Wordless Wednesday
Category Archives: Marketing
Hold the Mayo?
I forgot the mayonnaise.
I hate it when that happens but that’s not (exactly) what this story is about.
Lunch. Kay Ace came over for lunch. I carved off some roasted turkey breast, some not-too-too-bad cheddar cheese, one of the marvelous Homestead tomatoes we picked up at the Flea Market, and sliced some of the faux sourdough bread I made in the bread machine the day before.
Kay is nuts. I’m not sure if I had made that clear before. She asked for mustard for her sandwich.
Mustard.
On tomatoes.
And turkey.
Nuts, I tell you.
Liz Arden poked her head in about then. “Mmm. Mustard on tomatoes and turkey. Mmmmm,” she said.
Nuts. I’m surrounded by them.
I was so befuddled, I forgot to spread the mayonnaise on my own sandwich. It was a little dry but that tomato is so good, it was still right fair. I recognized what I was missing a couple of bites in. Remedied same. Lunch was sublime even with the slight, sharp aroma of mustard wafting from the other side of the table.
Mustard has its place. Any food that begins with “ham” needs mustard which is why hamburgers need mustard (and ketchup). Ditto hot dogs although they are mostly chicken. Brats and kielbasa and soft pretzels. Meatloaf sandwiches. Cheddar cheese on Ritz crackers needs just a tiny dab and a sweet gherkin pickle or two. And one should combine it with the mayo in potato salad. Not on ice cream, though.
The Romans mixed “must” (unfermented grape juice) with ground mustard seeds to make mustum ardens which translates as “burning must.” It’s also how we got the name “must ard.”
On the other hand, Kay puts mayo on her fries. That’s just wrong.
Mayonnaise is mostly fat; a single tablespoon serving contains 90 calories. No wonder we like it so much.
Mayo does go on turkey or chicken sandwiches and is especially perfect to bed slices of hard boiled egg. One could even add slices of bananas to that. Grilled apple, bacon and provolone sandwich is made perfect by mayo. It is the basis for tartar sauce, Thousand Island, and ranch dressings. I mix it with ketchup and Worcestershire sauce to make my “Russian” dressing.
For the record, if you put mayo on steamed broccoli it tastes a little like an artichoke.
Homemade mayo will spoil after 3-4 days but the commercial concoction uses pasteurized egg yolks and has so much acid and preservatives that it will extend the life of unrefrigerated sandwiches and salads by killing bacteria.
Now to the point: the vast squeeze bottle conspiracy.
I finally went back to the kitchen and put a dab of mayo on my sandwich.
Actually, that’s not exactly true. I tried to put a little dab of mayo on my sandwich and ended up with a monstrous glob of the stuff in the shape of the Great State of Texas on the bread.
I am disappointed.
The mayo folks have learned what the mustard folks have known for years. Why sell 32 ounces when you can sell 24 for the same price? In fact, why not water down the product a little so it squirts easier? After all, we’ll sell more.
<sigh>
In our next episode, Why doesn’t chocolate cake batter taste like chocolate cake?
A Byte of the Apple — A Cautionary Tale
A definite first-world problem.
I’ve owned (so far) four Apple iPods: a second generation Nano that works perfectly, a first gen iPod Touch that I “handed down” to SWMBO who lost it, and a fourth gen iPod Touch that fortuitously went belly up. The arithmetically astute will notice that that adds up to three. Stay with me.
Six days before the warranty expired, my newish and otherwise perfect iPod stopped talking in my ear. I often use my monaural cellphone headset with the iPod.
That’s a neat trick. The iPod Touch is basically a smartphone without the phone so the headset plugs right in and its buttons control iTunes. I carry the iPod and my old-fashioned regular cellphone when I walk most mornings so I can listen to podcasts and handle phone calls, all with one headset.
Diagnosing the iPod took a little while but after trying it with two different headsets and three sets of earbuds, I was pretty sure one channel was not working.
