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A Day in Atlantic City on the Cheap

September 19, 2011 by bobbycalise

Recently, I’d been itching to get down to Atlantic City. I hadn’t been there in a while, plus I’ve been watching a lot of Boardwalk Empire lately. It was time to visit my old friend again.

So, using an amNY daily deal, three coworkers and I took the Hampton Luxury Liner bus down to Atlantic City for the day this past Saturday.

For $7, the deal included a round trip ride to Atlantic City–normally $25 on Hampton Luxury Liner–and $10 food and $5 slots vouchers for the Resorts casino. (I ambitiously bought three thinking I’d make multiple trips, and since the remaining two will expire at the end of the month, I’ll have paid $21 for this $7 deal.)

Cheap round trip bus rides are nothing new for Atlantic City casinos. Long before Groupon or LivingSocial, casinos figured out that if they subsidized the cost of a customer’s bus ticket to AC, they’d easily make it back on the tables.

One of the challenges of gambling in AC on the weekends is the higher table minimums. Blackjack generally has the best odds of any table game, but if you only have $100 to spend and you’re playing at a $10 minimum bet table, you don’t have much margin for error. If you are lucky enough to find a $5 table and sit down with that same $100, you might have enough money to stick around and survive a few losing hands until you find yourself on a “heater.”

So when I spotted two $1 minimum blackjack tables at the Trump Taj Mahal, I sat down immediately. I had never seen a blackjack table with such low limits outside of Las Vegas, and I figured there must be a catch. And there was.

The $1 blackjack tables were charging a “hand fee” of 25 cents per hand for any bet under $10. Meaning, if I played 50 hands an hour (and didn’t bet at least $10 on any of them), the casino would get $12.50 even if I broke even. Despite a few bad beats and many questionable decisions from the really nice but inexperienced gamblers playing beside me,  I walked away with $110–a net profit of just $10 after hand fees and tips for the waitresses and dealers. The casino’s profit (even though I won) was $2.50.

Experienced gamblers will warn you about all the “sucker bets” the casinos build into their games to win even when they lose. This includes the “Insurance” bet at the blackjack table, where you’re given the option of insuring your bet against the dealer’s possible blackjack, or accepting a smaller payout for blackjacks at a “Single Deck” table (they pay 6-to-5 instead of the usual 3-to-2). In my excitement over finding a low stakes table on a weekend, I failed to identify the 25-cent hand fee as yet another obvious sucker bet.

Clearly, the $1 blackjack tables were designed to attract the low stakes gamblers who didn’t really know how to play the game to their best advantage. Even as I, a more experienced blackjack player, used by-the-book basic strategy, I barely managed to turn a profit. The other guys at the table, a bachelor party from Virginia, walked away one by one having lost all the money they had started with. (Mind you, none of them lost no more than $30, which was basically their “casino fee” for being able to sit around with their friends and ironically drink White Russians.)

As for me, by the time we returned home to New York my wallet was only $60 lighter than it had been when I stepped onto the bus that morning, and I’d been able to gamble, eat, and drink all day. Considering my history with AC, I’d call that a win.

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Travel | Leave a Comment »

Farewell, Entourage

September 14, 2011 by bobbycalise

This past Sunday’s Entourage finale marks the end of an era. In the age of DVRs and Netflix streaming and on-demand video, Entourage was still appointment viewing at the height of its popularity—truly water cooler television.

My old roommate Mike and I would meet at the couch every Sunday night to see what kind of Hollywood hi-jinks Vinny Chase and the gang would get into this week. And the timing was perfect. As the weekend was winding down and the harsh reality of Monday mornings was starting to set in, at least we had Entourage to look forward to.

We all wanted to be Vince or E. (We’d settle for Turtle or Drama.) We worshipped Jeremy Piven’s Ari Gold, who would emerge as the star of the show, and we wanted to scream “SHUT THE FUCK UP, LLOYD!” and then “hug it out, bitch.”

Entourage was classic escapism TV. Rather than thinking about our own problems—stalled careers, rent increases, girlfriends and ex-girlfriends—we worried about Vince’s problems instead. And along the way, there was no shortage of beautiful [and often topless] women, celebrity cameos, and tons of dude speak that drew  “Sex and the City for guys” comparisons.

Inevitably, we grew tired of Vinny’s problems and their easy fixes. We needed to see him fail a little more often, which in the later seasons he did. Then, of course, we griped that his failures—a downward spiral in which he became an adrenaline junkie, dated a porn star, and got hooked on drugs—weren’t compelling enough. Couldn’t we just go back to the old days when he was hooking up, partying, and all the studios and agencies inHollywoodwanted to be Vincent Chase business?

By the end, Entourage had become unrecognizable from the show I had gotten hooked on years earlier. In the last few minutes of the finale, all the problems that had arisen over the course of the last season were resolved: E and Sloan worked out their differences and were back together, as were Ari and Mrs. Ari, Vince was inexplicably getting married to a woman he had dated for 24 hours, and even Turtle and Drama had found some professional success.

