store: Ruehl’s “concept” of what appeals to the 22-35 hip NYC-loving crowd
First things first, I was asked to become an editor on Organic’s blog ThreeMinds, which might be easier than I want to believe, but I still am going to insist on feeling a little honored and excited. So, whenever I end up writing about something that would fit as an article on that blog, rather than duplicating entires, I will probably just write a summary here and link to the full article on ThreeMinds.
So, first example… I visited Ruehl the other day when I was shopping in the mall. For those of you who don’t know, Ruehl is the arm of Abercrombie & Fitch that is supposed to target “22-35 year olds looking for that West Village NYC shopping experience”. Really, it just does a lot to intimidate and infuriate that post-college casual professional crowd that it looks to target.
You can my full article about the store and its crazy design concept here: The Concept Behind Concept Stores.
technorati tags: concept stores, ruehl
customer service: club express card
Why does over-the-phone customer service have to suck so much? I feel like there are fifty times more bad customer service stories than good customer service stories. Riddle me this… how is this scenario a “service” to me the “customer”?
I get a phone call today from Express, the clothing store. It is the billing department asking me to pay the minimum fee on my 2 months overdue credit card. Funny, I haven’t been contacted once in the past two months in regards to this bill, no paper statement, no e-mail statement. But this person wasn’t interested in this, she was only interested in having me pay my minimum fee. Fair enough, only she kept trying to persuade me that “I only needed to pay $50″ even though I made it clear to here that I always pay my credit cards off on time and in full. So I finally convince her to charge me the full amount, then she tells me on top of everything that I will get charged a $7 fee since this was over the phone. Great!!
So I log onto my online account to see if I can at least get more information than this woman gave me. I see that I had indeed paid my bill on time over a month or so ago, and that it had been “no fault returned” a week or so after. Hmmm… so, I pay my bill on time, you return my money, don’t call more or tell me for a month or so, and then expect me to pay all your late fees and charges. Wonderful, wonderful.
I call up customer service and explain the situation. The customer service representative unsympathetically tells me that it was an input error on their side that got my bank account wrong, so they will waive the late fee as a “one-time courtesy”. I ask her why I was never called or e-mailed, and if this ever happened in the future, if they could make sure to call or e-mail me so that I am not late on my payments. She explained that depending on where the error happens in the system, there is no way they can assure me I will be contacted. But, I’m sure that if I don’t pay on time I will be instantly penalized for it, they can assure that.
So, she reads me off the new amount I will be charged, and I see that it is above the amount I owe… oh, but I forgot about that $7 phone fee. So, I pay online on time, your mistake causes my payment not to go through, and because of that I now have to pay over the phone… and I’m being charged extra for it. Yep, but she tells me she is actually saving me money because if I paid online right now it wouldn’t go through in time and I’d be charged another $20 late fee. So they are actually saving me $13!!!
So, I guess $7 in the end isn’t that big a deal, but when you add in the time I lost today on the phone with two different people, the gross sense of frustration on my otherwise nice weekend, and whatever points I’ve lost on my credit score for failing to pay the card on time (no way Express can help me out there)… was it really worth the 10% I saved on my clothing purchase by opening that account? No, especially considering all unnecessary marketing I have now opened myself up to by giving Express my information.
Bottomline, the next time you are tempted by one of these “just sign up, it’s so easy” deals, think about whether it is really worth it in the long run.
technorati tags: club express
wine concept: terroir
Terroir (/tεʀwaÊ€/ in French) very loosely translated means “a sense of place.” In wine, it refers to the sum of the effects on the final product that can be attributed to the local environment, meaning climate, soil, geology, altitude, vineyard practices, and the history of the land. All these and more are said to play a role in the quality and flavor of the wine that is produced.
With that being said… during a recent visit to some Ontario wineries, I saw a “terroir” that made me think twice about consuming this particular vineyard’s wine.
Mmmm… smooth black raspberry with a hint of oak and grandma.
technorati tags: terroir
web concepts: web 2.0, silly names and useless mashups
So for a while it was interesting, then it was funny, then predictable, and now it is just annoying. Why do Web 2.0 start-ups still insist on all the crazy “innovation” (aka boring conformity in the guise of silliness) when it comes to their names? There are about 30 posts a day on Mashable.com with the newest excessively web-2.0-ey named upstarts (see Streakr, Jaduka, Galaxi, the list goes on and on). It’s become so ridiculous that there are numerous web sites and articles dedicated to the stupidity and formulaity of it all: web 2.0 name generator, worst web 2.0 names, web 2.0 bullshit generator, and my favorite, the web 2.0 logo generator:
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A fully Twitter-integrated Google Maps mashup of the worlds stinkiest places
The web is so littered with junk like this that it is hard to find anything of use. Maybe someone can make a web 2.0 site to review, tag, and sort web 2.0 sites. Maybe it can integrate with Facebook and Flickr and publish out widgets to your iPhone. Oooh… and it can be a social networking site, a wiki, and user-generated video site all rolled into one!!!!!!
Sorry, I’m in a weird mood today, because I have recently accepted how wonderful the web 2.0 giant Flickr really is, yet how completely useless (although sometimes intriguing) and often poorly executed the billions of stupidly named mash-ups are. It is frustrating, because I really think there is so much more potential out there for Flickr, beyond a fun way to waste time.
