Here’s what flying in and out of Newark looks like right now:
That storm is very heavy, but narrow. It’s going to wash over New York like a big wave.
Hat tip to Flightaware.
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My loyalty to Peet’s Coffee is absolute. I have loved Peet’s since it was a single store in Berkeley. I told my wife in 2001 that I wouldn’t move anywhere outside the Bay Area unless there was a Peet’s nearby. That pre-qualified Santa Barbara, where we live now. When we travel to where Peets has retail stores, we buy bags of our favorite beans (which tend to be one of the above) to take to our New York apartment, because there are no Peets stores near there. When we’re in New York and not traveling, we look for stores that sell bags of one of the bean bags above.
Since our car died and we haven’t replaced it yet, we have also taken to ordering beans through Peet’s website. Alas, we’re done with that now. Here’s why:
I ordered those beans (Garuda and New Guinea) two Thursdays ago, June 16, at 7:45am. A couple days after I ordered the beans, I checked my account online to see where the shipment stood, and the site said the beans would be shipped on Monday, June 19. According to the email I got yesterday (a section of which I show above), the beans didn’t ship until the following Wednesday, June 21. Now the estimated delivery is next Wednesday, June 28.
While this isn’t a big deal, it’s still annoying because we just ran out of our last batch of beans here and we’ll be gone when that shipment arrives. Subscribing (which Peet’s e-commerce system would rather we do) also won’t work for us because we travel too much and don’t settle in any one place for very long. True, that’s not Peet’s problem, and I’m a sample of one. But I’ve experienced enough e-commerce to know that Peet’s shipping thing isn’t working very well.
And maybe it can’t. I don’t know. Here’s what I mean…
Way back in the late ’90s I was having lunch in San Francisco with Jamie Zawinski, whose work as a programmer is behind many of the graces we take for granted in the online world. (He’s a helluva writer too.) At one point he said something like “Somebody should figure out what Amazon does, bottle it, and sell it to every other retailer doing e-commerce.” And here we are, nearly two decades later, in a world where the one e-commerce company everybody knows will do what it says is still Amazon. (I’ll spare you my much worse tale of woe getting new air conditioners bought and shipped from Home Depot.)
So that’s a problem on the service side.
Now let’s talk marketing. A while back, Peet’s came out with an app that lets you check in at its stores for rewards when you buy something there. You do that this way at the cash register:
- Find the app on your phone.
- Click on Check In, so a QR code materializes on your phone’s screen.
- Aim the QR code at a gizmo by the cash register that can read the QR code.
- Hope it works.
I’ve done this a lot, or at least tried to. Here are just some of the problems with it, all of which I offer both to help Peet’s and to dissuade companies everywhere from bothering with the same system:
- It doesn’t work at every Peet’s location. This is annoying to customers who break out their phone, bring up the app, get ready to check in, and then get told “It’s not here yet.”
- Workers at the stores don’t like it—either because it’s one more step in the ordering process or because, again, “it’s not here yet.” Some employees put a nice face on, but you can tell many employees consider it an unnecessary pain in the ass.
- The customer needs to check in at exactly the right point in the purchase, or it doesn’t count. Or at least that’s been my experience a time or two. Whatever the deal is, the narrow check-in time window risks bumming out both the customer and the person behind the counter.
- The customer reviews are bad, with good reason. On the app’s page in iTunes Preview it says, “Current Version: 17 Ratings (1.5 stars) All Versions: 94 Ratings (2 stars).” The only published 4-star review reads, “They are a little vague on the rewards system – do I get a point per visit, or a point per drink? Also not a very rewarding system, esp when compared to starbucks or non chains I know of. However, I’ve had no problems with the app malfunctioning, so although I dislike the system it’s not the apps fault.”
- It sometimes doesn’t work. I mean, bzzzt: no soap. Or worse, works poorly. For example, when I opened the app just now, it said “Hi, Peetnik” and told me I have 0/15 reward points, meaning I’ve checked in zero times. Then, when I clicked on the “>”, it said “15 more & your next cup’s on us.” Finally, when I fiddled with the app a bit, it woke up and told me “4 points until your next reward.”
Here’s the thing: None of this stuff is necessary. Worse, it’s pure overhead, a value-subtract from the start. And Peet’s is one of the all-too-rare retailers that doesn’t need this kind of crap at all. It has already earned, and keeps, the loyalty of its customers. It just needs to keep doing a better job of making better coffee.
In The Intention Economy I tell the story of Trader Joe’s, another retailer that does a good job of earning and keeping its customers’ loyalty. You know how they do that? With approximately no marketing at all. “We don’t do gimmicks,” Doug Rauch, the retired President of Trader Joe’s told me. No loyalty cards. No promotional pricing. No discounts for “members.” (In fact they have no discounts at all. Just straightforward prices for everything.) Almost no advertising. Nothing that smacks of coercion. And customers love them.
