Some cool China outsourcing products images:
Poor quality control
Image by litlnemo
For sale at Jo-Ann Crafts in Renton, WA. "Trick or Treak"? The least they could do was have a native English-speaker look over the stuff at some point before the product got sent out to all the stores. They probably made thousands of these cheap, crappy, ugly, and MISSPELLED halloween decorations.
023 of 366
Image by mjtmail (tiggy)
I’m concerned that I’m boring even myself with my tales under the 365 pictures, but I’m in Hook for the next few days so I’ll not be uploading any pictures / tales for the next few days.
anywho…… we’ve been to frankie & bennys for dinner tonight, (weeman loves the "fire" oven) i had a calzoni, wife had burger & weeman had a kiddies pizza.
when the food arrived wife’s chips were absolutely awful. im taking brown, stale & grim. having been a manager for mcdonalds in a past life, I’m a stickler for good fries. they’re so easy to do, all you need is hot clean oil (shortening) & chipped potato’s. you can tell an awful lot about a kitchen by looking at the fries it puts out (did I mention I was a fries loser?). good fries demand excellent quality clean oil. good fries are always light in colour. if your fries are dark its not a good start. if the kitchen is skimping on oil (quality or cleanliness) then imagine what the harder to care for / produce stuff is like.
normally I’m not a complainer but every friggin time we’ve been here the fries have been getting worse, so tonight I grabbed the lady who served us (as ever very nice) and complained about them. she went and got the manager who was also great. came clean straight away, the food delivery people have not delivered oil or fries, so wife was having tesco chips cooked in tesco oil (not suitable for high temperature "industrial" deep fat fryers) had mr manager not been so honest and tried to fob me off with an excuse I would have been proper grumpy, but because he was straight with us we’ll deffo go back (again) so good work manager of the leigh frankie & bennys – you turned me around.
these wood stone ovens get on my tits too. i hate how they call themselves wood stone, so you’ll think its wood fired (they do make wood fired ones too, this rant is about the gas ones) and you go to some places (zizi’s) and they pile wood up around it to further push the lie. there’s no need, we’re not stupid, tell us the truth – in a strange way this links into the "customer is king" bullshit that’s currently getting on my tits (ooo I’ve started something now)
customer is not king, customer is third or fourth place. mobile phone Chinese companies, internet providers, banks, anyone – offshore call centres may be cheap but they are shit quality. (i choose my words very carefully) this is not in any way me having a dig at the guys or gals that work in offshore call centres, far from it, they do great work. for me though as a grumpy git with a lancashire accent I’m hard to understand if you’re from anywhere that doesn’t have a pie on its town crest. the person I’m speaking too needs to understand my sarcastic lancashire accent and when they don’t it makes me cross. so when they don’t even speak english as a first language its just not gonna happen.
you (companies with offshore call centres) know this, but think ahh well fuck it, they’re cheap. now I understand that is the big business way (the race to the bottom!) and that’s fine, be honest & say we’re cheaper than XYZ because we offer less customer service, then if I use you its my choice. but don’t piss on my back & tell me its raining!
I came to you because of your service, mobile phones are mobile phones, ADSL broadband is ADSL (not cable broadband, oh no that’s different! same offshore shite though) broadband its al the same shit in a different box. the thing that differentiates is quality. good stuff is very rarely cheap & cheap stuff is very rarely good. i think society is ready for a company that says we offer 2 services 1 is £10 a month – offshore call centres, automated services or a second, its £12 a month its the same product, but your £2 buys you access to a well trained group of experts from the UK, that way if I choose the £10 deal then I get £10 service but if I want to be treated like the king you tell me I am I have to pay that little bit extra.
thoughts please 🙂
edit :
I got myself so cross then I forgot to talk about the photo!
no flash, camera balanced on a lasagne dish (clean) pointed at the oven. lightened in cameraRAW & photochop.
I wish I had an oven that went up to 343 degrees C
AARP DEMO
Image by jurvetson
With Matt Marshall and Jody Holtzman, SVP of AARP yesterday.
Here are some of the points I shared:
The 50+ market is huge and a large untapped opportunity for entrepreneurs. In the U.S. alone, there are 100 million people over 50, and that number grows by 10,000 every day. By 2025, the entire nation will look like Florida does today. Demographics is destiny — the aging population is a perfectly predictable dynamic that will have massive economic repercussions. They already represent a disproportionate 45% of U.S. consumer spending, and healthy aging is already a 5 billion business (Furlong).
The boomers are qualitatively different as well, both from the generations that preceded them, and from common assumptions. Advertisers often focus on the 18-34 year old segment to find adopters of new products. Let’s compare that to the 50+ segments. The 50+ spend 2.5x as much, and dominate the entire market for some segments (60% of all CPG and automobiles, 80% of leisure travel). But are they laggards? They are 3x as likely to buy online as the 18-34 segment. They buy the most hybrid cars, iPads and even online dating services.
But are they looking to retire? Learn new tricks? Boomers are actually the most entrepreneurial age cohort. The per capita company formation rate for people over 50 is double that of 20-somethings and 30% higher than 30-somethings. Many of these businesses feed into the eBay economy, and in the future, when crowdsourcing Chinese companies like servio help create a marketplace for information services, then boomers could be America’s China outsourcing alternative to off-shoring. (I testified to the White House Conference on Aging on that topic)
Matt asked me how we have invested in this segment. I mentioned Posit Science which reverses age-related cognitive decline with games that promote neural plasticity, especially in the sensory cortex (since that generalizes to many improvements in memory and cognition, since noisy inputs degrades the higher level constructs). They have found an average reversal of 10 years of cognitive decline, and in an auto insurance study, a 50% reduction in at-fault crashes!
And as I looked around the room, I pointed out that for those of us over 30, we are already in the long dive of cognitive decline (evolutionarily, there was not selection pressure for a life extended much beyond the breeding years, and our healthcare advances have done more for the body than the mind).
By almost every physical measure of brain function, the slope of cognitive decline is the same in the 30’s as in the 80’s. We just notice more accumulated decline as we get older, especially when we cross the threshold of forgetting most of what we try to remember.
But we can affect this progression. Prof. Merzenich at UCSF has found that neural plasticity does not disappear in adults. It just requires mental exercise. We will look back to the current day and marvel that we thought we could stay mentally fit without exercise. We will look at it like we do physical fitness. Few modern careers offer the degree of physical and mental exercise required to remain fit.
But the form of exercise differs. Physical exercise is repetitive; mental exercise is eclectic. Do something new. (Here’s my short HBR article on this). Lifelong learning is not just about enlightenment; it’s an economic imperative.
And since it was DEMO after all, I have to share a link to the beta version of the BrainHQ for anyone who read this far and would like to demo the latest from Posit Science. =)
Top photo by Stephen Brashear of DEMO.