Archive for the 'Sales' category

Tea with a Surprise

Aug 24 2012 Published by under Business, Craziness, Food, How Not To Sell, Stuff That Sucks, Yuck!!!

 So I drink a lot of tea and coffee – A LOT of tea and coffee.  So much so that buying packages of tea bags is kind of pointless.  Instead I buy great big bags of loose tea, and typically buy a bunch of them at once. About two weeks ago I bought five 8 oz bags of Starbucks loose Awake tea (like the bag pictured here from their website.)

I have some old tin tea containers I keep the loose stuff in and this morning I went to pour from one of the bags into the tin.  That’s when I heard the clank and thought to myself, “Tea doesn’t normally clank.”

Tea, you have to understand, is one of your quieter beverages in its natural state.  There typically aren’t really heavy objects in tea that would make a clanking sort of a sound. That’s one thing I really like about tea. It’s pretentiousness typically lends itself more to quiet introspection rather than noisily announcing its arrival.  That’s more of a soda thing to do.

So anyway, the clank really took me by surprise. I looked into the tin to see exactly who this tea thought it was and why it was coming around bringing all this ruckus.

That’s when I saw it.

Now, of all the things you typically don’t find in tea, hardware is typically high on the list.  The ingredient list on tea is usually pretty straightforward. It’s typically, you know, just the tea. There may be some teas that are iron fortified, but I don’t really think that’s what they mean.

In my case, the fact that my tea included anything other than tea was pretty much a surprise. I’m not talking surprise on the scale of discovering you’re a lottery winner, more like finding out that girl you were flirting with at the bar is really a dude.  The extra parts were kind of unnerving.

So I thought I would post about this for two reasons.  First, I haven’t posted in a while and felt the need to justify the money I spend on maintaining this site. Second, I thought I would throw this out there in case my friends at Starbucks are planning to include anything else in my tea – like maybe a baby mouse or a human body part (both of which, for the record, would rise to the level of lottery winner surprise.)

You see, I like my tea just with the tea in it. I don’t really feel like the piece of their processing equipment that was in my order was really necessary or appreciated.

Some may disagree. Somewhere in the US there may have been a guy who would have said, “Wow!  That is exactly the size felangee I needed to complete my time machine and finally blow this place!”

I, on the other hand, just wanted some tea.

Starbucks, do you think maybe, just maybe, next time you can make that happen?

Comments

A La Carte for Video Games

Sep 22 2011 Published by under Gaming, Sales, Technology, Xbox

Last night I tweeted something mostly to mock the “free culture” movement that doesn’t want to pay for anything.  Since I mostly play the multiplayer versions of video games, and rarely spend any time at all with the storyline, I made the following comment:

A la carte for video games! Why should I have to buy the storyline just to get the multiplayer?

Since then, it occurred to me that there is a larger point to be made from that idea.  Everyone agrees that a disk based video game industry is on the way out.  As next generation consoles include more drive capacity, broadband speeds continue to rise; and optical drives fall aside in favor of downloadable content, the idea of a straight download model makes sense.

As delivery changes, the options for sales grow.  Services like OnLive, Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade clearly illustrates that streaming or direct to drive game delivery are models that work.  Given the removal of physical constraints that accompany disks, there is little reason game companies couldn’t provide three versions of a game – multiplayer, storyline, and a combo pack.

If they did, people like me would never buy the storyline again.  I simply don’t find the storyline game all that interesting.  Linear games are boring affairs and open-world can get just as tedious.  Multiplayer is infinitely variable depending on the opposition.  Campers (those cowardly rat bastards) aside, human players make a more interesting game.

If I could buy just the multiplayer for half the cost of the combo pack, I’d buy a lot more games.  My total contribution to the industry wouldn’t drop, but it would be spread out across a wider array of companies.  I suspect a lot of people would do the same.

The possibility of owning a larger library of games I would play (multiplayer) and keeping my drive from being all crudded  up with storyline crap, appeals to me.  I hope the game developers will realize the options available to them and consider breaking up the product.

