Juniorbird.com

I’m prematurely aged. Or, at least I am if you look at the ads on the TV I watch. “Franklin Mint”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Mint? Check. “Hoveround”:http://hoverounddirect.com/hoveround/unique/98149.php? Check. Good times, good times. But never did I think that I would see an ad like this one:
(I tried to embed the video here, but you’ll have to “go to here to see it”:http://www.hasbro.com/common/swf/flvPlayer/flvPlayer.cfm?video=/common/commercials/Playskool-Commercial-DreamTownMom.flv because, apparently, Flash is too complex for me.)
Hasbro: where little girls’ dreams go to die. Unless those dreams are of doing laundry for everyone. Want a Rose Petal Cottage for to get your little Elizabeth Cady back in line? Hasbro has a “fun Flash experience for you”:http://host.exemplum.com/hasbro/dreamtown_cottage/playskooldreamtowncottagedemo.htm, complete with an ad just for girls! (That other ad is for moms.)
Honestly? I guess the Rose Petal Cottage is great for girls who “plan to get their Mrs. degree”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-homemaking11oct11,0,900610.story?coll=la-home-center. Somebody needs to send one of these houses to the Suicide Girls or something.

I’ve recently had the privelege of interacting with two vendors who had sold their goods to me: Dell and PUR, the water filter people. It’s amazing how differently I was treated by the two — and amazing how the big-ticket purchase got me the worse service.
Dell was, as you’ve probably already guessed, the bad service. I bought two items from them: a $2,000 laptop and an $80 wireless router. As “already related”:http://juniorbird.com/archives/000646.html, the router was not the finest-made product I had ever procured. Unfortunately, the replacement they sent could be made to work either. I suggested to Dell that I simply return the item — if neither instance worked, then why should I expect that the product worked at all? — but they preferred to send me a third router and were quite vociferous that the cause was something in my environment, even though my old AirPort Base Station worked fine. Of course, all of this happened on their schedule, and I was happy to be flexible during my vacation, but the third router arrived the weekend before school started. Naturally I was uninterested in spending my time setting up the new router at the same time that I was getting used to classes, etc.
But Dell was adamant: no non-function of the router provided cause for me to return the item for a refund. I’ll admit; I was annoyed. Even worse, I began to doubt Dell. My mental image of my purchase switched from roughly 95% laptop and 5% router to 1 of 2 items working and 1 of 2 items non-working. And what would Dell gain? My $80? In fact, they lost, because now I think of them as the company that sells crappy peripherals and sticks you with them when they don’t work. And, if I buy a PC in the future, I’d seriously consider an HP — when I shopped for this laptop, Dell and IBM (muy caro!) were the only vendors I looked into.
In contrast, I couldn’t be happier with the customer servide PUR provided me for my $30 on-faucet water filter. The filter housing has a little plastic window that lets you see a progress bar on that tells you when the filter is used up. This plastic window broke seal on my unit, so, every time you run water through the filter some shoots out in high-pressure streams:

I’d only owned this filter for about 9 months and was sad to see it break already. So I asked them on their site, is there any way I can repair this? Their reply:
bq. Thank you for contacting PUR.
bq. I am sorry to hear of the problem you had with our product. The quality of our products – their content, performance and packaging – is very important to us. We have many quality control checkpoints along the manufacturing line because we want each of our brands to be in perfect condition when purchased by our consumers. I’m sharing your comments with the rest of our team. Since the amount of help I can offer via email is limited, I’m following up with you by postal mail. I will be sending you a voucher for a new unit. Please allow 3-4 weeks for delivery. Thanks for getting in touch with us.
That was the very first e-mail they sent back! They quickly turned a customer who feared he burnt $30 into a customer who trusts his vendor for future transactions. What could be a better outcome?
Here we have two really different outcomes of similar situations. Both dealt with commoditized products (I will assert that all PC laptops are good substitutes for each other, so we’re most of the way down the commoditization path, despite the price). Both dealt with manufacturers who need to fight for “mindshare”, who will either be the first vendor you think of when you need a new widget or will not get a shot at the sale. One was proactive and managed the interaction to get what I might consider a good result and was, at least, not a costly result for them. The other was responsive but stayed behind the curve and put themselves in a position in which the failure of their initial response (a “reasonably predictable”:http://www.epinions.com/pr-Dell_TrueMobile_2300_Wireless_Broadband_Router_TM23001/display_~reviews failure) would only leave me _less_ satisfied. There’s a lesson here about how, as James Carville would have said, speed kills. Customer service needs to respond quickly and aggressively to resolve issues on the first or second contact. That’s the only way to keep customers in today’s competitive, information-filled marketplace

