Amazon Unbox: My First Experience

Unbox is a service by Amazon where you can rent and buy movies and TV shows by downloading them straight to your computer. Right now, their prices are competitive with Blockbuster or Pay Per View, charging $4 per rental and $15 to buy the movie.

They're running a pretty sweet promotion right now, where you can rent selected movies for $0.99. Once you download the movie, you have 30 days to watch the movie, but once you start playing the movie, you only have 24 hours to watch it. Here's some of the movies on promotion:
I am downloading Live Free or Die Hard, and I'll report back with how it goes.

One Powerpoint, No Bullets

It's really hard to believe that a Powerpoint presentation could work without bullets. It's an even tougher time believing that you could limit each slide to less that six words. Everyone has an excuse as to why their data needs to be written out in full sentences rather than illustrated in a picture.

Here's a Powerpoint presentation I made for a website I was designing for the Penn Chapter of One in Four. You'll notice that there are no bullets, each slide has less than six words, and the pictures reinforce the words that I'm saying. There is one slide with my than six words, but I read exactly what is on the slide so that there's no division of attention.

Take the Seth Godin challenge - make a Powerpoint that follow his rules of thumb:

| View | Upload your own

Merry Christmas

The Story Behind Subprime

Fantastic editorial by the Washington Post business section called "Wall Street Cornered":

Is there any doubt what's going on here?

Morgan Stanley, a direct descendant of the great House of Morgan, so desperate for capital after its first quarterly loss in its 72-year history, as a result of $11 billion in write-downs on mortgage-backed securities, sells a 10 percent stake on unfavorable terms to the investment arm of the communist government of China, which is accumulating dollars at the rate of $1 billion a day.

Merrill Lynch, still bullish on America but facing losses that are expected to hit $16 billion, negotiates for a $5 billion infusion from a state-owned conglomerate in Singapore.

Bear Stearns, reeling from the dissolution of two of its hedge funds and $1.9 billion in write-downs, arranges a $1 billion equity swap with China's Citic Securities.

UBS, once a pillar of Swiss banking, now stuck with $14 billion in write-downs from its foray onto Wall Street, arranges for a $11.5 billion infusion from Singapore and an unnamed Middle Eastern investor.

And Citigroup, the first global financial giant, is so desperate to shore up its capital base after more than $10 billion in losses that it sells a 5 percent stake to Abu Dhabi -- its second such sale to Middle East interests -- for $7.5 billion.

It's a simple parable. A wealthy country that lives beyond its means, takes on too much debt and thinks it can slide by with a lot of clever financial engineering is finally forced to sell some of its crown jewels to its creditors.

All the rest is commentary.

VC Fred Wilson echoes the sentiment, adding in the cheap dollar:

The economic story of 2007 isn't Facebook being worth $15bn, its not the subprime mess and the resulting credit crunch, its not the fact that the US economy seems eerily similar to where we were in 1975.

The economic story of 2007 is where the money is coming from. The capital that is propping up our companies and economy is coming from China, The Middle East, and Russia...

Its been happening for a while, but we are seeing it in droves now. If you need capital, lots of it, don't look here in the US. Money is tight and assets are cheap in the US these days. Go to China, Russia, or the Middle East. That's where the capital is and when they look at the US, they see a bargain.

What does it really mean when our assets are owned by the Russians who are looking to become a superpower once again, the Chinese who are narrowly focused on economics, and the Saudis who are still sponsoring terrorism? Is it a threat, or does the Lexus trump the Olive Tree?

Best Buy Gets In Trouble with its Pricing

This one comes from Andrew. Apparently Best Buy's in-store kiosks with BestBuy.com show different prices from BestBuy.com that you would normally find from your own computer. This article from LA Times:

Last week, Simi Valley resident Leigh Murphy, 53, went online in search of a new DVD player. He finally settled on a Toshiba model that he found on Bestbuy.com, marked down from $79.99 to $71.99.

He decided to stop by the store and buy it there instead.

"I just assumed the same price would be available," Murphy said. "That's why I didn't order it online."

He found the DVD player at the store without difficulty, but it was selling for the full $79.99 price. Murphy asked a salesman about the discrepancy. He said he'd found it online for less.

The salesman guided Murphy to one of Best Buy's in-store kiosks, which displayed a page virtually identical to the website Murphy had seen at home. He called up the Toshiba device and, lo and behold, no more markdown. It was going for the full list price.