Of course Entourage hung on for one or two seasons too long. Countless other shows have done the same thing because there’s more money to be made in seven or eight seasons than in three or four. (I’m looking directly at you, Lost and How I Met Your Mother.)

But in five or ten years when someone mentions Entourage, I won’t be thinking of their lackluster final seasons. Instead, I’ll probably remember some obscure line from one of the first couple of seasons and talk about what a great show it was in its prime.

And more than that, I’ll never be able to read a sign for New York State Route 25A again without thinking, “Are you kidding? I am Queens Boulevard.”

Next post: HBO’s How to Make It in America: the new Entourage?

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews | 1 Comment »

Labor Day Weekend Customer Service Round-Up

September 6, 2011 by bobbycalise

On my second trip to the U.S. Open this week, I had nothing but positive customer service experiences.

American Express, a perennial sponsor of the U.S. Open, offers free mini radios to AMEX cardholders to listen to the live telecast in real time as they bounce around from court to court.

Despite a reminder from my girlfriend on Friday morning, I forgot my AMEX card and had to visit the AMEX concierge to try to get two radios. The customer service representative there was extremely helpful. I had no physical proof I was a cardholder—not even an email from AMEX on my smartphone—so the rep called AMEX to access my account. After a few minutes on the phone he was able to give me two radios, one for each AMEX card I have, and we were on our way.

When we got to Arthur Ashe stadium for Andy Roddick-Jack Sock match, we stopped at a concessions stand for two $9.50 Heinekens. As was the case when I went on Monday, the worker was having trouble getting a decent pour without too much foam, no matter which tap he tried. He did what he could, but for $9.50, I want a full beer. Undeterred, I stopped at a second concession stand and asked a worker there to top off my beer, which he did after half-jokingly asking me for a tip.

(As far as the match, it was a laugher. Young American hopeful Jack Sock may be a star some day, but on Friday night he was a punchline. My two best Sock jokes, which drew groans from my girlfriend and pity laughs from my mom: “Sock has the makings of a complete player, but right now there are a few holes in his game” and “Roddick is running him all over the court; it’ll take a pair of Socks to cover all that ground.” Thanks, I’ll be here all week!)

______________________________________________________

Saturday was a great beach day, maybe the last of the summer season. And for the roving ice cream salesmen on the beach, it means getting rid of their inventory while the beaches are still full.

I always wonder whether these guys make any money, and if they do, if it’s worth lugging a cooler up and down the beach bellowing, “Ice cream, Chipwiches!” a few hundred times.

But as the first ice cream man passed our blanket, we saw a second ice cream man make his way across the beach, proclaiming “$2 ice cream!”, ostensibly undercutting the first guy’s $3 ice cream.

When the first guy caught wind of the lower price, he stormed over to the second guy. “Hey buddy, don’t do that. You know the price.” He walked away for a minute, then walked back to protest some more. “It’s bad for business, don’t do that.” The second guy waited until the first guy walked a little farther down the beach, then continued selling his product.

Yes, I suppose it is bad for business if beachgoers know that they don’t have to pay $3 to the first guy when the second guy is selling for $2. But it’s the end of the summer and I would guess they’re both looking to get rid of their remaining ice cream. Also, if this is in fact the last big beach weekend, are beachgoers in the summer of 2012 really going to remember that they paid $2, not $3, for ice cream in 2011?

We went back to the beach the following day and as the two vendors crossed paths again, I assumed there would be yet another argument. But they left each other alone and I bought a Chipwich from the second guy—for $3. (I guess the strong arm tactics worked.)

Later, the first ice cream guy was chased off the beach by his wife, who was apparently annoyed that she was not allowed to help him sell the ice cream. I’m really sure how that fits into the story. It was just really awkward.

_____________________________________________________

In the last few weeks, my mom has returned an iPad and an iPhone. She found the iPad overwhelming; she found the iPhone 4 “beautiful,” not as functional, particularly in terms of the notification screen, as her old phone or some of the newer Droids she had researched.

She spent Sunday afternoon at the store—not an official Verizon store but a “Verizon dealer”—trying to purchase the HTC Incredible.

She had been there before and was familiar with the store manager who was helping her on Sunday. Usually he was helpful and patient, but today he was distracted with angry phone calls from his uncle, the store owner, and having to juggle his staff’s lunch breaks.

When he handed her a new Incredible, it didn’t have the protective plastic on the screen that out-of-the-box phones usually include. When she asked about it, the manager insisted the phone was new and the plastic was “around here somewhere.” My mom, who once got a “new” phone from this location only to find someone else’s family pictures on it, was not satisfied with his explanation.

After some back and forth, my mom told the manager that she is typically satisfied with his level of customer service, but in this case he seemed too busy for her and she would rather come back another day when he could give her his full attention. At this point, as my mom tells it, the manager went to the back and got her a new Incredible—still in the box—and threw in a $20 discount and a free car charger.

I’m proud of my mom on this one. Rather than becoming confrontational, or threatening to call Verizon corporate headquarters (or tweeting about it like I would), she was willing to walk away if she couldn’t get the level of service she deserved as a paying customer.

