Category: Big Business

The Credit Card Prank I

The Credit Card Prank II

For what it’s worth, I can confirm from my own experience that they almost never check to see if the signature on the back of the card matches (my signature is messy and the space on the back of the card is rarely large enough to match what I sign on a receipt; Margie’s is an illegible squiggle that I think she chose in homage to her brother, the doctor), though they will ask for an ID if there is no signature there (or if the signature has blurred with time into a vague, bluish cloud).

(via J-Walk)

A rambling but fascinating essay in the New Yorker on the business side of being a doctor. Great stuff (and no simple answers):

I remember, nine years ago, getting the bill for the heart surgery that saved my son?s life. The total cost, it said, was almost a quarter-million dollars. My payment? Five dollars — the cost of the co-pay for the initial visit to the emergency room and the doctor who figured out that our pale and struggling boy was suffering from heart failure. I was an intern then, and in no position to pay for any significant part of his medical expenses. If my wife and I had had to, we would have bankrupted ourselves for him. But insurance meant that all anyone had to consider was his needs. It was a beautiful thing.

Yet it’s also the source of what economists call “moral hazard”: with other people paying the bills, I did not care how much was spent or charged to save my child. To me, all the members of the team deserved a million dollars for what they did. Others were footing the bill — so it’s left to them to question the price. Hence the adversarial relationship doctors have with insurers. Whether insurance is provided by the government or by corporations, there is no reason to think that the battles — over the fees charged, the bills rejected, the pre-approval contortions — will ever end.

(via Kottke)

Let’s say you’re Wal-Mart, and some community has the audacity to restrict your right to unfettered metasticizing by putting a cap on retail store size — say, 75,000 square feet, when they know well and good that your usual store size is 100,000 square feet. What to do?

Think outside the box.

Signaling what could be a new approach to getting around such restrictions, Wal-Mart will build adjacent stores in Dunkirk, Md. with one outlet being constructed so that it will be just under the 75,000 square-foot limit that is allowed by a Calvert County ordinance.

[…] Calvert County passed an ordinance in August limiting the size of commercial retail buildings to 75,000 square feet. Wal-Mart usually builds stores that range from at least 100,000 square feet to more than 200,000 square feet for Supercenters.

Wal-Mart proposed a 74,998-square-foot store in Dunkirk that will be next to a 22,689-square-foot garden center. The two stores would have their own entrances, utilities, bathrooms and cash registers.

Wal-Mart has faced backlash for trying to expand in certain areas, and local jurisdictions have passed measures like the one in Calvert County that limit the size of retail stores. Total square-footage of the store would exceed the limit by 30 percent.

You almost have to admire the fiendish cleverness of it all.

Of course, they’re the good guys in all this:

It is the first time Wal-Mart has considered such a measure, said Mia Masten, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. spokeswoman. “As these big-box bills come up, all retailers will just have to be flexible,” Masten said. “In this case, we developed a model that allowed us to reach our customers.”

Never mind that those customers, in the form of their elected county government, just told you they didn’t want that large a retail center there, split bathrooms or not.

(via J-Walk)

1. McIllhenny, the makers of Tabasco Sauce, which they created in 1868 and named after a state in Mexico, is suing Tabasco’s Mexican Restaurant and Patio in Iowa, which says it named itself after that Mexican state, too.

   Sorry, obviously McIllhenny has arranged an exclusivity agreement with the Mexican government. One would guess that, at least, by their suit.

2. A tattoo artist is suing an NBA forward and Nike for not getting his permission before the tattoo (which he says is copyrighted) was visible in a Nike ad.

   I don’t think you can retain copyright on something that you made a permanent part of their body, except, perhaps, for technology. Even if the ad “focuses” on the tattoo, I think that’s part and parcel of mobile art like this.

3. The city of Chicago installed a huge sculpture in a public park — but the artist retained the copyright. Hilarity has ensued as park police kicked out photographers, both professional and amateur, who tried to (or inadvertently) included the sculpture in their snapshots of a public place.

