driveway is so bad that I can’t even get up it with four wheel drive.
This isn’t a big problem, though, really, because the UPS depot is about four miles from here, and I drive past it when I go anywhere. I checked the UPS website and found that I could pick up Air packages until 7:00 p.m.:
And I went down there.
You know the punchline, of course? Right. You can’t pick up Air packages until 7:00: they ‘pick up’ Air packages from there at 7 p.m. From a customer’s perspective, they really mean ‘drop off’, as in ‘you can drop off Air packages until 7 p.m.’
The hours are defined from their perspective, which I suppose I shouldn’t find all that surprising given the rest of the way they relate to their customers.
But the real punchline is that Nicole bought a pair of shoes from a private seller on eBay within minutes of me placing my Zappos order. That package arrived today, from Los Angeles, via Priority Mail. Little Guy: 1, Big Company With UPS Contract: 0
I don’t like to use the word ‘empowerment’, because it’s a buzzword. It’s a handy one, though, because the normal English phrase ‘allowing subordinates to make their own decisions and to solve problems themselves’ is cumbersome.
I watch a show called The Tube, an ITV show about the workings of the London Underground. I think that the thing must be underwritten somehow by the London transport workers’ union, because most of the show seems to be about how unbelievably hard everyone works, and how earnest they are. Or maybe they just do this to maintain access. In any case, the recurring theme is that the Underground people do their best, but that they would be able to do their jobs a whole lot better if it weren’t for all these passengers, who are a total nuisance and who just get in the way of the smooth operation of the system. It would be so much easier to keep the stations safe and clean, and to run the trains on time, if it weren’t for all these pesky people who insist on using them.
As such, the whole thing is a wonderful illustration of a libertarian’s feelings about public transport. The LU people are wonderful people, I’m sure: but they have no effective competition, and they’re working in a highly bureaucratic, highly unionized field. All of these factors tend to produce an environment where individual decision-making is strongly discouraged.
With no competition, there’s no special reason to deliver services more efficiently than anyone else. The whole purpose of bureaucracy is to establish Procedures, and to centralize decision-making power. And unions tend to favor limiting their members’ authority to make decisions; if there’s a clearly-defined Procedure, and if the employee is trained in and follows that Procedure, then the employer can’t find his actions at fault.
Add to this the general bureaucratization of modern British society and the general emphases on safety, security, and Not Giving Offence that now take precedence over everything else, and you have something like a perfect storm of customer disservice.
Consider this short clip from the show (MPEG4):
At the King’s Cross station, they’re doing construction and so don’t have room inside the station for the normal number of passengers. LU’s solution for this is to close gates at the entrance to keep the platforms from getting overcrowded. Eminently sensible.
However, after watching the video, consider:
1. The LU employee’s contempt for passengers when talking to the camera: “…they think the platforms are empty. Now, how do they know that? Because I can’t see from here, so how can they see? I think it’s the fact that they’re all in a rush, they all want to get to work.”
Not only does he seem to consider wanting to get to work on time some particularly inconvenient eccentricity, but he considers that the passengers’ frustration at being made to wait on the sidewalk as being due to their belief that the station is empty. There’s no particular evidence to back this up.
2. When a passenger complains, the immediate and sole reaction of the employee is to tell him to put his complaint in writing and to send it to LU at an address he can find on a poster in the station.
Now, ask yourself: is this going to help? No: it’s just going to piss off the customer even more. When a union employee of a monopoly tells you to send a written complaint to the head office, he means: I have adhered to the official procedure and therefore cannot be held at fault; send a letter and maybe get a response in eight weeks, and fuck you very much, sir.
It’s probably not even our intrepid employee’s fault: he’s probably forbidden to do anything other than close and open the gates, and to tell anyone with a complaint to write a letter to HQ. If he had any discretion in his actions, he might do the wrong thing, and neither the union nor London Underground want that.
In the process of relieving them of the burden of — and the ability to — make decisions based on the circumstances of the moment, LU dehumanizes its employees. Is it any wonder that the passengers then tend not to treat them with proper human respect?
Humans must mind the gap or be DELETED!!!
What if the employee had said, “I’m sorry for the delay, but with the construction in the station we don’t have enough room in there, and so have to hold people at the entrance until the previous crowd thins out”, and then told the guy to write a letter if he argued about it?
What if they increased the fare for people getting on at King’s Cross £1 while the construction was underway? If you absolutely had to get on there, you’d pay the surcharge; everyone else would walk down to Euston.
