How can Starbucks Survive?

That I don't often post here should tell you something, but tonight I have some fresh sucky service to report.
We went out to a movie tonight, to see the new Resident Evil installment. It was just the wife and myself, so we thought, why not just go to a coffee shop and sip a decaf together? We don't know a lot of places in Wake Forest, and anyway there was a Starbucks next to the theater on Common Oaks drive, so there we went.

Well, it was packed with college students. Apparently the local seminary students like the place, so that was a bad sign right off: at 9pm on a Saturday night, there was nowhere to sit. We ordered two decafs anyway, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And while we were waiting, we wondered, "How in the WORLD can Starbucks survive as a company when it takes THIS LONG to serve a couple of decaf coffees?". And three people who ordered after us got served, while we waited.

We peered over the tall counter in the cramped storefront. The clerk was pouring what turned out to be lukewarm water into the tops of two drip filters. And he waited. And waited. Then he poured some more. And waited. And while he waited, he served three other customers. While we waited too.

Our eyes rolled. "The coffee better be good," we hoped. After waiting for what seemed like ten to fifteen minutes, we got our coffees. Then we fixed it, and walked down the street to the (now closed) Brueggers, which had outdoor seating. And we sat, drank, and were disappointed. The coffee tasted off somehow, like the water was skunky or the cream a bit too old. Anyway, it was not good coffee. We threw it out and left.

So, next time you're in Wake Forest, don't bother going to the Starbucks at the Common Oaks shopping center. You may be disappointed too.

We just expected a little more

The wife and I decided to try a new restaurant in Rolesville, Fitzgerald's Seafood. The place is always hopping on a Friday night, so it seemed a reasonable guess that it would be worth our while. It was not.

I imagine there must be rational explanations as to why so many folks like the place, and since this blog isn't about restaurant review I won't go into that here. What I will mention briefly is that we did not get great service.  The impression we got was that the service you will get, may well depend upon whether you are well-known by the old timers. Come to think of it, when we were first seated we noted that all of the other patrons were white haired 60+ folks and their 40+ kids. The side-long glances from neighboring tables did not make us feel more welcome, and while this isn't exactly the fault of the owners one can always expect the same kind of fish to follow certain kinds of bait.

But it was the gruff and harried waitress that I felt it really important to comment on. The younger, dark haired ladies sitting nearby were largely ignored by her, as were we after the order was taken. Someone else delivered our order, and my drink was omitted. No one ever returned to ask us how the meal was, or if there was any way that we could be served. We waited patiently, enjoying our company and trying to catch the eye of the waitress with our ticket, then finally went to the cash register to end the experience. Another waitress got us a take-out box for over half of our meal left over, which we probably should have just refused.

All in all, the staff is not so much overworked as out of shape and unable to keep up given the organization. But that is no excuse for treating new customers like they don't exist.  We left a small tip, a very small tip, to show our dissatisfaction.

Wake County Public School System and Prestige Portraits

Our kid is going into his senior year at high school, and as part of the yearbook process someone really special must have been put in charge. 

Now, I support educational institutions, don't get me wrong. But like Homeowners Associations and local town boards, schools get corrupt mainly due to the neglect. The yearbook process is to me an indication of just how ugly it can become.

Take, for instance, the decision to take senior portrait photos in the summer prior to the senior school year. Kids are still growing, so their pictures look like junior year photos. They are also coming and going to different schools, so there has got to be a lot of coordination, and probably a lot of mistakes made in getting them into the right yearbook.

Then again, there are the printed instructions on the mail-in proof sets:

Choose 2 poses for YB. Yux/Drape pose only on moonlight blue b/grnd and any casual pose that's not full body. NO HORIZONTALS.

These instructions would be clear, except that the mailed package includes only one sticker for choosing a yearbook pose. "Ah," you think, "I can go on-line to select the portraits there!" But no, the on-line guidance is virtually non-existent. It says cryptically, to chose a "favorite" pose, and a "yearbook" pose. Once the yearbook pose is chosen, it is fixed... there is no option to make a change, so watch out if, oops, you chose wrong. Then again, what if you mail in a selected proof too? Sounds like whoever designed this process was an amateur shooting from the hip.

So, OK, all that could be forgiven if they were a startup still figuring it out, or a value-oriented operation. But Prestige Studios has had its hooks into our school systems for years and makes 1300 percent more profit from the smallest photo print ($65 for two 5x8's vs a $5 typical cost for a photo quality print = 13 times) . That is by definition price gauging by a monopoly. 

Then there is the conflicting interests of the yearbook photos with the advertising of the photo sitting packages. The yearbook can only have two photos (at most), so paying extra for lots of additional shots is worth very little. The parents pay the sitting fee for the shots, then find out later that the photo packages run way out of line with customary and usual portrait fees, well into the hundreds of dollars. It is a formal bait and hook operation, advocated by the school system itself.

Backyard Bistro a bit slow on the uptake

So I tried to have lunch with my spouse at the Backyard Bistro during her lunch hour. I had lunch with a colleague once before; the food was nothing special, your typical slightly over-priced, average sports-bar fare. But it was different, and being only about 5-10 minutes away depending on traffic, we made it there and were ordering by about 10 after the hour. Two guys in military camo outfits followed us in, as well as another couple and a middle aged guy. By 20-of, all the others had been served food by some guy in street clothes. We waited and looked for the waiter, who was nowhere to be found.

