You might open a newspaper soon to see an ad like the one at right which appeared in my local paper a few days ago.  It encourages you to “Stand With Main Street” to protest “special treatment” of Amazon.com that allows them to forgo the collection of sales tax on online purchases, resulting in an unfair advantage over “every Hoosier brick and mortar retailer.”  I don’t usually see full-page ads related to Internet commerce in a market this size, so I thought I’d investigate the issues at stake.

The question of taxing e-commerce transactions is a bit complicated to be sure.  If you have a strong and concisely-worded position on it, you’re probably running for national political office, or a Libertarian, or both.

On one hand we can see the clear financial and psychological advantage that an online retailer has with customers who are weighing a purchase from a local store that charges tax against an online store that doesn’t, and maybe offers the item at a slightly lower price too. At the same time, that online retailer may be benefitting from the infrastructure that sales taxes others are collecting help pay for (setting up warehouses, trucking goods around state roads, etc.).

On the other hand, we know that laws around state sales taxation were created prior to the age of the Internet and that the models of online business and affiliate sales have completely changed the way the world does business, and current attempts to rewrite them in order to create short-term bandaids on ailing state economies are probably not in the best interest of business innovation, especially when they favor large retailers (online and off) and send small businesses and people who make a living as Amazon.com or eBay affiliates into a quagmire of tax collection bureaucracy.

(In my company’s work building online stores for our clients, we’ve experienced this firsthand; helping a small business calculate the city, county and state tax rates that affect what they’re selling customers and then keeping that information current can take up a lot of their time.  Services like taxcloud.net are helping make it easier.)

Some states are moving toward “origin-based sourcing” for taxation, where the tax rate is based on the county/state where the vendor selling the goods is located.  This keeps the taxation process simple (the retailer has to know their local rate and doesn’t have to worry about where the buyer lives or what the rates are there) and encourages governments to keep their tax rates competitive for businesses that might locate there.

Indiana is still a “destination” state, where the tax rate is based on where the goods are being sent.  Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, not generally known for advocating taxation, is supporting the move to make Amazon.com and others pay sales tax so that the government isn’t “picking winners and losers.”  But as others point out, the playing field of retail taxation is already off-kilter in favor of big businesses, which get tax credits, exclusions and special pricing that make it very hard for mom-and-pop shops to compete with them.

Back and forth, back and forth.

I don’t have a strong feeling about what direction we should go (hence disqualifying me from running for office), other than that all of this highlights how complex and outdated the modern system of taxation is, for online commerce and pretty much everything else.  When small businesses or people selling used exercise equipment from their basements have to hire tax law professionals just to sell online and be fully compliant, we’re doing something wrong.  I’m not sure the “Stand With Main Street” ad advances the conversation any, but it hopefully encourages more awareness about what’s at stake.

Recently I went looking for a more sustainable way to shave, so that I didn’t have to throw away as many of those ridiculously expensive blade cartridges.

At some points in life I’ve used an electric razor, which had fewer parts that needed regular replacing.  I suppose you could try to make the case that a really well-engineered electric razor with a long-lasting battery could end up being lower resource usage than the manual razor with cartridges, but as electric razors got more crazy in their design (“buy this special gel-pack that only fits this one model of razor so it can automatically douse your face with soothing chemicals at just the right time!”) it felt simpler – and, okay, a little more manly – to just drag a blade across my face by hand.

But my cheap side cringes every time I walk into a drug store and pay $22 for 10 blades.  My cynical, paranoid side fumes as I see the razor manufacturers invent new models of razor blades that require a different model of razor handle and cost even MORE to buy, while also suspecting that the production quality is only decreasing over time so that the blade cartridges don’t last as long.

And let’s not forget the “disposable” animals that some razor and shaving cream manufacturers use to test their products on.  This is an issue that’s gotten more attention over the years, but there are still companies that perform toxicity testing experiments on rabbits and other animals.  (I recently wrote a letter to Gillette’s parent company Proctor & Gamble that in part asked them to make a more firm and permanent commitment not to test on animals.  I got a generic letter in response that said “Thanks for writing, Chris!  This is feedback I was hoping for…I can’t wait to share it with my team!” – sigh.)  You can find more products on mainstream shelves these days with “no animal testing” labels, if you want.