Even on the verge of 30, I’m still learning from her.

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments »

Rooting For the Underdog at the U.S. Open

August 30, 2011 by bobbycalise

Typically in the first week of the U.S. Open, many of the first and second round matches are more like mismatches. The high seeds–the Nadals, the Williamses, the Federers–are pitted against lesser knowns (or unknowns), and inevitably the better players dismantle their less skilled, less experienced opponents, barely breaking a sweat on their way to the next round.

The fans generally know this, but they buy tickets for these early rounds anyway because A) they’re cheaper than the later rounds and B) they came to see the best tennis players in the world playing on the sport’s biggest stage. Sure, 99 times out of 100, those top seeds will win, but the oohs and ahhs of a perfect drop shot or a bombastic serve or a long rally make it worth the price of admission.

In other words, people buy tickets to the U.S. Open to see a show.

This manifests itself pretty clearly in the way fans behave over the course of a match (sometimes eschewing proper tennis etiquette), and it plays out the same way every year.

The buzz at the U.S. Open, particularly during the evening matches, is unlike the typical live sporting event. Even from the nosebleeds, fans can feel the electricity as the players names are announced and they begin to warm up under the lights of Arthur Ashe Stadium.

As the match begins, fans want to see their favorite players do what they do best, because that’s what they paid to see. They want to see Rafa Nadal curl his extreme topspin forehand deep into his opponent’s court, just as they used to pine for Pete Sampras‘ lethal serve-and-volley game, or shake their heads as John McEnroe incorrigibly berated the chair umpire for a bad call.

But after a few games, when the buzz begins to wane, something strange happens. The fans, formerly rooting for the favorite, change their collective mind and throw their support to the underdog in the hopes that all their cheers and whistles and C’mon!s will encourage them to play their best tennis, and maybe make a match of it after all. (This switch happens so quickly that it’s almost as if the fans planned it together while riding in on the 7 train.)

This very phenomenon emerged yesterday afternoon as I watched the 3-seed Maria Sharapova, three-time Grand Slam winner, struggle against British teenager Heather Watson. The fans, watching their last match of the day before being swept out of Ashe Stadium, wanted to get their money’s worth. As Sharapova made several unforced errors, Watson fed off the energy of the crowd and jumped out to an early lead.

Sure enough, Watson won the first set 6-3 and was matching Sharapova shot for shot in the second set. At this point the fans, as they always do, realized that Watson was playing too well; if she kept this up, their wonderful day of tennis would be over and Sharapova–who had a legitimate shot of winning the U.S. Open–would be ousted from the tournament for good.

Slowly but surely, the generic and protean chants of “Let’s go, Heather!” became “Let’s go, Maria!” With a little fan support and some timely shot-making, Sharapova snatched the second set from Watson, 7-5.

By the start of the third set it was obvious Sharapova was in control and, barring a meltdown, would win the match. Predictably, the fans changed their allegiance again, seemingly feeling bad for the 19-year-old British upstart and how they had turned their backs on her during the second set. They suddenly admired her hustle, her gumption, the way she was making Sharapova earn the victory.

But it was too late; Sharapova had match point. In one final show of infidelity, the fans stood up and cheered Sharapova, asking her to put the cherry on the sundae that was an afternoon of exciting, competitive tennis. As she won the match’s final point and raised her arms in triumph, the fans smiled as they exited the stadium, likely forgetting the name of Sharapova’s feisty opponent they’d loved so much for the better parts of the past two and a half hours.

(As an avid sports fan, I can’t think of another professional sport where this happens. Gambling implications aside, I’ve never heard of someone rooting for their favorite team for the first few minutes of a game and then deciding the game’s not close enough, so they’d better root for the other team for a while.)

You may be reading this and thinking, So what’s wrong with that? The better player won and you got to see a great tennis match! Maybe so, but I’d be remiss not to tell you what happened when I was in attendance for the first round of the 2005 U.S. Open. Andy Roddick, the former champion and 4 seed that year, was all set to roll over his first round opponent, Giles Muller.

But nobody told Muller.

The fans did their classic flip-flop routine, at first cheering Roddick’s powerful serves but generously encouraging Muller. A few hours later, Muller, almost surreptitiously, had defeated Roddick in straight sets. (He’d go on to beat another American, Robbie Ginepri, in straight sets before losing in the third round.)

When I left the grounds and headed to the 7 train, I saw a gigantic billboard promoting the U.S. Open with Roddick’s face plastered on it. (Think Reebok’s 1992 Dan & Dave campaign.) Most of us fans, who had showed up hoping for a hard-fought first round match with Roddick prevailing, seemed to look at each other as if to say, What have we done?