I thought about it. Should I call a manager and futz about them forgetting our order while my wife's remaining lunch hour expires, let her go hungry, and end up being late? I did the next best thing: I walked out, got my wife a sandwich at Wendy's, dropped her off at work just in time, and returned to explain to the manager why I was unsatisfied with the service.

What really irks me is that the manager turned out to be that the guy in street clothes passing out the food to the people around us. The waiter never appeared again after initially taking the order. Instead I surmise that the manager took over and, confused about some detail, simply skipped us. Instead of acknowledging the oversight, he claimed the waiter said to him that the meal was ready 7 minutes after we ordered, and when he went to pick it up at the kitchen window we were gone. As he looked at me with glazed over eyes, I let him know we had been there for over a half hour waiting. He had no response except to look befuddled.

I thought it would be nice to try someplace different for a change, but I was wrong. It wasn't nice at all, it was an aggravating waste of my time.

Godaddy sucks like snail snot

Agile Markup Corporation is in the process of migrating its Web site to a new host. We were initially at oneononeinternet.com but feel they no longer provide a good value. We have long offered Godaddy hosting to our clients but we have seen the response times dragging and the amount of effort required to wade through the administrative menus is absolutely maddening.

Lately, we set up this Joomla system on a Linux Shared Hosting under Godaddy. We have found the response time to be extremely poor -- typically on the order of ten to fifteen seconds per request. If this were dog food we wouldn't feed it to our own dog. So we are looking for another solution, and will probably be using a cloud based service. So if you see this site, and wonder why it is so slow, don't blame PHP, MySQL, or Joomla. The brand recognition of Godaddy.com does not translate into a performance hosting solution.

Open Message about CyberPowerPC.com Gaming PC -- Don't Buy

I purchased a gaming system with SLI from Cyberpower, for my teenage son.
First thing, the Web site configurator did not mention that the gaming keyboard was backordered, so we were wondering when, or if, they had forgotten it in the initial order. There was no ETA on it. Several emails cleared that up.
When we unpacked it, cables were loose, not good.

The worst thing is that the system freezes up constantly.
We submitted a support request, and got NO RESPONSE. None. Nada.
Reading forums suggested that we turn off SLI, and that slowed the rate of freezing, but it still freezes up regularly.

Like memory, SLI is a basic feature of the system and should have been thoroughly tested, but my experience says that CyberPowerPC doesn't test adequately.

It was very poor customer service of CyberPowerPC to ignore our support request.
Now in every conversation he has, my son tells his friends to _avoid_ CyberPowerPC, and we know he influenced one purchase decision away from CyberPowerPC.
My own recommendations to clients, local friends, on Facebook, Twitter, and Blogger are to avoid CyberPowerPC.
A copy of this message was sent to CyberPowerPC. I will repeat blogging this opinion as long as I have a freezing CyberPowerPC.

TWC Strikes Again

For me, Time Warner's broadband Road Runner internet capabilities beats Embarq's by a long shot. But both businesses culture's discourage initiative and customer service that really sucks big time.

They are their own biggest fault modality: of the issues that I've had to endure as a customer, virtually all have been caused directly by unthinking, bureaucratic actions on the part of TWC people. Of course, a few have also been caused by unthinking Embarq contractors as well, and maybe some of the fault lies with the marking people too.

Here's the pattern that has repeated itself over and over:
1) marker guy walks all over my property spraying paint on my lawn and driveway, along the street, etc, etc.
2) contractors come out to dig something in
3) me or one of my neighbors points out that the marker did not mark the cable and/or phone. We say clearly "DO NOT DIG HERE" because there is something buried. We tell every one of the contractors on site.
4) Contractors ignore our information, trench directly across the cables. We lose phone and/or cable service for a couple of days.
5) Finger pointing beings.


Not to mention that these companies constantly send people out without notification to spin these problems, but can never identify exactly when a crew will fix the problems. You're supposed to be home "sometime between 9 to 1" or some such huge window. And even if it is noted as a cable cut on their work order, they may well test the signal at the pole and mark it "resolved" if no one is home.

I'm fed up with them. This last time it was the phone contractor who restarted the cycle. They were digging in fiber across the street. We went over and told them, look at the pole: we have internet and cable service coming from that pole. Please don't cut it. They cut it. Several hours later, TWC shows up and patches the cable.

Ok, fine, they patched it. But a week later, they show up again, this time with trenchers. I tell them, there is a phone line buried in my driveway, and ask why in the world they are replacing my cable, when it is SOUND. The cut was across the street. THERE WAS NO REASON TO REPLACE THE ENTIRE SPAN OF CABLE. It was completely unjustified. No, they said, this is how it is done. So away they go, and cut my phone line. Too bad they say, it wasn't marked by the guys who do the marking.

So now my phone doesn't work, and who knows when service will be restored. Worse yet, it is as likely as not that they guys who come in to fix that will again show their lack of competence by cutting through something else.

Stuff like this makes me yearn for a way to do without a phone company or ISP. The technology is sufficiently advanced to conjecture that a peer-to-peer urban/suburban wireless last-mile architecture could work. Something like an ISP co-operative. Something where the network terminators were themselves extenders for a co-op owned network segment, and segments were strung together through their nearest neighbors, with support provided by the cooperative but no ISP restrictions by a corporate ISP.

Of my service providers, the two who stand out as shining examples are Wake Electric, and Freedom Federal Credit Union. I would be much happier doing business with one of these kinds of companies than TWC or Embarq, who have completely lost touch with their local customers.