This jar of Broad Bean Sauce is $8.62 on Amazon with Prime shipping. At our local Asian supermarket, it’s less than $3.
The Amazon effect: sometime in the early teens, we needed a Weber Smoky Joe portable charcoal grill for a camping trip. We went to the camping aisle in our local Walmart and found the shelf and the price tab for the product, but it was out of stock. We pulled up the Amazon website on our phone—I recall being surprised we could get service inside the store—and ordered the Smoky Joe on the spot. It was the first time we’d done something like this, but certainly wouldn’t be the last.
The Amazon effect: this week we visited a couple of CVS stores in search of the 16 ounce bottle of coal-tar dandruff shampoo we like. They only had a shelf space for the 8 oz size and were out of stock. We checked the CVS app and found that only the 8 oz size is now available and it costs what the 16 oz used to cost. We abandoned the many CVS coupons we had loaded on our device and searched for “coal tar shampoo” on Amazon. A 16 oz bottle ships free for what the 8 oz bottle costs at CVS. We ordered it on the spot.
Non-Amazon marketers like to bemoan the chilling effect of Amazon on smaller retailers, but these are examples of mercantile Darwinism at work. Neither Walmart nor CVS would have lost the sale but for decisions they made about inventory management. Walmart has adapted quite well in recent years, while CVS seems to be going in the opposite direction. They’ve built a flashy app, but it is hard to use and you have to pay for shipping for that out-of-stock item; there’s no ship-to-store option.
And here’s a reverse Amazon effect: we’ve recently been doing a lot of Chinese cooking using The Food of Sichuan by Fuchsia Dunlop. As a result, we find ourselves browsing the aisles of our local Asian supermarket for products which are hard to find because the labels are not in English. So what do we do? Go on Amazon, find the product we want with a search term like “black Chinese vinegar” or “broad bean sauce”. We then show this product, the photo blown up so the Chinese characters can be read, to a store employee. They guide us to the shelf where we find the product, always at a much lower price, and we buy it on the spot. Amazon loses the sale in this instance; mercantile Darwinism at work.
Home page of Online Trading Academy website as of March 2, 2020. Click the image to explore the website and draw your own conclusions.
I stopped taking on new copywriting assignments not quite 2 years ago, but have continued to work with a small group of clients where the experience was personally satisfying and I felt I could make a measurable difference. In particular, I continued to work with Online Trading Academy, a financial education company with a broad curriculum designed to improve skills and confidence among investors who are making their own decisions.
Last Friday, February 28, this came to an end. The Federal Trade Commission brought an injunction against OTA alleging that the defendants (3 principal owners of OTA) “have made false or unsubstantiated representations that consumers who purchase Defendants’ programs will likely earn substantial income, any consumer can learn and use Defendants’ strategy to earn income without significant investable capital or free time, and Defendants’ instructors have amassed substantial wealth by trading in the financial markets.”
This didn’t sound like the company I had worked with for 10 years where my copy was constantly edited to avoid “promissory” claims. Nonetheless, the FTC wasn’t so much alleging as demanding. They sought a restraining order to keep OTA from distributing any monies that might be used as a settlement for the consumers who purchased education from OTA, and they got it from a U.S. District Court. All assets were frozen, meaning the company could not pay its contractors (like me) or meet its payroll. Last Friday, hundreds of employees were given their notice of termination.
Most of these were dedicated, hardworking people who handled the nuts and bolts of technology, customer service and such. They were a very diverse group, as you can see from this page of staff photos. (The website is still fully operational in case you want to click around and form your own opinions about whether this is some kind of bait-and-switch operation; OTA is not allowed to take it down or alter it per the terms of the restraining order.) There were meditators, musicians, adoptive parents, churchgoers. They were a family. And they’re now out of work with no advance notice and no paycheck.
A client contact who is on the creative side, not upper management, hypothesized that because the FTC like other agencies has been stripped to its bare bones in recent years, they do not have the bandwidth to investigate claims or negotiate with companies. They simply go for the jugular, with a preemptive strike. If it causes great personal and financial pain to people who may be exonerated when the case ultimately is heard in court, so be it.
This morning I sat in on an online education session moderated by one of the three principals, who had spent the weekend preparing a detailed financial statement down to the VIN numbers on his vehicles as a condition of the restraining order. If he was stressed, you wouldn’t know it nor would you have guessed this session was anything other than business as usual. Since all assets are frozen he was in effect donating his time as were the other subject matter experts and the technology enablers on the webcast. Nearly 1000 people were in attendance.
We discussed last week’s market turbulence in the uncertainty around the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The moderator drew a number of stock charts and indicated possible turning points as well as opportunities that had existed during the upheaval on Friday. Several students contributed on the chat about trades that they had taken or planned to take. At no point were promises about money made or was money per se even discussed. This was a technical discussion about predicting market direction. OTA offers the tools and the training, but it is up to the students to apply this knowledge and they may or may not find profits. If the FTC had sat in on this or any of the dozens of sessions each week they would have realized how off-base the claims of their investigators were.