But back to the razor itself.

I found GFD, a German company that makes a diamond-tipped tungsten carbide razor blade that is supposed to stay sharp 1,000 times longer than regular steel blades, so that’s a great choice to use after you go for a swim in your large vat of gold coins.  (Okay, they’re only $150-$200 per blade, but try getting that to mass market.)

I briefly contemplated not shaving at all, and then looked at some pictures of myself experimenting with growing out facial hair in college, and remembered why that is not going to work.

And then I found what has so far been a magical piece of information in my search for a more sustainable shave:

It turns out that the quality of the shave with a particular disposable cartridge isn’t decreasing over time because the blade is getting roughed up by the shaving process itself – it’s steel, it can probably handle itself okay against hair and skin.  Rather, it’s when water sits on the blade after washing it that you start to see corrosion, causing tiny bits of the blade to flake off over time.  As you can imagine, when the bits that flake off are the blade edge, your shave suffers.

How do you prevent this corrosion?

Dry your blades really well after each use.  Some folks are using blow dryers, some folks just blot them with a towel.  I’ve been using the towel method for a few months and I have indeed seen incredibly extended life from the blades I’m using.  YAY!  Shaving is a little less dependent on disposable things now, and a little cheaper.

I was at a drugstore this week and looked at the packaging surrounding razor blades and handles being sold, and none of them have any instructions about preserving or extending the life of the blades.  Of course, they don’t have instructions of any sort, so maybe this is one of those things that’s supposed to be passed down from generation to generation.  (Or maybe razor manufacturers don’t mind too much if customers buy blades more often than they might otherwise need to.)

I know most of you read this blog solely for my personal hygiene tips, so I hope you get some mileage out of that one.  Next time I’ll cover how to make your own prescription contact lenses using plastic wrap, steel wool and duct tape.

What a world of pure and unflinching justice we could then live in!  To walk around knowing that the slogans and invitations on billboards, newspaper ads and television were all required by law to be true, and that onerous fines and the shame of the public eye awaited the occasional miscreant who would stray from this noble code.  No need to worry about being deceived or misled as a consumer; we could always have confidence that advertisers would stand by their claims.

Like I said, I was young.

But at the risk of sounding curmudgeonly, I do think there’s been a notable shift in the standards we hold marketers and public figures to when it comes to truth in advertising.  Seems like somewhere around the mid 1990′s, we kind of gave up on it.

Was it when the Coke vs. Pepsi wars heated up?  Or maybe it was when product manufacturing was being outsourced to other countries and business owners became disconnected from quality controls in their production processes?  Or maybe it was when we stopped expecting politicians to tell the truth and started betting on just how outrageous their lies were.  Or maybe The Internet made it so much more difficult to police advertising claims that no one even bothers anymore unless it’s a particularly egregious case.

But there are more important things to worry about, right?  Caveat emptor and everybody for themselves, and let’s focus on the national debt or poverty or obesity, right?

I’m not so sure.  I think deceptive marketing practices deserve more of the blame for the state of the world than they get. I’m glad to hear that some high schools and colleges are teaching young people to be more aware of how marketing influences their buying choices, but the majority of us are still very much subject to the power of the marketing machine.  And when that machine is telling us to do things that are against our own best interests, it matters.

A few recent examples I’ve heard or seen just driving around town:

“Fast and fresh!”
Many fast food restaurants caught on long ago that fast food was associated with unhealthy eating, and that dietary advice was shifting toward recommendations of freshly prepared food with more natural ingredients.  The end result is the self-contradiction that you can have mass-produced food from a restaurant that is both “fast” (because it was pre-prepared halfway across the country in a warehouse and trucked to you frozen or full of preservatives) and “fresh” (because it has a piece of lettuce or tomato on it that was recently washed).  Or, “we have a salad on our menu, so we offer healthy eating options for everyone!” This undermines people who are trying to make healthier eating choices for themselves and their children by convincing them they can have it both ways, and it undermines local/regional food producers who actually ARE bringing you fresh food that you could prepare within a few days for a healthy meal.

