Randomn3ss

One year ago the House voted on raising the national minimum wage to $7.25, has anything changed? Not really. Since states can regulate their own minimum wage standard, five of which don’t have any guidelines or laws on a standardized wage, all in the southern part of the country. A few other states have minimums way below the new $7.25 standard, including Kansas, which is $2.65 per hour, premium pay, often called over-time doesn’t kick in until after 46 hours of work. The states which are following or exceeding the national minimum won’t be doing so until 2009, at which point the cost of living will probably have risen 3-6% more, keeping those workers still falling behind.

See what each states minimum pay guidelines are, along with proposed increases at the U.S Department of Labor.

Just over three weeks ago I started my investment for a better cup of coffee. The goal is simple, get a better tasting cup of coffee that I would enjoy more than a store-bought coffee and to save some green-backs from the drive through coffee places I was hitting in the morning. Little did I know that poor customer service would hold me back for as long as it did.

As mentioned in the other article, I bought a French press travel mug made by a company called Planetary Design, but they have the mug I wanted listed as temporarily discontinued, so I bought one from Amazon, who only four left, and only in wasabi green (now sold out). Not exactly the color I would have preferred, but it was the mug I thought I wanted. Before I go on. I only bought from Amazon after I had emailed Planetary Design about the wide base mug and if or when it would come back in stock, two full business days later, no response. Ironicly, the mug I bought through Amazon is actually shipped by Liquid Planet, the store version of Planetary Design, as Amazon is a “front” for many businesses.

The mug arrived a few days after buying it, however there was a problem, it was only a mug, not a French press mug. It seems that I mis-read the description and assumed that it was a French press, because that is what the company slogan is, it was just a plain old mug. Mind you, a very nice one, but no French press. This is where my frustration started.

Looking at the Liquid Planet store site, I see that they sell replacement lids and plungers, great! I’ll just find the one that will work in my mug, pay the $5 plus $2 for shipping since it was my stupid mistake and start enjoying it. Then I realized that the wide base mug was not in the drop down menu, so I started to wonder if another one would work. Since more than a week had past since sending an email to Planetary Design to inquire about the mug and it was never replied to, I figured I would just call Liquid Planet directly and talk to a sales person, get my question answered, pay the $7 and move on. Wow, I was wrong.

First call was on the Tuesday that the mug arrived, I explained my situation to the sales person on the phone, told them that I bought a mug that I thought was a French press but clearly it wasn’t and it was my mistake, and I’d like to buy a new lid / plunger to turn it into a French press, but wasn’t sure which one to get, could he help? He said that I would need to speak with a product specialist and asked to put me on hold to see if one was available. They weren’t, so he took my name and number and told me they would be in touch soon. Around 5pm that day a woman called me back, I missed the call but listened to the message, in which she said she would try me again tomorrow. I thought that was odd, I was expecting to get a request to call her back and a direct extension. At 6pm I called and asked the person who answered to talk to the young woman who left me the message, they told me she was unavailable and took my name and number, again.

Wednesday, no call back by the time I went to lunch, so I figured that I’d be proactive and call her back, same story, she was unavailable and took my name and number, now the 3rd time. At 6pm I left work and started driving home, no missed calls, no messages on my cell, I called in once again only to be told she had left for the day. I explained my situation to the person on the other line, all I wanted was a simple answer and only one person there seemed to be able to give it to me. He apologized for not being able to help me and asked for my name and number. I got my first name out and he finished the last for me, followed by my phone number. Clearly they were starting to know who I was. Sadly, I actually wanted to buy something, I wasn’t calling to complain, ask for a refund or exchange, I just wanted to know what part I needed to purchase to make my mug work like a French press.

Thursday, most of my hope was gone for a resolution, when I saw a missed call on my cell phone around 4 in the afternoon - I had given up calling on my lunch break by this point. It was the woman who I was trying to reach, and again telling me she would call back shortly. I called back while leaving work at 6pm and she was unavailable. Fifteen minutes later I was home and just about to take the dog out for a walk when my cell rang, it was them! The woman apologized profusely for the missed connections, phone tag and overall lack of customer service I had experienced and was calling to tell me that there is a proper lid and plunger for my mug and they would be mailing it to me free of charge, just for the hassle. It arrived the following Monday. For the last week and a half I’ve been able to finally enjoy coffee made in a French press.

