WebPointX

So the Fail Whale is back today. Based on what I’ve seen in my own TweetDeck traffic, admittedly with a lot of commercially oriented folks I’m following, I wonder if a lot of the commercial traffic is to blame.

Your social graph, or social network as Wikpedia defines it, “is a social structure made of individuals (or organizations) called “nodes,” which are tied (connected) by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as friendship, kinship, financial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships, or relationships of beliefs, knowledge or prestige.”

I think there’s a new Graph developing as well, called a Commercial Graph. (Well, I’m calling it that anyway.) While it’s exactly the same as social with regards to the interconnectedness of entities, it’s clearly different in it’s commercial nature. A Commercial Graph would explain the complex inter-relationships of a company with it’s various stakeholders. In fact, creation of a Commercial Graph may be a valuable tactic when exectuing a Stakeholder Analysis project. Individuals of course have Commercial as well as Social relationships. In the increasingly blurred world of where the lines are today, the Prosumer, (so-called Professional Customer), may have both social and commercial relationships with those fomerly thought of as social only. Or commercial only.

The OpenSky Project is a great example of a Commercial Graph forming both between Shopkeepers and their customers. The company is a growing collection of niche oriented Shopkeepers running stores that have special collections of products in their niche. Each of these Shopkeepers typically has a Blog for which they became popular in their niche. So these Shopkeepers have had real existing relationships with their audience; who are now also becoming customers. As well, the Shopkeepers may build relationships with each other. In another new service, called Tracked.com, former Quigo advertising service CEO Michael Yavonditte is creating a place where “business information, communications and connections come together to enhance your business life.” If you click on person somewhere, (via their image or otherwise), you’ll find a collection of links to associated people. Use of this visual network technique may not be entirely new. Others have gone into the publicly available EDGAR databases and others to express various types of Commercial Graph relationships. And there’s all manner of Twitter and Facebook relationship visualization. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of business information here presented fairly cleanly. I can easily see this service  becoming a great place to visit for professional and private investors.

From day one, the world wide web has been about relationships. Primarily link relationships set up among various types of data. As we’ve grown the web, we’ve grouped these data points to represent collections of various sorts, including personal profiles, business profiles, etc. And we’ve built links to those as well. It may have taken awhile, but now that this is being done, the relationships we’ve always had among each other; social, commercial or both, are being made clearer. As this happens, it becomes useful to classify the nature of these relationships if only as a filtering mechanism. At a high level, many people do this by saying, “Well, my LinkedIn.com relationshps are business only. Whereas on Facebook, those are my friends.” And lately we’re seeing within these services the ability to tag and classify these relationships.  So as much as the web has been and will remain social, there’s plenty of room for growing Commercial Graphs as well.

Worth Reading?

Yes.

Why?

We may know a little more about Wal-Mart since this book was published in 2006. But perhaps not that terribly much.

The author, (Charles Fishman), seems to have – as do many others including myself – a love/hate relationship and fascination with this company. There can be little doubt they’ve revolutionized supply chain logistics, brought down the cost of products across many categories and re-defined just what “big box” retailing means. What’s less clear is if this is really good or not.

While one can hardly fault a company for seeking efficiencies – of scale or otherwise – there’s serious questions raised about potential hidden costs of the Wal-Mart Effect. Low wages and their consequences for both workers, (sub-standard incomes), and society, (gainfully employed workers needing public assistance health insurance and other services), are one aspect of potential negative effects. (Though it’s hard to confirm the truth of this.) Then there are environmental issues and worker effects in foreign countries. (The author recounts issues regarding Chilean salmon farming and how pushing for supplier price concessions may result in sub-standard environmental and employment practices.) Lastly, there’s the quality argument. In the race to the bottom for prices, suppliers cutting costs to the bone may skimp on quality to the point where goods are so cheap, they’re poorly made but inexpensive enough to be considered disposable.

Meanwhile, millions of families save billions of dollars on grocery bills.

So… is the company good or bad or like anything else a little or a lot of both?

