Archives
December 2006
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
It's been a while since I've posted anything here (do all of my entries start that way?), but I figured that rather than try to come up with something meaningful and deep, that perhaps I'd be better served by trying to just get in the habit of being timely.
So to kick off this new strategy, I figured I'd point out a couple of "things that made me go hmmm."
1) Yesterday, I was in a Radio Shack store buying some solder (yes, I solder things in my spare time; what of it?). While I'm checking out, the clerk tried to upsell me. Ok, that's just retail.
The odd thing is that what he tried to upsell me to: a 42" LG LCD television (with interest free financing). Now, for those of you who haven't stepped foot in a Radio Shack in some time, solder is $2.99 (there's even less expensive $1.99 solder as well). What kind of consumer walks into a Radio Shack intending to make a $2 purchase and gets upsold to a 42" LCD TV? Mind boggling.
2) I spend a lot of time on planes, and you hear snippets of very strange conversations. My favorite in recent memory: "Can I get a glass of ice water... with no ice, please."
3) And finally, here in the Bay Area (California), a lot of technology companies put up billboards on Highways 101 and 237 that would be incomprehensible (or just plain weird) to most of the rest of the world. Other regions get ads for alcohol, or some for churches. Here, some number of years ago, there was one that was promoting a company that had produced a new technology that could "double the number of FPGAs per millimeter"... or something like that. And there was a great Oracle/Informix billboard war that broke out around that same time.
But more on that later. Recently, AMD put up a billboard that touts their lower energy CPUs, and has a countdown of how much money could be saved if everyone had just used these new energy efficient CPUs instead of whatever they're using now. Of course, the countdown is a giant, illuminated display. Does anyone else see any irony in that?
And on that technology note, back to our regularly scheduled program. The next timely update will be about technology - or something like that ;-)
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Random acts of commerce...
So to kick off this new strategy, I figured I'd point out a couple of "things that made me go hmmm."
1) Yesterday, I was in a Radio Shack store buying some solder (yes, I solder things in my spare time; what of it?). While I'm checking out, the clerk tried to upsell me. Ok, that's just retail.
The odd thing is that what he tried to upsell me to: a 42" LG LCD television (with interest free financing). Now, for those of you who haven't stepped foot in a Radio Shack in some time, solder is $2.99 (there's even less expensive $1.99 solder as well). What kind of consumer walks into a Radio Shack intending to make a $2 purchase and gets upsold to a 42" LCD TV? Mind boggling.
2) I spend a lot of time on planes, and you hear snippets of very strange conversations. My favorite in recent memory: "Can I get a glass of ice water... with no ice, please."
3) And finally, here in the Bay Area (California), a lot of technology companies put up billboards on Highways 101 and 237 that would be incomprehensible (or just plain weird) to most of the rest of the world. Other regions get ads for alcohol, or some for churches. Here, some number of years ago, there was one that was promoting a company that had produced a new technology that could "double the number of FPGAs per millimeter"... or something like that. And there was a great Oracle/Informix billboard war that broke out around that same time.
But more on that later. Recently, AMD put up a billboard that touts their lower energy CPUs, and has a countdown of how much money could be saved if everyone had just used these new energy efficient CPUs instead of whatever they're using now. Of course, the countdown is a giant, illuminated display. Does anyone else see any irony in that?
And on that technology note, back to our regularly scheduled program. The next timely update will be about technology - or something like that ;-)
eaokiatwork at 1:06:00 PM PST Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
5/23/07 1:59 PM
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