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays | 1 Comment »

Confessions of a “Fired” Customer

August 25, 2011 by bobbycalise

I came across an interesting Harvard Business Review article this morning called “It’s Time to Fire Some of Your Customers,” in which the author, Anthony Tjan, describes a scenario where a business pares its customer base by only focusing on the most desirable customers, its “super loyalists,” which effectively means “firing” the low-potential customers. From the article:

Some businesses exhibit the classic 80/20 rule, with their top 20 percent of customers making up 80 percent of the revenue. We have also seen a good number of firms with even more skewed revenue distributions that are closer to 90/10. Yet organizational efforts and resources are often poorly mapped to, or unaligned with, that revenue distribution pattern. In fact, it is often the opposite. That is, the bottom customer quartiles take disproportionately from a company’s sales, marketing, and customer service resources. Some of the most challenging customers are those who in the “low-middle” bucket, buying relatively little, but needing very high touch and maintenance.

When I read the HBR article, I automatically thought of a coffee shop owner I know who’s very serious about customer service. I reached out to him to find out whether he’s ever had to “fire” any of his customers, and coincidentally, he had a customer experience to share.

Recently, some of his customers had figured out a way to “game the system” regarding his pricing. Instead of purchasing an iced latte—two shots of espresso with milk, served over ice—these savvy coffee drinkers were ordering espressos over ice in large cups, and then pouring their own milk from the milk-and-sugar station. Essentially they were getting all the same ingredients but at a lower price. According to the owner, he was actually losing money on these drinks because these customers were pushing the milk costs back onto him.

Eventually he figured it out and readjusted his pricing. He says that based on the change, some of those customers raised a stink at his store and have either stopped coming in or begrudgingly paid the new price. He thinks some people will always be hatching the next great coffee scam to game the system again, but that he’s not spending too much time worrying about them.

Back to the HBR article. The part about the most challenging customers who don’t spend a lot but are the biggest pains in the ass? That’s me. I wouldn’t consider myself a “super loyalist” at too many places, but I’m the first to ask to speak to a manager, or send back a beer that doesn’t taste quite right, or write a scathing Yelp review, or share my thoughts about a poor customer service experience on my blog.

In a post last month I wrote about a bar crawl in which I only drank at bars that offered a free drink for just one Foursquare check-in, and the lukewarm customer service I received as a result of my low-potential customer status. It’s obvious to me now that like the iced latte bandits, I too have been fired as a customer many times.

I have one more similar customer experience to share regarding a very popular dining program: NYC Restaurant Week. As many couples do, my girlfriend and I occasionally like to splurge for a decent meal, and Restaurant Week affords us the chance to have a fancy dinner for a little less than what it would cost normally. For $35 a head, restaurants include an appetizer, entrée and dessert—alcohol is not included. Inevitably, the food will be tasty and the night will be fun, but when the bill comes, the $70 figure I had in my head at the start of the meal (that’s $35 times 2) has suddenly ballooned to around $135 after alcohol, tax, and tip.

Unlike the much maligned Groupon deals that have many small businesses complaining about a lack of profitability (often due to a lack of repeat, full price-paying customers), the concept of Restaurant Week got us to spend as much—and possibly more—than we would have otherwise.

Had we ordered our exact same meals (again, appetizer, entrée, and dessert) off the regular dinner menu, my food would have come to $54.50, so in theory I saved $19.50 by ordering from the RW menu. But my girlfriend’s meal would have come to just $39, merely a $4 savings. On a regular night, we may have ordered just one glass of wine at $11 apiece, but the implied savings from the RW “deal” had us feeling like we could order two each and still make out on the deal. In the end, we had a tasty (though hardly mind-blowing) meal and a fun night, but the RW promotion didn’t really do us any favors.

I think it’s safe to say I’ve been fired as a customer of that restaurant, and possibly fired from all of Restaurant Week. And I’m sure I’ll be fired by many more establishments in my lifetime, but the good news is there’s no shortage of businesses of all shapes and sizes in NYC, and eventually I’m bound to be hired somewhere.

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays | 4 Comments »

A Complicated Relationship With My Kindle, Part II

August 16, 2011 by bobbycalise

Where we last left off, it was Christmas 2010 and I had just been given a Kindle by my mom.

My first Kindle book was East of Eden, on my mom’s recommendation (and on her credit card). I have to admit, reading on a Kindle is very cool. The text is so crisp that it looks like an actual printed book. And once you get used to pressing the “Next Page” button instead of turning a physical page, one-handed reading is far easier in places like a crowded subway.

Based on my last eight months using my own Kindle, here are a few points worth exploring before you decide to bite the bullet and enter The Wonderful World of E-Readers:

Buying Books

Mostly every book title is available on the Kindle through Amazon.com, and Kindle titles are often a couple bucks cheaper on Amazon than their print counterparts—plus an e-book comes with free, instant delivery.

The second best feature of Kindle is book sampling. (The #1 feature is the Dictionary; see below.) This is the digital version of leafing through a book at a bookstore; I can have a sample of a book sent to my Kindle to try free of charge. If I like what I’ve read, I have the option to buy the full book and my Amazon account will be charged.

Free Books

On Amazon’s website, there’s a list of e-libraries where free e-books are available. I’ve attempted to navigate these libraries on several occasions and found it not worth the trouble. Amazon has a few free titles as well, which are mostly classics whose copyrights have expired. I got about halfway through Bram Stoker’s Dracula before cutting my losses—the best perk of a free book is there’s no guilt about not finishing!