Regardless of the actual answers which may be shrouded by lack of data, Fishman is asking some interesting questions. Even though the book may be getting a bit dated at this point, it’s worth a read for anyone working in consumer packaged goods or otherwise affected industries.

This was both odd and funny and annoying and just weird all at the same time! Courtesy of Visa Card and United Airlines. As with any post like this I do, it’s not so much just to whine about it personally as to simply demonstrate bad processes and procedures.

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Bottom Line First: Do not buy blinds from Hunter Douglas via Costco. Or perhaps at all. Besides being overpriced as compared to options elsewhere with the same quality, their customer service ethic is garbage. Everyone just about everywhere has their own story about some really bad customer service experience. I’ve been fairly lucky. Not too many vendor problems. But this one time I suppose, things just went wrong. And then right.

They were really badly wrong with Costco and Hunter Douglas Blinds, and to some small degree American Express. Then things went great with Blinds To Go. American Express was actually really helpful in assisting us with disputing the charge for the not done services. But in the end, their policies likely won’t help us. We’re not going to pay the charge though. At some point, either my wife or myself or both will have our cards canceled even after years of personal and business charges. (Because we’re just not going to pay the charge.) Oh well. We’ll likely have to waste some time and money on a lawyer or something at some point as well. And drop a note to the major credit agencies about the dispute for when our credit gets dinged for the bill we won’t pay for a product that was wrong in the first place, (based on their measurements and cutting), and which we don’t have in our possession in any case as it was returned. As you can probably tell by now, this isn’t just about the money. This is one of those principle things where we don’t really care if this affects our credit or wastes more time or whatever. It just can’t be let to stand.

When I get some free time, I’m going to put up on this page, in all the gory details, either scans or links to .pdf files of all the correspondence between us, Costco Hunter Douglas and American Express. Most won’t bother reading all of it. Some might if they find this page while searching for Costco Hunter Douglas Blinds and just feel like seeing how painful it can be with what should be a simply resolved issue.

For now, I’ll just offer the bottom line again. Don’t buy Blinds at Costco Hunter Douglas. Go to Blinds To Go. It’s less expensive at Blinds To Go, they’ll actually cut your product correctly, and it’ll work perfectly. Or at least better than Costco Hunter Douglas Blinds.

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Update: Costco did the right thing. They gave us a credit and the matter is closed. We should have gone directly to them earlier. American Express was great the whole way with our dispute, but the fact that Costco was responding to Amex as a merchant rather than dealing with us as customers may have been an issue. Since I’ve not had a lot of issues with vendors about much of anything over the years – just lucky I guess – I really didn’t know how to handle such things. But should it happen again, I think I’ll try to a) go to all the sources I can rather than just the credit card company; and b) just write directly to the highest level folks I can find wherever I can. Anyway. I can now once again feel comfortable picking up some bulk toilet paper and cases of whatever.

My wife and I like Costco. We like it better than the other big box folks. You do have to check a little bit on the prices as not everything is the best deal; but in general, things are solid there and it let’s us get a lot of bulk stuff so we don’t have to shop that much. We both work busy jobs and don’t have time for such things. We appreciate Costco’s having done the right thing so we can be happy shopping there. I recently watched a Motley Fool video with Costco CEO Jim Sinegal. This guy’s attitude towards customers is probably why we came out of this with a good resolution that keeps us as customers.

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Another Update: We obviously had one really bad experience. I’ll add this though, to Hunter Douglas’ credit… In our new home, we have a Hunter Douglas blind. There was a problem with the retraction mechanism. After troubleshooting and calling them, they sent us the small part we needed to fix it. No charge. We were not the original customers, we didn’t have a receipt. We don’t even know how long the blinds were there. So maybe we’ll give them another shot. It’s most likely we just had a really bad rep who got assigned to us in our original purchase. Still, they all handled it badly. So the whole original post here should just be taken as a cautionary tale. Just like everything else, even though you expect pros to do the right thing, you have to make sure you ask a lot of questions and ensure that they really are doing things properly.