Author: Mr. Cheap

I boycott companies often.

I don’t make a big stink about it (like picketing out front, setting up a website, or anything), but if I’m unhappy with a product or service and the company won’t fix it, I stop shopping there. I’m like the soup nazi as I’ll give different punishments for different crimes (sometimes I won’t patronize them for 6 months, sometimes for life). I’ll warn friends away from them if it comes up in conversation, but that’s about as far as I go.

I don’t pretend to believe that this hurts the company in a significant way, I’m sure they’re usually not even aware of it, but I view consumer activity as voting with your dollars, and I refuse to “vote” for companies that do a poor job. I certainly experience some schadenfreude when and if the company goes out of business.

One unfortunate side effect is a built-up black list of nearby businesses until I have to move in order to purchase the necessities of life. I live in fear that the moving company will piss me off one day. Sadly this is only a half-joke.

The things I boycott over are usually poor products or rude service. I won’t pay to be disrespected (enough people will do it to me for free). I realize that employees are individuals, and perhaps the company owner can’t control everything they do or say, but if you haven’t trained your employees to deal with customers in a civilized manner, I’ll shop somewhere where they have. I’ll sometimes boycott stores if they have a convoluted purchasing process – if it takes too much effort to shop there, I’ll go elsewhere.

I don’t boycott over expensive prices, but I probably won’t buy much there either if its pricey. I never boycott based on political / social issues that don’t affect me as a customer. If the owner of a cafe donates money to pro-life or pro-choice causes, how does that affect my latte? Society would be a pretty miserable place if we only did business with people who had the exact same world outlook as ourselves.

Meg at “The World of Wealth” recently wrote up her bad experience ordering sushi (I was sympathetic as I know what its like when you’re jonesing for sushi!). I’m 100% behind her to not order from a restaurant where she can’t interact with the staff (and which leads to order mix ups). I wouldn’t make the same choice she does about not eating at a restaurant that employs illegal immigrants.

How often do you boycott a company? Which company has treated you the worst, and what have you done about it?

Occasionally you come across an article that gives you an epiphany and shifts your view of the world. One such article for me was Tom Sloper’s excellent #1 lesson for aspiring game designers. While its interesting in and of itself (assuming that you’re interested in video games), I think the core idea extends to most areas of life.

It is: “Ideas are worthless, it’s implementation that has value”.

This flies in the face of a lot of deeply held beliefs many people have. I knew one man who spent his life coming up with ideas for inventions and trying to sell them to companies. He was retired and broke (late in life he finally tried to finance one of his ideas himself and lost his house). He was convinced that a clever idea pitched to the right person would make him rich.

The Google guys originally made the rounds trying to sell their PageRank approach to various companies for $1 million. They were turned away, and eventually decided to just do it themselves. The idea wasn’t worth $1 million, but the company they’ve built is worth over 100 billion.

The argument could be made that the value of their idea was unknown when they were pitching it, and that its worth more now that its been proven to be a better approach. I’m sympathetic to that view, but I really feel there’s more to it than that. You can read their original paper on PageRank and implement it yourself if you want, but your new search engine certainly isn’t going to be worth billions.

I think there’s an abundance of good ideas in the world. The easiest part of creating anything new is to think of an idea that would be an improvement on what is currently in existence. I think just about anyone can do this easily. The hard part is making that idea happen, and dealing with the hundreds or thousands of obstacles that stand in your path. This takes resources (including your time), in a way which brainstorming doesn’t, and makes it inherently more valuable.

In his article, Tom cites the example of a friend of Dune author Frank Herbert who suggested to the author that he tell him a great idea for a novel, Herbert write it, and they split the profits 50/50. Herbert refused, saying that writing is the hard part. Similarly, Craigslist is FULL of people trying to find a programmer to implement their “revolutionary idea for a website”. They offer to give the person who does all the work building it a share of the resulting site. How nice! I foolishly met with some of these wannabes in my younger days, and not only did they expect me to do all the work, their ideas were pretty lame (“its like MySpace, but cooler!”). Ideas for websites are the easy part, BUILDING them is hard!

