How Halifax's library deals with rule breakers.

Everyone has a vacation quirk. My family's is to visit libraries wherever we go. Last week we visited Halifax's central library and uncovered this brilliant scheme they have to make peace with rule breakers.

What is going on in grocery retail?

This is a thought-provoking piece on innovations in grocery retail. 

Farmhouse Market in particular caught my eye. It's a shop in Minnesota that lets customers use a key code to enter and shop 24/7. You can buy groceries alone. There is no on there to help, no on there to watch you, no one there to check you out. For me it flips the downside of zero staff—the fact that no one can help you—into an upside—you can shop anytime you'd like. Many large grocery stores let you shop 24/7 too, but having the option to shop in a smaller shop close to home with better food and less carting around through endless aisles...it sounds compelling. It also upends the Amazon Go grocery test where they hung a zillion dollars worth of cameras watching every move in the effort to let you shop without cashiers. That model is crazy expensive and freaks many people out that they are turning the act of buying cereal into Orwell's 1984. Instead, this couple installed a fifty dollar lock. And Big Brother isn't watching.

One emotion that staff-free retail invokes is trust. Do we believe customers will steal if left unattended? I lived in post-communist Slovakia for a year just after the Berlin Wall fell. The way retail worked there was utterly devoid of trust. In many shops you had to wait in a queue and ask for someone to get your item for you. To buy some noodles I would wait, then point at a box of pasta behind a counter and ask for someone to get it for me. Part of the justification for this nonsense was communism's mission to maximize employment. Jobs for everyone, jobs doing everything. A job getting you a box of pasta. A job handing you a piece of toilet paper at the bathroom (I'm not making that up). But another reason was trust. Since everything was owned by the state, people probably felt about as bad stealing as people do cheating on their taxes in America. A little wouldn't hurt, right?

I haven't thought about what that experience meant to me for years. Then I read this article on Chinese ecommerce. It is fascinating. (I'm sorry it's behind the New Yorker's firewall, if you'd like a copy I can send you a PDF.) It had loads of interesting news. For example, if you're like me and thought Amazon's drone special on 60 minutes was a PR stunt intended to deflect holiday attention from the working conditions described in an undercover Mother Jones article, you may be surprised to learn that they were just copying the Chinese who already use delivery drones. Who knew? But it was the author's own experience coming to America that hit home for me. She is a Chinese immigrant and described shopping for the first time in America after, like me in Slovakia, having to queue-and-ask shop in China. Here is her description of the marvel:

I can still remember the first visit my mom and I made to a Stop & Shop in New Haven, Connecticut, soon after we moved to the U.S., in 1992. I interpreted the unguarded aisles of open shelves as a sign that everything was free. I’d never heard the word “supermarket” before, and it seemed likely that “super” indicated a market where no money was necessary. My mother was awed that store employees, instead of trailing our every move as they did in China, seemed indifferent to our presence. How had shoplifting not bankrupted the establishment? What sort of society would allow such a risk? 

I had always thought of the Slovak model as weird. Here was someone describing how she felt the model I grew up with was weird. I took our get-it-yourself shopping for granted. But a hundred or so years ago, we shopped in America like they did in Slovakia, like they did in China. We lined up in a queue and asked. It made me realize that, of course, duh, retail changes. In high school I had a job at a video rental store. (It was there I watched Better off Dead about a hundred times.) That job no longer exists—for anyone. People don't rent videos from stores. Blockbuster used to employ almost 60,000 Americans. Where did they go? What do they do now?

Of course retail is going to change. Here is a mind boggling list of recent grocery innovations alone. How else will it change? Will it go backwards, like it's done recently adding delivery, something our grandparents took for granted? What will it add? What will it eliminate? Will we eliminate  the next queue — lining up to have people take our money? It seems the answer is inevitably Yes. There are many places, like CVS, where we line up and a machine takes our money. Or there are shops like Apple —or Zingerman's Mail Order, during our warehouse sale — where almost anyone walking around can take your money. There's no need for a single queue. Amazon wants their invisible app to take your money at Amazon Go. Surely that's just a stage, too.

