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.

The Washington Post has, in its editorial and news writing, what you might call a generally ‘anti-sprawl’ position. The paper reflects the values of its culture, and its culture is that of downtown Washington, where it’s based.

So when it comes to urban planning, the Post favors the It’s-The-Greedy-Developers school of thought on what causes sprawl. The argument goes something like this: Housing developers, many of which are organized as limited-liability corporations, want to make as much money as possible. Therefore, it’s in their interest to build each house using as much land and as many materials as possible.

This is insane, of course: the general idea is to build things as cheaply as possible, and then sell them for what the market will bear. Specifically, you want to build condos or townhouses, because those actually produce the greatest return on investment.

The Post doesn’t see it that way, though, and they seem to willfully ignore, most of the time, the simple fact that county zoning boards more or less require developers to build sprawl. The counties like residential sprawl because it allows them to spend a hell of a lot of money per pupil on schools, which in turn makes their statistics look good. It’s a lot easier to spend a lot of money per pupil when you don’t have all that many pupils, and when those you do have all live in million-dollar houses which are generating quite a bit of property tax per family. So the counties essentially ban the construction of anything but million-dollar houses (or ‘active adult communities’, which they love because they produce tax revenue but don’t generate any kids for the schools) and then complain that the huge demand for housing for all the teachers they’ve hired isn’t being met because of… wait for it… greedy developers.

Anyway, so you would think that a developer buying up shoddily-built houses that straddle two lots each, in a neighborhood without sidewalks, and replacing each one with two houses would be something that would meet with the approval of the Washington Post, or that would at least merit a straight story without any moralizing.

But, of course, you would be wrong. The Post, like almost all of American society, utterly lacks any vision when it comes to the human habitat, and so it prefers stasis above all. That the status quo here embodies precisely that which the Post doesn’t like in other places is unimportant.

For $700,000 cash, a corporation named Hall Hollin LLC is offering to purchase Mark and Nancy Welch’s brick Cape Cod, built after World War II in one of Fairfax County’s oldest neighborhoods. No contingencies, no inspection, immediate closing. As is, because the house would be knocked right down.

In its place would rise not just one four-bedroom manse with granite countertops, ceramic tile, hardwood floors and a two-car garage, but two — towering 3 1/2 stories on the 13,000-square-foot lot and selling for $1.4 million apiece.

Four bedrooms! Ceramic tile! Wood floors! A two-car garage! What sybarites these mansion-dwellers must be! When they move in to the neighborhood, surely everyone will crowd around to see whether they’re made of gold, or rubies, or some kind of platinum-iridium alloy: because certainly people made of flesh could have no possible use for such luxuries.

The houses will tower 35 feet above grade! Such height! Perhaps God will confound the language of the builders, so the houses won’t get built.

Here’s a picture of Tino Manor (Mid)West:

Counting the porch and the terrace in the front yard, it ‘towers’ over 35 feet above the sidewalk. It ‘looms’, even, no? No? Huh. How about that.

The term ‘McMansion’ has officially been devalued. The Post applies it twice in this article, outside of quotes, to four-bedroom houses with two-car garages on 1/3-acre lots.

If we examine the article a little more, some clues emerge:

A red Hummer rumbles behind Mount Vernon Parkway, a showy hulk charging through humble rows of Cape Cods and ramblers.

Debbie Goram slides out of the driver’s seat, a real estate agent clutching a potential windfall for an unsuspecting homeowner. She crosses the modest front yard at 8036 Washington Rd. and shoves six pages under the front door.

[...] A dozen houses on double lots have sold so far, and developers are eyeing about 40 more — a bonanza for builders meeting buyers’ demands to live close in.

[...] They’re fighting the two-for-one plans every way they can: with protests, community meetings and glares at the neighbors who’ve sold. Like many residents watching old suburban values clash with new real estate values, they feel helpless.

To the Post, this is all about ‘values’, and it goes without saying that the ‘values’ of the people who live in the neighborhood and who don’t want to sell are inherently superior to the values of the people who have sold, the values of the developers, and the values of the people who will buy the new houses. The people living in the old houses are modest and humble; the real-estate agent working for the developers drives — no, charges around in — a Hummer, and a showy hulk of one at that. The Post doesn’t see fit to mention the cars that the residents drive, presumably because it’s irrelevant to the story. That didn’t keep them from using the agent’s car as the lead, though.

It’s interesting that the Post didn’t seem to illustrate this story — which appears on page B1, the front of the Metro section — with a single photograph of any of the houses in question. I found a picture of one under construction here, in a story about the redevelopment in a local newspaper:

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you your McMansion: a two car garage and four windows and a door across in front. Not a particularly big house these days: but, to paraphrase Jimmy Carter, it’s big in his heart. It’s uppity, in short. It puts on airs.

And the Washington Post doesn’t like that.

It’s time for another Customer Service Rule:

Keep your promises.

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:

1. It’s for the ‘week ending 7-11-06′; but this picture was taken on July 15.
2. 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.