Murphy, an engineer, wasn't sure what to make of this. So he returned home and went back online. Once again he visited Bestbuy.com, and once again the DVD player came up at the reduced price of $71.99.

So Murphy purchased the player online and then returned to the store to pick it up. But the experience left him wondering.

"It seems like they have one website online and a fake website that's available only in the store," Murphy said.

The company explains:

Sue Busch, a Best Buy spokeswoman, acknowledged that customers may encounter different prices on the company's website than may be available in the store -- and at the store's kiosk.

"Bestbuy.com is the national price," she said. "Individual store prices may vary from market to market."

Busch said the in-store kiosks closely resemble Best Buy's website "for the sake of efficiency and to ensure that customers who were familiar with the national website could easily navigate the in-store kiosk to find what they were seeking."

She said the kiosks were never intended "for price-match purposes," but admitted that "a small percentage of customers did not receive a price match when they should have due to errors in policy execution."

Busch said that in response to the Connecticut attorney general's investigation, Best Buy placed a notice on its in-store site making clear that prices might not reflect what was available on the company's Internet website...

[However] the only significant difference was an inch-wide yellow strip sandwiched between the tabs and delivery notice that said, "This kiosk displays in-store prices -- which may differ from national Internet prices. Promotions can differ between stores and Internet. See your sales associate if you have questions."

Now let's be honest, about this "for the sake of efficiency argument." When you have a chain of 1,170 stores, the cost of changing the interface of the website for in-store kiosks is a drop in the bucket. A little bit of web design would cost at most $50,000. Spread out across 1,000 stores, that's about $500 per store.

And that's all it would take to solve this problem is a little web design change. Then people would perceptually see the in-store kiosks as different from bestbuy.com.

The question for Best Buy becomes how much does it cost them in customers lost and bad publicity like this news article. They obviously believe that the revenues they get from tricking the vast majority of shoppers outweighs any bad publicity or customers lost. It also seems as though it's deliberate strategy, as well, with the Best Buy spokesman defending it.

I think the lawsuit brought against Best Buy will be good for consumers because their strategy right now really does amount to false advertising. Hopefully the courts will make Best Buy change their strategy.

Five Guys: Pick One Thing and Do It Well

If there's one restaurant that decides to pick one thing and do it well, it's Five Guys. Their menu consists of hamburgers (and variations thereof) and hot dogs (and variations thereof). No McNuggets or McRibs to distract - just hamburger and hot dogs. And people are willing to wait a while for their hamburgers and hot dogs.

And that's my one complaint - it takes a while for them to make my burger. It's slow fast food, and I get antsy while waiting. If I were them, I'd install a TV with maybe the cooking channel because TVs tend to make people think that it takes them less time to get their order. Bank of America installed TVs in its branches for just that purpose.

Apple: On-help Purchasing

I went to the Apple store today to buy a dock for my mom's iPod Shuffle. When I asked for some help, not only did the guy help me pick the right product, but he had a device in his hand that could swipe my credit card and take care of the transaction then and there. I gave him my email and when I got home, my receipt was in my inbox. Pretty cool.

I have no doubt that this is good for Apple's line management. I have no doubt that the employee standing there makes you more likely to buy the object that the employee helped you with, rather than reconsidering whether to buy it. Another brilliant move from Apple.

Urban Outfitters: Home of Gifts

Urban Outfitters is just my favorite place to buy gifts from. They have some of the quirkiest, coolest gifts available.

Apple's Computers Are Top Rated

Before I buy electronics, I tend to go an look on cnet.com to see the editorial reviews and, more importantly, the user feedback on products.

When I went to look at both desktops and laptops, the MacBook and iMac got the best overall ratings from both users and the editors.

Apple is on fire.

Compassionate Consumerism

Daniel Goleman, author of the book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, gave a talk about compassion and asked the question: if we had more knowledge about the things we buy, would it make the difference.

He talked about this dye that runs off from the manufacturing of cotton clothing that causes leukemia in children around these plants. If we knew which t-shirt was safe, would we buy different t-shirts?

I think so.

One of the trends of my generation that I learned about over the summer was the trend that my generation likes to do good by buying differently. When given the option to be virtuous, we take it.

The problem is that for most decisions we aren't given the option. For instance, I searched all the stores around my school to find the environmentally friendly light bulbs, and I couldn't find any. Or sometimes when I want to recycle, there's not recycling can, only a trash can. Or if I'm buying food at a restaurant, I can't tell what is healthy and what's unhealthy. Often, doing the right thing is simply a deficit in information or accessibility.