My recommendation to Peet’s on the service side is to ship as fast and well as Amazon, or to stop trying and let Amazon handle the whole thing. Amazon already carries a variety of Peet’s beans and other coffee products. Either way, there is no excuse for taking almost two weeks to deliver an order of beans.
On the marketing side, I suggest dropping the app and the gizmos at the stores. Save the operational costs and reduce the cognitive overhead for both personnel and customers. Personal data gathered through apps is also a toxic asset for every company—and don’t let any marketers tell you otherwise. Like Trader Joe’s, Peet’s doesn’t need the data. Make the best coffee and provide the best service at the stores, and you’ll get and keep the best customers. Simple as that.
You’re in the coffee game, Peet’s. Keep winning that way. For everything that isn’t doing what you’ve always done best, less is more.
Tags: coffee, e-commerce, loyalty, marketing, Peets, retailing
I’ve hated rating people ever since I first encountered the practice. That was where everybody else does too: in school.
After all, rating people is what schools do, with tests and teachers’ evaluations. They do it because they need to sort students into castes. What’s school without a bell curve?
As John Taylor Gatto put it in the Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, the job of the educator in our industrialized education system is to teach these things, regardless of curricular aspirations or outcomes:
- confusion
- class position
- indifference
- emotional dependency
- intellectual dependency
- provisional self-esteem
- that you can’t hide
It’s no different in machine-run “social sharing” systems such as we get from Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. In all those systems we are asked to rate the people who share their cars and homes, and they are asked to rate us. The hidden agenda behind this practice is the same as the one Gatto describes above.
I bring this up because yesterday my wife and I had our first less-than-ideal shared ride. To spare everyone involved, I won’t say whether it was with Uber or Lyft, or where the ride went. I will say the ride is normally around half an hour, and we’ve taken the same ride dozens of times.
First, the driver didn’t help us load our two heavy bags into the trunk of his car, which had a lot of loose crap in it.(And, to be fair, lots of shared-ride drivers have a collection of their own stuff in the trunk.) Maybe he declined because there was heavy traffic and we all needed to get a move on, or he didn’t see the bags; but let’s just say that wasn’t normal, or what drivers usually do when picking up people with sizable luggage.
Soon as we were on the road, he asked if we’d mind if he stopped at an ATM, because he needed money for tolls. Seems his EZ-Pass transponder had a problem and needed to be sent in and exchanged, so he was operating without it. We said okay and took a slow parallel highway where he hoped an ATM could be found. He eventually found one at a gas station mini-mart, but the machine had a problem that took about 20 minutes, during which we just sat in the car.
After he got the money, we found our way back to the main toll road, and eventually to our destination. At one point on the toll road I reminded him that he should get a receipt for the toll he paid in cash. At our destination he did get out of the car to help with our bags, but I had already removed them from the trunk.
The whole ride took an hour and thirty two minutes, according to the Moves app on my phone. Since it was rush hour, I’d say the ride took about 45 minutes longer than it should have.
So that’s the down side.
The upside was that he seemed to be a genuinely good guy, trying to make a living and dealing with the world. He recently moved into the area to seek work as a recording engineer: a skill he learned recently at a trade school after tiring of an earlier career as a technician for a mobile phone company. His wife is pregnant with their first child, and they are struggling to make ends meet, which is why he was felt he had to work giving rides, even though he lacked two essential conveniences: an EZ-Pass or enough cash.
He had a lot of interesting things to say about working for Uber and Lyft (he drives for both), what makes a good or a bad ride (he’s had both as a passenger), and whether telling the story of their coming baby would make a good YouTube mini-documentary or podcast. We also talked about history, architecture, culture and travel. He speaks Spanish as well as English and would like to go to Spain someday. He also apologized for the delays, and thanked me for understanding his situation. (Or situations.) And I gave him a tip. (Which I always do, at least in the U.S.)
So, while the ride itself wasn’t great, the conversation was one of the better ones I’ve had with a driver. And I wanted to support the guy’s work.
But I couldn’t not rate the guy, or I wouldn’t be able to get a receipt or book the next ride. So I gave him four stars out of five. That’s the first time I’ve given any driver less than five stars. When I clicked on the fourth star, the app said what you see in the screen shot (from my phone) above. “Okay, could be better” was about right. Still, I would much rather have said nothing—or to have sent a note to the company. Anything but giving the guy some number of stars.
And no, I don’t know a better way. I am just sure that rating people is icky, and would rather say nothing than stroke or damn somebody with a star.
Tags: ratings, ride sharing
I’ve been fascinated for years by what comes and goes at the Fort Irwin National Training Center—
—in the Mojave Desert, amidst the dark and colorful Calico Mountains of California, situated in the forbidding nowhere that stretches between Barstow and Death Valley.