I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose a number of friends and family members simultaneously in a plane crash or other unpredictable disaster. But I can guess what that sense of overwhelming loss must feel like. The OTA folks are very much alive but their lives have been thrown into chaos by the kind of top-down bureaucratic intervention we might expect in an autocratic country like China, but certainly not the United States.
I’m outraged and angry and wish I could come up with a good call of action in closing. But I feel completely helpless, which only makes me angrier.
Even if the case is ultimately found in OTA’s favor, the damage to peoples’ lives is already irreparable. The case number is SACV 20-287 JVS (KESx) and you can google it if you like, or simply try “OTA vs FTC”. Compare what you see in the court documents with what the student say in their testimonials—this page might be a good starting point—then contemplate the possibility that if this could happen to Online Trading Academy, it could happen to any company that promises to help people point their lives in a new direction.
Thanks, FinishLine.com!If you do a search for “Nike Pegasus” you’re likely to find the best prices at Finishline.com. I was excited to locate a pair in my size discounted to $60 which is about half original retail price. The package arrived quickly and I opened it to find one shoe in my size and the other several sizes smaller.
I called their customer service line and after an extensive phone tree experience I got a message that an agent would be with me in two minutes. It actually was five minutes, so this is just a message they play rather than any predictive software at work. The non-US based agent, when she finally came on the line, had great difficulty finding my order and I had to repeat the order number multiple times. She asked me what the problem was and I said I needed shoes I could wear in my size. Her response was to give me detailed instructions for returning the shoes. I asked if I could request a replacement pair in the right size and she said no. I would have to go into the store for that and they would help me order a new pair.
I remembered from a previous ordering experience that Finish Line doesn’t have a warehouse, just a network of stores, so my order will be broadcast and another store will hopefully be able to fill it and hopefully the shoes will be the right size.
What’s happening here is that FinishLine.com is creating the appearance of being an internet retailer when they actually haven’t invested in the training, systems and logistics to pull it off. Shame on them.
P.S. I went to the store in my nearest mall to return the shoes and discovered the store had closed for good. Nearest still open is 30 miles away. I can go there or return them without getting a replacement. I also thought of ordering a new pair online but the same style is now $20 more.
Here’s the transcript of a chat this morning with ATT:
opener : Hi, I’m AT&T’s automated virtual assistant. How can I help you today? Otis : Our student is back from semester abroad so we would like to reactivate XXXXXXXXXXXX agent : Oh no! We can help you with reinstating your service.
Was your service interrupted because of: Payment issue Other Otis : Other agent : The Reactivate Wireless Service page has detailed steps to restore your line! Otis : ##Url#https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM1011528 agent : Here are step by step instructions for restoring your line. Otis : ##Url#https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM1011528 agent : Here are step by step instructions for restoring your line. Otis : the page doesn’t have the answer and your “step by step instructions” aren’t showing up agent : Hmmm. Could you rephrase your question? Otis : I want to chat with a real person agent : Let me get you to a specialist. Please tell us your first name. Otis : Otis agent : Thank you, Otis. You will now be connected to a specialist who will assist you.
How might this have been a better experience? Keep the bots out of the chat room. Specifically, when I clicked “Chat” I expected to be connected with a live person. This was the way ATT chat worked in the past. If you’re going to try to make me use a virtual assistant, make it clear you are doing so. (Because I assumed I was going to get the same experience as previously, I did not notice the reference to the automated virtual assistant till I read the transcript.) And it should be a separate help/support function than Chat, which has the user perception of being a conversation with a real person.
The bank in town recently changed its logo. They explain in the pop-up above, which appeared when checking my statement online, that they wanted to “keep up with advances in technology” and that the new logo is “very well suited to today’s mobile world” and then go on to explain the design strategy, much as the designer might have done when presenting to the client. How much do I, the customer, care about this stuff?
They’ve also got a new website that must seem complicated to use because there’s a statement at the top: “Welcome! Learn to use our new website–watch our tutorial video here.” When I click that link I get a warning that I am about to go to a third party website, which turns out to be Youtube. The video is a screen capture done with Camtasia, where we watch as they select from a drop down menu, access a contact form and such, all without any narration. Meanwhile the old website–which is called Webwise Banking–is still there and looks pretty much the same other than the logo change and doesn’t have any new functionality. Unlike most bank websites, it doesn’t present me with a table of recent activity. I have to counterintuitively click “history” to see any of that stuff.
The best thing about all of this is that their mobile sites, both adirondacktrust.com and webwisebanking.com, have been mobile-optimized; formerly webwisebanking (I never knew about the other site) returned a micro type version of their desktop. And their app, which formerly didn’t work for making mobile deposits, has been updated as well.
