fedward, tumbling

How Not To Sell Me Something Expensive

This list brought to you by the optical industry:

1. Be opaque.  Nothing makes me uncomfortable about spending hundreds of dollars like not having any idea what I’m actually getting for my money.
2. Treat “specialty” as “luxury.”  Everybody who needs personal service for medical reasons also needs to pay a couple hundred bucks extra just for status, right?  Who wants to be seen in a Toyota when they can be seen in a BMW for only twice the money?
3. Be so convinced of your own awesomeness you don’t even bother to explain why your prices are so much higher than everybody else’s.  Get huffy or pompous when asked.  Also, see item 1 about being opaque.
4. Sell only the “best” products, like a 20-year-old lens design that isn’t even the MIDDLE tier from your vendor.  It’s the “most popular,” so it must be the best, right?  And never mind the insane markup!  That’s just your little secret!
5. Have a buying agreement with a single big vendor (like, say, Essilor) without being honest about it.  It helps if you also “take insurance” by knocking off a bit of your markup in exchange for the kickback from the “insurance” company (which is, of course, tied into that big vendor in one way or another).
6. Charge a premium for something simply because I need it, not because it still costs that much to manufacture or is the product of ongoing development (again, I’m looking at you, Essilor).  High index lenses I’ve been wearing for 25 years now?  Gosh, those are still new and luxurious, right?
7. Sell snake oil like anti-reflective coatings at an obscene markup, because again, just because something is necessary doesn’t mean it’s not also a luxury!  Ignore the fact that it’s all crap and pay twice as much because you deserve it!  It’s scratch-resistant!  And if it’s not, just blame the lab!
8. Mark your prices up just so you can mark them down again, for “insurance” or because you’re having a “sale.”

P.S. I can’t buy glasses online. The requirement of progressive lenses means I have to go to an optician and be propery fitted for them, and have them be gatekeepers for what will and won’t be possible in a frame that looks good on me.  While it is “possible” to buy glasses with progressive lenses online, there’s too much room for error with the fitting, and the super-cheap places don’t even offer progressive lenses except in a very small subset of their frames, none of which would look good on me (believe me, I looked at them all).  I don’t mind paying for service I actually get, but the prices aren’t consistent with the level of service I feel I’m receiving.

Anybody have anything to add to this list?

Title for my paper

tbridge:

“Network Neutrality: Threat or Menace?” 

What do you think?

I would avoid using the term “Network Neutrality” except to deconstruct it, since it has become laden with half-truths and propaganda.  And I’d be tempted to use a Simpsons reference, something like “Argle-Bargle or Fooferaw?” instead of “Threat or Menace?”  If you insist on using the two words “Network” and “Neutrality” together like that, though, I’d probably do something like, “Everything You Know About Network Neutrality Is Wrong (and so is everything you didn’t know and were afraid to ask).”

Things worth remembering when talking about network neutrality, on one side:

1. The ISPs would like nothing more than to double-dip, charging twice or more for the same transmission of data.  The end user is already paying what should be a fair price for their own usage; the content provider has paid to get the content delivered to the ISP in the first place. Arguments about how the content providers are using the ISP’s networks “for free” are disingenuous.
2. Claims about “bandwidth shaping” and “protocol limiting” can be used to mask business decisions and/or force users to use preferred or premium services the ISP makes extra profit on.

And on the other side:

1. Content providers talk out of both sides of their mouths. They desire not to have their usage capped or surcharged, because they have their own contracts with other ISPs and networks to protect. Hulu benefits from unrestricted, unmetered access, but it also has made arrangements with presumably every network to protect everybody’s profits.  It’s also theoretically possible that a Hulu-like site could be pushing more content through its own peers than they were expecting when they signed the contracts, but that’s not the end ISP’s problem.
2. While there are substantial legal uses of BitTorrent and the like (downloaded a Linux distro lately?), it is undeniable that heavy users of these protocols are a drain on network resources, and acting as if piracy isn’t really all that big a problem weakens the validity of one’s arguments.

I don’t think anybody can talk intelligently about network neutrality unless they understand how peering and transit work, and very few people even know what those things are, much less how they work.  The people who could actually have a reasonable discussion on the merits could fit into a large conference room.   FWIW, my own exposure to peering and transit was both tertiary to my actual job and so long ago that I’d have to study up just to be able to follow along.