Here and there, amidst the webwork of trails in the dirt left by tanks, jeeps and other combat vehicles, fake towns and other structures go up and come down. So, for example, here is Etrebat Shar, a fake town in an “artificial Afghanistan” that I shot earlier this month, on June 2:
And here is a broader view across the desert valley east of Fort Irwin itself:
Look to the right of the “town.” See that area where it looks like something got erased? Well, it did. I took the two shots above earlier this month, on June 2. Here’s a shot of the same scene on June 25, 2013:
Not only is the “town” a bit bigger, but there’s this whole other collection of walls and buildings, covering a far larger area, to the right, or east.
I also see in this shot that it was gone on December 8, 2014.
Now I’m fascinated by this town and the erased something-or-other nearby, which I also shot on June 2:
It appears to be “Medina Wasl,” which Wikipedia says is one of twelve towns built for desert warfare training:
One of the features of the base is the presence of 12 mock “villages” which are used to train troops in Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT) prior to their deployment. The villages mimic real villages and have variety of buildings such as religious sites, hotels, traffic circles, etc. filled with foreign language speaking actors portraying government officials, local police, local military, villagers, street vendors, and insurgents. The largest two are known as Razish and Ujen, the closest located about 30 minutes from the main part of the post. Most of the buildings are created using intermodal containers, stacked to create larger structures, the largest village consists of 585 buildings that can engage an entire brigade combat team into a fight.
Now I’m slowly going through my other shots over the years to see if I can find Razish and Ujen… if they haven’t been erased.
It would be cool to hear from military folk familiar with Fort Irwin, or veterans who have worked or fought mock battles in those towns.
Once, in the early ’80s, on a trip from Durham to some beach in North Carolina, we stopped to use the toilets at a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere. In the stall where I sat was a long conversation, in writing, between two squatters debating some major issue of the time. Think of the best back-and-forth you’ve ever read in a comment thread and you’ll get a rough picture of what this was like.
So I sat there, becoming engrossed and amazed at the high quality of the dialog — and the unlikelihood of it happening where it was.
Until I got to the bottom. There, ending the conversation, were the penultimate and ultimate summaries, posed as a question and answer:
Q: Why do people feel compelled to settle their differences on bathroom walls?
A. Because you suck my dick.
That story became legendary in our family and social network, to such a degree that my then-teenage daughter and her girlfriends developed a convention of saying “Because you suck my dick” whenever an argument went on too long and wasn’t going anywhere. This was roughly the same as dropping a cow: a way to end a conversation with an absurdity.
The whole thing came back to me when I read Pro-Trump Chalk Messages Cause Conflicts on College Campuses in the NYTimes today. The story it suggests is that this kind of thing regresses toward a mean that is simply mean. Or stupid. For example,
Wesleyan University issued a moratorium in 2003, after members of the faculty complained that they were being written about in sexually explicit chalk messages.
So I’m thinking we need a name for this, or at least an initialism. So I suggest BYSMD.
You’re welcome.
At the uptown end of the 59th Street/Columbus Circle subway platform there hangs from the ceiling a box with three disks on fat stalks, connected by thick black cables that run to something unseen in the downtown direction. Knowing a few things about radio and how it works, I saw that and thought, Hmm… That has to be a cell. I wonder whose? So I looked at my phone and saw my T-Mobile connection had five dots (that’s iPhone for bars), and said LTE as well. So I ran @Ookla‘s Speedtest app and got the results above.
Pretty good, no?
Sure, you’re not going to binge-watch anything there, or upload piles of pictures to some cloud, but you can at tug on your e-tether to everywhere for a few minutes. Nice to have.
So I’m wondering, @TMobile… Are those speeds the max one should expect from LTE when your local cell is almost as close as your hat?
And how long before you put these along the rest of the A/B/C/D Train routes? (The only other one I know is at 72nd, a B/C stop.) Or the rest of the subway system? In Boston too? BART? (Gotta hit all my cities.)
Meanwhile, thanks for taking care of my Main Stop in midtown.
Tags: @Ookla, @TMobile, infrastructure, internet, mobile, new york, research, RF, speedtest, subway, telephony
Made a dawn run to the nearby Peets for some dry cappuccinos, and was bathed in glow on my return by one of the most spectacular sunrises I have ever seen. It was post-peak when I got back (to the place where I’m staying in Gold River, California), but with some underexposure and white balance tweaking, I was able to get the shots in this set here.
Alas, the shot above is not in that set. It’s a screen shot I took of an adjusted raw file that Adobe Photoshop CS6 simply refused to save. “The file could not be created,” it said. No explanation. I checked permissions. No problem there. It just refused. I just checke, and the same thing happens with all files from all directories on all drives. Photoshop is suddenly useless to for editing RAW files. Any suggestions?