At the same time, simply labeling something or having it available won't necessarily get people to act. When I was in California this summer, some people were talking about "Fair Trade Coffee," which was clearly labeled. I'm still not quite sure why drinking Fair Trade Coffee is important, so I don't.

Getting people to choose to do the right thing isn't hard. It's just a matter of giving them:

1. A story about why they should care
2. An easy cue on which products are better than others
3. A right decision that's as accessible as the wrong decision
   

Smart People Underperform

When I gave my presentation on prediction markets, my professor asked, "Why would you want everyone in the company involved in the prediction market? Some of them obviously have no experience in pricing decisions. Wouldn't you want your smartest pricing people to work on it?"

I stumbled through the answer, but apparently if I had read to Chapter 2 of The Wisdom of Crowds, I would have had the real answer:

Scott Page is a political scientist at the University of Michigan who has done a series of intriguing experiments using computer-simulated problem-solving agents to demonstrate the positive effect of diversity. For instance, Page set up a series of groups of ten or twenty agents, with each agent endowed with a set of skills, and had them solve a relatively sophisticated problem. Individually, some of the agents were very good at solving the problem while others were less effective. But what Page found was that a group made up of some smart agents and some not-so-smart agents almost always did better than a group made up just of smart agents. You could do as well or better by selecting a group randomly and letting it solve the problem as by spending a lot of time trying to find the smart agents and then putting them alone on the problem.

The point of Page's experiment is that diversity is, on its own, valuable, so that the simple fact of making a group diverse makes it better at problem solving. That doesn't mean that intelligence is irrelevant--none of the agents in the experiment were ignorant, and all the successful groups had some high-performing agents in them. But it does men that, on the group level, intelligence alone is not enough, becasue intelligence alone cannot guarentee you different perspectives on a problem. In fact, Page speculates, grouping only smart people together doesn't work that well because the smart people (whatever that means) tend to resemble each other in what they can do. If you think about intelligence as a kind of toolbox of skills, the list of skills that are the "best" is relatively small, so that people who have them tend to be alike. This is normally a good thing, but it means that as a whole the group knows less than it otherwise might. Adding in a few people who know less, but have different skills, actually improves the group's performance.

, even people with little or no pricing experience, to be involved in a pricing decision when you can just have some of your smartest pricing guys do the work.

Seesmic: What Exactly Is It?

I got an invitation to the pre-alpha version of Seesmic, which is basically a video-based way to update your status. So in Facebook right now, you can write a few words about what you're doing, but with Seesmic, you can make a video of it.

As Seesmic is at the moment, there is basically a public area, and people post their thoughts and responses to an endless thread of other people's thoughts and responses. My first impression was that it was like going into an online chatroom, but now people had poorly lit and poorly produced videos of themselves talking about boring stuff. As it stands now, the website was like taking all of the boring, inarticulate responses that people make to popular videos and putting them in one central location. It's appealing to some people, but not quite my thing.

What I think Seesmic trying to achieve is to have people updating videos from their life and then everyone in your network of friends being able to instantly get that video update.

In my opinion, today's technology is not quite there yet to make it happen. But, maybe by making the website now, the technology will come in the next several years and Seesmic will already be there.

Biggest problem: people are tied to their computers

If the idea is video updates, then people need the means to shoot videos in their everyday life and upload it instantly. The closest we've come to that technology are crude videos on cell phones that is slow and expensive to upload. As cell phone video quality gets better, upload speeds faster, and data transfer prices get cheaper, the video update may be able to take hold.

At the other end of the spectrum, people need to be able to watch the videos from anywhere if they want to be involved in the video status updates. The iPhone is a first step in being able to watch video anywhere, but it's obviously a very small piece of the overall market.

I think that these are fundamental technology barriers at the moment to the service being more useful. Until then, it's going to remain an uncomfortable, somewhat boring, and inarticulate video chatroom. All the interesting well-produced stuff will go to YouTube.

How to Guess Who Will Win the Presidential Primaries

There's a lot of talk about who's going to win the presidential primary. People are looking at the polls in different states - Iowa, Newhampshire - as an indication on who will win. I look at one metric, and one metric only - it's called the Iowa Electronic Market.

