So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[GHT]

Been saving this one...

View attachment 125044

It was worth the wait.

 

[2jakes]

Monday!

 

[Trenchfriend]

Everytime, when you are on bicycle, at least one of the boys with the old two-stroke mopeds comes and stinks the bikeway up.

 

[LizzieMaine]

 

[Fading Fast]

The "Moviepass" thing. How do they get off starting a business that requires theatres to cooperate without even asking if they want to be involved? And then when something goes wrong with the card or the transaction won't go thru, we have to take the blame. Nuts to that.

From MarketWatch

Amid cash troubles, MoviePass launches peak pricing

Published: July 5, 2018 3:05 p.m. ET

By

SARAHTOY
REPORTER

Movie subscription service MoviePass launched "peak pricing" on Thursday. In an email to subscribers, the company said that peak pricing will go into effect when there is a high demand for a movie or a showtime. "You may be asked to pay a small additional fee depending on the level of demand. You can avoid the surcharge by selecting a different showtime or movie," MoviePass wrote in its email. The company said it would also be introducing "Peak Pass" in the next few weeks, which would allow users to waive one peak fee per month. Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc. HMNY, -7.59% the parent company of MoviePass, disclosed in a June filing that it had just $18.5 million available cash at the end of May. Since then, the company has made a number of cash-raising moves, including proposing increasing the number of its shares of common stock to 2 billion from 500 million, entering an agreement to issue 20,500 shares of preferred stock and $164 million in convertible notes and filing a shelf registration statement to raise $1.2 billion. Helios and Matheson shares have tumbled 96.9% so far this year. The S&P 500 SPX, +0.75% has risen 2.2%.

 

[tonyb]

How many times in the past couple-three days have you been urged by a star-spangled pitchman or -woman to “declare your independence from high prices”?

 

[LizzieMaine]

^Loathe.

How about we're honest about the Fourth, a holiday which commemorates an armed revolution by a militant radical terrorist cadre against a militaristic and imperialist government led by an authoritarian chief of state in the early throes of what would soon blossom into full-blown psychosis?

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
Thing is, the crass commercialism would cease if it weren’t effective. People in the business of selling flimsy furniture and kitchen cabinets and whatnot dump wads on advertising because it moves merchandise.

There’s a huge discount furniture outfit maybe two miles from here that buys full-page newspaper ads and lots of direct mail and seemingly every other commercial on TV. The merchandise there would be deemed junk by most anyone who bothered turning it over to see how it is put together. But it’s inexpensive and it looks okay when you take delivery and they offer six-months-same-as-cash terms, so you know who their target audience is. Volume, you know. Most of it’ll be landfill fodder in a matter of just a few years, but it’ll really jazz up that double-wide while it lasts.

Gotta admit, though, I bought an adjustable bed base from them because it was priced well less than half of what I might have paid elsewhere. We have no kids here to use it as a trampoline, and there really isn’t much to it — steel framing and electric motors is about it. If it does fail, I’m confident it would be fairly cheap and easy to fix.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The only thing worse than those places are the parasitical "Rent to Own!" joints that infest my mailbox with circulars screaming that I CAN HAVE THIS 60 INCH FLAT PANEL DISPLAY IN MY HOME TONIGHT with just a phone call. I can think of nothing I would rather less have in my home tonight.

These swindly places are not unique to the present day, though. Read thru any metropolitan newspaper from the Era and your eyes will burn from the ads selling cheap curtain-burner radios, rickety beaverboard furniture, gaudy jewelry, and shoddy off-the-rack clothes to Joe and Sally Punchclock from Bensonhurst on EASY KREDIT TERMS! I guess spelling it KREDIT makes it seem friendlier when the man in the truck comes to take it all away.

 

[scottyrocks]

And of course there's Anthony's Law of the Workshop: "Any tool, when dropped, will roll into the least accessible corner of the workshop." And it's corollary: "On the way to the corner, any dropped tool will first strike your toes."

And the more important or irreplaceable (and smaller) a part is, the more likely it will disappear when it hits the floor.