I have over 20 ideas for innovative businesses that I think all could work. Implementing any one of these ideas (or even building something that wasn’t original, like starting a Subway franchise) would be FAR, FAR more valuable that a “portfolio” of ideas that never go anywhere. I’ve actually been tempted to start a series of posts detailing my ideas just in the hope that someone likes one and implements it: these ideas have so little value that I’m happy to give them away.

Starting a business is REALLY hard, which why I just yak about ideas instead…

I love free giveaways, and last Sunday Harvey’s (a Canadian burger chain) was giving away its original burger free from 10:30-3 pm. I swung by, looking forward to munching on the beefy goodness, and gave up when I saw the lineup was out the door and down the sidewalk. Not being willing to wait for 20-30 minutes for a $3 burger, I shrugged my shoulders and headed to my office to work.

Years ago when I was an summer intern at an Ottawa tech company, there was a big promotion at a local bar with free beer. Tons of young people went out for the night and if there was any free beer available, I didn’t get any of it. When I asked servers there, they kept saying “later, later”. Then suddenly it became “its all gone”.

The obvious defense if someone complains about something free is “well, do you want your money back?” Mike and I don’t charge visitors to our blog a dime, so there’s a limit to how much complaining we’d put up with from a visitor. HOWEVER, businesses that decide to do free giveaways do them for a reason, and I think they’re sometimes undermining themselves when they do them poorly.

In the case of Harvey’s and the bar, they clearly are saying to their customers: “Come try our product free, its so good you’ll become a regular”. However, in both cases when I went to sample their product, I was dissatisfied. So their free giveaway alienated a potential customer instead of converting them. I never went back to that bar, and my view of Harvey’s has shifted a bit to viewing it as a place with long lineups and slow service.  I’ll still eat there, but when I’m trying to decide where I want to go out to grab some grub, I’m sure it’ll factor into my decision on some level.

In both cases, if they wanted to give away a free sample, they should have tried to make the experience as good as possible, even if that means having more staff on hand, or more samples to give away. Otherwise why even bother?  I can’t see the point of teasing people with “we have something for free / cheap” then making it difficult for them to try it.

In terms of our blog, we’ve never hit the point where we stop listening to someone complaining (Mike always forwards the complaints with the most cursing in them to me – although usually we just laugh). Even though visitors to the blog don’t pay us directly, we like traffic and higher traffic translates directly into more options for monetizing. They may not be paying customers, but we want visitors to have the best possible experience.  If they complain, we welcome that as an opportunity to learn how to improve what we’re offering.

I recently came across two similar approaches to “becoming an expert” in a field. Both are somewhat similar, and both are in harmony with my experiences in life.

Two way to become an expert on any topic are:

1. Read a book every month on the topic for one year.
2. Study the topic every day for 30 minutes.

A father of a friend of mine suggested the first approach. The selection of books is important, if you keep reading “introductory” books on the subject, you probably won’t make much headway (although you might be in a great position to teach others the basics, in a sense you’d be an expert on the basics). Conversely, even if you read through advanced books on the topic, they won’t do you any good if you don’t understand them. A course of reading that progresses from the basics to the more advanced would be ideal (and a reading list from someone who already possess expertise in the field you’re interested in would probably be worthwhile).

Keep in mind that your book selection will also determine what you’re an expert OF. If you read a Robert Kiyosaki book every month for a year, I think you’d be an expert in the “Rich Dad” philosophy, NOT necessarily an expert at finances or making money. Similarly if you studied naturopathy for a year, you’d be an expert in naturopathic medicine, NOT necessarily in medicine or the maintenance of good health.

My childhood doctor complained to my father that with the ease of accessing information from the internet these days, most of his patients develop more expertise about their individual ailments than he possess. These same patients could have probably done this 50 years ago if they were willing to invest the time.