But LU doesn’t do these things: why should they? Are they going to lose customers to a competing system of subterranean trains? Are all these people going to buy cars, find somewhere to park them in central London, and then deal with the traffic? No. They’re totally powerless to do anything, so they assault the employees. And the response to this is measures that make the passengers feel even more powerless. Give ‘em any lip, and they immediately start reaching for the Button that will bring in the Hired Goons. (At LU, they first suggest that you write a letter: so that’s a progressive policy, then.)
Children throw tantrums because they have no control over their lives. Adults don’t throw tantrums often because, to a large degree, they do control their own lives. What’s more, they’re used to controlling their own lives. Deny them any of that control (as on an airplane) and they throw tantrums, just like children. More force, more authority, more procedures, and more hair-trigger hired-goonery can only make things worse.
Seth Godin writes about Under New Management signs.
Why would anyone put a sign like this up on her store?
If I liked your store before, now I’m on notice to be careful–it might not be as good.
If I didn’t like your store before, why on earth am I paying attention to your little sign and why should I go out of my way to take another chance?
But I think he misses the point completely. When I see an Under New Management sign, I assume that the previous management was so foul that it drove away all the customers, and wound up going broke.
The New Management bought the lease and the stock at a discount, and put up the sign hoping to get rid of some of the ill will generated by the previous management. Certainly most of the establishments I see these signs on are placed that I have learned to avoid. If they’re selling something I want, I might be prompted to give them another try if I know that the idiots who used to run the place are no longer there.
In a situation where competent management has been replaced, it might make less sense, except when you think about transparency. If the old management generated a lot of goodwill, customers might think that they were being hoodwinked when they came in and found different people running the place. Hanging an Under New Management sign on the door of a successful business can be seen as an attempt to be honest and open with your customers, and to avoid being seen as someone who’s trying to merely buy a reputation.
The New Yorker has updated its DVD archive version, which I complained about here. For $20, you can get a replacement DVD 1 (of the 8 DVD set), which includes an improved version of the application and issues of the magazine up through April 2006.
The new application is better; it is noticeably faster. I suspect that what they have changed is not in fact the application but the database, but I haven’t looked into it. If they have just changed the database, this would go some way toward excusing them for not distributing the update (minus new issues) to everyone who paid for the old, defective version. The database is over 500MB, and it’s not really practical to distribute it online.
The new issues — which, in any case, it is entirely fair to require people to pay for — look great, and everything’s wonderful. I cannot comment on the DVD-swapping speed, as I gave up on that idiocy some time ago and just copied everything onto a hard disk. They now sell a version of the archive already loaded onto a portable hard drive, and that’s probably the way to go. I’d want to know what their response would be when that disk inevitably fails, though, before I bought one. Do you get another copy of the data when the hardware dies?
So it’s an improvement, but there are still problems — and they still seem to stem from what you might call a lack of perspective.
The most annoying problem, for me, is that the application still takes over your whole screen. On the Macintosh, the application opens a giant window that can’t be resized or moved, and that covers everything except for the menu bar and the Dock. You can close the window, or you can minimize it: that’s it.
Now, I cannot figure out why they decided to do this. The only thing I can think of is that they didn’t think they could trust the users to make the window large on their own, so they’d make it large for them.
The thing is, I don’t have this problem, and their attempt to ‘solve’ it — I am being charitable in not just accusing them of being jerks — actually makes things worse for me.
I have a 30″ monitor, with a resolution of 2560×1600 pixels: I can easily fit a New Yorker spread on the screen at full size with room to spare. But The New Yorker greedily takes up that room, and renders the pages larger than actual size, making some of the images — they’re scanned at a lower resolution than the text — look bad.
Here’s the magazine on the screen, with a recent (paper) issue of The New Yorker for comparison:
When I use The Complete New Yorker, half of my screen, or about $1000 worth, is a useless, featureless gray, for no discernible reason. It’s as if when you opened a paper magazine, it blotted out the rest of your living room until you were done reading it. This is The New Yorker damn it, you’re going to pay attention! Look at that cartoon of the dog talking to the bartender! Now really think about it! Focus, damn you!
I ascribe this to arrogance, but it’s probably just a failure on the part of the developers to think that some people have very large displays. (And it’s even worse if you have multiple displays, because you can’t reposition the window to take advantage of the space you have.)
The other screen-size problem I complained about last October is still there, too: while the viewer is too large, the search tool is too small, and there’s no way to make it any larger. The search tool is sized to fit on a 1024×768 screen, and if you have a larger screen than that, it’s still sized to fit on a 1024×768 screen. This significantly reduces its utility, because you can’t see as much at once.