 

[scottyrocks]

On some websites - Amazon, Walmart and Seamless all do it - when you go to "your cart" and then click to purchase, you begin a series of steps to complete your purchase - fill in your address, shipping choice, payment method, etc. So far, so good, but have you noticed that you can't easily click back to the main website? It's odd, but it's like you're locked in the "purchase" process.

You are unable to swipe back out of the purchase process and the back button on your browser also won't take you out of the purchase process. I find I have to put the company's website address in the web browser to get out of the purchase process and back to the regular website.

If I'm guessing correctly, it's just more obnoxious behavior where someone in the company has learned (probably based on some consultant's study since several large companies are doing the exact same thing) that if you can "keep" your customer in the purchase process and make it harder for them to return to the regular website, the client is more likely to complete the purchase.

This is such a great example of (1) short-term thinking and (2) not valuing your customers and not respecting them. Trying to bully your customer into completing a purchase will only turn them off to your company and create ill will. How is that a good thing? Sure, it might help get some more immediate sales today, but the damage done is long-term and hidden because the customers who are turned off to your company by this crass grab for money don't (in most cases) let you know that, they just don't come back or buy less or buy less frequently.

Have others noticed this?

Yes, I have been through this. I just X out of the window or tab and that's that. Sometimes I use the vendor again and sometimes I don't. I just can't be bothered with dishonest behavior.

 

[scottyrocks]

"may I have half a pound of shaved turkey please?"

I like my turkey hairy.

 

[scottyrocks]

Stores that force you to enter on the left.
Here at least, we were trained from kindergarten on to walk down the hallway on the right, enter or exit double doors on the right, etc. A few years ago I noticed new stores were reversing that ingrained system and setting up traffic flow to enter/exit on the left. I see more jamups and people bumping in to each other trying to come and go than I see any benefit to this.

Well, I actually know why this is done.

Supermarkets usually have two entrances. The one on the left has the entrance to the left so that people exiting the store, coming from checkout, which is in the middle front of the store, don't have to bump into, or cross paths with folks entering the store. The same is true on the right side entrance, but we enter on the 'correct' right side on that side of the store.

 

[scottyrocks]

A “customer satisfaction” survey from a business that sells what is called (with a straight face) “durable medical equipment” arrived in our mailbox a couple days ago.

Maybe it’s my paranoid imagination working overtime, but I can’t see how telling these people how satisfied we are with their product and service will be to our advantage if at some point down the road it turns out that this equipment is not quite as durable as advertised.

I purposely don't fill out such surveys especially because I don't want to tell them how wonderful their product is and then have it malfunction the next day.

I have become very good at ignoring survey and begging 'scams.'

 

[scottyrocks]

I loathe those things that float down in front of a web page I'm looking at. I don't know what they are called. Usually these are images telling me to sign up for their email spam assaults. It makes me crazy with rage. I almost always close the site and spend my money elsewhere.

Anyone know what those things are called?

So ruuuuuuuuuuuuude! How dare they!

It would almost be worth my time to contact their customer service department and tell them that I closed their page without buying anything. Then, as per Lizzie, I will end with a rousing "you stink!"

I've always referred to them as 'pop-ups.'

 

[tonyb]

I purposely don't fill out such surveys especially because I don't want to tell them how wonderful their product is and then have it malfunction the next day.

I have become very good at ignoring survey and begging 'scams.'

Turns out that the piece of “durable medical equipment,” of which we took possession May 30, failed on July 2.

Send us the customer satisfaction survey after a year has passed, please. And leave lotsa space for comments.

 

[tonyb]

The only thing worse than those places are the parasitical "Rent to Own!" joints that infest my mailbox with circulars screaming that I CAN HAVE THIS 60 INCH FLAT PANEL DISPLAY IN MY HOME TONIGHT with just a phone call. I can think of nothing I would rather less have in my home tonight.

These swindly places are not unique to the present day, though. Read thru any metropolitan newspaper from the Era and your eyes will burn from the ads selling cheap curtain-burner radios, rickety beaverboard furniture, gaudy jewelry, and shoddy off-the-rack clothes to Joe and Sally Punchclock from Bensonhurst on EASY KREDIT TERMS! I guess spelling it KREDIT makes it seem friendlier when the man in the truck comes to take it all away.