Also keep in mind, this would be a very academic form of expertise. Studying a book on tennis every month for a year would allow you to VERY knowledgeably discuss the players, game and history. It probably wouldn’t make you play very well. On the other hand, reading a book on chess strategies every month for a year probably WOULD improve your game, even if you didn’t play once during that time.

John T. Reed advocates the 30 minutes of study per day approach. In some ways this is a broader idea, as the 30 minutes a day COULD be reading books, but it could also be alternative approaches. I learned “Django” (a framework for easily constructing database driven websites) for a few projects a while back and at the time I was learning it, there weren’t any books available. There WAS a number of discussion forums and on-line documentation (along with using the system itself) which did allow me to become an expert.

In neither of these cases does expert mean “best in the world”. It means you’ll be “a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject.” When the topic comes up in social situations, typically you’ll be the most knowledgeable person participating.

John T. Reed boldly claims that after 6 months of studying something for 30 minutes a day people in your region will seek out your expertise, and after 1 year people nationally will seek it out. This corresponds with his experience. Mike and I were referenced in the Globe and Mail after writing our blog for about a year.

Have you had experience becoming an expert using either of these approaches? What was the topic and do these time frames correspond with your experience? Do you think there are areas where this wouldn’t work? If yes, what are they?

I love to save money and phone service is typically one of those big bills none of us like to pay each month. A little over a year ago, I was preparing to move in with my then girlfriend, and thought an excellent idea would be to move my number over to a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) phone. These are basically phones that operate over the internet instead of being connected to Bell’s network.

There are a number of providers, but at the time Vonage was advertising like crazy. They seemed like the market leader (and I had had problems with Primus, my provider at the time). Although they promised to migrate my phone number, I had to keep on them constantly to actually make this happen (and I was nervous as the move was approaching that Primus would cancel my service at my old address and release my number back into the pool). Apparently number allocation still involves Bell, and they do everything they can to make this process difficult (ideally to embarrass their competition is what I was told).

Pretty well from the start, service quality was spotty. I’d be talking to people and occasionally (like once every hour or two) it would cut out for 3 seconds. Not the end of the world, but I got pretty sick of having to ask people “could you please repeat that, my phone cut out”.

The installation and portability of the phone was nice. You just hook it up to any internet connection, and start talking. In theory, you could be in Taiwan, talking on the phone, and to the rest of the world it would seem that you were in Toronto (your number WOULD be a local Toronto number).

The price seemed great at the start, but after I added unlimited minutes in Canada and the US it got up to about $40 / month, which doesn’t seem like a great deal these days. It *was* nice that ALL the bells and whistles are included with the basic line (you get call answer, call display, call waiting, call forwarding, conference calling, etc, etc, etc all included). It also was pretty neat that I could check my voice mail through a web browser (all callers would be displayed and you can play the messages as a sound clip).

The guy I talked to to cancel tried his damndest to keep me, offering to get technicians to help me improve my quality (I had already setup a new phone service through Rogers at this point so I wasn’t interested). When I refused that, he offered me one month free along with the promise of improved quality, and when I held firm, he offered me 2 months free before finally cancelling my account. So if you’re a Vonage customer, an easy way to get 2 months of free service would be to call and say you want to cancel :-).

As part of the cancellation, they hit me with a $50 “termination fee”. This was because I had been a customer less than 2 years. Supposedly this was in my service agreement, but I certainly don’t remember ever being warned of this when I was setting up the account. Please factor into your decision, if you ever decide to get VOIP and Vonage specifically, that they’re the type of company that will kick you in the teeth if you ever want to leave.

A man I was talking to at the University laughed at me and said there are a number of VOIP options that are far cheaper than Vonage. If it wasn’t for the sound quality issues I may have inquired further, but I’m basically off of VOIP at this point.

Have you ever used VOIP?  What was your experience like?  Who do you use as your landline phone service provider?