That said, I’m not about to demand FCC acton to regulate game companies to make that happen.

Comments

Taco Bell Now Transphobic AND Bashing Immigrants

Sep 28 2010 Published by under Business, How Not To Sell, Marketing, Sales

I’m not sure who is doing Taco Bell’s advertising, but speaking as someone who does communications for a living, I think they should be fired immediately.

Apparently it wasn’t enough to bash the transgendered.  That ad was pulled and they issued a formal apology.  Now the fast food giant’s advertising brain trust has set their sights on a new scourge facing America – Hispanics who sell food door-to-door in offices.

For a couple of years out of college I worked in a warehouse – arriving every day at 5:30 am to get the morning shipments out the door.  Around 6:45 every morning, a guy would arrive carrying a cooler chest full of breakfast burritos.  They were, and to this day, remain some of my favorite burritos.

The point to that little anecdote is this: I would pay $5.50 for one of those burritos right now, before I would consider spending ninety-nine cents at Taco Bell.  The quality was far superior.  The larger reason, though, is that the Hispanic guy selling them got up earlier than I did every morning, made dozens of breakfast burritos, and then spent his morning selling them door-to-door.  He had drive, a good recipe, and found a way to support himself peddling those burritos. That deserves my support far more than Taco Bell does.

Taco Bell, part of a giant conglomerate of sketchy food brands, is now bashing exactly that sort of hard working individual – suggesting that it’s proud to be undercutting them and pushing them out.

That’s a lovely campaign.  Taco Bell should really be proud of themselves and their ad firm.

Comments

The Perfect Storm Of Stupid

Oct 03 2008 Published by under Business, Congress, Craziness, Crime, Democrats, Government, How Not To Sell, Legislation, Republicans, Society, Stuck On Stupid, The Economy, The Law, Waste

Let’s be clear about one thing. The economic disaster we find ourselves in is not entirely the making of Wall Street. For the Democrats in the audience, it is not entirely the fault of Republicans. For the Republicans in the audience, this is not entirely the fault of Democrats. This is, to put it plainly, the net result of the perfect storm of stupidity.

If you have ever read The Perfect Storm, there is a great explanation of the three weather phenomenon that came together to create the system that is the focus of the book. The movie glosses over the explanation, so read the book instead.

What we are witnessing this week is the same interaction of three deadly factors. Any one of the three would be destructive. In total, however, they have just cost you and I a trillion dollars. And don’t for a moment think the total will end there. Mark my words, this bailout has only begun to cost us.

The Three Factors

Under a Republican congress and Democratic President, Washington expanded a Carter era relic called the Community Reinvestment Act.

The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound banking operations.

In other words, banks will make loans for houses to people who are ill-equipped to pay them back. The “encouragement” came in the form of penalties for not doing so.

Add to that another bill passed by a GOP controlled Congress with a Democratic President. That bill, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act sought to:

Enhance competition in the financial services industry by providing a prudential framework for the affiliation of banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and other financial service providers, and for other purposes.

In other words, prior to the law, Insurance companies could sell insurance, banks could do loans, securities firms sold stock, and never the three should meet. After the law, it was a free for all. Banks created securities out of the shitty loans they issued under the CRA, Insurance companies under wrote those while creating their own shitty securities, etc, etc.

Now into the mix you have to throw the American people. They look at the news and see home values going through the roof. The react the same way they did during the Beanie Baby craze. They rush out to get a piece of that action. They can buy a $5 stuffed animal and sell it for $300 on eBay, so they buy the hell out of Beanie Babies.

Unfortunately, economic laws will only support that for so long. The company will make more (thereby reducing demand for the things), people will lose interest, or some other force will enter the market and suddenly your left with crates full of stuffed animals rotting in closets. Beanie Babies were an artificial market.

In the same way, people saw home ownership as a great way to make money. Home flipping became the rage, people took out second mortgages to buy second homes, and suddenly everyone had to buy a house.