There are a lot of stories this morning about AOL’s plan to offer most of its services for free. I have seen no mention in any of them of the connection to recent publicity about Vincent Ferrari. He recorded his phone call wherein he attempted to cancel his AOL subscription, which recording was subsequently distributed far and wide on the internets. It was distributed so far and wide that the guy wound up on a number of TV and radio shows, telling his story.

The result is that no one who pays the slightest bit of attention will ever sign up for AOL again. No amount of corporate apologies will help; AOL’s product was marginal to begin with, and now that the news is out about just how unbelievably bad AOL’s customer service is, very, very few people are going to trust them with their credit card numbers any more.

I have formerly been a defender of AOL, trying to point out that the doom-mongering articles that you could read in places like the Washington Post ignored, entirely, that this was a business that made billions of dollars a year while running on fumes, and that there was still a lot of potential there.

The Post — which is mainly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, a very large chunk of which is in turn owned by Bill Gates — was relentless in its attacks on AOL. They have even gone so far as to say that the 2000 AOL-Time Warner merger was a scam perpetrated by Steve Case to exchange AOL shares for shares in something ‘really’ valuable, like a company whose business is based on magazines with declining circulations, movies with declining ticket sales, TV with bad ratings, and music that’s being pirated by everyone and his dog.

The Post willfully ignored the fact that, in 2000, AOL was a company with a robust business operating an online walled garden and with considerable expertise in delivering custom-made client software to people (all those CDs), and Time Warner was a company with an enormous warehouse full of ‘content’ in almost every medium imaginable, but with no way to efficiently distribute it.

This should have been a match made in heaven. Assuming that, even in the best case, Time Warner would have held tight to its most valuable properties, an AOL subscription should have meant, by 2001, at least some level of access to most of Time Warner’s less readily salable properties. The company has thousands of bad or just obscure movies, TV shows, magazine articles, etc., etc. which to this day are not producing any revenue for them. Had they started digitizing this stuff, they could have started increasing the number of AOL subscribers paying them $25 a month, and without needing to threaten and harass people on the phone, either. They could instead have grabbed hold of the Long Tail and gone along for the ride.

This didn’t happen, though, obviously. A number of things ultimately scuttled that merger, in no particular order:

1. The absence of Steve Case and Gerald Levin
2. Time Warner turf wars
3. Management-by-numbers
4. Growing bureaucracy

In 2002, Steve Case largely disappeared after his brother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Gerald Levin, the former CEO of Time Warner, retired. The two architects of the merger were out of the picture, and the turf wars started. AOL was a small company without a whole lot of fat, relatively speaking. It never stood a chance against the more bureaucratically-minded Time Warner culture.

Everything became — and remains to this day — the subject of a turf war. One of AOL’s real problems is that it has no real consumer broadband strategy; a lot of the diminution of AOL’s subscriber ranks, we’re told, is because of people moving to broadband services.

Some of those people are moving to Road Runner cable modem service, which is owned by Time Warner and which is, in fact, headquartered in Herndon, VA, about a five-minutes away from AOL HQ. Was Road Runner folded into AOL? No. In fact, Road Runner subscribers had access to things like free video from CNN (back when CNN still charged for access to its video); AOL subscribers got no such deal.

AOL doesn’t offer VoIP service because Time Warner Cable does, and Time Warner didn’t want anything from AOL competing with it.

There are dozens of other examples, small and large. The company took advantage of almost none of the opportunities uniquely available to it, because each of those opportunities would have required changing something; and none of the Executive Vice Presidents who had been in charge of foozling around inefficiently thought much of that. The absence of Levin and Case meant that there was effectively no one around to order these children to Play Nice.

Then, inevitably, Management By Numbers set in, where people are put in charge of things about which they know nothing. The idea is that knowing about ‘management’, and not about what the company or division actually does, is what’s really important. Once in a while, this will not be a total disaster; but I cannot think of a single case where this has produced particularly good results.

What Management By Numbers does tend to produce is rampant bureaucracy. The Manager doesn’t really understand what’s going on, and so he thrashes around, trying to get a handle on things. Reports are generated. Committees are formed. Metrics are decided on and measured — usually badly. If the company doesn’t sink immediately under the weight of this and the resulting departure of key employees, Bad Decisions start being made, based on the bad metrics and imperfectly-understood reports.

The company continues to sink, so new Reports are written, new Committees formed, etc., etc.

Repeat until doom.

I always held out hope, though. AOL was in pretty bad shape, but it could have reversed itself. People forget about the walled-garden aspect of AOL, because most of their subscribers these days just use the service as a slightly expensive dial IP service. The walled garden is still there, though, and so is the giant pile of movies, TV shows, music, magazine archives, etc., etc., etc.: all that Time Warner had to do was combine the two and they’d have had a successful product.

They never could bring themselves to offer access to this stuff, though. You get access to the complete Time archive if you pay them $30 a year (and get a magazine mailed to your house every week); but if you pay them $25 a month, you don’t. For $12 a month — not all of which goes to Time Warner — you can subscribe to HBO and get all the latest episodes of The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Curb Your Enthusiasm; but for $25 a month you don’t even get access to any of Time Warner’s lesser cartoons from the 1930s.