“Hurry in to our store to save!”
I heard this one on the radio this morning.  ”Be the hero of your household’s budget,” the ad proclaimed.  They want you to come in to the store and spend money so that you can “save” money.  Buy things you might not have bought otherwise and might not need, so that you can feel good you’re getting them at a slightly lower price than…someone else somewhere else might or might not be selling them for.   This approach twists the notion that “saving money is good” into the idea that you have to spend money to save money.  No wonder we have unprecedented levels of personal debt and bankruptcy.

“For a limited time only!”
This one is tried and true: the idea that a time pressure will almost always result in consumers making different choices than they would make given time to think through the value of what they’re getting.  ”I might not have bought a case of gummy bears THIS week, but surely I’ll need a case in the coming year or two, and this sale ends TODAY!”  Marketers are telling us that rational responses are not to be trusted and that our gut instincts are what we should go with.  Instant gratification is okay because…then you’ll be gratified, and that’s all that matters, right!?

There are many, many more.  And I’m sure none of them are all that surprising to you, because again, we’ve come to accept that marketers are trying to mess with our sense of reality, and that we should just deal with it the best we can.

But why do we accept that?  Why are we willing to subject ourselves to that dance of pain when all we get out of it is some cheap plastic crap, stomach aches and buyer’s remorse?  I’m accepting comments for a limited time only.

I try not to give my my money to companies that practice false or misleading advertising most blatantly. But for me, one of the long-term solutions is to be very, VERY intentional about how I market myself and the products or services I’m associated with.

When I market my own business and our technical services, I try to make sure we speak plainly and clearly about what we can and cannot do, so that no one is misled and no end result is hyped up.

When I tell people who I am and what I stand for, I’m careful to note complexity and messiness where it exists.

When I talk about my qualifications for being voted into elected office, I’m careful not to spin or inflate my experience and accomplishments beyond what’s real, and to give other people credit where it’s due.

When I mess up or say something that might be misleading, I try to go back to correct it as soon as I can.

Sometimes it’s harder to be accurate and honest than it is to be catchy and broadly appealing.  Maybe it’s that younger version of myself still wandering around in oblivion waiting for the FTC to make it all better, but I still hope for a world where we all practice – and expect – truth in advertising at every level.

Most other communities have recognized the benefits of having bike parking in a central retail and business district like Richmond’s.  They’re good for business (when cyclists feel invited to shop downtown, they tend to spend even more money in a given area than car drivers do), they help prevent damage to benches, trees and lamp posts, they make for a more orderly-looking streetscape, they prevent theft, and they’re relatively cheap to buy and install.

Unfortunately, in all of the time that I’ve worked in downtown Richmond, there hasn’t been any convenient and consistently available bike parking available here.

If Richmond wants to be able to say that it’s a city looking forward, a city that wants to attract and retain the modern worker, a city that cares about issues of sustainability and energy usage, it absolutely needs to have bike racks in its central business district.

Hopefully the current dearth of bike parking is about to change.

For the last few years, we at Summersault (as coordinated by my coworker and local bikes-as-transportation advocate Mark Stosberg) have been asking the City of Richmond and related entities, “What can we do to get bike racks here?“

We’ve pointed out how the City’s own comprehensive planning supports the installation of bike racks, we’ve offered to pay for them (they’re only $65 each), we’ve gotten price quotes and offered to manage relationships with vendors, we’ve presented specific plans and recommendations for where they can go (which have been approved), and we’ve even offered to install them ourselves – hey, I’ve got a wheelbarrow to mix some concrete in.

As you can imagine, sometimes the decision-making processes and bureaucracy in these matters make for slow progress, but we’ve found that people are very receptive to the idea and want to make it happen. Now, it looks like the Urban Enterprise Association (UEA), which has taken up the mantle of getting the racks installed, is approaching the final steps in completing an initial installation.

