eird business events in the news.  You're not going to find anything too controversial on this page; just strange stories about local and international businesses doing strange and amusing things.

More recent updates are added on top of this page.

December 9, 2003

Interesting article about Crime Scene Cleaners.  And that's capitalized for a reason; it's a proper noun, not a description.

April 18, 2003

I at last purchased a Cable Modem on Thursday. I hadn't paid my cable bill for three months, so I went into the office nearby to pay it, and once there asked about getting a CM, since I'm tired of paying the $10 a month rental fee.

I've had cable since I moved into this apartment, and that's coming up on the 5th anniversary this summer, in August, I believe.  Yeah, I thought I'd live here like 12 months tops at the time.  Life is pretty much an ongoing series of disappointments, you know.

Anyway, I've been paying $10 a month that entire time, and had the same modem the entire time.  In other words, the crappy old Motorola modem I have here has cost me around $560 to date.

The new one was $90, with a $30 mail in rebate.

That sounds like I'm insane, which I would be if I got one now and rented it until 2008, but at the time I got my CM they were still pretty new, and cost a lot.  Electronics stores didn't even carry them, or maybe just one model, and they were like $400 new.  I looked into it at the time, and decided to rent because of the price.  Hell, just my ethernet card was like $150 then, and they had one type at Fry's, and it was like $89.  But since installation was like $50 more if I didn't get the card they offered, I just went with the default one.

My current computer is from February 2002, and I paid $9 each for 2 ethernet cards at the time.

So yeah, computer parts get cheaper over time.

Anyway, the way Cox @ Home handles old CMs is sort of funny.  I can't buy it.  Even if I want to.  I can either keep renting, get a new one and keep renting it, or buy my own and not rent it.  Since they can't possibly have any use or resale of a 5 year old cable modem, it's garbage.  Why not offer them for sale to customers for very cheap?  I mean anything, $25.  Get the equivalent of 2.5 more months of rental.  Beats $0, right?

Apparently not.

I tend to dread mail in rebates, since companies are so slow about granting them, apparently hoping they'll just go out of business before they have to pay them out.  A friend of mine got a new computer from Dell in mid-2002, and is still waiting on her mail in rebate, despite numerous follow up emails and even phone calls.  And I know myself a little bit.  I would never be arsed to call or write about the rebate, unless it was like a month's salary.  I'd pay $30 to not have to do that, in essence.

And probably will.

The other thing I realized while getting the Cable Modem is that CompUSA really sucks now.

I've been coming to that realization for a while, but my deeper memories are that they are a great computer store with a good selection and prices. I got a bunch of random computer parts there years ago, and they had pretty good service at the time. However in recent years I've been inside half a dozen times, and I don't think I've ever bought anything but a surge protector.

I look for things, but they have a limited selection, and when they do have something I want it's always about 10% more than it would be at Fry's.  I guess that even with half a dozen stores in the SD area they can't compete with the single mammoth Fry's store, in terms of volume of sales, therefore their prices are higher.  Whatever the case, they had like 3 brands of cable modem, and all were at least $99.  None with rebates, none with discounts, etc.

About a mile away is a Circuit City, and while they are really the poor man's Fry's, in terms of stocking a little bit of everything, but not that much of anything, they had 4 models of CMs, including two that Cox recommended for easy compatibility. And one was a Motorola with the $30 rebate. They had another brand for $79, but it wasn't on the compatibility sheet I got from Cox, and had no mail in rebate, so I left it alone.

When even Circuit City beats you on selection and prices, it's a bad sign.

One other thing that amused me at Cox was the cashier was telling me about how often they mailed out info about buying your own CM, and I realized that I had no idea what she was talking about.  It actually took me a minute to remember that I had an email at my own ISP.  I have had my current computer going since I got it and WinXP back in Feb 2002, and have never set up any @cox.net mails on it, and don't have any set on my older computer either, which I was using back in 2000.  I'd say it's been at least 3 years since I checked anything from my ISP, or my account on it.  God only knows how much spam is backed up there by now.

I don't know the SMTP info, my account name, or my password.  Other than that...

How is that possible, you might ask?  Well with a CM, you don't have to set up anything on your computer to work with it.  If you have a working computer with an ethernet card and your house is wired for the CM, you just plug it in and go.  There isn't any connecting to your ISP, or via your ISP, at least not that you see.  I have nothing installed on either of my computers from Cox, and other than knowing to put "smtp.west.cox.net" into my outgoing email setting (which I had to check now to verify) I do nothing with my email or user account.

And I like it like that.

January 23, 2003

Exhibit #8,322,147 in our ongoing "corporations are idiots" series.  "Carding" senior citizens when they buy beer.