The Iowa Electronic Market is basically a stock market where people bet on who will win the presidential nomination (and the overall election). Similar to the stock market, people are constantly trading on who will win. Right now, it has Guiliani leading the Republicans with a 37.8% chance of winning the Republican nomination, and Hillary leading the Democrats with a 66.5% chance of winning the Democratic nomination.

Although the Iowa Electronic Market is not well-known, it is actually better at predicting the outcome of elections than opinion polls or expert opinions. From <The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki:

Three-fourths of the time, the IEM's market price on the day each of those polls was released was more accurate. Polls tend to be very volatile, with vote shares swinging wildly up and down. But the IEM forecasts, though ever-changing, are considerably less volatile, and tend to change dramatically only in response to new information. That makes them reliable as forecasets.

What's especially interesting about this is that the IEM isn't very big -- there have never been more than a few thousand traders in the market -- and it doesn't, in any way, reflect the makeup of the electorate as a whole. The vast majority of traders are men, and a disproportionate -- though shrinking -- number of them are from Iowa. So the people in the market aren't predicting their own behavior. But their prediction of what the voters of the country will do are better than the predictions you get when you ask the voters themselves what they're going to do. And while the IEM traders undoubtedly get information from the pools, the superior accuracy of their collective forecasts suggests that the traders are also adding information to what's in the polls.

Here's the graph of the Democratic primary:

It looks a looks a lot like a stock market graph. In this case, Hillary is in blue, Obama's in green, Edwards is in yellow, and anyone else is in red. The price of each candidate is equivalent to the probability that they will win the nomination. In this case, Hillary has a 66.5% chance, Obama a 23.7% chance, Edwards a 7.1% chance, and anyone else a 2.6% chance.

You can also see how responsive the graph was to new information. For instance, when Oprah started coming out for Obama, his chances of winning the election rose and Hillary's dropped. Not so significantly that Obama is favored to win, but you can see the gap close.

This type of market is actually what's more broadly called a prediction market. According to Business 2.0, companies are starting to use them: HP to figure out input costs and Google to figure out product launch dates. They've been extremely successful for companies too: HP finding that they were as good or better at predicting the future 6 out of 8 times, and Google finding that the launch date with the highest price was right about 70% of the time. And it's just based on people trading future events like they would a stock market.

Here's a great research paper by Wharton Professor Justin Wolfers on why and how prediction markets work.

Why Finals Are Good (but I don't like them)

Finals is always a stressful time. I have studied like a (insert something that studies hard), learning a semester's worth of material in a week's time. While it's awful, I think I would have to admit that if I were a teacher, I would have a final.

I think that there's just something different in terms of attention and amount of information absorbed between classes with finals and class without. In my pricing strategies class, people tended to zone out because they knew that they would never be held accountable for the material. I don't necessarily think that the final needs to be hard for it to be effective (although the harder people expect it to be, the harder they study), but I think that there should be some test of what you learned. It keeps students engaged.

Even as a student, people respond to incentives.

Try N' Buy Grocery Store

What if there was an entire grocery store with the Try and Buy method. There are ten different kinds of apples - what if you let people have a sliver of any one that they want to try? I bet it would increase sales. Or how about cereal? FiberOne sounds gross, but maybe it tastes good. Let people try it ahead of time.

A Try n' Buy grocery store could be a really interesting experiment.

One in Four, Study Shows Decreases Rape

A new study recently released shows that One in Four, the sexual assault peer education group I'm involved with, actually decreases sexual assault. From the press release:

Because they are at high risk for committing rape, the study looked at the fraternity men, and found that they were three times more likely to commit sexual assault than men not in fraternities. However, when fraternity men saw the “The Men’s Program,” only 6% committed sexual assault compared to 10% in the control group. The worst behaviors committed by program participants amounted to “unwanted sexual contact” whereas control group members also committed “attempted rape” and “coercive sex.”

Go Team!

Taking Tissues for a Test Drive

Striving to be environmentally friendly, I bought a box of tissues made out of 100% recycled tissues. What a mistake. The napkins at McDonalds provide more softness than recycled tissues.

One of the things I really wanted to do, though, is be able to feel the tissue before I buy it. None of the tissue packaging allowed me to feel beforehand. If I were a company trying to show people how soft my tissues were, I would somehow let them touch it in the store before they buy it.

Puffs is passing up a great opportunity.

