Fry’s Electronics is a Bay Area institution. Fry’s has notoriously poor customer service paired with excellent selection and an amazingly great no questions asked return policy.
How bad is the customer service?
When Best Buy set up shop here, they ran a sequence of ads asking local Bay Area residents what they thought of Fry’s customer service. Let’s be clear, they said that their pimply faced sales reps knew more about the products they were selling than the other guys sales reps. They were saying the other guy had set the bar so low, that they could vault over it …
Fry’s Sales Reps Mislead
Many years ago I learned that a Fry’s Electronics rep would mislead you. The sales rep in 1998 sold me a VCR that he said could skip over ads. Stupid Kostadis, what the sales rep meant was that there was a 30 second skip button on my VCR.
Two years ago, I relearned that lesson when I tried to buy a portable AC. The sales rep tried to sell me the product he was tasked with selling even though it was the wrong product for my needs.
Fry’s as a warehouse
The last two years I have used Fry’s as a warehouse. I show up with a piece of paper that describes the precise product I want. I avoid every single sales rep in the store, pick up the product, and then leave. If I have any questions I use my cell phone to look the information up. If a sales rep approaches me I growl at them: Go away. If they try and offer help: I say no, I don’t need it.
That approach mostly worked. Until today.
The all-time low
I wanted to buy some memory for my new 10” netbook. So I write down the specifications, and I march into Fry’s expecting to find the part and leave.
Unfortunately I could not just pick up the memory module from an aisle. A sales rep had to enter the specifications and then fetch me the part. I was ready to turn around and leave but figured that the simple task of entering some data into a computer and fetching the memory should preclude the usual set of Fry’s shenanigans.
But no.
The sales rep enters the information I carefully wrote down, tells me the price and I say okay. But before I sign and she gets her commission, she asks me a question. The question made it clear to both of us that she didn’t have the part I wanted. Instead of admitting that she could not fulfill my order, the Fry’s shenanigans began.
First she says that:
The memory module does not exist. That the memory module whose specifications I recorded from a memory module being sold on Amazon did not exist.
When I look at her with disbelief and say, no I want this specific part, she turns around and says that
To get the memory module I wanted, I had to buy 4 GB.
And when I refuse to do that, she starts mumbling stuff. Frustrated, and concerned that her inability to speak English was causing a misunderstanding, I ask if she could just get me the part so I could read the packaging for myself and determine if I wanted to buy it. Her response was:
No
Okay, so I can’t get the part I want, I can’t look at the part I before I buy it, but there is an excellent return policy.
Wait, I know of a website that lets me get the part I want, doesn’t let me touch the part before I buy it, and has an excellent return policy …
Hmm…
And so 15 years later my sordid affair with Fry’s is over. I will never buy anything from that store as long as there is the option to buy it from Best Buy or Amazon. And if it only exists at Fry’s, I will live without the product.
September 3rd, 2010
http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=2&ct=1&artid=351032&dt=29/08/2010
Το πιο εντυπωσιακό συμπέρασμα της έρευνας της Κάπα Research είναι ότι η μεγάλη πλειονότητα των νέων με πτυχίο στην Ελλάδα δηλώνει πρόθυμη να εγκαταλείψει τη χώρα για να βρει μια σταθερή και καλά αμειβόμενη εργασία. Από το σύνολο των ερωτηθέντων, το 73,6% δηλώνει ότι θα έφευγε από την Ελλάδα, ενώ το 42% δηλώνει ότι έχει ήδη προβεί σε συγκεκριμένες κινήσεις για να το επιτύχει, αναζητώντας εργασία στο εξωτερικό, κατοικία ή κάποιο ειδικό εκπαιδευτικό πρόγραμμα πρόσθετης επιμόρφωσης. Από εκείνους οι οποίοι δηλώνουν πρόθυμοι να εργαστούν στο εξωτερικό, το 66,4% δηλώνει ότι το κάνει για να έχει καλύτερη ποιότητα ζωής συνολικά, το 44,7% για να βρει μια καλή δουλειά και το 32,6% για να διασφαλίσει περισσότερη αξιοκρατία στην εξέλιξή του. Μάλιστα, το 60,7% δηλώνει ότι θα προτιμούσε μια θέση εργασίας με προοπτική καριέρας στο εξωτερικό παρά μια μόνιμη θέση εργασίας στον ιδιωτικό ή στον δημόσιο τομέα στην Ελλάδα. Ταυτοχρόνως, η συντριπτική πλειονότητα εκείνων που δηλώνουν πρόθυμοι να μεταναστεύσουν θέτει ως επιδιωκόμενο μισθό ένα ποσό της τάξεως των 1.500 ως 5.000 ευρώ. Ακόμη τονίζουν ότι «οι Ελληνες της ξενιτιάς είναι δύο φορές Ελληνες», προσθέτοντας ότι «μπορεί να γίνει πατρίδα και η χώρα που μπορεί να εργαστεί και να ζήσει κάποιος αξιοπρεπώς».