I am of two minds.

Yes, rent-to-own outfits prey on the struggling classes. It’s their business model, really, once you get past the spin. Them and the check-cashing joints.

Still, as one who grew up under such circumstances, who lived under such circumstances for much of his own adult life, and who maintains friendships with others still living hand-to-mouth, I am all too familiar with the poor financial habits that perpetuate such an existence.

No, you don’t need a 60-inch TV, nor a new genuine vinyl recliner with built-in beer can holders, nor a cable plan with all the premium channels. Add it all up and you’re spending hundreds of dollars a month to distract yourself from your woeful financial situation. Chase your tail, man.

I view the proliferation of rent-to-own joints and gambling parlors and self-storage places as signs of a certain cultural decay. Perpetually struggling people I’ve known have for years paid every month to store stuff that is worth less than it costs to store it for more than a few months. And they feed their fantasies by motoring out to the tribal casino. And they plop themselves down in front of big-ol’ TVs, for which they paid at least three times what they would have cost to buy outright.

Judging from what you’ve disclosed, Ms. McLeod, it seems you live on a modest income. You’ve arranged your affairs in such a way that you can live reasonably well on what you bring in. I wish for my lower-income friends with essentially nonexistent prospects of ever earning more than they do now to look to people like you as models.

 

[LizzieMaine]

It's the most valuable lesson I ever learned from my grandparents. They got married in the teeth of the Depression, and lived in a house with no electricity or running water until 1940. They were *truly* poor -- their total income for 1939, the year my mother was born, was $460. They did better as time went on, but they never forgot the difference between "need" and "want," and they never bought into the idea that the way to compensate for poverty was acquisition. When they bought a house it was just enough of a house for what they needed. They never bought anything they couldn't actually use, and they never believed in "aspirationalism." They didn't buy the more expensive car, or move up to a bigger house, or buy fancy clothes, because they didn't want them. Even if they could have afforded them they wouldn't want them.

I can't think of two people who ever walked the earth who were more impervious to the Boys than they were -- they lived thru that whole postwar-Fifties U Auto Buy Now go-go-go era, and rejected every bit of it. If they taught me anything, it was that.

 

[EngProf]

Here's another way of looking at the "acquisition" lifestyle (or the lack of it):
My parents grew up in rural Tennessee during the Depression, and were by any standards *quite* poor. Later my dad fought in the infantry during WWII and spent part of that time living in a cold hole in the ground.
In the post-War boom-times they both wanted to have what they had not had growing up: a nice house, a nice car (or cars), plenty of good food, and good clothes. I firmly believe that if the infamous "Boys" had not existed, my parents would have still wanted those things.
It fits my perception of human nature - if you have been deprived and uncomfortable in the past, and later have a chance to have abundance and be comfortable, why wouldn't you take it?
My parents both worked, and later my dad started his own business and then worked even harder. They spent money wisely, so they had enough to live well, and also buy what would been luxuries when they were growing up.
As one example, my dad was a "car guy" and bought new cars in '50, 52, 54, 57, 61, 65, 66, 68, etc. He was also the most independent-minded person I ever knew, and I am convinced that if he thought the Boys or anyone else was trying to convince him to buy new cars, he would not have bought them.
I think any marketing schemes concerning cars were just as effective on him as pet-food marketing schemes were on convincing my kitty-cat that she likes Meow-Mix Tender Centers. My dad wanted new cars and my kitty wants Tender-Centers completely independently of anyone trying to convince them that they do.
We lived frugally, with a very Puritan-work-ethic basis to our lives, but without a reluctance to buy "luxuries" if we could afford them. As an example, we had a family conference one Christmas to decide if we wanted a color television enough to cut back on other presents to afford it. Consensus "yes" - proceed with color TV purchase...
It was a partial-disconnect from the "acquisition" culture, so we didn't have one of everything that was advertised on TV, but it was a lifestyle that worked very well for us.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
My working-class grandpa allowed himself a new car every couple-three years as well — FoMoCo products, Fords and a Mercury or two. Lincolns would have been too showy for him, and expensive.