Here’s a snapshot of my whole screen, with the search tool outlined in red:
That’s it. That’s the only possible size or position for the search tool. If you’re looking at a long list of articles, this means scrolling, even if there’s room to make the window twice as large. If you’re looking through a bunch of articles, and you want to have the search results and the articles visible, tough luck. You can’t do it on a computer with a 1024×768 display, so The New Yorker has seen to it that you can’t do it on any display.
The other day, I complained about finding some places near here selling the Washington Post for fifty cents, instead of thirty-five cents. I’m sure that if I checked — if I could have figured out who was responsible, and asked them — they would have said something about gasoline prices.
Gas around here is back down to $2 a gallon now. I haven’t bothered to check whether the price of the Post has also dropped, because the machine I usually buy my paper from never raised its price.
Maybe it should, though. I don’t try to buy a paper every day, but on the days when I do try to buy one, more than half the time lately I have been finding the machine entirely sold out before 9 a.m.:
It’s been like this three days in a row now; the next time I’m passing, I will probably not bother to try to buy a paper. Burger King maintains house copies of both the Post and the appalling Northern Virginia Daily, and the demographics of Front Royal are such that I am usually the first person to pluck the Post from their rack. I save $0.35 (or $0.50), and the back seat of the Tinomobile doesn’t fill up with old newspapers.
But it’s not really the customer service failure that I’m interested in; it’s the corporate idiocy angle. If you do a search for Washington Post circulation on Google, you will not find words like ‘booming’ or ‘growing’ or even ‘holding steady’.
The media navel-gazers have a lot of explanations for this, but I have never seen them even mention the one thing that is within newspapers’ control. They can’t abolish the web, and they can’t get rid of TV, or reader apathy. But it is fully within their power to make it easier to buy the newspaper.
There’s precisely one place that I’m aware of on my end of Front Royal where I can buy the Post without having to wait in line or traipse all over a grocery store, or both. Is this machine outside a restaurant that serves breakfast? No. Is it outside a place that is open at all in the morning? No. Is it reliably stocked? No. In short, it’s placed and stocked for the convenience of the newspaper route guy, not would-be readers.
The newspapers are so focused on their external enemies, and their low opinion of their readers (a lot of big newspapers now produce a free daily tabloid full of celebrity ‘news’ and short, easy-to-read articles because they think that the public is too dull to understand the regular news), that they cannot see the most obvious and easily-correctable problems.
In July, I wrote about the local grocery store’s practice of promising fresh bread at 5 p.m., and then failing to deliver. I accompanied that complaint with this picture of the bread basket, complete with sign, already filling up with trash at 5:33 p.m.:
Today I happened to be looking for bread at exactly 5:00 p.m.
They’d removed the basket entirely. I don’t think this is a permanent departure; rather I think that they have amended their policy to a far more pragmatic one, which might be expressed as ‘If we have fresh bread at 5 p.m., we’ll have fresh bread at 5 p.m. Otherwise, all bets are off.’ Lovely.
But that’s not all the unpredictability afoot!
We don’t subscribe to any newspapers here at Tino Manor; instead, I buy them on those days when I’m out and about in the morning. There is even a newspaper machine nearby, so I can drop in my thirty-five cents and buy the Washington Post without having to stand in line and get a receipt and a bag by buying at at the grocery store.
Except that it’s not thirty-five cents any more. Now, apparently, the Post is fifty cents:
The tiny print under the price on the front page of the Post says
Prices may vary outside Metropolitan Washington. (See box on A4)
The relevant part of the box on A4 says:
Of course, this all depends on how you define ‘Washington Metropolitan Area’. Tino Manor is out in the boonies, to be sure: but it’s well within the Washington-Baltimore-Northern Virginia, DC-MD-VA-WV Combined Statistical Area as defined by the census people. We watch Washington TV stations here. Half the town drives into Washington every day to go to work.
Moreover, the paper isn’t fifty cents everywhere; at the grocery store, you can’t get bread but you can get the Post for only thirty-five cents. I’m not sure whether this is because some places haven’t got the memo yet, or because these people have decided that the cost in terms of customer goodwill and trust is greater than the extra fifteen cents to be had by charging more than the price that’s clearly printed on the thing.
Anyway, so some places and some machines are now charging fifty cents for the Washington Post. What annoys me about this isn’t the extra fifteen cents. Even at fifty cents, the paper is a great bargain, and if it’s a little more expensive there’s some possibility that the lone paper machine on my side of town won’t be sold out before 9:00 a.m. every day.
What annoys me is that it’s more unpredictability. The paper is thirty-five cents, unless you’re outside of an area that’s not clearly, consistently, or constantly defined. This is particularly annoying with something this casually purchased. I’m already incurring enough extra cost in trying to find a place where I can buy the Post without standing in line behind lottery fiends, and where it doesn’t sell out before dawn. I don’t also need to keep track of a private definition of ‘Washington Metropolitan Area’.