But all that payment stuff, in context, seems like small potatoes now that I think about it. That's just the last part of retail. The money. There is so much more. One of the cornerstones of Toyota's lean operation tools, kanbans, came from how American supermarkets replenished shelves. That idea, born in retail, transformed manufacturing around the world. What else will come from retail? What else will come to retail?  How will we react to it? 

Apple Pay may not be a big thing for retail shops, but it may be huge for online shopping.

Most of the attention that Apple Pay and the other new mobile payment systems have received has centered on how (or why) paying for a latte on your cell phone is better than whipping out a credit card. Some people say why bother, but I think that's because credit cards are pretty good for that kind of task. The brick-and-mortar application for mobile payments is small beer. It's an incremental improvement. It's online shopping where Apple Pay may become revolutionary.

The ability to enter a totally secure credit card online with just a thumbprint solves a lot of problems for our mobile website. I'm convinced one of the main reasons people don't shop on their phones — even if they are on mobile-optimized sites like ours — is that they have to type. People have to enter all kinds of info like addresses and credit card info on a phone's dinky keyboard and that sucks. The other reason is that they need to remember passwords but all their passwords are on their laptops or buried in some other secure password-remembering App that's a pain to access.  Apple Pay can solve all that.

Apple Pay could let your finger print be your password to a site. Apple Pay knows your billing address so presumably it could automatically enter that when you finger print too, saving you from typing your  address. Apple Pay could allow the mobile browser access to the phone's contacts where you have 99% of your likely candidates for a ship-to address (chances are if you're sending a gift you know the person and they're already in your contacts). That means you could log in, enter your billing address, credit card info, and ship-to address in one  thumb print and maybe 2 more clicks. Think about that. You find something online with your phone. You click the link to a shopping website. Then you place a complete order in 3 clicks. You wouldn't need to download the company's app, it can all happen in the browser. A website could take an order from a new customer, too, in just 3 or 4 clicks. This could be a big deal. 

Silicon Valley wants to deliver your food

Restaurants and small food shops have always been flustered by delivery. On the one hand they could help customers—and find more of them—if they took orders online and delivered. On the other hand there's the problem of how to price delivery, the logistics of delivery and the problem of setting up an online order system and making sure its inventory is accurate.

In the last year there's been a wave of new Silicon valley start-ups that try to help with the last part—the online order system. 

The most prominet are Grubhub and Seamless. They take orders for restaurants. The restaurants figure out how to make the food and deliver it. Grubhub and Seamless take a cut that's probably around 20%. Speaking personally, I've used Seamless a lot in Brooklyn and it's very good. The benefit to a restaurant here is that they only have to figure out the logistics part of delivery. They can put all or just part of their menu online—and make it available at times that make sense to them.  Take Prime Meats in my neighborhood, a fancy restaurant that's full almost every night. They are on Seamless but in order to prevent overburdening their kitchen they initially showed up on Seamless only between 5 and 7pm, when they were slow.

In the novelty arena, you can also order pizza on a smartphone, albeit in a ridiculous way. There's a one button app that, when you push it, delivers pizza in 30 minutes. From somewhere. Anywhere.

In a more interesting twist, Square, the payment processing software company, is buying a food delivery company called Caviar. This is the only Silicon Valley firm I know trying to do the delivery part of the delivery business. Presumably the idea here is that a restaurant can buy their POS system from Square and the delivery software—and delivery logistics team—will come along with it.

This is happening with grocery, too. I just spent time at Bi-Rite and talked with the GM Patrick (ex-Zingerman's Deli manager) and learned about Instacart, which Bi-Rite just joined. With Instacart you place your grocery order online and they find someone to go get it from you. It's not an employee of the grocery store, it's not an employee of Instacart, it's just some shmo who signed up to be a grocery store picker. (They call them pickers, just like we do for people who pick items for boxes on our production line). Like with Grubhub and Seamless, Instacart takes a cut.

How these all play out will be interesting. Short-sighted merchants, or ones that do their own order and delivery, may look at the cut these companies take and say they don't need to pay someone else for something they can do on their own. The problem there is they will be shut out of network effects. The more merchants sign on to Seamless the more common it'll be for customers to shop there. If you're a merchant and you're not there, you'll loose out. Merchants will be saving cost to give up sales, which is rarely a good move.