A Victoria Secret Ad Knew My Gender

Today, I saw an ad on Facebook that said that the Victoria Secret lingerie pictures were out. Not one to fall behind on fashion, I clicked on it. Interestingly, it took me to a page that said, "Find out what lingerie to buy for your girlfriend this holiday season." For the website to say that, it must have known my gender. I know a lot of people get caught up on the privacy issues behind that, but I kind of like that the advertisement was more personalized to me. Now I just have to find someone to buy lingerie for.

The Paradox of Choice vs. the Economics of Choice

Barry Schwartz talked about the strange phenomenon of choice: too much choice leads to paralysis and unhappiness. He gives the example of Vanguard who found that for every 10 extra funds that you offer an employee for their pension, the participation in the pension program decreases by 2%.

Similarly, in the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a researcher selling jam. When she had six choices out, 30% of people who stopped by to try the jam. When she had 24 choices out, only 3% ended up buying jam.

Obviously there's an optimum amount of choice. As Schwartz says, some choice is better than no choice, but you can always get to the point of too much choice.

My question is this though: if having fewer choices is more desirable, why is it that stores with more choices do better. Supermarkets stock thousands of choices, which do better than smaller stores with fewer choices. Windows outdid Apple because it was an open platform with more choices. Playstation 2 beat out Nintendo 64 because they had 5-10X more games. Facebook opened up its platform to provide more application choices. AOL's closed community failed in comparison with world wide web which offered millions of choices.

Obviously, there's a competitive advantage in having more choice. But if choice makes us less happy as Schwartz suggests, why do we buy from the stores with more choices to offer?

Is there an opportunity for supermarkets to take more products off its shelves and make more money?

Or is it merely a matter of organizing choice for the consumer to make the choices easier? A better search engine. A rating system. Editorial reviews. Organize the chaos so that it's not overwhelming.

Whistleblowers and the Bush Administration

Interesting article from Think Progress:

Retired Col. W. Patrick Lang, a former official in the Defense Intelligence Agency, reveals that senior CIA analysts pushed for the NIE’s key judgments on Iran to be released, threatening to speak to the media if they weren’t:

The “jungle telegraph” in Washington is booming with news of the Iran NIE. I am told that the reason the conclusions of the NIE were released is that it was communicated to the White House that “intelligence career seniors were lined up to go to jail if necessary” if the document’s gist were not given to the public. Translation? Someone in that group would have gone to the media “on the record” to disclose its contents.

What's interesting is that during Bush's height of popularity, these men would have never blown the whistle about the Iran report. The Bush regime had so solidified their control that any whistleblowers would be intensely punished. But now that the Bush control is crumbling, people are more willing to blow the whistle and are seen as heroic if they dare to go against the system.

I guess what I think is that this is more an indicator of a weakening regime than a sudden rise in heroism.

Pre-rolls on TheStreet.com

As a lay stock investor, I get my news from TheStreet.com, which I really like because they give me the financial news with an opinion. I don't know enough about the fundamentals of investing yet or the current trends to know what's hot and what's not, so having an expert opinion along with the news stories is helpful and interesting to me.

Their news comes as both videos and written stories, and their videos have a pre-roll advertisement on them. Lately, they have been one minute pre-roll advertisements for Viagra. Now this is frustrating because for two minutes of video, I have to watch one minute of advertisement. Not only that, but every time I watch a video, I have to watch a one minute advertisement.

Hopefully TheStreet realizes that there's a trade-off between volume and length of pre-roll commercials. The more commercials you run, the fewer videos I can watch AND the more annoyed I get. One minute is simply too long in the online environment in my opinion. And in Google's opinion.

Google has been experimenting with video ads now on YouTube, and they've clearly steered away from pre-rolls or post-rolls. They realize there would be a severe backlash against YouTube if people had to watch a 1-minute commercial before each video. Perhaps the difference is that YouTube is a mass market product, whereas TheStreet is a more niche play with viewers who are more willing to tolerate the one minute pre-roll.

Either way, I'm getting annoyed with TheStreet's ads, and I have no doubt that I will subconsciously decrease the amount of video I watch if it keeps going.

MGMT 100 Fails at Powerpoint

Yesterday, we had presentations for my marketing class, and the powerpoints were awful. It was slide after slide of full sentences, bullet points, and unformatted data. The presenters might as well have just not talked and submitted their powerpoints because all the information was on the slides. And what kills me is that this strategy is actually what they teach in Management 100 to all Wharton freshmen.