This was clearly an ordering error on my part, yet contacting the company to purchase more over the phone was a total hassle. The downside is, I really like the mug, it is very high quality and I will give a more in-depth review of it when the follow up article comes, I’m just really disappointed in the quality of customer service that Planet Liquid and Planetary Design have. To this day, I have still not received an email response to the inquiry I sent a month ago.

Woot is many things to many people.  The word has deep, geeky roots, but is now used by nearly anyone who has the internet.  The Urban Dictionary’s definition is

Woot originated as a hacker term for root (or administrative) access to a computer. However, with the term as coincides with the gamer term, “w00t”.

“w00t” was originally an truncated expression common among players of Dungeons and Dragons tabletop role-playing game for “Wow, loot!” Thus the term passed into the net-culture where it thrived in video game communities and lost its original meaning and is used simply as a term of excitement.

Most people just use the term as defined in the last line, a term of excitement.  Then comes one of the web based stores that kind of changed internet retailing, Woot.com.

If you want the actual information on the site, check out the Wikipedia entry, but a quick synopsis is, one item is sold per day, if it sells out, wait till tomorrow.  This was kind of a unique business model when it started and there have been dozens of copy-cat websites, none have been able to capture the fanatical fans that Woot has though.  Items being sold are usually that of a tech nature, although coffee makers and electric razors show up, but Woot is famous for two other sales pitches that they do on a regular basis.  The bag of crap is a $5 grab bag, most are unique, limited to three per purchase and a $5 shipping fee.  Rumors go in the forums that people have received everything from a few ink pens worth about 15 cents to a 42” plasma.  The bag of crap doesn’t come up nearly as much as it used to, but it almost always sells out in less than 3 minutes.  Ironically, the new items are listed on the site at midnight Texas time, where the company is based.  The other sales stunt that helped boost visibility is the Woot off, an all day sell out of random items.   There is no official word on how much of each item, but the Woot off will go for about 24 hours and is the only time the site deviates from the one item, one day business model.

Since no insight is given by the company as to what the next days item will be, or in the case of a Woot off, what the next item up will be, it keeps fans [customers] coming back daily, often times more than daily.  This unique business model leads to thousands of comments on each item and an above average chatter in the forums where fans discuss current and past items.

With this in mind, and the Web 2.0 bubble growing, it wasn’t long before the Texas based company was prone to getting a phone call from a major corporation about buying them.  Sure as shit, it happened this week when Woot announced a partnership with Yahoo.  Yahoo has been struggling to figure out exactly what the fuck they bring to the customer experience on the internet for years, in my opinion at least.  Their front page is so cluttered, their email is prone to spam and their failed attempt at an auction site are in my eyes, just a way to try to be too big.  If they would focus on just a few core offerings and be really good at them, they may have not been over-run by Google, who was much slower and methodical with how they released new services and offerings to their users.

All that, and now they will be trying to do the one product, one day business model with the help of Woot.

Ironically enough, the new service is poised to be called Sellout.Woot.  In typical Woot humor and satire, they have explained what is going on, sort of, in a recent blog posting on their site, Woot sells out.  While I’ve still never purchased anything from Woot, I have enjoyed watching the site from time to time and if you need to kill 10 minutes, reading the comments on any given day should be enough to get a chuckle out of ya and keep you entertained.  I’m only hoping this doesn’t change as Yahoo looks over their shoulders.

In what could possibly be one of the most unique marketing ideas in a while, big bad box store Wal-Mart will have dedicated check-out lines for the release of the much anticipated Xbox 360 Game, Halo 3. This is rather unique in that most Wal-Mart stores are open 24 hours and they have agreed to sell the game at midnight.

If you talk to any hardcore gamer who’s into these sorts of games, they will tell you that they have probably already pre-ordered it. Some will even stand in lines the day / night of the sale, just to get the game before others do. With Wal-Mart advertising checkout lines just for the sale of this game, it could lead to more people skipping the traditional gamer stores and hitting up the big box giant, not only boosting Wal-Mart sales but could prove to be a nail in the coffin of the smaller mall based game stores like GameStop. Take a look at this 3 page forum post where most are agreeing that they would rather go to Wal-Mart and get fast checkout then deal with their local game store.