I drove the 50 miles to Burlington to take it to Small Dog Electronics, the only authorized Apple dealer and repair center in Vermont. They confirmed the warranty status and that one channel was definitely munged so they overnighted it in to Apple for free warranty repair.
Apple declined to fix it. “Water damage,” they said so they overnighted it back to Burlington where Small Dog could give me the bad news. Small Dog told me they had gotten nowhere trying to fight the determination but maybe I could get better attention.
Search for applecare horror stories. Google turned up about 223,000 results in 0.26 seconds.
So I called 1.800.APLDONTCARE. I had a prior bad experience of my own and wasn’t particularly sanguine about this call.
“You may need to purchase a single incident coverage for $19.”
Grrr.
The first person I talked to said the problem would take more than she was authorized to fix so she self-escalated me to Travis.
I told both of them that I had had the iPod since it came mewling out the box as a wee chip and it had never been under water, splashed, sprayed or splattered. He dug into the file (they take pictures!) and said it was more than just the components that change color. There was definite corrosion everywhere inside. It had finally gotten bad enough to take out that channel. [My thought: It probably was also driving the failing Home button and other, smaller issues.] And it was bad enough that they wouldn’t repair it even if I paid for it.
I reiterated that it had never been underwater, splashed, or mistreated.
He asked if I ever take it into the bathroom while showering.
Say what? An apple product isn’t tested against humidity? What if the owner lives in Pago Pago or, say, the Florida Keys?
Anyway, after the Apple phone system dropped me twice — Travis called back immediately both times — he agreed to a one-time-only “Customer Stroking” exception. He sent me a Fed-Ex box to ship the thing back to Apple again. They replaced it, complete with engraving. No warranty, though.
That’s number 4.
I wondered aloud that they would ship a product for outdoor use in the Keys that can’t stand up to humidity or salt air.
Travis said his wife has a waterproof case.
Back to Burlington where I picked up the pile of rust to ship back to the mother ship. I don’t quite understand why (a) Apple didn’t keep it instead of shipping it back or (b) why Small Dog couldn’t simply return it but, no, “the customer has to send it in, not a store.” Sheesh.
Apple sent me several emails reporting on its progress. They all had this header:
AppleCare
Sarah Limoge
3456 Abblesnaffy Road
NORTH PUFFIN, VERMONT 05990
UNITED STATESDear Sarah, Repair ID:
D98765432
My only question is, wtf is Sarah Limoge?
The replacement iPod showed up from Kunshan CN, adult signature required, a day before the FedEx delivery plan so I was quite surprised when I heard a scratching at the screen door. Lucky I heard it — by chance I was in the kitchen, not in the shower or here in my office.
It’s a beautiful, scratch free, superb looking device. It was odd to have to enter my wifi password and Apple ID several times and I miss Swype. Otherwise the restore went just fine. I just wish it worked through my headset.
“Do you have another phone-like headset to try on it?” Liz Arden asked.
First thing I did, including other earbuds and a couple of different headsets. Every one of them works perfectly with the Nano and none has what I’m calling the left channel on the iTouch.
I called 1.800.APLCARE again. Anna said, “Um, let’s see here…”
[Click]
It looks as if they still have phone problems. I called back in and made the new Support Advisor, Romel (it was our pleasure to provide you excellent service), take my phone number before we did almost anything else. The connection stayed stable through updating iTunes from 10.6.xx to 11.0.xx <sigh> and the rest of the call, including his putting me on hold a couple of times.
I resisted updating a little because I really don’t like to upset a stable iTunes operation with some new variable but it was the only way I could get the service call so I went through with it. So far it’s working.
We went through all the usual troubleshooting. Romel was very patient. It didn’t work.
He suggested restoring it to the OOB standards. I did that, restarted it “as a new iPod,” and put one random (and previously unused) playlist on it. The sound appeared to work on both channels on that setup, so we decided to try restoring the backup.
It don’t work again which made us both think there’s a software issue with the backup rather than a hardware problem. Still, Romel had no solution other than to send me yet another (that would have been number 5). It wasn’t until I blanched at having to drop the thing in Burlington that he bumped me up the ladder to his supervisor to approve a pre-paid label.