   Said park police are getting remedial training.

Crazy, man.

(via J-Walk, J-Walk)

A word of note: not everyone thinks raccoons are cute. And not everyone who thinks they are cute thinks that feeding them in your house is a good idea, even if they were orphans, and especially when they started bringing friends along. And not everyone who thinks that it is a good idea is likely to make use of your professional services after you send them a local print shop calendar of fuzzy snapshots of said raccoons eating in your kitchen, with the request that if they use said services you can continue feeding the raccoons.

I suspect it was a sales idea that probably sounded a lot better discussing it with friends than it turned out in the execution.

If globalism — the blurring of market boundaries for merchandise and labor — is such a great thing, how come it’s only a great thing when it helps companies, not when it helps consumers? (Don’t answer that — it was a rhetorical question.)

So now we have regionalized printer supplies. If you buy an HP printer, it detects (through all that consumer-friendly hardware) whether the ink cartridges being put into it were made in the same country or region. Seems there are significant disparities in HP ink jet prices between the US and Europe — and heaven (or HP) forbid that Europeans buy cartridges from the US through a third party.

HP insists that it’s not out to “make money” from this. It says that it’s a way to keep prices stable. The increase in HP cartridge costs in Europe is because of the sliding dollar. If the dollar rises in value, HP claims it won’t raise the European prices to match.

Riiiiight. And they have a beautifully rendered, archival quality print-out of the Brooklyn Bridge that they’d like to sell you …

(via BoingBoing)

I find it amusing that Comcast, which bought out and fully rebranded TCI a couple of years back here in Denver, still shows up as “TCI” on Caller ID.

Copyright and trademark are, in concept, beautiful things. The former protect the fruits of one’s labors for a time so as to encourage innovation and creativity. The latter protects consumers from fraudulent attempts to confuse them as to a product’s origin, and protects the reputation of the entity the trademark represents.

When misused, though, both concepts are dangerous. Sometimes to a laughable degree.

So take the case of Urinal.net, a site that lets people post pictures of men’s urinals from various locations. Kinda weird, but that describes about 99% of non-commercial Internet sites (including this one) and about 50% of the commercial ones, so who am I to complain?

A year ago, someone posted a picture of a urinal there, identifying it as being at the Toronto Lester B. Pearson International Airport, which is operated by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority. The GTAA responded that it was unlawful for Urinal.net to mention the airport name. Urinal.net complied with their request to remove the name (whilst describing the airport using everything but its name), but noted that the GTAA had made them take the info down — at which point the GTAA said that using their name would lead to legal action, too.

Now another “outraged” locale is taking things further. Not only does the Marco Beach Ocean Resort apparently claim that to refer to them in association with a photo of a urinal from their site is a violation of their trademark — but said location’s lawyers claim that the cease-and-desist letter sent to Urinal.net cannot be forwarded or reprinted because it’s copyrighted.

Now, flash back to what those purposes of trademark and copyright were again …

Urinal.net amusingly explains what they can about the situation here. They could fight the matter, perhaps, but who can afford lawyers (assuming they could actually show the c&d letter to one without getting into copyright trouble) to protect a “hobby” site.

Of course, in doing this, the folks at Marco Beach Ocean Resort seem unaware that far more people will look at the picture, and associate their name with it, than ever would have happened had they left well enough alone …

(via BoingBoing)

Daniel Gross thinks Gift Cards are evil. His criticisms?

First off, Gross thinks they’re the “lazy” gift.

What do you buy when you’re too lazy to find a real present? Probably a gift card. In a Christmas shopping season that lacked a must-have product, the most successful item may have been that nondescript, infinitely malleable slice of plastic.

Which could be the case, though they may also reflect that the giver knows the sort of thing the the recipient likes (books, clothes, etc.), but aren’t specifically aware of what they really want, or don’t already have.