I’m also currently reading an e-book I “bought” for free on Amazon called Stealing Jake (published June 2011), which averages 4 ½ stars on Amazon. I’m getting the sense that users factored the bang for their buck into their ratings.

My biggest disappointment about the device is that the New York Public Library doesn’t currently support Kindle. Nook owners can download select e-book titles from NYPL, but Kindle owners are out of luck, at least for now. I tweeted @NYPL to ask them whether there’s a timeline for supporting Kindle through their digital content solutions provider, Overdrive. Their response was “unfortunately not yet…but stay tuned…” According to Amazon’s website, “You’ll be able to borrow Kindle library books from any of the more than 11,000 libraries that work with OverDrive, the leading provider of digital content solutions for libraries.” We’ll see.

Dictionary

In my opinion, this is easily the best feature of the Kindle. In the past if I was reading a book that was full of SAT-level vocabulary, I might carry a dictionary with me or mark pages that contained a word I wanted to look up later. Often, I’d just forget to look them up and when I did, I almost never retained the definition.

Kindle allows me to quickly and easily access its dictionary and look up a word without distracting me from enjoying the book I’m reading. This feature is so good that when I come across an unfamiliar word in a print book, newspaper, magazine, or an online article, I find myself wishing I was reading it on the Kindle.

Lending Policy

Amazon’s Kindle lending policy says that the owner of an e-book, if that title is deemed “lendable” by its publishing house, may lend it one time to one other Kindle user for a period of 14 days.

I was able to borrow the entire Hunger Games Trilogy at no cost from a co-worker. This worked perfectly because the books were quick reads and the 14-day policy never came into play. However, the policy is largely impractical for longer books like The Pillars of the Earth, which might take months to read.

As Kindles become more mainstream and publishing houses (hopefully) become more malleable about the “lendability” of their titles—though I don’t see why they would—the lending feature may become a legitimate selling point for the device. But for now, it’s a non-factor.

Vacation Reading

Another theoretical selling point for the Kindle is that if you went on vacation for a week and planned on reading at the beach, you wouldn’t need to lug around a bunch of heavy books.

I’ve traveled fairly often since I got my Kindle and I have run into a few cases where I finished a book and wanted to download another title and start reading right way. (If I didn’t have a Kindle, I simply would have packed more than one book and complained about the extra two pounds.) Having a thin, light reading device might have made my life a little easier during my two-week trip to China, but is that convenience alone worth the $180 price tag for a Kindle?

Percentage Reading

If you’re a Kindle owner, chances are you’ve said some variation of this sentence: “Oh yeah I’m reading that right now…I’m 63% through it.” Many Kindle owners I’ve spoken to find the percentages, as opposed to page numbers, a little odd. The lack of page numbers becomes particularly inconvenient if you’re in a book club or a classroom where not everyone has a Kindle. (For that problem, Amazon has a solution.)

I’ve gotten used to the percentage thing for the most part but in some cases it really gets on my nerves. The Kindle factors in acknowledgments and “also from this author” pages into the total, so most books end around 90 to 95%. Fine. But I was reading the nonfiction book Little Bets, which is full of footnotes, and when I finished the last chapter I was at just 70%. What??? Turns out, the remaining 30% was academic sourcing, which of course I didn’t plan to read.

Technical Difficulties and Customer Service

I’ve already had my Kindle replaced twice. One was due to my own carelessness, leading to a cracked screen; the other died on me while I was on vacation (which, by the way, never would have happened with a print book). Customer service in both cases was extremely accommodating and sent me a new Kindle right away at no cost.

Recommendation

For me, I’ve found the cost of buying books once a week or more often to be a little expensive. To cut costs, I’ve actually read my last four books “off-Kindle”—which prompted me to explore my feelings towards my Kindle in this very blog post.

My recommendation is that if you already buy lots of books, the Kindle probably makes sense for you–provided you have $180 to spend on it. Sure, you won’t have an impressive book collection to show off to guests, but if you’re living in a cramped NYC apartment, you’ll be happy to have some of your shelf space back.

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

A Complicated Relationship With My Kindle, Part I

August 12, 2011 by bobbycalise

The following is the first of a two-part post about my customer experience as a Kindle owner. It’ll be half personal essay, half product review—a format that has become par for the course here at BCSAB. I’d guess this is not quite how they do things over at Consumer Reports.

When my brother and I were younger, my mom was adamant about passing on her love of reading onto us. We were typical book resistant boys, preferring to do anything else in the world other than sitting down with a good book.

As a compromise, my mom set aside a half hour of reading time every few days for us to finish before we could go outside and play basketball or stay in and play hours of NBA Jam on Genesis.

There was nothing sweeter than the sound of the egg timer dinging, signifying that our prison sentence was over. We’d stop reading mid-paragraph, mid-sentence, perhaps even mid-word, and throw our books across the room to rush to the next activity, eager to wash the taste of reading out of our mouths. Often we wouldn’t even bother to bookmark our pages.