Most alcoholic-beverage retailers ask for identification from patrons who appear younger than 30 or 40, but Pick 'n Save officials say they wanted to eliminate the chance of selling to someone underage.

"We've had a few complaints," said Robert Mariano, president and chief executive officer of Pick 'n Save's parent company, Roundy's Inc. "People may not like it, but they understand what we are trying to do. We're just trying to do the right thing."

Because, you know, god forbid there's anything resembling common sense or intelligence or logic in a business these days.  All those 20 year olds who can pass for 72 will really be out of luck getting a sixer now, huh?

January 13, 2003

Interesting article about "Dojinshi." What's that? It's a huge and growing type of Japanese manga. Comic books, basically.  What's interesting about Dojinshi is that it's all illegal, technically speaking.  It's a sort of professional fan fiction, with characters and scenes and settings and art style lifted directly from someone else's original work.  In some cases the copycat Dojinshi sells as much or more than the original, but it always boosts the popularity of the original, so the next sequel or version of the original has a far larger fan base. Why?

The reasons are clear enough: in an attention economy, the key is to capture customers and keep them focused. The dojinshi market does exactly that. Fans obsess; obsessions work to the benefit of the original artist. Thus, were the law to ban dojinshi, lawyers may sleep better, but the market for comics generally would be hurt. Manga publishers in Japan recognize this. They understand how "theft" can benefit the "victim," even if lawyers are trained to make the thought inconceivable.

There apparently isn't any prosecution of the Dojinshi, since it's adding value to the original stuff.  I'd think there would be lawsuits demanding royalties at the very least, but it's not mentioned.  They do have an interesting example of how lawyers don't think outside the box in other cases.

Lawyers (save those from Chicago) are not typically trained to think about the business consequence of their legal advice. To many, business is beneath the law. When a Sony lawyer threatened a fan of the company's Aibo robotic dog, who had posted a hack online to teach the dog to dance to jazz, he or she no doubt never thought to ask exactly how making the Aibo dog more valuable to customers could possibly harm Sony. Harm was not the issue, a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was: consumers should be banned from hacking Sony dogs, whether or not it was to Sony's benefit.

This is similar to a lot of authors and companies who try and persecute fan fiction, or fan sites that use some images from the TV show or movie or whatever.  It's an ignorant blind adherence to the letter of the law, without any common sense thrown in to see that fan sites and fan fiction are boosting interest in the original work.  Now obviously if the fan sites are posting major chunks of the original material, that's a rip off and people might not buy it if they can get it for free. But the vast majority of the time it's a benefit to the original material.  Free advertising, of a sort.  FOX lawyers were engaged in a huge online war against Simpson's sites a couple of years ago, trying to get every site that used any show artwork shut down, or at least force them to remove the artwork.

As if you could have a decent Simpson's fan site that didn't have images from the show, and as if such sites were doing anything but boosting the show's popularity.

Lawyers and other corporate weasels never seemed to stop and think about it intelligently, in terms of what good vs. harm the fan sites were doing for their product.  Are people who view a fan site with images more or less likely to watch the show on TV?  It seems pretty obviously to me; and it's ridiculous to think that because they see some still images of Bart or Lisa they're going to have their fill of Simpson's and no longer watch the show.

I think the issue with fan fiction is much the same, but in that case it's often about the author's vanity.  It's their creation, their baby, and they don't want anyone else writing it, no matter that most fan fic is so awful it can't do anything but make people crave the original.

March 7, 2002

Door to door salesmen!

In my years (8 or 9) living in apartments, I've yet to ever see someone actually selling anything of use door to door.  It's not like in the comics, I.E. Blondie and Dagwood, where there's some brush or vacuum or plumbing supplies or whatever guy, with a briefcase of supplies.  I've seen 100's of people selling various crap, but it's always modified charity work, or just a scam.  Generally kids, with overpriced candy or magazine subscriptions.  Those are maybe legit and maybe scams, but at least they give you something in return, and you know you're paying 50% more than you could get Kit Kats for at the store, but at least you get a candy bar, and it's no different really than Girl Scout cookies.

The ones that piss me off are the sneaky ones, where they give you some talk about how they have a school project, have to interview people about their lives, or their jobs, etc, get you talking about yourself (if you don't just close the door and say you can't be bothered, which is harder to do face to face than with telemarketers, who are so hated that most people have no problem just hanging up, or else putting down the phone so they can talk to the counter top for 5 minutes before they realize formica has no interest in a vacation timeshare in Guam).