One wonders why Adirondack Trust thought it was necessary to put up a video tour of the site and why they didn’t imbed it on the page so they didn’t have that warning about the third party site. (This morning, by the way, the site is glitching and clicking the video link doesn’t do anything.) And why they continue to operate two sites, adirondacktrust.com and webwisebanking.com rather than redirecting the latter.
Think about Betty Crocker and Aunt Jemima and how those food product icons have evolved over the years. Do those companies make an announcement every time they update the art? Think about your favorite apps which are constantly updated behind the scenes. If you’re curious or bored you can look up a snippet about what’s changed, but often these are silly, suggesting the developers don’t think anybody will read them.
It’s fine to update your logo (the old Adirondack Trust logo was complex and not particularly attractive or bank-y) and a good thing to improve the user experience. But just do it, don’t harp on it to your customers. To do so is like wetting your pants while you’re wearing a dark suit. It gives you a nice warm feeling, and nobody will notice but you.
Here is a new but pervasive conversation in my home area (upstate New York). You’ll be completing a credit card transaction at a retail counter and the checker says, “do you want your receipt?” Well, of course I don’t. In an era of readily available online statements there are easier ways to track my purchases. And it’s just one more piece of paper to stuff in my wallet or lose in the shopping bag and ultimately throw away.
And yet. If I DON’T accept the receipt that leaves me open for fraud (the transaction is altered after the fact) or an error, like not picking up a sale price, that I would notice if I had the record. So my policy has been to say no if I’ve been watching the items and their prices on the register screen, and it’s a place I trust, otherwise yes. And I take those receipts, as I always do, and match them against my next statement to be sure they are consistent.
I am curious where this new policy came from. Is it supposed to be eco-sensitive because it avoids wasting a scrap of paper? Is this happening where you live? Let me know.
Black Friday was the catalyst that turned me from a wise-ass cub copywriter, marking time till I sold a screenplay, into someone serious about their profession. Not a few years ago, I got a job as direct mail ad manager at the Broadway, a defunct chain of department stores in Southern California. One of my first assignments was the sale catalog to bring people into stores on the day after Thanksgiving. (No evening-before previews then.) I had to wrangle departmental buyers all of whom wanted more space than they’d been assigned, or wanted to jam more product into their allotted space. It was a nightmare. I seriously thought about quitting.
Then, on that morning (yes, we worked the day after Thanksgiving then) Marketing VP Jan Wentzel put me into his car along with my boss, Lisa Stanley. We drove to several stores to watch the people lining up to get in, and then lining up at cash registers–LONG lines–to purchase the very products I had been working so hard to present in an even handed way. For the first time, I realized that what I was doing had something to do with the company’s success and, by extension, all of us keeping our jobs.
In more recent years, I’ve pretty much ignored Black Friday, especially as it became easier to shop online. This year, at the goading of my teenager, I decided to check it out. I hit Walmart, Target, Sears and our local mall on Friday afternoon. I also made a serious attempt to find online deals which could count as Amazon-killers because they combined online and pickup-in-store shopping.
Walmart was the winner at that category. I bought a device which was one price online, but $30 cheaper if you bought in-store. However! You could order online for in-store pickup, know it wasn’t going to be out of stock, and get the same $30 discount. I did that and went to the store to pick it up, scanned a bar code at a kiosk, and realized I could buy a couple more things while I was waiting for them to bring it. Very smart, Walmart.
Sears was just sad. Not a lot of shoppers but even fewer cashiers, so there were still long checkout lines. What you’d expect from a store that’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
I like Target a lot but ended up buying just one thing from them. They had a nice sale on Fitbits as a doorbuster, but the model I wanted was gone. I found it on their website and ordered it. Unfortunately I then found it elsewhere at a lower price so the item will be returned. Feeling bad for Target, I spent a good amount of time checking their website for other bargains to buy, and returned yesterday on Cyber Monday when they were offering 15% discount and free shipping on everything. But time after time, when I got to the product page it was unavailable to ship, check inventory in store. Where I wouldn’t have the 15% discount.
The one sale product I really wanted was a Sony wireless Blu-Ray player, marked down from $119 to $49. It was “temporarily” out of stock online and finally disappeared from the website. Amazon, surprise, had it at the same price and I ordered it. Not going to the mall was more than worth the $7.50 in theoretically lost savings. Amazon wins again.
This morning I discovered that the new SWA reservation system automatically cancels you if you book two flights out of the same city on the same day. For example, I’m going to be on the west coast in July but don’t know whether I am coming home directly or continuing on to SNA. So I booked flights for both and now SWA has cancelled my return to ALB because it was the more expensive ticket. After 30 minutes on the phone with customer relations, the SFO-ALB leg has been reinstated and the SFO-SNA cancelled. I will now book the latter on another airline.