The Scene: a futon shop, Delmar Boulevard, University City, Missouri. Tino and Nicole walk in, looking for a king-size platform made out of splintery softwood. They already have a king-size mattress, they hate box springs, and they haven’t liked any of the normal platform beds they’ve looked at over the past couple of days.
As soon as they enter — walking past the operating Lawrence-Welk-style bubble machine that’s outside the door, they are greeted by the Futonnier, a young blond guy who’s playing Freecell behind the counter, and looking like he’s already Gone To Carolina In His Mind, if you know what I mean.
Futonnier: Heyhowareya.
Tino and Nicole greet him and them spin around a couple of times, taking in the room. In the middle of it is precisely what they’re looking for, but in a Full size. Furniture places almost never put King beds on display, because they take up too much room.
Nicole: We’re looking for a king-size platform or futon frame. It doesn’t have to fold up, and we’re pretty open on design.
(This is true: almost anything would be okay.)
The Futonnier makes a look that suggests that he has just thrown up a little in his mouth. He then recovers, and says that they don’t have one on hand, but that one could be ordered.
Nicole: How long would it take to get one?
The Futonnier‘s mouth opens, and he appears to pick a date almost at random.
Futonnier: Couple weeks.
Tino and Nicole thank him and leave.
* * *
Here’s the thing about retail, the kind of retail where you have a door on the sidewalk and a bubble machine outside: the only thing you offer is convenience. I can buy a platform bed from Amazon for about $250 including shipping, and get it in about a week. The only reason I’m dealing with you, in a store, and dodging bubbles on my way in is that I want the thing sooner.
If I deal with you, not only do I pay more (probably — the futonnier didn’t bother to look up anything or give us any prices), and pay sales tax (7.325%), but if I can’t walk out with the goods today, I’m dealing with the whole transaction through an agent.
In my experience, this almost always works out to be a nightmare: my agent — the retailer — doesn’t have the product, so he can’t deliver it up to me. If the wholesaler or manufacturer has some delay, the retailer doesn’t really care about it: it’s not the retailer who’s sleeping on the floor. And even if everything goes perfectly, I either have to go pick the thing up at the store or wait for a delivery-receiving-loading-delivery cycle to transfer the thing from the manufacturer’s shipper to the retailer’s delivery truck, which will add a day to the process.
For this I should pay more?
I’m not generally a fan of buying anything by mail order, simply because I don’t trust the people in that business to have their act together. When I buy something at retail, I pay the money and have the product: the transaction either fails, or it succeeds. When dealing with a remote seller, usually the rows are locked (so to speak) for far too long. This isn’t good for a database, and it isn’t good for Tino.
And when I do trust the sellers to live up to their very simple promises — I trust Amazon, for instance — I don’t have faith in the shippers. Or, rather, I have something like absolute faith that UPS and FedEx will take as long as they possibly can (usually) without actually failing to meet their contractual obligations to bring something to me. I have faith that most sellers will attempt to turn shipping into their biggest profit center by calculating ‘handling’ charges as a percentage of the shipping charge, meaning that the customer is punished for choosing anything but the cheapest shipping. I have faith that most sellers will lie about their inventory, and about their deadlines for same-day shipping.
In short, there’s too much uncertainty in buying anything that needs to be shipped. If I need it sometime in the future, it’s fine; but if i need something anytime soon, I cannot count on mail order.
But I certainly can’t count on what amounts to mail order by proxy, which is why I’m amazed when retailers tell me that they can order something for me. That business is totally, utterly, 100% dead: I can order it myself with less trouble than dealing with retail flunkies.
And so this merits a new customer service rule:
You can only sell what you have in stock, or available to you in some special way.
Unless you’re in the business of selling a product that’s only distributed through very tight channels, acting as a mail-order agent for customers isn’t actually useful. Twenty years ago, you might have been able to act as a helpful agent in this way: now, you’re just an unnecessary obstacle between the customer and the goods.
If it’s not practical for you to keep inventory on hand, you need to figure out some way to actually add value in your role as agent. You know the market, you know the suppliers: if you can’t manage to get supplied faster than Joe Blow can through Amazon, and if you can’t offer something to offset the fact that you’re handicapped by having to charge sales tax, you are obsolete.
You don’t have to make explicit promises of one thing or another, but if you choose to do so, you absolutely must live up to them.
Martin’s is the best grocery store in Front Royal — it’s better than Food Lion, which admittedly isn’t saying a whole lot. Martin’s has an extensive bakery, and they turn out reasonably good baguettes.