Yeah, yeah… I know there actually are some useful Flickr apps in existence (although they are greatly outnumbered by stupid ones). But, here are a few I haven’t found yet, that I would like to see:
Maybe there are some of these useful tools already out there, but they are so buried underneath the piles of web 2.0 garbage, that I haven’t been able to find them. Maybe someone can invent a StreetSweepr plugin for Firefox that is able to block out particularly annoying, useless, and/or redundant web 2.0 apps from your browsing experience.
technorati tags: flickr mashups, web 2.0 names
tv show: On The Lot
Ugh… another hour of my life wasted on this terrible show. With the third season of “Top Chef” starting, a show where you don’t even get to reap the fruits of the contestants labor in any true form, I am reminded of how much more interesting and engaging the Bravo format is. FOX missed the entire point about what makes the creative reality TV ventures so entertaining. We like to see creative people challenged beyond their box, we like to imagine what they had to go through to create what they did, and that way we can actual value what is being created. Top Chef makes chefs create gourmet dishes out of canned ingredients in 30 minutes time. On “On The Lot” we have no idea the time limit, resources, budget, or creative limitations the filmmakers had. How then can we effectively compare one to the other? These people should be challenged to make fun but disposable YouTube shorts… little time, little budget, random props, crazy idea, go. They should be creative exercises… give them a short 1 minute script that is vague enough to be interpreted into any situations. Make them direct child stars, make them work with animals. “On the Lot” should be filmmaking boot camp at its finest. Instead it is a complete and utter failure.
technorati tags: On The Lot, Top Chef
movie: Creepshow 3
Creepshow II featured such talents behind it as Stephen King and George Romero. Naturally, Creepshow III (a good 20 years in the making) would be a straight to video sequel featuring the talents behind Day of the Dead 2: Contagium, another straight to video sequel many decades in the making that has been described as “a disgrace to Romero’s name and the series.” Creepshow II featured such memorable segments as “The Raft“, King’s short story about a group of college kids who go swimming in a lake only to get surrounded and eventually devoured by an abstract deadly monster substance. Creepshow III features such amazing segments as:
In the words of another IMDB user, “So horrible, it made me angry.”
technorati tags: creepshow, bad movies
tv show: NBC’s Heroes
My blog posts have been increasingly long lately, so I’m going to make this quick. Especially since the great Heroes vs Lost debate has already been well waged by people other than me. So short and sweet… Heroes had me hooked for a little while there, even made me cry (the sign of all really good television) during the episode where Claire’s dad erases his memory in the hopes to save his adopted daughter. Their story is easily the best plotline in the show that really gave some depth in an otherwise flat experience, and from that episode on, the whole show went into cruise-control until the season finale. What I mean is the characters followed their paths as expectedly as possible, there were no surprises, just steadily increasing mediocrity. But other people sum it up better than me. I just wanted to throw my hat into the Heroes vs Lost ring by saying that ultimately what Lost will always have that Heroes can never obtain is the ability to throw things out there that will have the community aflutter, talking, theorizing, wikiing, posting screenshots, playing online experience games in the hopes of figuring out the big mystery. And to me, that will always make it a far better show, no matter what the ratings say.
technorati tags: Heroes, Lost, season finale
websites: http://winespectator.com, http://corkd.com
As I began to draft this article out, an amazing announcement came that Gary Vaynerchuk, famous wine vlogger at Wine Library TV, acquired Cork’d, a web 2.0 community site for reviewing wine. This could mean great things for a continually growing online community of the knowledge hungry wine youths. Since 2005, wine has overtaken beer as America’s drink of choice, and the marketers have targeted in on the Millenials and with good reason. The wine market has an intimidating learning curve to a beginner, and simple things like unique packaging, flashy labels, or quirky names, can set a wine out amongst the sea of indecipherable foreign labels with chateaus and medieval fonts. Millenials are drinkers not collectors, drinkers that can easily become brand enthusiasts, loving to share the knowledge they have with peers, which is why Cork’d exploded ever since its launch last year.
So with a web-savvy, info hungry audience looking for a helpful guide into this sometimes gated community of wine appreciation, it would make sense that Wine Spectator Online would be a safe haven, perhaps not on the cutting edge of social web technology, but at least a highly useful online Encyclopedia Brittanica of all things wine. Oh… but no, so far from it, so very far from it. I cannot fathom how the slick oversized glossy pages (makes the in some ways more friendly, approachable Food & Wine pathetic in comparison) could be translated so poorly into this uninspired chaotic design:
I could go own for pages about what drives me nuts about Wine Spectator Online. The biggest crime to its name is that it actually has a wealth of content, useful industry respected content. It’s just so unnecessarily hard to find. In the sea of dull grey and blue that is the boring WS homepage, it took me nearly a full year’s paid subscription to even realize there was blogs, forums, travel information, etc. Wine Spectator the print version is packed full of content already, to aimlessly pile more content creates a disorienting browsing experience. There are no individual RSS feeds for the blogs, or an easy way to distinguish one from the other, or from the exclusive WS online articles for that matter. Wine Videos… is this like a wine vlog or educational videos, I’m not sure and WS isn’t helping. They direct me to view from various different channels with no definitions of what is what, no helpful tags to cross channels, and its certainly not exporting any sort of XML making the video content searchable. Everything just seems to be throw in haphazardly and without proper thought. Ask Dr. Vinny, a wine expert column that isn’t integrated into the overall site search, no RSS, no categorization. It’s the everything but the kitchen sink policy to web design.
Well at least they got their primary site use functionality nailed, right? At least searching for wine reviews is easy. While a recent update has taken it from “disastrous” to “lacking”, the inability to customize the display of the returned list, especially when it is supposed to act as a shopping guide, is a major problem that makes me really wonder how far into the experience the creators of the site thought. It seems that all the paths get you as far as information retrieval without allowing the user to actual use the information they are being inundated with (and there certainly is a flood of it). Part II… where the world of online wine needs to go to get me truly excited.
technorati tags: Wine Spectator, Cork’d, wine
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