Our reading lists were typical for two young boys. I read a lot of the Hardy Boys series, Matt Christopher’s YA sports books, Where The Red Fern Grows, The Crazy Horse Electric Game, or articles in Sports Illustrated; my brother, four years younger than me, read classics like Goosebumps and the novelization of the movie Rookie of the Year. (After reading ROTY, my brother, then maybe 9 years old, expressed some confusion about the Chet Steadman character, played by Gary Busey in the movie. Apparently, each time he read Chet’s name he thought it referred to the New York Mets’ former ballpark, Shea Stadium.)

By the time I got to high school, required reading was no longer enforced by just egg timers and “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” looks from Mom. There were pop quizzes and please-please-please-don’t-call-on-me mini panic attacks to encourage us to stay up on our reading. And by college, not only was there syllabi telling me what textbooks to read, but I also had to pay through the nose for them at the college bookstore.

I couldn’t remember reading a book just because I felt like it. It was only after reading was no longer required that I realized I had, in fact, inherited my mom’s bibliophilia. (To some degree, it was like figuring out that I didn’t want to eat cookies for dinner simply because no one was telling me I couldn’t.)

I attacked my newfound love of reading with fervor. I took book recommendations from coworkers, and shared my own suggestions with friends. I signed up for a new library card for the first time in ten years. I’d peruse giant shelves of fiction titles the Sachem Public Library—often judging books exclusively by their covers—wondering if some obscure novelist would get really excited when she found out I checked out her book.

After I moved from Long Island, whose library sharing system is phenomenal, I had far less luck with the Hoboken Library. The tiny facility almost never had my desired titles in house and the transit process to get it from another library, usually a couple of weeks, was too long for me to wait. The waits only got longer, much longer, when I moved into Queens and later Manhattan, where there are simply too many readers for the city libraries to adequately service. I found myself buying books when I couldn’t borrow them—and doing a lot of Sudoku in between.

At least once a year, I knew I could count on a free book from my mom, who started a Christmas tradition of buying me my own copy of her own favorite books. A few years back, it was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead (still one of my favorite books to this day, which led me to Atlas Shrugged), and the next year J.R. Moehringer’s outstanding memoir, The Tender Bar.

I never make it easy on my mom when it comes to Christmas shopping because I never ask for anything specific, with no exception this past Christmas. But I knew I could trust her to pick another great book for me, so I was happily anticipating that as I opened my first few presents from her. I still didn’t find the book after a few minutes of unwrapping when she handed me my next present.

It was the Kindle!

(To be continued in next week’s “A Complicated Relationship With My Kindle, Part II.)

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

The 48-Hour Defensive Driving Course

August 8, 2011 by bobbycalise

Anyone who’s ever taken a six-hour defensive driving course knows that this is arguably the most boring six hours a human can endure. You don’t want to be there. The instructor doesn’t want to be there. And after the six hours (hopefully less if the instructor is merciful) you have not improved at all as a driver, but your insurance rates will have gone down slightly so it’s just barely worth it.

With that in mind, my friends Sean and Gil decided to try something a little different this past weekend: an online defensive driving course. The plan was to watch TV and drink beers while they breezed through it—the irony of a careless, distracted, and possibly drunk defensive driving course is not lost on me—but as it turns out, the online version is actually fairly complicated.

According to Sean, the online course is programmed with little pauses so users can’t skip through the whole thing as quickly as possible. If you do finish a section early, the program keeps you there for a predetermined amount of time to make sure you’re actually doing the required reading. It also asks you choose a password at the beginning of the course and every so often re-enter it to prove you’re still there (and awake).

The biggest issue Sean and Gil faced was re-entering their passwords. The program wasn’t recognizing them even though they were typing it in carefully and correctly as they had at the start. This snafu stalled their progress for the weekend, and they were forced to wait until Monday morning when they could get a live person from the company on the phone to explain the situation and troubleshoot.

When Sean called the company today, they were able to reset his password, only to have it still not work when he tried it again. He called a second time and they explained that the password not only needs to be correctly typed, but also typed at the same speed that it was originally entered when he started the course. Sean’s initial reaction in his head, as mine would have been: “How the f*** do I know what speed I typed it???” To his credit, he kept his cool and convinced the customer service guy to disable that feature so he could finish the course.

But forcing users to match the speed of their original password? Talk about overthinking it. At this writing, it will have been a two full days, or 48 hours, since Sean and Gil started the online defensive driving course, and they still haven’t completed it.

Instead of creating a more efficient defensive driving course that saves time and money (the online course was $30 versus the $45 in-person course), this company, Empire Safety Council, created one that takes much longer, is far more aggravating, and will still teach its users next to nothing about defensive driving—and possibly induce new strains of road rage.

Have you had similar issues with online defensive driving courses? Are there any in the marketplace that aren’t as poorly designed? Let me know in the comments section.