If bike parking, and having alternative transportation options in general, is important to you, please let the UEA know that you support the installation of bike racks in Richmond’s center city.  You can contact UEA program director Beth Fields at (765) 983-7396 or by e-mail at bfields@richmondindiana.gov.

Hopefully I’ll be updating this post soon with news about the first racks getting installed!

Got a new debit card for a new checking account.  Sticker on card says “must be activated at an ATM before use.”  Went to ATM at bank, inserted card, entered temporary PIN (securely mailed in a separate envelope).  ATM menu came up, one option was “Change PIN.”  Entered new PIN.  ATM said “Card is being retained” and ended my session.

What the heck.

Went inside bank, asked teller what’s up.  Our conversation, paraphrased:  “You can’t change your PIN on the first use.”  “But why did it offer me the option, then?”  “I don’t know.”  “How can I get my card back?” “The person who handles that isn’t here today.”  “But I’m about to travel and was planning on using it.” “There’s nothing we can do, come back when the person who handles that is here.”

Waited several weeks to let astonishment at poor user interface design subside and to see if the highly digitized and heavily audited banking industry would notice that it had mailed out an ATM card that was promptly retained and consider contacting the owner about it – nothing.

Visited bank again.  Paraphrased: “We can’t find your ATM card anywhere – not at the branch where the ATM was, not at any other branch.” “So it’s lost?” “Yes.” “What do I do now.”  “Sign here and we’ll send you another one.”

Interface design and customer service morals:

1. Unless you are trying to deceive and annoy your users, don’t design interfaces that offer options leading to predictable frustration or failure (e.g. a “Change PIN” option that guarantees the card will be retained if selected).
2. When a user reports a bad interface design, at least pretend that you will try to suggest an improvement to someone who can do something about it.
3. If you’re designing systems that are intended to be secure (e.g. for banks), it might be good to keep track of authentication credentials (e.g. ATM cards) that are retained during their initial activation attempt.

Bank interface story #2:

Decided to make an extra payment toward principal on a loan I’m paying down.  Clearly indicated on payment slip that extra amount was to be applied to loan principal.

Received loan statement indicating extra amount was applied to future monthly interest and escrow payments, not loan principal.  Called bank and explained to customer service rep.  Rep didn’t understand concept of paying on principal vs. interest/escrow, had to get supervisor.  Supervisor explained to rep how to make the change, but rep had trouble getting the math right.  Several times.  I walked rep through correct math.  Rep finally thought she had it input correctly.  I asked “will this be retroactively applied to my original payment date so I’m not seen as making a late payment?”  “Oh yes, it will be retroactively applied.”

Weeks pass. Got letter and voicemail from bank noting that they hadn’t received my loan payment for the previous month and that I was being charged penalties and interest.  Talk of collections and loan defaults if payment not made today.  Called 800 number, their office is closed today.

Really starting to treasure the time I’ll get to spend with bank reps sorting this one out.

Customer service morals:

1. If you let customers specify how they want a payment applied, consider respecting those requests when you process the payment.
2. If you’re hiring people to answer the phone at a loan customer service center, make sure they understand concepts involved in loans and loan payments, and that they’re able to perform basic financial math.

The article contains some interviews with downtown business owners, some perspective on the history of the Main Street organization there, and some talk of renewed activity from merchants and business owners (myself among them) in helping make the area thrive.  But there’s something missing from the picture the article paints.

One key angle that the article glosses over is the role that the rest of the community plays in creating and maintaining a thriving downtown.  While there’s certainly some role for business owners and merchants to play in creating a thriving downtown, it’s not entirely their burden to bear.  Retail districts live and die by the shopping choices of their customers, and so it seems important to recognize in any conversation about the health of a downtown that at least some of it is dictated by the “consumer culture” of the surrounding community.