Senior Advisor Pam asked an innocuous question and I gave her the back story including my belief that sending yet another replacement was a bad idea since both Romel and I thought the backup/restore was at fault, not the new hardware. She had me reset All Settings (just the paswords n stuff) on the “not working” restore. It worked again so we agreed that it was better to stress test it before I sent it back yet again.
Bottom line is that Apple is willing to do another exchange but I asked for a couple of days to test the thing first. She’s going to do a call back on Monday. [Ed. note: she hasn’t called yet.]
Meanwhile, lather, rinse, repeat.
ITunes has four backups stored for this 4G iPod; I’ve restored from each. Both channels work fine from the one, very early backup. One channel doesn’t work whenever I restore from any of the later backups but does when I reset All Settings. I restored from the most recent backup to get the most up-to-date config, reset All Settings, and re-entered all the passwords and wallpapers, and the like.
It’s still working fine.
I have about 2-1/2 hours in tech support calls this time around. I spent entirely too much (unbudgeted) time on this project but I’m cautiously optimistic that my diagnosis is correct.
The truly interesting discovery is how much dumb luck I’ve had. If the “lost channel” misfire hadn’t happened, I would very shortly have had a pile of loose rust in a pretty case but instead I sent it in for the software problem that had masked the hardware issue. And so far the re-re-re-restored version works perfectly well.
OTOH, I’m still torqued that normal use would corrode an iPod to death in less than a year. Unless we can figure out that I really did expose it to some completely unexpected acid bath, took it to Burning Man, or that there was a manufacturing defect no one found, this is nothing less than bad design.
“Don’t take your iPod to the bathroom when you shower.”
I vote for bad design.
You may also recall that Small Dog couldn’t simply return the iPod. “The customer has to send it in, not a store.”
The Small Dog tech and I rolled our eyes over that little bit of efficiency.
“They’re certainly not Vermonters, are they?” she said.
Faded? FADED?
Liz Arden and I were talking about dog food this morning. She looks for a brand that has plenty of meat and meat by-products, eschews vege loading, doesn’t disgust the human eye or nose, and isn’t “gourmet” priced. Our mutts dined on fresh-frozen horsemeat that we bought in little waxed-cardboard takeout cartons but you can’t hardly find that any more.
“The pups lurve Costco canned food,” she said.
That got me going on chain store brands. I have a Kirkland blue oxford cloth dress shirt that fits well, drapes nicely, has decent stitching, and has a nice hand. Come to think of it, I have a couple of shirts from Wal-Mart that fit the same bill. I might not choose one to impress a client but I would certainly wear them with a tie to go to work.
If I wore ties.
Everybody hates Wal-Mart, though.
Many have good reason. In fact, Google™ came up with about 2,920,000 reasons in 0.27 seconds.
- The high cost to get low prices;
- About half of Wal-Mart employees qualify for food stamps;
- Despite the “Made in America” branding, 85% of Wal-Mart commodities are made overseas with 70% coming from China;
- Envy: Wal-Mart customers yearn to be Target customers;
- Wal-Mart is too rich;
- Wal-Mart customers are too poor;
- Wal-Mart is building a super center in Puffin County, Vermont.
And the top reason:
- The stores are always crowded.
A Vermont Environmental Court decision granted Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., permission to build a 147,000-square-foot store in Puffin County. The decision requires Wally to pay the Town additional “public service costs” (such as for fire and police) that its presence cause the Town to incur.
The decision is not without precedent in that municipalities often charge developers impact fees before allowing them to build houses and stores.
On the other hand, here comes Wal-Mart, a business that will pay property taxes year in and year out to underwrite public service costs such as the fire and police departments and the schools and the Town gets to charge them extra year after year for the increase in police and fire costs.
Heck, I think as long as we’re putting our hand in their pockets, we should get them to pay extra for satisfying a demand for three ring binders in our schools.