What's the downside for the customer? On the restaurant side there seem to be very few negatives. Seamless doesn't mark up for delivery so why not order online and get the same food you could have driven to pick up brought to you for free? On the grocery side, I can see inventory being a hard nut to crack. Right now Instacart has no database connection between what's for sale online and what's in stock at the merchant. If something is sold out, the merchant has to remember to go to Instacart's website and mark it sold out. Will that happen? Sometimes, but not always. That will mean upset customers. Instacart gives leeway to their pickers to choose subs or call the customer to see what they'd like, but either answer is a flawed fix, one that will frustrate customers and hurt sales.

Disrupt yourself or be disrupted

You've probably heard of Uber, the car service that works like a cab—except better. You hail an Uber car from an app on your phone. On the app you can see how long the car will take to get to you. When the car arrives Uber texts you (so if you're inside finishing a conversation inside you walk outside and voila!, there's the car—I've used it a lot and it really does work this smoothly). You can select the size of your car (big SUV if you need to haul the family to the airport). You don't need cash and you don't tip. When you reach your destination you walk out the door and Uber automatically charges your card.

Uber is launching in city after city all over the planet and almost everywhere people are having a fit. Well, not most people, just people who drive cabs for a living. Cabbies are angry, ostensibly, that these "untrained," unlicensed Uber drivers are scooping up their business. I get why that sucks if it's true (in Boston, cab medallion prices, which are basically proxies for how valuable being a cabbie is, have gone up, not down, since Uber came to town which suggests it might not be true.) I think their anger is misplaced, though. They shouldn't be angry at Uber. They should be angry at their employers, the cab companies.

After all, there's no reason why cab companies couldn't do this. Uber's technology is not all that complicated. Any cab company could have done this for their customers years ago and can still do it now. I'm sure someone—or lots of someones—who worked at cab companies has thought of it; I'm sure it was brought up in meetings in cities across the world. All these things Uber does are clearly benefits for customers. So why haven't any cab company on the planet made their own app?

Well, it turns out instead of griping, one finally is. Seoul's cab agency is going to make its own Uber-style app. 

The DNA of Uber is, in practice, very simple. Its power lies in the fact that a huge number of people on the planet now carry a computer connected to the internet in their pockets all day long (we happen to call it a phone). When you use something like Uber for the first time it can seem so obvious you wonder, "Why hasn't this existed before?" The elegance and utility of Uber makes the cabbies argument against it seem archaic. Sorry cabbies, you don't stand a chance on this one. And there are dozens of businesses just like you that are next.

What do lean operations and New York bodegas have in common?

New York sometimes gets a bad rap for a mythical, brusque, who-cares kind of service, but speaking personally, I've almost never experienced it. What I've had instead usually combines professionalism (on-time, accurate, everyone says "sir" a lot) with individual customization. Take this instance.

Recently I stopped by the closest bodega to my house for a couple cans of beer as I do from time to time. They have a big selection and I always hope they'll have Heineken in a can but they almost never do. So I chatted with the guy who appears to be kind of like an owner — you know, he was the kind of person who acted like one whether he was or not —and asked if he'd take suggestions for beers. "Of course!" he said and agreed with me, "Heineken in a can is so much better!" He got the attention of the other guy in the shop and told him, "Let's get a couple cases tomorrow." This is 10pm at night. Next day, they were there.

That's what a corner store used to feel like. Or so I imagine. Frankly, I've' never experienced many corner shops in Michigan. In one way it's weird that there's this level of personalization in the biggest city in America. On the other hand, there are a lot of factors about shopping in New York that, when thought through, make its personal service seem not so odd.

In New York, everyone shops in the immediate vicinity of where they live because it's a pain to travel long distances hauling stuff on foot. You don't have a car and you have to carry everything yourself so you shop in small batches. This is a key factor that, like small batches in lean operations elsewhere, leads to beneficial and unexpected results. Because you shop in small batches you'll often be in the same shop several times a week.