Διαβάστε περισσότερα: http://www.tovima.gr/default.asp?pid=2&ct=1&artid=351032&dt=29%2F08%2F2010#ixzz0y11LUstZ
In this article by Vima, an Athenian newspaper, 73.6% of Greeks between the ages of 22-35 want to leave Greece, and more depressingly 42% of them are in the process of making plans to leave.
Reasons are opportunities, and depressingly 32.6% say that because they don’t feel that Greece has opportunities for advanced based on merit. In my own life that was part of the reason I wanted to leave. The fact that you had this impression that who you knew was more important than how good you are…
What’s really depressing, is that in the mid-80’s to late 90’s a similar study would have revealed the same data. In the 90’s, with the economic boom, things changed. Greeks in that demographic wanted to stay in Greece.
But now we are back to where we started. And what’s depressing is that the best educated segment of the country will leave, again.
August 29th, 2010
I love this humorous comment on youtube:
Look at your comment, now back to mine. Now back at your comment now back to mine. Sadly it isn’t mine, but if you stopped trolling and started posting legitimate comments it could look like mine. Look down, back up, where are you? You’re scrolling through comments, writing the comment your comment could look like. What did you post? Back at mine, it’s a reply saying something you want to hear. Look again the reply is now diamonds. Anything is possible when you think before you post.
August 25th, 2010
After almost a year long hiatus, I got my python program twitterblog to work again.
twitterblog lets me take a twitter time line and directly dump it into my typepad blog.
There were a couple of limitations of the original software, which are now fixed, and on top of which I added a couple of new features.
So the new features are the ability to specify the title from the command line with the –T option and the ability to specify an end time for a time line so you print out the tweets from 4 days ago, and only four days ago using the –e option.
I also fixed a bug related to how tweets that contained non-ascii characters were being treated. Normally twitter returns nothing but text, but if the text contains UTF-8, the rather simplistic parser I had would puke.
Now if I detect an error while parsing, I’ll do something semi-intelligent, but at least no longer crash.
Python continues to impress with it’s syntax and it’s wealth of libraries.
March 7th, 2010
Okay so they are virtual and not quite real, but hot-doggedy-damn.
I saw 8 CPU’s in Windows 7 viewer and that was just cool. Almost 10 years ago I thought it was super cool that I had an Octane as a workstation with TWO processors, and here I am with my new shiny laptop and it has EIGHT.
That’s cool.
March 5th, 2010
Twice this Olympics Scott Hamilton has been snarky.
First it was the Brian Boucher comment: Finally Brian gets his gold medal. Like really dude, we know you beat him. We know it. And yes we’re bitter as Canadians that Brian came in second twice.
Then it was the comment on Ice-Dancing: I’ve been around the sport of ice-dancing my whole career, but I’ve never understood it.
well at least that one I can get behind.
February 27th, 2010
The Olympic Quarterfinal women’s pursuit between Germany and the US produced the most amazing race.
The German racer, Anna Friesinger-Postma, bonked, pulled a muscle, who knows, but she was failing with one lap left to go. And then with no gas left in the tank she fell on the ice and hurtled herself towards the finish line.
She falls on the ice and slides into the finish line.
Convinced she had blown it for her team she was on the ice pounding her hand onto the rink in frustration. She didn’t even bother to look at the result, because she knew they had lost. She knew she had failed her team. And the team was also convinced that they had lost.
But no. She had managed to cross the line just before the Americans … And her absolute determination to cross that line at all costs had paid off.
From heaven to hell in 5 seconds.
February 27th, 2010
The Pew Research group created a survey that measured how close to being a millennial we all are.
The data the was the basis of the study is here.
http://pewsocialtrends.org/assets/pdf/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change.pdf
What I found amazing was that I was 87% millenial. Given that I was born 10 years before the millennial generation
February 27th, 2010
So I was curious to read about ski waxing. And I thought, well maybe there is some home-brew, anecdotal, crappy knowledge, but there isn’t any real science behind this.
Uh no.
There isn’t just some research out there, there is a body of research on the topic.
There is a field. I found this thesis which concentrates on a subset of the co-efficients that affect the performance of skii’s.
http://epubl.luth.se/1402-1757/2006/03/LTU-LIC-0603-SE.pdf
I’m sorry.
I didn’t realize. Waxing at the Olympic level requires a Ph.D..
The countries with the deepest research departments, and the best athletes have a decided edge.
Wow.
February 27th, 2010
How wonderful. The Figure Skating competition has, once again a controversy.
On the one hand, we have Plushenko executing maneuvers that no one else did, but was flawed.
On the other hand, we have Evan Lysacek who executed the maneuvers he could execute, perfectly.
And then the debate emerges.
Was attempting flawed stronger moves more valuable than executing safe moves perfectly?
The scoring encourage perfection at the expense of experimentation.
Which is unfortunate and sad.
But ultimately, winning an event is about optimizing for the rules that are presented to you, not to argue that the rules are wrong…
So I agree with Plushenko, but Lysacek deserved to win.
February 19th, 2010
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