For instance, this year, they taught all 500+ Wharton freshmen that they should put full sentences at the top of every slide. Are you kidding? A full sentence? The problem with putting everything you're going to say on your slide is that it actually distracts from the presenter. I can either listen to what the person is saying or read what's on the slide, but either way, neither medium is getting my full attention.

Seth Godin, as I've written before, gets it right in saying:

Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

The purpose of powerpoint is to give a visual reinforcement to what you're saying. When you put up a picture, the audience doesn't spend time trying to read and process; rather they can continue listening and focusing on you and the story that you're telling. They don't zone out. Godin challenges his reader to use only six words per slide, and pictures as the main reinforcement to your words.

But what about the data?! Either visually represent it, or create a leave-behind document. There is no reason for there to be sentences in your powerpoint, unless you intend to read that exact sentence to the audience so that their attention is not divided. There is a differentiation between leave-behind slides and presentation slides and having full sentences does make sense when you create a consulting report that your client will read. It doesn't make sense for presentation where the powerpoint is supposed to support, not replace, the presentation.

So how is it that the freshman class gets none of this kind of information? It's because the person that runs the public speaking portion is a student TA. There is a speaking chair that someone is appointed to. The TA doesn't necessarily have any training either - they simply teach what they learned from their MGMT 100 TA. There is no research behind their methodology, but rather the opinion of one person.

Before next year's class, MGMT 100 should require its public speaking chair to take the class that trains public speaker advisers. In that course, they go over all the research and best practices.

It's important because people become defensive about what they learned. By senior year, they don't want to try new methods. They need to be taught right in the first place. If nothing else, it's for my own selfish desire not to have to sit through another awful powerpoint when I have a Wharton grad presenting to me in the real world.

Here's an example of a presentation without bullet points to show you how effective it can be:

Comments on my Posts

I just found out that a whole bunch of people had commented on my posts that I never saw. But now I've subscribed to my own comments feed, and so I will be responding to comments in the future. I feel awful because some people have left some pretty interesting things:

Why Blockbuster won't take debit card from Thom:

The reason is that at a B&M store, there are due dates, and if you are too far beyond a due date (7 days), the movie or game is sold to your account, and thus charged to the credit card on file. If this is a bank card, there is a greater chance of an overdraft fee and a lot of complaining from the customer. My store recently started allowing debit cards on accounts. They have also always taken car registration or a utility bill with current name and address listed, so I would try again with those.

Why Iran Wants Nuclear Power from Hass:

For the same reason that the US encouraged and supported Iran's nuclear program: because Iran is actually short of oil, and needs to export the stuff rather than consume it domestically.

Iran Has Enriched Uranium, But Not Going for A Bomb

So I just read a New York Times article on Iran, which said:

A new assessment by American intelligence agencies released Monday
concludes that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 and that the program remains frozen, contradicting a judgment two years ago that Tehran was working relentlessly toward building a nuclear bomb.

Wahoo! But at the same time...

Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium, a program that the Tehran government has said is intended for civilian purposes. The new estimate says that the enrichment program could still provide Iran with enough raw material to produce a nuclear weapon sometime by the middle of next decade, a timetable essentially unchanged from previous estimates.

Do you buy that? Iran is sitting atop a huge oil reserve and they need nuclear power for their civilians? I don't think I was born yesterday... Can anyone explain that to me?

Getting Let Down Right

So I've finished up my recruiting process, and have a job next year.

Today, I got a rejection letter in the mail. The interesting thing about this is that it's a month and a half after my interview. Now at least they were kind enough to let me know at some point, whereas I'm still waiting to hear back from some companies, but timeliness is kind of important. This feels like more of a slap in the face because they took the time to write paper that I wasn't good enough and then mailed it to me. It doesn't get less personal than that.

I feel as though an email or phone call two or three weeks after an interview is appropriate, but a letter a month and a half later is not.

PNC Bank Focuses on Customer Service

In the midst of West Philadelphia, where customer service is notoriously bad, stands PNC Bank who seems to be putting a tangible emphasis on customer service. During my interaction with the teller, I could tell that he was trained to make small talk, and even though I could tell he was trained instead of genuine, it was still nice to get that attempt at care.

Also, at the end of our interaction, he asked me how my customer service was. This is interesting because people don't like giving negative feedback, so just by asking, people will say it's great, even if it was just mediocre. And once it's verbalized, you convince yourself of it. I like the psychology of it.

So even though it was somewhat forced, I like where PNC is going with their customer service effort, and I hope it succeeds.