It would be interesting to interview some “regular citizens” and ask them where they tend to shop, and how they perceive the downtown area.  “Given the choice between going downtown to support a business there and going to the mall or a big box store, how do you decide?”  Are they willing to pay a little more for products and services knowing those dollars stay in the community longer (thus supporting the long-term health of the area), or will they always prioritize convenience and the lowest available price?

It also seems worth looking at the environment of governmental and political support surrounding downtown.  Is it possible that city, county and state laws might be negatively impacting the ability of downtown business to thrive?  Is it possible that our approach to zoning, transportation, taxpayer-funded economic development and taxation are favoring non-local chain businesses over those who would choose to start and grow a small business in the place they live?  Is it possible that politics and personalities are at times standing in the way of a thriving central business district instead of nurturing it?

I’ve blogged about these ideas before:

The value we get from a strong and diverse local business community is hard to see when compared as a “bottom line deal” against the attractions of the “big box” stores. And I’m not suggesting that these larger retailers don’t have a place in a strong local economy. But my hope is that we’ll see the Target store closing as yet another indicator of an important trend. By putting so many of our eggs in baskets that lack the personal ties and community investments that our local businesses are built around, we set ourselves up for even greater disappointments and more noticeable disappearance of the business ethic, entrepreneurship, and innovative spirit around which Richmond has historically been built.

There’s no question that the economic health of our downtown is based on complex systems with lots of variables.  The business owners and downtown merchants are mostly already doing their part – they’re running their businesses and they’re engaged in the life of the business district and the wider community.  As a small business owner myself, I know that there’s probably not a whole lot of time left over for those hard-working folks to ALSO do the marketing, advocacy, legislative and policy work needed to help downtown compete against strip malls and big box stores.

So what role does the rest of the Richmond community have in creating a thriving main street area?  How do your choices make a difference in the health of downtown?

That’s why it’s difficult for me to even pose this question, but I must: should I unsubscribe from Wired?  Here’s why I might: despite being a magazine that has chronicled the leveling of many playing fields, technological, social, and intellectual alike, they can’t seem to stop objectifying women to sell magazines.

Sometimes its the ads they accept from their advertisers, which depict women as decorations to complement what a particular product, service or man has to offer.  Sometimes its the use of scantily clad models to illustrate how one might use a particular tech gadget.  And sometimes, like with the cover story in their current issue, it’s a blatant use of the sexualized female body to increase newsstand sales.

I can’t do a better job than Cindy Royal did in describing Wired’s double standards and failures at cleverness.

Go back through your covers over the years. How exactly are young women supposed to feel about their role in technology by looking at your magazine?…

You’re better than this. You don’t need to treat women in this light to sell magazines. You have the power to influence the ways that women envision their roles with technology. Instead, you’re not helping.

Plenty of other people have noticed too.  And Peggy Orenstein’s timely article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine about the sexualization of breast cancer awareness certainly points to a larger trend in mainstream organizations generating new sources of income by feigning concern for womens` health issues while exploiting and demeaning women at the same time.

So, what’s my role in this as a consumer who doesn’t want to support or reward this kind of behavior?

I could cancel my subscription to Wired.  I would be able to find most of their content on their website, eventually, but the reading experience would be lost.  I would deprive them of $12/year which might mean they don’t buy as many coffee filters one week, but I would also have lost any leverage I do have as a “paying subscriber.”

Or, I could stay subscribed to Wired.  I could write them letters and threaten revolution.  I could tell myself that on the whole, the benefit and enjoyment I gain from reading the magazine outweighs the harm done by participating in their problematic editorial choices.  And the next time an issue comes to my mailbox with a pair of bare breasts on the cover, I could again sheepishly apologize to the people around me who wonder about my taste in magazines, let alone my values as a human being.

I welcome your opinions.

Ever since I upgraded my iPhone to IOS4 (the latest version of the phone’s operating system), the Mail application has been flaky when it comes to syncing mail messages via IMAP. Duplicate messages, empty/blank messages, messages dated 12/31/1969, messages that are deleted and then re-appear, and so on.