Very, very recently, AOL has started to change some of this, offering certain heavily-DRMed TV shows to subscribers running certain software; and this gave me at least a bit of hope. They’ve still got the pieces of what could be a great service, of something that’s still not available anywhere online. If they’d only put them together, AOL would once again have something of value to offer people, and they could start gaining subscribers again.

All of this came crashing down in the last month, though, with the publicity that ensued when Vinny Ferrari posted the recording of that phone call. Now not only would Time Warner have to pull its head out of its ass long enough to remember that they need to offer something that people want, but they’d have to work to convince people that their service isn’t a roach motel. They appear to be responding to the latter problem essentially by offering the service for free; this is probably the best thing they could do in these circumstances.

But offering the service for free — essentially pulling down the wall around the walled garden — significantly diminishes their ability to do what they’re uniquely positioned to do, i.e. to make all those TV shows and movies available.

And so I think that’s effectively the end of AOL as anything worth watching. The Valuable AOL, as I like to call it, would have been a transitional product at best, but it’s a transition that could have taken ten or fifteen years. In that time, either the traditional Professional Media companies will have loosed their tight grip on their product, or they’ll largely be pushed aside all together. Time Warner has now, intentionally or not, opted for the iron grip on the rail of the sinking ship.

And the opportunity of this multi-billion-dollar company to shift its direction was destroyed, largely, by a single bad customer-service phone call. This call violated nearly every one of the Customer Service Rules, but it particularly broke #15, ‘Customer-profitability accounting is almost totally inaccurate’, and its meta-rule, ‘You don’t know who your customer is’. Vinny Ferrari was a nobody; but now, because he was treated badly, millions of people have an even lower opinion of AOL’s customer service.

So the customer service lessons to be drawn here?

1. Offer something of value
2. Do not coerce people into doing business with you

That those are the lessons really says something about how bad a pickle AOL is in.

Dear Jackass,

When entering the mall parking lot, please observe the sign posted there that says PROCEED WITHOUT STOPPING. The people already in the parking lot have stop signs: you don’t. There’s a reason for this, you fool: it’s to get people into the parking lot while the light is green, instead of having them back up and gridlock the intersection. Observe the sign, glance quickly to make sure that the people with stop signs are not taking the law into their own hands, and then KEEP GOING.

I am particularly interested that you do this when I am behind you. You see, I’m counting on you to FOLLOW THE RULES and do the right thing; the more uncertainty I have about what you’re going to do, the further behind you I have to follow, the lower the effective capacity of the road is, and the worse things are for everyone.

While I’m on the subject, I’ll point out that simply FOLLOWING THE RULES while driving might be a good idea in general. By this I don’t (just) mean finally discovering what that mysterious stalk on the left side of your steering wheel does; I mean observing the rules of right-of-way. When you spontaneously decide to yield to me for no particular reason, you’re not really doing me a favor. Because neither you nor 90% of the other people on the road are using their turn signals, I have no idea what the hell you’re up to. I just know that you’re not moving. Do you want me to turn in front of you, or are you just spacing out? Are you going to launch forward as soon as I’m in the way? I have no idea, and as you are ALREADY not adhering to the system, I don’t really feel comfortable venturing a guess as to what you’re going to do next.

The only solution is to look over at you and see you waving furiously. Am I to go first? Is your dashboard on fire? Are you having a fit? By the time I am sure of your intention and have gone, more time has passed than if you’d just taken your turn and let me take mine.

Dear Bicyclists,

Unlike, I believe, most other motorists, I understand that bicycles have precisely the same rights on most roads as do cars. I might not like crawling up a hill behind your slow ass, but I don’t begrudge you the pavement.

However, sharing the road means, you know, sharing the road. It means not stamping your foot and pointing to the law that says that you’re allowed on the road, while ignoring all the laws about stop signs, traffic signals, right of way, etc., etc. which apply equally to bicyclists as to cars, and which most roadgoing bicyclists seem to ignore entirely.

When I’m trying to make a legal right turn, and one of your number zips past me on the right and into my path — thus scaring me out of my wits and forcing me to nail the brakes — I want nothing more than to chase you down and run you over. With me, the feeling soon passes. With some people, it doesn’t. Don’t expect better treatment from drivers than you give to them. And if you’re one of the rare bicyclists who does obey the laws while in traffic, you might want to beat the crap out of the bicyclists who don’t and who thus make it harder for all of you.

Thanks
Tino

Dear Motorcyclists,

The practice of driving around with your high-beams on — and, in many cases, with your mis-aimed fog lights on as well — doesn’t make you more visible to me so much as it blinds me when I’m in the oncoming lane or ahead of you in the same lane. Cut it the hell out.

I understand that you might want to throw light as far as possible in order to spot the wildlife that inevitably jumps out of the woods and into your path around here, but might I suggest that instead you slow down or possibly drive a car if this is such a big concern of yours? Or maybe you could just turn off the damned high beams when there’s someone in your path, just like everyone else does.

Thanks
Tino