The shops are different than many other cities, too—smaller, often run by adults, not the teenagers and college students you see working in big box stores elswhere America. The staffs don't turn over very much. I'm not a guy who is super chummy with everyone when I shop but it's telling that I know the names of the person who runs the laundromat, the florist, the wine shop, the cafe, several restaurants, the bodega owner and probably a few others I'm forgetting. In Ann Arbor I knew maybe two of the names of the people who ran their shops—Bob Sparrow the butcher and Mike Monahan the fishmonger. (They were there when I shopped.) Ann Arbor is a town a fraction of the size of New York but, to me, felt far more anonymous

Anyway, this is not meant to be a plug for New York. I wanted to point out a couple things. One is that smaller shopping batch sizes, one of the principles of lean, lead in this case to greater personal contact. That personal contact ultimately, in my case (and I know I'm not alone), led to better and more customized service. That service was not administered by a survey or a some other process. It was a question, an answer, and and act—all done immediately, just in time, on demand. It's a powerful way to run a business. These are great lean skills, hard to replicate and some of the reasons that, in spite of CVS and Rite Aid and other national chains trying to make a dent in the commerce here, small owner-operated bodegas in New York thrive.

Recent reading

Japan gets my honorary Office Space award for this, a gigantic, totally weird national competition for best office phone answerer. Hat tip to Val.

A restaurant that sells food past its expiration date? This might just have a chance. An ex president of Trader Joe's is starting a very different kind of food experiment. 

Annie's Mac and Cheese is everywhere. It sells itself as the slightly-better-for-you version of boxed mac and cheese. Is it? Who knows. What's crazy is the "sauce" is based on cheese popcorn—her ex-husband invented Smartfood.  Annie essentially turned Smartfood's topping into Mac and Cheese, convinced everyone it was healthy, sold stock to their customers, then got very, very rich. Welcome to the new "food" business.

Ancient calendar technology

I don't know when seven day week calendars began — they predate the Romans — but I don't think it's a stretch to call them ancient. Or maybe I should say heirloom. Whatever the word, calendars work crazy well. Everyone knows how to use them, the structure is the same worldwide so you don't need to understand a local language to read one, and they're super fast to scan and pick out the exact info you're looking for. When you want to tell people something specific to a day of the week there's nothing better. So I'm always surprised how many times people choose to ignore them and force customers to wander their word maze to find the information they're looking for. Like this restaurant:

Here's the same information written as a calendar:

How not to price a product

Our partners group held its annual retreat last week. One of the topics we discussed was health care costs. A little background first: each year Zingerman's benefits committee solicits bids from insurance companies and creates a proposal document to help us understand the menu of costs and changes. It's not typical for us to talk about the proposal at the retreat but this year we had a few more changes than usual.

It took an hour. To say that people were mildly baffled is an understatement. It was a clusterfuck. It's not that things cost different amounts—that part makes sense. It's that each insurance company offers so many different options that cover so many different contingencies you need a degree in Kafka to understand how to read the bid. Explaining it is an exercise in invented language; the health care industry has so much jargon you need a glossary to understand what they're saying.

Yet a one hour meeting explaining a financial bid to seventeen experienced partners is nothing like what happens when we have to share the costs to our crew. That meeting takes two hours—per employee. We have dozens of those meetings during the enrollment period, which for some reason that's never been explained reasonably to me, only happens once a year. (That's right folks. You have the privelege of buying health insurance at most American businesses just once a year.)

Imagine if we had to sell sandwiches this way. Imagine we had to have meetings with our customers that took an hour to explain how to buy a sandwich. Imagine we had two dozen different pricing schemes per sandwich. Imagine we only let customers get in on the sandwich buying action once per year. Imagine any other industry where service remotely this bad is inflicted upon its customers.

The Worst Run Industry In America is my look at the American health care industry, its service, prices and promises, from my view as a merchant

Business advice from Nine Inch Nails

"... the song chosen by algorithms...has begun to feel synthetic. What's missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation. As great as it is to have all this information bombarding you, there's a real value in trusted filters. It's like having your own guy when you go into the record store, who knows what you like but can also point you down some paths you wouldn't necessarily have encountered."

Trent Reznor on what's missing from Spotify and Pandora. Also, in a nutshell, a good approach to selling food.

The postal system versus the medical system, which is worse?

There are plenty of worries about unknowns arising from the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare). One that I’ve heard is that government intervention will turn the medical system into the postal system.