At first I thought it might be my phone hardware, which had been cursed from the beginning (a story for another time), but after that phone died and Apple replaced it with a brand new one with fresh firmware and settings, and it STILL happened, I was convinced it’s the software on the phone.  Other people are having the same issue all over the place.  But it can be hard to make Apple believe this – said the Apple Genius Bar worker at the Apple Store in Chicago, “they’re probably all just using the phone wrong.”  Wha?

So I decided to look at the source code of the iPhone mail program to see if I could find the problem, but Apple doesn’t make that source code available.

So I decided to turn on the Mail program’s debugging options to have it output the results of the IMAP sync sessions, but it turns out the Mail program doesn’t have any debugging options.

So I decided to look at the log files on the phone’s operating system to see if they reported any software issues I could address, but actually I can’t look at those log files even if they exist because Apple doesn’t let you look behind the scenes.

So I decided to report the issue on the project mailing list that all of the iOS4 developers monitor, and it turns out that no such mailing list exists.

So I decided to go report the issue to Apple to see if they can help.

After submitting a case online, I was called back in 27 seconds (FAST!) and talked to Chris from Apple, who works in iPhone support.  He was very good at gauging my level of tech savvy and talking to me at an appropriate level, so he quickly confirmed that I’d already done all of the normal troubleshooting steps they recommend.  I asked him if this was a known bug, and he said not as far as he could tell.

Chris then connected me with Shawn who is a senior adviser on the iPhone tech support team.  Shawn told me that in fact I had identified a known bug with the iOS4 firmware.  VINDICATION!  He said that they’ve mostly been seeing it in gMail syncing issues, but that they’re aware of it as a wider IMAP issue.

I asked Shawn for the unique identifier number for the bug so that I could go follow the progress of a fix on their public bug tracking system, but it turns out that Apple doesn’t publish information about known bugs until they’re fixed.

I asked Shawn how I could learn more information about when this would be addressed or other recommended fixes in the meantime, and he said I would just have to wait and see.

(Chris and Shawn at Apple were excellent tech support reps within the confines of what they’re allowed to do and say.)

Bottom line: these are the horrors of using a closed-source, proprietary product for a key piece of tech functionality in my life.

What Apple can do better:

• Test its Mail software’s IMAP syncing functionality more thoroughly before releasing it to production.
• Publish information about known software/hardware issues BEFORE they’re resolved so that people having those issues can see what’s up and possibly even contribute to the resolution.
• Train its store Genius Bar workers so that they don’t dismiss a legitimate complaint about functionality problems with smiling condescension.
• I’m pushing it here, but hey, it’s my blog: release the source code for iOS and related applications.

If you’ve had this issue with your iPhone, or similar software/hardware troubleshooting experiences with other vendors, feel free to share in the comments.

Update 9/17/2010: After installing iOS 4.1 a week or so ago, all of the IMAP syncing issues seem to have gone away.  I’ve seen a few reports that problems remain for others, but it’s clear that this release included some fixes for the mail application that weren’t described in the release notes.

Unfortunately, most of the responses (and the ones favored by the Obama administration) are focused on paying insanely large amounts of money to private contractors to create and deploy complex technological solutions in hopes of addressing the threat.

What advocates of this approach fail to appreciate is that (A) most of the actual threat comes from uneducated human operators of the technology in question, and (B) deploying homogeneous, technologically complex solutions often makes us more vulnerable, not less.

Once you get past the flashy headlines and attention-grabbing introductory stories in these articles, meant to scare us into believing how real the threat is (basically, bloodthirsty hacker terrorists are trying to kill us all), each of them seems to come back to one of two recurring themes behind these threats.   Either a human being messed something up, or a piece of technology wasn’t secure enough and is now being exploited.

For the first case, it’s usually things like “so and so unknowingly downloaded a virus onto their USB flash drive and then plugged into a secure government network – things exploded!” or “an e-mail user clicked on a phishing scam link and had their password stolen.”  For the second case, it’s usually “Windows machines are insecure, and so they get taken over and absorbed into botnets, which can then wreak havoc through denial of service attacks” or “a security hole is found in a product made by a brand that everyone was supposed to trust, and so it’s running EVERYWHERE and OMG we’re all going to die.”