Of course, Gross tries to have it both ways, indicating that they could be an insult, too:

Finally, depending on the recipient’s self-esteem and level of paranoia, gift cards can seem a wee bit paternalistic and controlling. Gift cards are tailor-made for recipients who are irresponsible or deficient in taste and self-awareness?or who are simply prone to feeling that way. Give your teenager $50 and she might blow it on midriff-baring halter tops at Abercrombie & Fitch. But that J. Crew gift card can be spent only on presentable clothing. Dismayed that your boyfriend’s recent reading list extends only as far as Maxim? A Border’s gift card could send a message. For the insecure male on your list, a Thomas Pink gift card could be a not-so-subtle hint that his shirts are blighted with ugly stains.

Sure. And the same could be true for any gift (e.g., giving your boyfriend a specific book, or dress shirts, etc.).

Okay, well, that’s not the worst part of it. The worst part is because it provokes extra buying.

And gift cards frequently carry a price for their recipients. Walking into a store with free money in your pocket is like walking into an all-you-can-eat buffet after fasting?you’ll feel psychologically impelled and entitled to consume more than usual, because the short-term cost will seem lower. “When customers go into the store, they don’t feel constrained to just stick to that card,” said Karen Larsen, vice president of global marketing and business development at ValueLink.

That’s one of the reasons retailers issue gift cards in low denominations. The Neiman-Marcus $50 gift card won’t go very far on its own. Ditto for the $10 card at Wal-Mart. Indeed, ValueLink said that 55 percent of those in its survey spent more than the initial value of the card they received. (In an exquisite example of how commerce blasphemously adopts sacred language, such incremental spending is referred to in the industry as “uplift.”) Dan Horne says that “the evidence is that there is incremental spend of 40 percent.”

Gads. You mean that folks treat a gift card, not as a gift per se, but use it as a 60% discount on goods at the shop in question? How unspeakably evil!

(Oh, and by the way, while “uplift[ing]” is sometimes used in spiritual contexts, it’s also a geological term and, in fact, can just generically mean “elevating.”)

Oh, but that’s not the worst part — because gift cards actually benefit the retailers, and thus are unquestionsably absolutely evil!

Buy a gift card and you’re essentially lending cash to the retailer today that is paid back through merchandise tomorrow, or next week, or next month. ValueLink reported that 27 percent of those in its survey blew the cards out within seven days, and another 31 percent did so within a month. Which means that about 42 percent of cards retained some cash value on them for at least a month. Wal-Mart and Neiman-Marcus can borrow all the cash they want from banks or the bond market on rather favorable terms. Do they really need us to extend short-term interest-free loans to them?

Wow. So it benefits the retailer. So freakin’ what? It sounds like a clever move on their part (which also incurs some accounting costs, too, but never mind those). That doesn’t make it evil, just not altruistic. Which is usually the case with business. And ditto for the critique that gift cards encourage folks to come in and spend (additional) money during slow post-Christmas months.

My guess? I think Gross didn’t get enough gifts himself for Christmas …

(via J-Walk)

This certainly appears to be legitimate. And, if so, suhweet — a link that lets you opt-out of “pre-approved credit and insurance offers” garned by companies buying credit lists from credit reporting companies like Equifax (the page is cosponsored by all the big reporting companies).

You can either type the link directly — www.optoutprescreen.com — or go to a site that will redirect you (like this one under the EPIC, which recommends doing this here). For some reason, the credit reporting companies won’t let you click on a link directly to it, possibly for security reasons, but more likely (he says, mistrustingly) because they really don’t want you to do it.

Once on the page, you give your identifying info, and designate whether you want to permanently opt-out, do so for just five years, or even opt back into such offers. I’ve gone ahead and run it for myself, but not Margie, just in case it’s some horribly cunning scam, but it certainly looked legit and a bit of digging made me think it was.

(via Doyce, so I can blame him in case it’s some horribly cunning scam)

The ultimate example of “people will sign/click-thru anything.”

(via BoingBoing)