The Perfect Storm

The trouble is when you have people who can’t afford to buy houses meeting up with people who have to sell houses to keep from running afoul of laws designed to promote home ownership among the poor, you wind up with a) a guy who will lie about his income or b) a guy who will lie about the value of the house or the terms of the loan.

So suddenly a lot of people are invested in houses they can barely afford anyway, and the real terms of those notes go into effect. People can’t pay, so the value of that note becomes worthless.

Since you have built shitty securities on the value of that house, the value of those securities go into the toilet. When that happens, the debt that the mortgage company is carrying becomes unsustainable and the house of cards comes tumbling down.

This is exactly what we’re witnessing. We’re seeing exactly what happens when an artificial market comes tumbling down. There never was a market for housing for people who can’t afford it. The government created one, took their eyes of the guys who were managing it, and is now asking us to throw another deck on the house of cards so people who can’t afford to borrow can keep doing so.

DC is Fundamentally Broken

I have said that Washington DC is so fundamentally broken it is going to drag the rest of the country down with it. I am more convinced of that than ever today.

With this bailout, we’re solving nothing. We’re simply allowing people who shouldn’t have credit to keep on borrowing. We’re enabling addictive behavior. The Congressmen who voted for the bailout should be tried as traitors.

Despite all of that, I was forced to watch to politicians on TV last night both of whom blamed “the greed and corruption of Wall Street” for the mess while giving a pass to the incompetence and stupidity of Washington. Make no mistake. This dismal situation was the result of horrible policy that started with, and was supposed to be overseen by, Congress. They passed the laws that allowed this to happen and ARE TAKING ABSOLUTELY NO RESPONSIBILITY for the mess they created.

What’s worse, is both candidates for President, and both candidates for Vice President, appear to have learned absolutely nothing from watching this happen and are pursuing the same ridculous policies that have crippled our nation.

I believe you can absolutely count on two things.

First, when the next Administration is about 6 months or a year into its term, they will have to deal with an economic disaster of Biblical proportions. This is a band-aid fix for a missing leg. It’s stupid and will do nothing but punt the problem into an off-year when the sheep aren’t watching.

Second, if you think we dodged a bullet with this bill today, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Comments

How Not To Sell Volume 1

Apr 11 2008 Published by under Business, How Not To Sell, Marketing, Sales

I guess it is sales and marketing education day here at The Quip. No sooner did I complete my post about following your brand online that I get the e-mail below. This was the whole message:

Every Month, We Show 30 Million Cable Customers Why Cable TV Is a Great Educational Resource for Teachers, Students & Families of All Ages!

www.EducationConnection.tv

I guess the sender was under the mistaken impression I would be so impressed by his ability to write one coherent sentence that I’d feverishly click, Pavlov’s dog-like, on the link.

Talk about a stupid way to introduce yourself or make a pitch to someone via e-mail. There’s no mention of who he is, why he thinks I might be remotely interested in his product, or even a cursory explanation of why I should bother myself for 30 seconds out of a busy day to explore the url he sent.

Seriously, this is the equivalent of the following cold call:

Potential Customer: Hello?

Caller: We have a product. Want to buy it?

I’ve been on the receiving end of some incredibly bad sales pitches. In one, the salesman pulled a filthy, dirty, broken toy tug boat out of a box, placed it on our very expensive wooden coffee table and tried to make some point that included the pilfering of said toy from his kid’s sandbox. Honestly I don’t recall a thing he said after that nasty piece of crap hit the table.

In another, the salesman was so coked up he was almost unintelligible as he ran through what should have been a twenty minute pitch in about 45 seconds. He was talking so fast he raised my blood pressure and caused a nervous eye tick in a co-worker.

Both of those, however, stood a better chance of getting business from me than this ridiculous e-mail. There are ways to sell, and there are ways to convince me you’re a moron. This achieved the latter.

Comments

Livefyre Not Displaying on this post