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews, Personal Essays | Tagged , | 3 Comments »

Foursquare & Free Beer on the Upper East Side

August 7, 2011 by bobbycalise

At my tech-savvy friend Ross’s suggestion, he and I spent this past Saturday afternoon foursquaring some of the Upper East Side’s local businesses that were offering, well, free drinks.

If you’re familiar with foursquare, you know that many bars and restaurants use the service to offer check-in specials in the hopes of getting people off the street and into their establishments. Once there, the theory goes, customers will realize how wonderful the bar or restaurant is and spend lots of money there.

However, some establishments are limited by their naiveté. Meaning, just because a fancy French restaurant offers me a free drink for checking in one time doesn’t mean that I’ll be spending $35 on a three-course prix fixe meal as a thank you for their progressive approach to marketing.

So, with that in mind, here’s a look at how our afternoon went down:

First stop: Brasserie Julien on Third Ave between 81st and 82nd Sts
foursquare special: Free cocktail with 1 check-in

I arrived before Ross with my BlackBerry in hand, already having checked in from the street. At 3:45 pm on a Saturday, the place was pretty dead. When the bartender greeted me, I politely explained that I wanted to use the foursquare special and asked what beer she recommended. She was polite in return, but it was obvious that because I had come in with my foursquare guns blazin’, she wasn’t taking me too seriously as an upscale customer (the dollar tip I left did little to change her mind).

While I waited I perused the menu, which looked really good if not a little pricey. When Ross arrived he requested his own foursquare free drink. The bartender turned to me and said half jokingly, “What, you told all your friends to come here and get free drinks?” Ross tried to deflect her annoyance, explaining that we wanted to check out the place and that he and his wife were looking for a new French restaurant in the neighborhood. Still skeptical, she admonished us that “bartenders remember customers’ faces pretty well,” ostensibly implying that if we came in again tomorrow or the next day for free drinks (completely within our rights as foursquarers), we wouldn’t be looked upon so kindly. After about 20 minutes we decided to move on to our second stop.

(As far as the place itself, I’d consider going back in for dinner with my girlfriend, but I’m not likely to stop in just for a drink again–free or otherwise.)

Second stop: Mad River Bar & Grille on 82nd St and Third Ave
foursquare special: Free domestic beer with 1 check-in

Much of foursquare‘s appeal for small businesses is that it literally puts them on the map. It raises awareness among customers who either have never heard of a business or who have walked past it but never decided to go in. This wasn’t the case when it came to Mad River.

Ross and I had been to Mad River many times for their generous Friday night happy hours, which are particularly popular among the early 20s crowd (if you “win” one, you and your friends pay a $5 cover and get $1 drinks for three hours). So for us, checking in there wasn’t a recon mission; it was simply to get a free beer and watch the Yankee game. I nursed my free Bud Light for a while before breaking down and actually paying for a $4 Blue Moon. They only had a handful of customers besides us and from the looks of them, they weren’t there for the foursquare special. Unlike Brasserie Julien, the bartender at Mad River wasn’t as suspicious about our use of their foursquare special and was content to let us sit and talk and watch the game.

(At this point we made a detour from the free beer bar crawl to grab wings at Bar Coastal, 78th St and First Ave. We’d both been there before and knew how good their wings were–especially their off-menu “Kerry’s Way” wings–so we were willing to buy a late lunch and catch a few innings of the game. FYI: Bar Coastal’s foursquare special is 10% off your bill of $25 or more if you check in 3 times in 14 days.)

Third stop: Southern Hospitality on Second Ave between 76th and 77th Sts
foursquare special: Free domestic beer with 1 check-in

We showed up in time to catch the end of the Yankee game. The bartender was friendly and didn’t give us too much trouble when we ordered our free beers–they were also starting to seat dinner guests at this point so we weren’t a priority. We spent about a half hour hanging out at the bar, relatively out of the way of paying customers, and then headed home.

Conclusion
So, what was learned from this experience? Well, I learned that if you’re willing to put up with slightly dirty looks from bartenders, you can cash in on three free beers within a few blocks’ radius. But it’s not really about what we learned about gaming the system. It’s about what businesses should be learning from our freeloading.

In the case of Brasserie Julien, a free drink foursquare special doesn’t make much sense. If you’re willing to spend over $100 on dinner for two, you probably don’t care about getting one free beer with your meal. If anything, perhaps a 10% discount on your bill for frequent diners might work, but offering a free drink with every check-in will do little to attract your ideal customer, i.e. not Ross and me.

Mad River’s happy hour is already so good that one free beer isn’t going to make me go there more or less, and certainly not entice me to spend a ton of money there. I’d recommend they offer a half-price appetizer with every check in as long as a customer spends around $10 (about two beers). Most of their customers are there to drink, but why not let them sample the food in the hopes of upselling them on the rest of their menu right then and there or on a future visit?

Southern Hospitality is more restaurant than bar. With plenty of competition from established BBQ places like Brother Jimmy’s (right up the block on Second Ave between 77th and 78th Sts), a deal that appeals to frequent customers is probably the right fit for them.