Then they segue into their school project, and how if they do a good job at it they'll earn a senior trip, which is where you start to get suspicious, if you weren't already.  Then they whip out their brochure of magazines, and suddenly it's just another overpriced bunch of popular magazines, and you figure all that preamble about school project and interviewing people with various occupations stuff was bullshit, just part of their sales scam/pitch. Those make you want to break their legs afterwards, when you contemplate how bored/lonely/desperate/old people probably fall for it all the time.  Someone should study the correlation between subscription sales of crappy popular magazines, like say Time, Entertainment Weakly, Redbook, etc, and how successful those little con artists are in getting people to buy their bullshit.

The guy who just came to the door today was a new one.  Black guy, early 20's short spiky braids, grey shirt and jeans.  He did the typical "crime/gang prevention" spiel, and I was waiting for him to whip out the candy bars or magazines, but no, he just showed me his "permit" which was a 3x5 card in cracked and peeling lamination that I could duplicate (or surpass) in 30 seconds at any Kinko's, and asked for a donation.  As in, give me money, a total stranger on your door, with nothing more than a quick introduction about how I used to be in a gang and want to help others to get out of them. No mention of what he'd spend it on (clothing I hope, he had a rather tatty t-shirt and jacket), no organization name, nothing.  He was friendly and smiling and non-threatening, but as I think about it now, that's quite some nerve, eh? I mean semi-glorified pan handling, but at least beggars don't come to your house, they just stand on street corners or bother you at gas stations.  Who knows if his "permit' was a real thing; I didn't know you needed a permit to beg for money, but maybe he was part of a real charity and they do good work.  After all, $5 to a kid on your doorstep certainly beats being car jacked downtown one night.  This guy just sucked at giving the intro and forgot to mention the good works part.

In any event, it once again makes me want to get a nice big "No solicitors!" sign for the door.  I hate to get phone calls selling me shit, one of the reasons I never answer the phone, but it's even more annoying at the front door.

At last, something everyone can agree on.

March 2, 2002

The mystery gas station closed overnight.

About a quarter mile from my apartment there's a big new Shell station with a car wash and mini mart, and today driving by it was just gone.  All the pumps removed, all the signs gone, the mini mart looking gutted.

They mystery part is how that station stayed open for as long as it did.  It's been there for maybe two years, and has never had gas priced less than 20 cents a gallon higher than every other station in town.  Usually it would be something like 1.59/1.69/1.84 for the three grades of unleaded, while other stations in town were 1.39/1.49/1.59, and cheaper places were 1.19/1.29/1.39.  I've seen it as much as 60 or 70 cents more per grade, even far more than other Shell stations. Directly across the street is a 7/11 that was always 20 or 30 cents cheaper, and within 2 or 3 miles there are probably 10 other gas stations, all of them going to save you $4 or $5 at least on a fill up.

There were never more than 1 or maybe 2 cars at the Shell station, usually none at all, and I always wondered what they were doing.  They had to be losing money hand over fist.  I always meant to go in sometime and ask the manager what the hell was going on, but I was afraid it was something shady, and I'd get shot.  Like they were laundering money for the mob or something, or the tanks were really full of stolen machine guns, with just a little bit of gas on top, and they couldn't sell much or they'd run out.

Invent your bad movie plot concept and insert here.

In any event, it was clearly the worst-run gas station in San Diego, at least in terms of profitability, for despite a very good location on a busy street right by a freeway, they failed miserably.  If they were really trying to succeed.

Curiously there is another store just a block or so away that I have similar suspicions about.  It's a small convenience store, something like "Sun Market Liquor", and it's located on a side street, almost all residential, and is back in the lot, behind a bunch of trees, and right next to a 7-11.  The 7-11 is visible from Spring Street, which is the big busy road my bedroom window looks over, and the parking lot is never less than half full, other than at like 4am.

There's a small residential street next to it, then a huge apartment complex, and then the Sun Market Liquor is past that, next to a realtor.  No one ever drives that way if they don't live on that street, and every time I go past the place, it's deserted.  Maybe one car there, and inside it's like some mob-deli in NY.  Two or three big fat Italian looking guys, very ethnic, sitting around by the counter and just talking.  They don't have a gas pump, and the store is pretty small, so how the hell do they stay in business?  Maybe they deal a lot of under aged liquor sales, but that's the only way they sell anything.  It's no where near any college or other drunk-intensive area, and 99% of people in the area for that sort of purchase would just go to the 7-11 anyway.

So I imagine it's some sort of front for organized crime.  I've been in two or three times in about three years, and always there are several guys sitting around talking.  They look like the "How are you doin'?" Budweiser commercial guys, all swarthy and heavy-set, like a Goodfellas flashback.  You don't see people who look like that in California very often, outside of extras casting for a mob movie in Hollywood.

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