Forget about the fact that the premise is wrong—private health insurance companies will still pay private doctors, there won't be any government in the waiting room. But perhaps some aspects of the postal system wouldn’t be all that bad. I’d like to take a bleak moment to defend the postal system, at least with respect to the health industry. My examples aren't meant to line up apples to apples—delivering mail and delivering medicine are very different. I write these posts on what I think is the worst run industry in America from a merchant's perspective, trying to look at the problem health care has with its customers, not with its science. I don't think the post office is a beacon of great service so this defense won’t last long. But they do some things well and, in my opinion, a lot more than the health care industry does.

A recent example. I had to get my daughter’s first passport. I went to the passport website, downloaded a form that explained exactly how to go about it, then went to the post office without an appointment. I waited a short time for someone to review all the documents. They told me how much everything would cost and told me when it would arrive (it beat their arrival estimate). I was done in less than twenty minutes. Could any one of those things have happened with a doctor? Well, I’m sure they could. But for me they almost never do. Doctors don’t provide instructions on websites, don’t work without appointments, don’t tell you what anything costs, and I’ve yet to have a visit last fewer than half an hour, even though I only get to talk to the doctor for a couple minutes. Put the two next to each other like that and the post office comes out looking pretty good.

Here's another. The post office delivers—nearly every day, with remarkable accuracy. When’s the last time you mailed a letter and it went to the wrong place? (I can tell you it happens almost a half a percent of the time in the private sector. That’s the number of mis-ship complaints we get about UPS at Zingerman’s. That doesn’t sound like much but I bet it’s a hundred times more than the postal service.)

But I digress. I don't know how accurate medicine is and that's not the point. I'm asking about delivery. Does the health care industry deliver doctors to your home? Why not? Doctors used to make house calls, after all. Wouldn’t it be better for patients—especially the elderly—if they still did? We don’t even ask health care this question any more because we think delivered modern medical service is impossible. It’s not. Virtually everything else we purchase offers home delivery. Why not medicine?

The health industry is often lauded for its innovations in technology, surgery and drugs. Why don't they spend any time innovating on service?

Other Merchants...Casa Camper

This is probably the single most boring picture I never took in Spain. It's the refrigerated food case at Casa Camper Hotel (I found the image on the internet). Casa Camper is a blood red hotel, a good looking place in Barcelona, a very good looking city. You might know Camper as a quirky shoe company, which it still is. The hotel is a new thing for them.

They perform a number of interesting service twists that make the hotel feel intimate and alive in a way few other hotels ever have for me. The biggest one is that they give away things most other hotels charge for. Like food. It's all free. The fridge case is just off the lobby. It's filled with little sandwiches, Weck jars of yogurt and fruit, water, fresh squeezed juice, glass bottles of soda and so on. The food is healthy, tasty, easy to graze on. It changes every day. They tell you up front: eat it whenever you want, take it anywhere you want, we want you to enjoy it. That gives you a sense of control while, at the same time, making it feel like you're being given something very generous.

 

The Worst Run Industry in America No. 1: Your best customers are your worst customers

Last week I sat down with two people who are leaders in a relatively large Michigan health insurance company. (I won't use their names or the company name.) They sought me out because they were redesigning their website and they liked the one I direct at Zingerman's. They appreciated that it was fun and likeable. They wanted to know the philosophy behind the design to see what they could learn from it.

I told them that the fun and likeable parts of our website are not there because we think it's cool and nice to have. They're not a veneer. They're there to solve a customer problem. The problem is that most people find expensive food they've never heard of kind of intimidating. Our job is to remove that obstacle. We make the food approachable with information, humor and cartoons. My advice to them was to find their customer's problems and solve them on their website. Boiled down, that's essentially my philosophy of website design.

Like most of you I've been a student of health care since the minute I had something serious happen to my health as an adult. It happens to all of us. We start paying attention to health care when we really need health care. If you're like me, what you found when you started to use health care in America was inspiring, terrifying and baffling. On the one hand health care professionals and their gizmos and drugs do a pretty good job of making us well. But the health care industry that they work in is, bar none, the worst run industry I've ever experienced. (I used to reserve that line for the airline industry. But health care is run so atrociously it's not even a contest anymore.) When I say it's the worst run I'm not talking about profits and income statements. A lot of health care is profitable. It's everything else that the health industry does that makes it horribly run.