In yet further evidence that our civilization is in collapse and that we shall all soon be reduced to finding our dinner by hunting small prey with stone axes (that is, we will have the stone axes, not the small prey), Save Karyn has gotten a freaking movie deal.
Not familiar with Save Karyn, are you? Well, the lovely Ms. Karyn Bosnak was dutifully applying herself to her employment in sunny New York when she was blindsided by totally unexpected Consumer Debt. Poor Karyn! Suddenly she had thousands and thousands — specifically, twenty thousands — of dollars in debt for things like shoes and handbags and all of the things that Carrie buys on Sex In The City. And our fair Karyn barely did anything to deserve all this debt, except for maybe buying the items in question.
So, beset by the minions of Visa and Mastercard and probably even Discover, greedily demanding principal and interest and late fees, Karyn hatched a clever plan:
_She would ask 20,000 people for just $1 each, via the internet._
And so “Save Karyn”:http://www.savekaryn.com/AboutSaveKaryn.htm was born. And lo and behold, our heroine’s evil debt disappeared in less than a year — all without doing any work (or even, may I say, learning how to properly code a Web site). Wasn’t Karyn clever?
At least that’s how she spins it (and you do have to respect her skill with the spin). See, to me it looks different. I know tons of people who made the big bucks in the dot-com era, and then had their incomes collapse when the economy went south (me, for one). And every one of these people made the right choice: they tightened their belts, they looked new places for income, they invested in their education, they did all the little things. And you know what? They built character, they learned about their priorities, they learned how to make tough decisions, they became better people. That’s what happens when you’re independent and have to sink or swim on your own.
Not Karyn! She begged. She found a virtual street corner and told her sad story to everyone who dropped by. She got $20,000 and she didn’t even work for it!
Am I bitter? Did Karyn earn it by thinking up a new idea and marketing it effectively? To some extent, yes, and she should get the credit for that. But there’s lots of ways to make money by doing things that are wrong. And, fundamentally, Karyn did not learn the life lessons that come from getting yourself out of a hole you’ve dug. If you look at her “Daily Buck” you see a list of false savings — false because every one involves an unnecessary expenditure. Did Karyn ever learn how to say “No” to things she doesn’t need? Doesn’t look like it; she doesn’t even have to fill the gas tank on her car.
So, what did Karyn get from all this? Well, $20,000, which is a pretty good haul. Not just $20,000, though, no, she’s got a “book out”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060558199/ which I hope will help a lot of people to cure their shopping addiction because something good had better come of this somewhere. Oh, and she sold her book’s movie rights, so there’s probably tens of thousands of dollars more. Yep, Karyn’s making bank, all from having begged for money. Gosh, thanks modern civilization!

Today, at Ralph’s for canned tuna, I saw rise in front of me in much the same way the apes in 2001 saw the monolith rise in front of them, the following shocking marketing decision:

That’s right, in the middle of the ghetto Ralph’s up the street from me is a display dedicated to selling nautcally-themed bric-a-brac. The kind of stuff your grandfather might put on the mantel or your aunt on the sideboard. Yes, precious keepsakes for your home, like this chronometer:

First, because who doesn’t need a wall clock shaped like a sailing ship’s wheel? Verily, for my apartment has been unfurnished to this point without such an item. Second, because the Ralph’s (not even a Ralph’s Fresh Fare) is where I would first think to buy such a thing. Nautical home accessories! At the supermarket! It’s a marketing breakthrough!
In case you missed it, apparently somebody’s going to buy a carved wooden boat. Yes, a boat at the supermarket. I have proof:

I’m so confused by this concept, I’m almost unable to make fun of it!
OK, I’ll admit there was one time I wanted something sold at Ralph’s — I still wish I’d purchased the Spirited Away DVD there. I figured I could get it cheaper at Best Buy but they didn’t even have it! Ah, cruel fate.
But the DVD even was at least an appropriate checkout aisle impulse purchase. Sailing ships of yore, on the other hand, are bulky home decorations. Who pushes their cart past this display and picks up something? Why did Ralph’s think this was a good idea? Is it the competition from the Big Lots next door? Because, if I had a store and found myself competing with Big Lots I’d throw in the towel (don’t get me wrong, I love my Big Lots deals — but it’s one thing to keep them off your home territory and another to branch out to cover the rest of their purview). I mean, it’s a frickin’ grocery store. Dump the boats and give me some meat that’s not nasty and brown and old.
I dread, dread the day they begin to sell divans and ottomans.