The Peak - Great Children's Programming from Japan
The good news is that I got an early Christmas gift from my father-in-law. It's a DVD collection of interstitials from the Japanese Children's show ピタゴラスイチ ("pitagora suichi", which means Pythagoras Switch). The show opens, closes, and is interspersed with Rube Goldberg-like contraptions of every day objects that involve marbles, magnets, and a LOT of physics.
This DVD is in a beautiful book-like binding that has a booklet explaining each of the 20 or so contraptions. You probably can find some on YouTube. I love that this is from a childrens' show that is also fascinating and fun for an adult. I'm definitely going to show these to my kids some day, and maybe we'll spend a rainy afternoon trying to make our own contraptions at home.
The Valley - Car Shopping and Car Salesmen
I suppose this frustration is not unique to car dealerships, but I think it takes what is wrong about commerce and big business and inflates it to ridiculous proportions. My overall complaint is this: it appears to me that most businesses feel it's necessary to deceive, rip-off, or pressure the customer into purchasing something they might not really want and certainly don't need.
This weekend my wife and I visited a Honda dealership on a whim to check out the Honda Fit. We were not motivated buyers - just curious. With this in mind I prepared myself to face the hard sell from the staff there(I recommend this article for anyone who is thinking of stepping inside a dealership).
Amazingly, my concerns were unfounded. The youngish salesman who helped us did not pressure us. He explained the features of the car without a lot of jargon and without implying that we need to buy this car with every word. We felt comfortable with the interaction, and we may eventually buy a car from this guy because of that. They had one Fit there, but with all the bells and whistles (which we don't want). We took it for a test drive anyway. Afterwards, we talked a little about pricing, told the salesman we'd think about it, thanked him, and left.
That was it.
It was a good car-shopping experience for us. The next day the guy's boss calls with the hard-sell voice and the hard-sell push; something like, "I'm just calling to say I'm sorry we couldn't sell you a car yesterday..." and, "what will it take to put in this car?" etc. I politely told him that we didn't want the car they had on hand, and that we don't want them to call us. Yesterday, we received a "follow up" letter from the nice guy. I'm sure his boss is grilling him to close a deal he knows he won't make right now.
Now, to get back to my original point - as far as I can see, the goal of the car dealership (this one and others I have visited) is to sell a car to any person who walks in at all costs, regardless of whether that person is ready to buy. Car sales staff use psychological tricks to keep you in the store and pressure you into a deal that's not in your favor and they wont let you out of there without a fight. There's a great difference between a good salesperson and someone who's trying to fool you into a deal that's not good for you. Instead, car shopping becomes a mental duel between you and the entire sales team at the dealership. It makes looking at cars a bit stressful, and it's irritating.
The same could be said for things like stores convincing customers to buy extended warranties that they don't need, rebates that are intentionally difficult to get, deceptive retention scripts at internet service providers, and credit card companies that hope you miss payments so they can hit you with fees and increased APR's. These business models are not based on selling a good product to people that want it - they're legitimized scams, the purpose of which is to squeeze money out of people for no good reason. What's worse: these scams benefit the salesperson only a little; they earn the most money for those at the top of the food chain in the company. Why can't companies just try to sell a good product?