I think there's a lot that health care can learn from American retailers, who, in my admittedly limited travels in the world, can be the most forward-thinking and creative service companies anywhere. We retailers can also learn from health care. Mainly, we can learn what not to do. Because sometimes we're doing the same things to our customers that the health care industry is doing and we don't even know it. To that end, today I'm beginning a blog series I'll call The Worst Run Industry in America. It's not meant to be a venting session. My intention is to share lessons on what not to do from the industry that seems to figure out all the wrong ways to help people.

As my conversation wrapped up with the health care leaders they said something so shocking I can't shake it. We talked about different ways they could give great service to their insurance customers. At one point one of them said, "You know, there's a problem here. If we give service that's too good then what happens is we attract the really needy patients, the ones who need lots of health care. These customers are bad for our bottom line." 

In other words, their best customers — the ones that need them the most — they consider their worst customers, the ones they don't want. It made my jaw drop. No retailer could ever survive if it felt like that. My hope is that, in time, no health care insurance company will survive that thinks like that either.

The end of cash registers

Zingerman's Delicatessen is working on overhauling it's entire order-taking and cash register system to a series of iPads. (A screen shot of the test version, above.) Yesterday, Urban Outfitters announced it's doing the same thing at all of its stores.

You see it happening everywhere. I went to a bakery last week and they took my credit card on an iPhone. I went to the next shop, a cafe, and paid cash. They rang up the transaction on an iPad. We've used Square for two years at ZMO for our warehouse sales, it works really well.

This is not going to stop. The cash register industry is about to go the way of the frozen water trade. The benefit to the businesses is that the software to run a cash system is no longer tied to its hardware. If you don't like Square you can dump it and use a competitor, but keep the iPad. The benefits to us customers is that we don't have to wait in line. Anyone can be a cashier. In the future shops won't have to devote any real estate to the cash stand. In many places it will disappear. Where do I pay? Anywhere. Everywhere.

Other Merchants...Billy Reid

Billy Reid is a southern clothing designer who opened his first shop in Manhattan a couple years ago. The clothes are good and worth a visit, but it's the shop's hospitality that I'd like to draw attention to.

Here's a picture I took of a table near the door this summer. It's stocked with fresh lemonade, cucumber water and mismatched glasses. Help yourself, it's free, it's hot out. (In the winter there's a decanter of bourbon on the sideboard.)

It's so easy and so memorable. Why don't more companies do things like this?

Why don't companies like answering the phone?

This article describes some of the clever, confounding ways that tech companies make it increasingly difficult to reach them by phone. 

While those of us who have to use a phone to do work will suffer a migraine just browsing this article I think the folks who run most big time phone service departments feel the exact opposite. I bet they're almost jealous of techies' refusal to talk to their customers. They probably wish they could do the same. After all, while phone service departments are ostensibly in the business of taking care of people, everything in how they're run—from hiding phone numbers on websites to automated answers to making it impossible to reach a human being—makes me think they don't see any business value in it. To them the tech industry is essentially at the avant garde of their silent dream: to be virtually unavailable.

To be fair, they want to be unavailable when you have a problem. If you're placing an order that's a different story. They'll answer the phone—after you wait. Nearly every company with a call center puts you in a queue to wait before they answer. I never knew why. Until I had a call center.

When I started Zingerman's Mail Order we had two ten dollar phones and an answering machine. When the phone rang we answered it. We kept the second line free so if we were busy the call would "hunt" to the second line and go to voice mail—I mean the answering machine. Voice mail came later.

We knew we weren't doing right by our customers. They couldn't wait on hold for us to answer. If we were on the other line or out getting a coffee they had to leave a message. Then they had to wait till we called them back. When we could finally afford it we "upgraded," as they say. We got a phone system. It could allow people to wait. Unfortunately, you had to wait whether you wanted to or not.

With the new system, when the phone rang my recorded message answered it. Even if there were three people twiddling their thumbs waiting to answer phones the recording answered first. If you knew your way through the maze you could press 2 to bypass the message and get your call answered. But most people didn't. They waited. At a minimum they waited 25 seconds through my welcome message and the list of options before the system let the phone ring to reach a human.