[Later…] An Adobe forum provided the answer here. All better now.
One of the things that fascinates me about Prague are the skewers atop the spires of its many iconic buildings, each of which pierces a shiny ball. It’s a great look.
I am sure there’s a reason for those things, other than the look itself.
I am also sure there is a word for the ball. The skewer too.
I know it’s not spire, because that labels any conical or tapered point on the roof of a building. Prague is said to be the city of a hundred, or a thousand, spires. Most of those have these balls too, and I’ve become obsessed, while I’m here, with finding out what the hell they’re called.
I’m sure more than a few people out there on the lazyweb know. So tell me.
Thank you.
I travel a lot, and buy newspapers wherever I happen to be. That would be true online as well, if I could do it. But I can’t, because that’s not an option.
For example, my butt is in California right now, but my nose is in Boston, where I’m reading the Globe. I don’t want a subscription to the Globe, but I would like to pay for today’s paper, or for at least the right to read a few stories from it.
Not easy. Or even possible, after the first one or two. Because, soon enough this paywall thingie comes up:
It’ a subscription come-on, modeled after the one the New York Times has been using for years, and I wrote about back in 2012, here. (The switch after the above bait: “$.99*… *That’s less than $1 for 4 full weeks! Then pay the regular low rate of $3.99 per week.”)
I had some advice for the Times at that last link, and I’ve got some for all papers today: create an à la carte option. I know there are lots of reasons not to, all of which arise from system-based considerations on the sell side of the relationship with newspaper buyers.
What I’m saying is that the newsstand option has worked fine for more than a century in the physical world, and should be an option in the networked one as well.
At least think about it. Constructively, as in Let’s see… how can we do that? Not “It’s too hard.” Or “People only want free stuff.” Those are all echoes inside the old box. I want us to think and work outside of that box.
People are willing to pay value for value if it’s easy. So let’s make it easy. The ideas I vetted three years ago are still good, but don’t cover the à la carte option. Let’s just focus on that one, and consider what’s possible.
Here’s a hunk of what one set (aka Album) in my Flickr stream looks like:
And here are what my stats on Flickr looked like earlier today (or yesterday, since Flickr is on GMT and it’s tomorrow there):
I ended up with 32,954 views, with no one of my 49,000+ photos getting more than 56 views. More than 95% of those views arrived via Flickr itself. The stats there are spread across 87 pages of results. Pages 1 to 63 go from 395 views (#1) down to 2. From page 64 to 87, all the results are for 1 view.
I just pulled the searches alone, and got this:
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1 |
395 |
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2 |
307 |
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3 |
206 |
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41 |
164 |
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48 |
143 |
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49 |
139 |
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51 |
138 |
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56 |
134 |
|
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57 |
134 |
|
75 |
113 |
|
79 |
108 |
|
87 |
A contact’s home page |
100 |
|
88 |
100 |
|
92 |
95 |
|
95 |
93 |
|
|
96 |
93 |
|
102 |
90 |
|
107 |
86 |
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110 |
83 |
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|
111 |
82 |
|
130 |
70 |
|
|
131 |
69 |
|
139 |
63 |
|
144 |
61 |
|
153 |
58 |
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|
154 |
57 |
|
165 |
54 |
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|
166 |
54 |
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|
167 |
53 |
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169 |
53 |
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171 |
51 |
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173 |
51 |
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174 |
50 |
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178 |
50 |
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|
179 |
50 |
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184 |
49 |
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189 |
47 |
|
203 |
41 |
|
39 |
|
211 |
39 |
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212 |
39 |
|
216 |
38 |
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220 |
37 |
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221 |
37 |
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225 |
37 |
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229 |
36 |
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235 |
34 |
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239 |
33 |
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244 |
32 |
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249 |
31 |
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251 |
31 |
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252 |
31 |
|
262 |
29 |
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264 |
29 |
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265 |
29 |
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269 |
28 |
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272 |
28 |
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273 |
28 |
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|
274 |
28 |
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275 |
27 |
|
|
276 |
27 |
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284 |
26 |
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287 |
26 |
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300 |
24 |
The numbers on the left are where they fall in the order of popularity. I think the last one means there were 24 searches for roads aerial desert, which was the #300 search.
When I go to the bottom of the pile where all are tied with just one view, I get this stuff:
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
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1 |
Most of the results are not searches, but photos, or photos that are “with” another shot. For example: https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/with/9382370440/. Somehow all those are “with” this shot: https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/9382370440/.
I think that means somebody searches, finds a shot, and looks for other shots like it. Not sure, though.
What I am sure about is that my photos get more action than my writing. I never meant it that way, but there it is.