Saturday morning, clear sunny sky and 43 degrees, coffee’s hot, and Cadence Spalding .. A perfect start to the perfect day.
Cadence Spalding is an American educator, vocalist, instrumentalist and composer. She is well known as a new age musician and also as a children entertainer under the name of Miss Jenny. Her solo album Save The World peaked #4 on the Top 100 New Age/Ambient/World Radio/Internet Airwaves Chart and was the best new age album in 2009.
Walmart may be the largest retailer in the nation, but being the largest won’t do it any good when we find that they are lacking grossly in customer service, price, and quality.
I read a piece in the Times online tonight that touched base on how Walmart is rolling back their Rollbacks .. evidently, having the “lowest prices” isn’t doing Walmart any good at all in helping to stabilize their bottom line.
Walmart, I feel, has grown so much, so fast, over the years, that it has lost it’s grip on quality. These days, with the economy in the toilet, we find shoppers looking for quality wares .. wares that might last a while longer.
Walmart can raise their prices all they want, but it might not do them any good as long as they insist on selling can openers that will only last long enough to open maybe two or three cans. I mean, C’mon .. a one dollar item is just that .. A one dollar item. If that can opener had the true price of just one dollar, like it should have had .. I never would have purchased it, and I could have saved both Walmart and myself the trouble, by purchasing a quality can opener at a different store.
Selling the cheap China knock-offs for a higher price may indeed be the undoing of Walmart altogether. Walmart .. Dollar Store products with a Sears/Macy’s/JC Penny price tag isn’t going to work.
Customer service? .. Walmart doesn’t pay it’s help enough money per hour for them to really even care if you can find a product or not. One store will tell you they have the desired item over the phone .. and when you arrive at that store, you discover that they really didn’t have the product or item after all.
The Walmart stores in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Idaho, Montana) do a better job on their customer service, but the Walmart stores I’ve shopped at here in Southeast Texas are an epic fail. These people down here seemingly just don’t give a tinkers dam about anyone who walks into their store ..
The only complaint I might find with regard to the Walmart stores in the Pacific Northwest, is that they are stocked continuously with clothes that some one in the south might wear .. Different geographical regions of this country have different tastes, styles and needs .. it’s too bad that Walmart, for as large as they are, still hasn’t figured this out .. one size (XXL), style, color .. in this case .. absolutely does not fit all.
The Walmart stores in the north are seemingly stocked with a variety of fish products, whereas the Walmart stores here in the south are not.
The Walmart greeters in the north are seemingly very friendly .. they won’t sneer at you or make inappropriate comments directed at you when you are having a bad day, like the Walmart greeters in the south will.
The Walmart meat, in both the north and the south, when cooked, tastes nearly the same as the packages they came out of .. Walmart meat is yet another epic fail.
I’ll refer to the article I read in the Times online when I comment on Walmart’s infamous “Action (clutter) Alleys” .. I understand the impulse shopping angle in this case .. but what about the shoppers themselves .. shopping carts that would choose to steer to the perpetual left from being hit by cars all day out in the parking lot, loaded with items, kids, or in most cases, both — trying to navigate the insanely narrow space that these so-called “Action (clutter) Alleys” create. Trust me when I say that your Walmart shoppers are spending more time trying to navigate the narrow alleys than they are even attempting to see how much the clutter costs that stands in their way.
Wide open spaces are a good thing, but Walmart doesn’t seem to think so .. let’s fill our shopping corridors up with even more of those cheap China products in an effort to increase our bottom line. Let’s ruin the moral of our employees by paying them a wage that requires them to have a welfare supplement.
Walmart .. you are not Sears, Macy’s, or JC Penny .. you are the late night infomercial .. the “As Seen On TV” guy .. the “ShamWOW Guy” .. the epitome of Chinese superiority in the retail market in this nation.
The only way that Walmart is ever going to make it beyond this recession, is to start selling some quality .. no .. corporate pep rallies aren’t going to get it done for you.
Arguing over a posted price for a product at checkout, can openers that only last a day or two, toasters that heat but won’t toast .. the list is longer than my arm ..
This blog post may be written off as just a rant by the many .. after all, I’m just one guy .. one guy that’s shopped at Rosauers, Buttery’s, Safeway, Albertsons, Fred Meyer, Tidymans, HEB, Kroger, and so on. I’ve also shopped at Walmart stores from Seattle, Washington, all the way down to Beaumont, Texas.
Walmart receives a failing grade in these three areas .. Customer Service, Quality, Price .. and depending on where in the west you are shopping .. these three fails will occur and may not appear in the exact order listed here.
Seems to be quite a bit of buzz going on about Google Buzz these days.
By and large, Social Networks are fine. When it comes to Social Networking, we are free to come and go as we please .. or at least, we “used to” be able to do that .. Enter The Buzz.
IMO, putting the Buzz into the Gmail is most likely one of the bigger boneheaded things Google has done lately. There is a time and a place for everything, and this line of thought even applies to Social Networking.
I look at my friends on Social Networking sites, not in an email client.
Back in the day, when I set up my Gmail, I configured it to the IMAP, and looked it over in Outlook. No need to be looking at what everyone else is doing — I’m looking at my email. Yes, there is even a time and a place for email.
Due to the fact that Google has been so wrapped up in their keylogging and tracking lately, I’ve decided that my Gmail account won’t be sending out anymore emails.