After we bought this "upgrade" we asked if there was some way to bypass the queue. We asked, "Can't we just have our crew answer the phone if they're free and only use the queue when we're all busy?" The first answer we got was, "No one does that." After being persistent the answer we got was, "No, you can't." There are often questions you wish you asked before you signed a check.

Phone systems are usually sold under contract. As soon as ours was up we went looking for a replacement. We got it about a year ago. We asked the same question. "Can't we just have people answer the phone if they're free and only use the queue when we're all busy?"The first answer we got was, "No one does that." But to their credit they did their homework and came back and said, "Yes, you can." So we bought it.

We started the process of figuring how to get rid of the queue in March. It took five months. We launched last week. Now when the phone rings we answer it. Most of the time. If everyone is on the phone the call goes to the queue. Sometime during the first day I check how often that happened. We had eighteen calls at that point. Two went to the queue. Nearly 90% were answered on the first ring. Now, it's worth noting we get a couple of hundred thousand phone calls a year. If we can keep that percentage up it means, in the next twelve months, at 25 seconds a pop, we'll collectively save the human race fourteen hundred hours of waiting. 

Here's to small steps backwards.

Big hat tip goes to Jackie and Joe and everyone else who helped make this happen.

Other Merchants...Etsy, darling

I just bought something from an Etsy seller in Hong Kong — which is one of the amazing things about Etsy — and this was the note they included. Obviously English isn't their first language. But there's no way they looked up a translation and got "Darling" unless they wanted to say something that bizarrely intimate, which I think is kind of great.

I also like some of the cards from this seller in Indonesia.

A lot of people bash on Etsy, some of it for good reason. But the way it's created a personal way to sell things internationally is fascinating.

Unexpected Acts of Service

A new coffee shop opened up around the corner from me a couple weeks ago. It's a little like what people are calling a "Coffee 2.0" shop. These are the post-Starbucks coffee houses usually staffed by very intense, lean, bearded dudes and tattooed women who park their fixed gear bikes behind the counter and work their shift with their pant legs still pegged. The menus are sparse. Five drinks maybe, often no food, certainly no CD's or insulated mugs. The foam is poured seriously into exacting patterns: hearts, Christmas trees, apples, friendly lions.

While I like the monastic attention to that's given to the coffee drinks, the experience is often marked by a total lack of humor and, more often than I wish, poor service. Want a smile? Not today. Want a custom drink? Good luck. I've seen a sign at one place that basically said "We don't customize in order to respect the integrity of the drink." Huh?

This new place has been getting its bearings for the past couple weeks. Service has been up and down. But today I stopped in, grabbed a pound of beans and was walloped with a couple surprises.

"Hey, thanks for coming in. How are you going to brew those?"
I make espresso.
"Good -- they're great for that. What kind of machine?"
I told her.
"Nice. We're using that blend to brew our espresso right now. Same roast date even. I like it a lot, it's pulling awesome right now. Would you like a shot on the house?"
Hell yes!

The interaction was quick. The shot cost the cafe almost nothing. The attention and questions she offered were free. The experience was something I won't forget. Guess where I'll buy my next bag?

I was reminded of our kind of service. These small, thoughtful extra miles are what we do really well. They're not easy to invent on the spot, customized for every different customer, but they don't have to be. It was obvious that she'd offered people shots for buying a bag of coffee before. She had her own system that let her give service that felt fresh and personal and not contrived at all.

Christmas Story

The customer got a catalog. They were a regular, going on five years. Ordered every holiday. They called the service star. The service star was a veteran and knew them well. Had spoken to them many, many times.

Bad news. The customer wouldn't be placing an order for themselves this year. Just a couple gifts. Nothing wrong with the company. It was something else. The neighbors, a one income family, lost their one income. The job was gone. The customer was spending a portion of their holiday money on helping the neighbors. Food, mortgage payment, the works. Not enough left for the annual box from the company.

The phone call ended. The service star looked up the customer's order history. Entered a new order. Sent it out, no charge.

--- --- ---

Thanks for all the many small acts of kindness that are happening, have happened, and will happen soon. I thought I'd just share one as this season begins to wind down. It reminded me yet again why this is such a wonderful place.