Category Archives: Business

I Beg to Differ

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OK — beg? No, not so much.

Dell deceived customers, judge says

I have no complaint about any alleged bait-and-switch. It’s this:

“Our goal has been, and continues to be, to provide the best customer experience possible,” spokesman Jess Blackburn said in a written statement to CNN.

Cough, splurt. Get on it, please.

I had the misfortune and displeasure of buying from Dell recently. I was buying a computer for someone else, and they had gone to the trouble of configuring and customizing it, and saving an e-quote. Which I could not retrieve — I apparently can only retrieve quotes for some predefined work group. So if you aren’t set up in the system, I can’t buy from the quote. My colleague didn’t create an account, so going back and even accessing the quote on his computer was problematic. At that point, if this had been any other purchase, I would have been shopping elsewhere, but approval had been obtained for this particular machine. Eventually — it took about an hour — we prevailed. I don’t see the business advantage in making it hard to buy something.

But the story doesn’t end there, since I had to get a replacement keyboard a few weeks later. Except there’s no actual part number on the invoice, and searching on Dell’s website led me to a dead-end. I had to pretend to buy a new computer to figure out what to order.

And even that is fraught with danger. I tried to replace a video card for an older machine last year, and found a list of compatible parts, but the Dell site wanted to charge me tax (government purchases are normally tax-exempt) so I ordered the part elsewhere. And it didn’t fit. An AGP vs PCI problem. When I contacted Dell to tell them their information was bad, I was assured that the card did fit my computer — it says so on the website!

Contrast those experiences with Amazon. I bought a new pocket-camera last week (SLRs don’t always travel well), and after taking a few pictures I noticed a spot in the same location on each. It became sharper when I zoomed in, and didn’t go away when I cleaned the lens. So it was inside somewhere. Went to their website, clicked on the “exchange this” option, and they overnighted a new camera to me (works great!).

Worth its Weight in Printer Ink

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The monetary density of things

People have been saying that the new industrial grade swimsuits like the LZR Racer are worth their weight in gold. As you can see, this is clearly inaccurate. But such a suit is worth its weight in marijuana or industrial diamonds.

At the high end of this graph is gold (the only thing worth exactly its own weight in gold!), right next to the cost of launching a pound of stuff to low earth orbit on the ISS. Putting that into perspective here: You might as well build your whole spaceship out of $20 bills– it still would cost less than putting it up there. It could almost be made of solid gold for that price.

At the end there’s a table with a whole bunch of stuff, all with its weight per pound. Printer ink? More expensive than silver, pound-for-pound.

What's the Rolls Royce of Chemistry?

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Disciplines of chemistry as retail chains. The IKEA of Chemistry

Total Synthesis- The Wal-Mart of Chemistry. Okay, before I alienate my tot. syn. friends with this one, let’s think about it. Typically, when modern reactions are developed, they are almost immediately put to task in syntheses of natural products, as proof of their usefulness. People go to natural products in a pinch, typically cause they have nowhere else to go. Much like Wal-Mart. Both Wal-Mart and total synthesis labs are open 24 hours. Also, both have gathered quite a bit of controversy in their exploitation of labor…

Seftonomics

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Via Kottke, The Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp

Stories circulated of a padre who started off round the camp with a tin of cheese and five cigarettes and returned to his bed with a complete parcel in addition to his original cheese and cigarettes; the market was not yet perfect. Within a week or two, as the volume of trade grew, rough scales of exchange values came into existence. Sikhs, who had at first exchanged tinned beef for practically any other foodstuff, began to insist on jam and margarine. It was realized that a tin of jam was worth 1/2 lb. of margarine plus something else; that a cigarette issue was worth several chocolates issues, and a tin of diced carrots was worth practically nothing.

In this camp we did not visit other bungalows very much and prices varied from place to place; hence the germ of truth in the story of the itinerant priest. By the end of a month, when we reached our permanent camp, there was a lively trade in all commodities and their relative values were well known, and expressed not in terms of one another – one didn’t quote bully in terms of sugar – but in terms of cigarettes. The cigarette became the standard of value. In the permanent camp people started by wandering through the bungalows calling their offers – “cheese for seven” (cigarettes) – and the hours after parcel issue were Bedlam. The inconveniences of this system soon led to its replacement by an Exchange and Mart notice board in every bungalow, where under the headings “name,” “room number,” “wanted” and “offered” sales and wants were advertised. When a deal went through, it was crossed off the board. The public and semipermanent records of transactions led to cigarette prices being well known and thus tending to equality throughout the camp, although there were always opportunities for an astute trader to make a profit from arbitrage. With this development everyone, including non-smokers, was willing to sell for cigarettes, using them to buy at another time and place. Cigarettes became the normal currency, though, of course, barter was never extinguished.

Don't Fall Behind

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Ketchup

A whole lot about the king of condiments, without getting into shear thinning and thixotropic properties.

It explains why Barenaked Ladies can’t find the fancy dijon ketchup they want in “If I Had a $1,000,000”

What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

The business decision of empowering kids

A typical five-year-old consumes about sixty per cent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control. “If you are four—and I have a four-year-old—he doesn’t get to choose what he eats for dinner, in most cases,” Keller says. “But the one thing he can control is ketchup. It’s the one part of the food experience that he can customize and personalize.”

With some multivariable optimization thrown in.

The Truth Can Be a Scary Thing

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Mechanization and Standardization

. . . and how some people resist it, thinking manual labor is best.

Given an infinite number of monkeys with Excel, you can produce the client reporting.

(And for those of you who live in 2007 where the idea of having human beings actually touching data is out of the misty past, I bring news from the rest of the world: It’s cold out here, cold as death. The vast majority of business in this country is done in the exact same way your forward-thinking uncle did his taxes in 1986. “That machine? Oh, that machine has the client billing Access database. Don’t touch it.”)

I’m stuck somewhere in that nightmare.

Anyway, the rest of the story is pretty funny.

Random Thought

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Business section of the LOLcat Times-Gazette, headline about the pedestrian eating habits of a well-known an activist shareholder

Icahn Has Cheeseburger

(sometimes on the treadmill, all one can do is think silly thoughts)