It’s not news that some businesses are better at marketing than others. But as services like foursquare continue to pop up, it will become more and more critical that small businesses not only use these services, but use them correctly.

Posted in Beer, Wine & Spirits, Customer Experience & Reviews, Small Business | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Death Cab For Cutie at the Williamsburg Waterfront

August 3, 2011 by bobbycalise

Going into last night, I had never been more pumped for a concert. Sure, it wasn’t Jay-Z and Eminem at new Yankee Stadium, or Pearl Jam at the Garden. But it was my favorite band, Death Cab For Cutie, playing an outdoor venue in Brooklyn in the summer, and I was pumped.

A couple months ago, I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t get to see Death Cab when they came to town. I tried to navigate Ticketmaster.com in the precious few moments when tickets were still available for their Manhattan show, from about 12 noon to 12:15 on a Saturday in the spring, but had no luck. So when they announced they were sticking around to play at the Williamsburg Waterfront on a Tuesday night in August, I was there.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t actually heard of the Williamsburg Waterfront before, or that the tickets were a little more than I wanted to spend—$50 apiece after Ticketmaster’s generous processing fees—or that I usually play softball on Tuesday nights. The second I emerged from the Bedford Avenue L stop, I knew I’d made the right decision.

New Yorkers are quick to label any 20s or 30s Brooklyn resident a hipster, which is only true some of the time. But as I spun myself in circles trying to figure out which way the East River was, I felt a great vibe. Lots of shorts and dark rimmed glasses and flip flips and fedoras and tattoo sleeves. My kind of people.

Taking the advice of a fellow Yelper, I stopped in at Teddy’s Bar and Grill to wait for my girlfriend and take advantage of their terrific happy hour, $1 pints of Bud or Bud Light. The doors at the Williamsburg Waterfront were scheduled to open at 5:30, and I had read online that the opening act, Frightened Rabbit, would start around 6 and Death Cab For Cutie wouldn’t take the stage until after 8.

Having never been to Teddy’s, it had the feel of a neighborhood bar. While I drank my first pint, the guy next to me shamelessly asked me to remind him how to spell the word “brief” for a text he was composing. Once he left, I eavesdropped on the bartender’s braggadocio as he assured two female patrons that he could make any cocktail they wanted, because he was a “Manhattan bartender.” Meanwhile two older gentlemen lamented their poor decision to stop in on a Tuesday night, remembering too late that we concert goers would take up all the good seats at the bar.

My girlfriend arrived as I was finishing my first pint, and we chatted about each of our days at work and tried to keep our cool among the hipsters over how excited we (mostly me) were for the show. I quizzed her on her favorite songs from the two Death Cab albums I put on her iPod (Plans and Narrow Stairs) and we filled up on the cheap beer, anticipating the considerably higher prices for Brooklyn Lager ($6 for a 12 oz cup) we’d be paying later at the concert.

After ordering the last of our three rounds of Bud Light, I hit the bathroom. I struck up a conversation with a couple of guys waiting on the line with me and we discovered we were all going to the concert. A local overheard us talking and interrupted to tell us that typically the headliners during the Tuesday night Williamsburg Waterfront concerts don’t get on until after 8, but that “Death Cab seems to have their shit together, so they’ll probably start around 7:45.” I checked my phone: it was 7:32.

I finished in the bathroom and hustled back to the bar. We chugged the rest of our pints and jogged the three blocks from the bar to the Williamsburg Waterfront and entered the gates. Death Cab was already on stage and in the middle of “I Will Possess Your Heart.” I was disappointed that I had missed the band take the stage (I found the set list online the next day and it turns out we hadn’t actually missed any songs), but I was still giddy as we slipped through the crowd to find an open spot to stand. (Also, we ran into this guy.)

A few fellow Death Cab fans had told me the band puts on a great live show, and they were right. Despite little in the way of visual effects, nothing more than four low-tech LCD screens blinking lazily in purple, orange, and green behind the band, the music was great. After a few songs, lead singer Ben Gibbard stopped playing and asked the crowd to turn around to take in the sunset behind the Manhattan skyline and tell us “what a beautiful city you have.” It didn’t surprise me one bit that Ben Gibbard, as gifted a songwriter as he is, would pause his own concert to appreciate a perfect moment like that.

My friend Nikki had been to the show the night before in Boston and said Death Cab played a two hour set there. As they jumped around from album to album, they had played 20 songs when Ben thanked the crowd and told us to “get home safe” around 9:10. I’m not a huge concert guy but I knew enough to anticipate their encore a few minutes later. They re-opened with “Home is a Fire” off their latest album, Codes and Keys, then two of my favorites, “Title and Registration” and “The Sound of Settling,” before ending with “Transatlanticism” as the crowd chanted “I need you so much closer…” in unison over and over again.

When I woke up the next morning, I still had “Transatlanticism” stuck in my head, along with a crumpled orange souvenir t-shirt ($25) and a few Facebook photos my girlfriend had posted. And at the risk of “PH-ing” the experience, I’ll say it was easily the best concert I’ve ever been to.

Posted in Customer Experience & Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments »

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