I was notified of the cancellation by an automated email, no explanation, which arrived in the middle of the night with a new mystery confirmation number. The long conversation and time on hold has produced the above information, which the rep says has always been in the contract but is only now being enforced. She says the people most affected are “tiered” passengers (frequent flyers) who often make multiple reservations and later cancel one. Exactly.
This flexibility is the precise reason I have been flying SWA. I am paying for the ticket and I understand if I forget to cancel the money is gone. It seems like a fair and straight up business transaction. I pointed out to the agent that I am one of the lucky ones because I took the trouble to research this; a lot of folks are going to show up at the airport and discover they don’t have a ticket because they thought the automated email was an error, they didn’t see the email, or they didn’t make the reservation on the web.
Any recommendations on a carrier with lots of coast-to-coast itineraries out of ALB?
My NuTone IMA-4006 Music Intercom. Not only did they rebuild the control unit, Northside Service Company cleaned it up so it looks like new.
I recently moved into a house that has a NuTone IMA-4006 Music Intercom system installed. You can press a button and be heard in another room (or from the porch if you are ringing the doorbell) and also play music throughout the home. I know that sounds quaint in these days of earbuds and instant messaging, but there is a remote unit in every room so it was pretty hard to ignore.
The most recent owners, who lived here for 15 years, had never tried the NuTone intercom system. I experimented by turning a few knobs and got nothing but hum. But at least there was power. Was it possible the system could be restored to working condition? My local NuTone service center said “we don’t know anybody who works on them anymore.” So it was off to the internet.
A search quickly put me in touch with Northside Service Company, a factory-authorized NuTone Service Center in San Ramon, CA. Their site features dozens of links to videos, manuals and articles to help you make the most of your obsolete equipment. I filled out a web request form and a few minutes later the phone rang. It was owner Chris Peters, calling to discuss my system. It turns out that the remote units rarely fail so if I would send him my control station he would rebuild it at a cost that was not cheap, but far less than buying a comparable system today or taking out all those speakers and patching the holes walls.
I disconnected the many wires following Chris and Cindy Peters’ very clear step by step video, then packed it up according to another video of instructions. A couple of weeks later, I got the unit back along with a bag of parts that had been replaced. Not only did they rebuild the unit, they replaced the doors that cover the controls and often break off (the hinges are no longer available so Northside had them custom manufactured) and at my request added an A/V jack and sent me a couple of new lighted doorbell buttons.
It took me a few days to get up the courage to re-install the unit and test it, but I did and everything works as advertised. I’m back in business, feeling very much like a wired denizen of the early digital era.
This is a story that could not have happened without the internet—which helped me find Northside Service Company, and enabled Chris and Cindy to build a site that was incredibly useful and also showed me they knew what they were doing. But the capper was the personal service. I mentioned that Chris called me immediately when I submitted a request. (It was on New Year’s Eve as I recall.) When I had a question about an extra wire during re-installation he answered me by email within an hour. This is a business model many other specialized service providers (copywriters come to mind) can learn from, and emulate.
It was Parents Weekend in Amherst, MA where our son is going to school. We were late in finding a hotel and did not realize when we reserved for that the Quality Inn in Chicopee was over 30 minutes away on a dark, winding, back road. We arrived intact and politely told the desk clerk that we’d be checking out in the morning. He told us no, we’d reserved for two nights and we would be charged for two nights. And that’s how Choice Hotels loses a customer.
En route to Amherst the next morning, after paying for 2 nights but staying 1, I spent time on the phone with Choice customer service. They told me they this was an extremely unusual policy but because I had agreed to it–by initialing that document they give you when you arrive at 11 pm–the hotel was standing its ground. Meanwhile, my wife found a totally pleasant accommodation at Holiday Inn Express in Hadley, 2 miles from the campus.
The Chicopee Quality Inn was a little shabby, but not outright dangerous. The Holiday Inn Express was a definite step up and well worth paying $100 more. I have an upcoming business trip and have already joined the Holiday Inn loyalty program and identified their location near my client and will likely stay there. And will stay there again and again on future trips.
Now here’s the takeaway. I’ve probably stayed at Choice properties 50 times, usually for multiple nights, because they’re near a business meeting and I don’t care to pay for frills. They’re a franchise operation: independent owners who are members of a group. And this one particularly avaricious owner in Chicopee, MA has likely brought an end to my long association with the Choice brand.
This is how you lose a customer: not the only way, but certainly a very effective way. Let individual franchisees push customers away, since most folks won’t realize they are dealing with a jerk whose actions don’t extend across the company. Thus one bad apple spoils the entire brand. If you are interested in driving your business into the ground, I highly recommend this model.
If you care to short Choice hotels, their ticker is CHH. They’re currently rated 6.2 (a little above average) by Starmine but I predict that number is going down.