Further, Martin’s does something that I’ve never seen anywhere else (though that might just be for lack of looking): they promise baguettes ‘Fresh @5′ — which means that at 5 p.m., which is around when most people do their grocery shopping they aim to actually have fresh bread in stock. Nobody forces them to do this.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Martin’s bread bin at 5:33 p.m.:
Filling up with abandoned products, perhaps left there by people who decided to do something else altogether for dinner when they discovered that there was no fresh bread to be had.
Maybe I’m taking things too literally: between 5:00 and 5:01 p.m., there might be a lot of bread. Somehow I doubt it, though. And if it’s all sold out in 30 minutes, they’re not baking enough of it.
But it’s worse, because they go out of their way to promise me fresh bread at 5 p.m.; so when they don’t have it they haven’t just let me down, they’ve broken their promise.
But wait! There’s more!
At the very same store, on the very same trip, there was no soap in the restroom. I don’t just mean that they were out of soap: I mean the soap doowhackey has been torn off the wall.
Okay, I understand: such things happen. What makes this a customer service failure rather than just an inconvenience is this ‘restroom inspection sheet’ on the back of the door:
Problems with this sheet:
It’s for the ‘week ending 7-11-06′; but this picture was taken on July 15.
The sheet makes reference to the restroom being inspected every 3 hours; but there’s only one time (7:00 or 7:20) noted for each day.
There is, to the best of my knowledge, no requirement that Martin’s post their restroom inspection schedule on the door. I expect that they do so not only for convenience (you only need the inspection sheet when you’re in there), but to communicate to their customers that Martin’s Cares.
But because they post it, and because they haven’t kept up with it, what they’re really communicating is that Martin’s doesn’t care about living up to the standards that it has set itself.
So the Customer Service Rule, fully articulated, would be:
Keep your promises.
Opening your doors for commerce at all is a promise of sorts, but if you make specific commitments to your customers — any specific commitments, no matter how small — make damned sure that you deliver on what you have promised.
If you can’t be counted on to deliver, not only will you not get the benefit of your promises, but you’ll lose the customers’ trust in general. If you can’t deliver, don’t make the promise in the first place. And when you do make specific promises, make certain that someone has the specific task of continually making sure that you’re delivering on all of them.
So today we decided to try Victoria’s Restaurant for lunch. This is a buffet place that opened earlier this year, and from the outside it’s hard to get an idea of what to expect.
The biggest problem — make that the second-biggest problem, actually — I noticed was that the place is lit with fourteen big sodium-vapor lamps, the kind of thing you might find at Costco or in a school gym. At lunchtime, the large south-facing windows let in enough light to keep things from being too grim, but I’d expect that at night the place has all the ambience of a warehouse.
There are plenty of good tables, though: in the planning, someone was involved who knew that people don’t like to sit in the middle of a sea of tables. A number of waist-height walls breaks the space up into smaller areas, making for a lot of corner tables.
The salad was good, though the croutons were a bit… not soggy exactly, but soft. They had one bowl of iceberg lettuce, and one of real lettuce, along with all the things you’d expect to find at your ordinary mainstream buffet restaurant.
The macaroni and cheese was conspicuously good, though a little heavy on the sauce. The mashed potatoes were good, but would have been better made with actual butter instead of spread. The green beans were great.
I’m afraid that I can’t give any opinions on the desserts, though. I was looking forward to dessert, as one of the things on offer was chocolate cake, an I am a connoisseur of chocolate cake.
I didn’t have any dessert because while eating I found this in the peas:
Yep, that’s a bug. Or actually half a bug, which is in some ways even worse. This is the ‘biggest problem’ I hinted at above. Click on the picture to see it even larger.
Bugs wind up in agricultural products all the time, and I’m sure that had I actually eaten the thing nothing bad would have happened to me. The discovery of something like this tends to kill the appetite, though, and we left. Our money was… not cheerfully refunded, but there was no trouble made about it. We were told that the peas come in frozen, and that the bug must have been in the package because they’re just dumped into a pan and heated up. Interestingly, this contradicts what they said in this article:
With pride, Rodinos notes that nothing in the restaurant is shipped in; everything is made fresh daily.
“That is the difference between us and chains,” he says. “They have big boxes of dishes shipped in and frozen and thawed. We make everything right here every day. It is all made from scratch.”
…but then it would be hard to serve up gallons of fresh peas on a $6 all-you-can-eat buffet.
Had I been in charge of the place, I’d have refunded the money and given us a gift certificate to come back again on the house: the next time we’re casting about for somewhere to eat, Victoria’s could have been the place where we could eat free. Instead, it’s just going to be the place where we found the bug in the food.