During the negotiations, Wal-Mart released a list of the stores they will put out of business in their first year of operation. The friendly, local bookseller. Gone. The friendly, local drug store. Gone. The friendly local store. Gone. The number of “independent retailers” in the United States declined by 60,000 stores between 1992 and 2007.
For the record, the friendly, local hardware stores either affiliated with the national chains like Ace or True Value or they disappeared, but that happened in the 70s.
I have a different reason not to like Wal-Mart: “Faded Glory.”
Like most large retail and grocery chains, Wal-Mart offers private label store brands, commonly referred to as house brands or generic brands, which consumers expect to be low-priced alternatives to name brand products.
“Faded Glory” is Wal-Mart’s house brand for basic men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing and footwear. It is the store’s primary clothing brand.
Definitions of “Fade”:
1: to lose freshness, strength, or vitality
2: to lose freshness or brilliance of color
3: to sink away : vanish as in “a fading memory”
4: to change gradually in loudness, strength, or visibility
5 (of an automobile brake): to lose braking power gradually
Usage: “He’s trying to recapture the faded glory of his youth.”
Why on Earth would a major chain want its primary customers to think they are fading off to nothingness.
Unless the glory of Sam Walton’s dream has indeed faded.
Today is Earth Day
I suspect that has nothing to do with the fact that eBay’s President and CEO, John Donahoe, personally emailed me this morning. “Congress is considering online sales tax legislation that is wrongheaded and unfair,” he said, “and I am writing to ask for your help in telling Congress ‘No!’ to new sales taxes and burdens for small businesses.”
I’m all for no new taxes or burdens on small businesses (or their customers).
Voters seem to have a different idea.
Voters haven’t figured out that when they tell the boneheads they elect to “stick it to the rich businessman or rich businesswoman” what they are really doing is making their own cigs or Twinkies or wife-beater t-shirts cost more.
Most states levy a sales and use tax on merchandise.
Here are the arguments, pro and con.
PRO: Sales tax proponents say taxing goods bring economic growth, savings, and investment. I’ve seen no reliable data proving that. Still, the rooms and meals tax here in South Florida is about to ratchet up another thousand percent to finance Dolphin Stadium. That’s OK, though, because that tax fleeces only the tourons.
If a sales and use tax on merchandise is legit, then online sellers should charge it the same way local stores do. After all, people who use stuff owe the tax no matter where the stuff is bought.
CON: Sales taxes are regressive. (A regressive tax is defined as “a tax that takes a larger percentage from low-income people than from high-income people.”) I discussed the how much a bigger bite of your paycheck a sales tax takes here last week.
I don’t believe sales and use tax on merchandise is a fair or equitable way for a state to raise funds so no online merchant should collect it; the local stores ought not charge it either.
Mr. Donahoe thinks the solution is simple: if Congress passes online sales tax legislation, eBay says small businesses with [fewer] than 50 employees or less than $10 million in annual out-of-state sales should be exempt from the burden of collecting sales taxes nationwide. Mr. Donahoe wrote “less” there, but I corrected that, too.
eBay’s solution is the worst of all possible worlds. If the tax is due, exempting one group from collecting it is an accounting (and marketing) nightmare, not to mention probably unconstitutional.
And what happens when a $9,999,990 business sells an extra $10 this year? They didn’t collect tax all year. Do they go back to all their customers? Do they suddenly have to find the $5 or $600,000 in taxes owed from their own revenue?
“So what is the fair and equitable way for a state to raise funds?” Liz Arden asked me.
If We the Overtaxed people really really understood how much it costs us to employ 22,267,206 federal plus state and local government civilian workers, we would have thrown the always-on-vacation bums out of office decades ago.
And that, dear reader, is why there will never, ever be tax reform in these United States.
(The U.S. Census reports, in a file called “APES,” that our federal government civilian employment plus state and local government public employment payroll for March of 2011 was about $86,500,000,000.)
Did you know you can deduct the state sales tax you pay from your federal tax return?