“Sure,” you might say, “But isn’t the Buzz turned off?”
With Google there just isn’t any way of ever knowing that — I mean, look at how the Google Toolbar continued to track it’s users even in spite of the fact that it was supposedly turned off — not going to take the chance I’m afraid. And thank God for the Domain email server, because it stands to get fairly busy, fairly shortly.
Have I ever tried Buzz? .. Short answer .. No.
Some ideas are just so idiotic that it’s not even worth the time to check them out. Social Networking through your email client is a very poor idea possibly born out of the frustration on Google’s behalf that Twitter and Facebook might just be beating the pants off of them with regard to viewership.
One day Google is going to sit down and figure out that one of the main reasons why people surf the internet is because they like to go places, see unique things, and visit “other venues” — it can’t be the Google venue every single time. AOL tried that model and look what happened to it.
Buzz will go the way of Orkut and Froogle I’m afraid, and that will be the end of it.
In the mean time — hand me the bug spray — will ya?
Update on the Google Buzz scene:
The danger in creating an instant social network around email contacts, as Google Buzz does with Gmail, is that the boundaries between what is private and what is public are not always clear. @TechCrunch
Imagine for a moment, that you’ve strapped yourself to a wild bull and they’re about to throw the gate open at the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas, Nevada .. and the real beauty of it all is that you’ve never been on a bull in your life. All you know is that this is something that might be fun, exciting, and maybe just a little dangerous.
The twists and the turns of the internet, not too unlike bull riding, can throw even the most experienced among us for a loop.
Regular, everyday average people, login to the internet every day, and are taken for the rides of their lives the minute they decide to click that mouse for the very first time.
It’s a ride so wild in fact that just last week, I was dealing with a client once for the first time and he had as many as 5 toolbars installed in his browser, and couldn’t figure out for the life of it all, how to get rid of them. If his panel had been any smaller than 20 inches, he wouldn’t have been able to view the site he was visiting.
Just because someone online says that it’s good for you, doesn’t mean that it is. Used Car Salesmen are a dime a dozen when it comes to the world of being online.
When Google popped off a few years ago about not counting the description tag in their algorithm, I kept right on writing the description/keyword tags. A few of my internet buddies thought I was nuts, it was only after I explained to them that other search engines still counted these tags, that they settled down a bit about it.
This whole social networking thing kind of has me in a quandary as well. By quandary, I mean to say that if Facebook’s own founder can’t figure out how to make money off of the some 350 million odd users on his service, what makes Google and Bing so sure that they can? Or .. are Google and Bing just so desperate for monetary gain and position that they themselves would be willing to throw caution to the wind for a few cheap clicks?
I’ve been to Facebook. I’ve had an account there for over 2 years, and what I get from the whole experience is that people over there aren’t interested in looking at what’s passed off for ads on that platform. In the old days of the WWW, we called it spam .. Now, I guess, they are called ads. I guess that when you become desperate enough for money, you’ll change the meaning or definition of something so that you can find a certain justification in whatever it is you are doing.
You know what I mean:
Toilet Paper – Bathroom Tissue
Trailer Houses – Mobile Homes
Spyware – Toolbars
Spam – Targeted Advertising
A few weeks ago, I was all about getting completely rid of any social networking references on my domain — instead however, after giving it a bit of thought, I decided to be rid of the existing accounts and start all over again. This time there would be quality, I figured. Surely the internet is big enough to have some quality left, I thought to myself, and I went on with creating a new Twitter account, and completely blew away my existing Facebook account to reflect only one solitary business page. And Myspace? — totally gone forever, and the term, “forever”, doesn’t seem like a long enough period of time when I think about just how long Myspace should be gone.
The internet, not to unlike that old wild bull at the rodeo, will throw you if it can. It’s important to remember to not get all caught up in the noise.
The internet is a living, nearly breathing, fast moving thing, and if you must venture out into the badlands of it, be sure to hold on tight.
Ah yes .. another Google page rank update is happening ..
I am amazed at just how uncorked webmasters get every time this happens. Never-mind the client .. the little green bar rules their days.
I’ve never been one to get all and up over the things Google does, and getting bent over the green bar is just, well … stupid.
If you’re keeping it real, and by this I mean, taking care of your clients, developing decent readable pages with good original content, then the little green bar shouldn’t ever become much of an issue.
For years I’ve watched webmasters do their jobs. And for years, I’ve seen websites rank highly regardless of what the little green bar says.
Google isn’t stupid. If you’ve got something unique to offer, as it might relate to how you do business online, then you should never have to worry about anything else. Your listings will be high for your terms, your traffic will be steady, and the sales will continue.
All too often, I’ve seen some great stuff absolutely ruined online as a result of webmaster anxiety as it relates to Google’s little green bar. Sites that list perfectly well for their terms, gone down in flames because someone thought they needed to change something because of a one point loss on the little green bar.
Your industry, your clients, your services, should dictate whether or not you change something on a site. If you’ve got stale content? Well then add new .. throw out the old .. evolve and move as the internet does .. as your industry does. Don’t be taken in by the little green bar.
Build your pages with your client(s) in mind, not Google .. and you’ll be fine.
Now that Google’s Page Rank Update for Jan 1 is finished, I’ve noticed that Google has awarded one of my very blank domains a page rank of 3 — while at the same time, giving another of our full content and heavily linked to domains a page rank of 1.
Keep it real then — never-mind the little green bar