But in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at cyberwarfare defense we will most likely see only minimal resources devoted to end-user education and training to defend against social engineering, poor personal security practices, and the related actual vulnerabilities.  The funding will also not include programs to hold hardware and software vendors more accountable for selling more secure products and services to end users.  Instead, it will go toward funding secret surveillance and the further shifting control of the Internet into military hands.

With this approach, in the end we’ll be back to where we are right now.  End-users will continue the insecure personal practices that lead to security breaches, and the continued homogenization of hardware and software will amplify the potential impact of every security hole discovered.   This is not helpful.

Trying to stop getting unsolicited postal mail from Comcast

I’m not a Comcast customer, haven’t been for a long time, and never at my current address. I get postcards, letters and brochures from them on a regular basis – sometimes several times a week.  It’s annoying and wasteful.  I searched the Comcast website and the Internet at large for a while for a web-based form to get on a “do not send me mail” list, and couldn’t find one.  I called their 800 number and hung up after too many minutes on hold.  I finally sent in a generic inquiry through their online form, providing the addresses I wanted removed.

Done, right?  Nope.

The first response asked me to come onto their website and fill out another form with my contact information so that I could join an online chat with them about getting off their mailing list.  I wrote back and said “no, I’m not filling out another form, you have what you need.”  The next response said (paraphrasing) “we really need you to join our online chat so that we can get your Comcast account number.”  I wrote back and said, “I’m not a Comcast customer, you have what you need to take me off your list.”  I channeled Jack Bauer: do it now.

The next response, quoting:  “I understand that you want to be included in the Do Not Mail List. We appreciate that you have given us this opportunity to communicate with you and address your concerns as quickly as possible.  I have forwarded your concern to the appropriate management team for your request to be processed Chris.  Rest assured that the request will be honored as quickly as possible, but definitely within 30 days.”

So, if you want to be removed from Comcast’s postal mailing list, all it takes is a phone call, an online form submission, and four clarifying e-mail messages so that your request can then be forwarded to a management team for processing within a month.  Lovely FAIL.

A bagel shop on 5th Street in Richmond

Before I was all the way in the door the woman at the service counter shouted at me across the room, “hi, can I help you?”  In the eternity that seemed to pass between that moment and when I was close enough to answer without yelling back, I tried to suppress the feeling that this would be a FAIL.

But as the server continued to have conversations with co-workers while taking my order, hope started to slip away.

When I asked to have my order just wrapped in paper and not in Styrofoam and she said “okay” but didn’t pass that along to the person preparing my order, I knew my smile was not long for this world.

When I got a spritz of cleaning solution from her as she wiped the counter-top right next to me (still chatting away), my smile returned, this time with little twists of approaching insanity at its ends.

And when the server who packaged my order in Styrofoam anyway glared at me as I politely said, “oh, actually, I’d asked for paper instead of Styrofoam,” huffed and puffed as she fixed it, and propelled it across the counter at me as she turned away, a sense of FAIL calm arrived.

There’s a peace that comes with the clarity of  “oh yeah, I don’t have to come back here again.”

Ordering from Gimmees.com

At Summersault, we recently ordered some custom-made Yo-Yos from Gimmees.com for our open house event back in March.  The order was delayed and there were some communication issues that amplified the inconvenience of that delay.  But after I commented on the issue on Twitter, the owner of the company called me directly and made it right, and we got the order in time for our event.   WIN for Twitter and Gimmees.com.

Customer service lessons:

1. Don’t make simple things complicated. If you’re a company that sends out gazillions of postal mailings every day, have a really clear process for letting people get off that mailing list.
2. Hire staff who can empathize with your customers` experiences. If they can’t, train them better, or get them away from your customers as fast as possible.
3. When something goes wrong, act quickly and boldly to make it right. It’s true, “a happy customer tells one friend, an unhappy customer tells everybody.”

Any recent FAIL or WIN customer service experiences in your life that you’d like to share?