That sometimes you still need a good book.
Do you? (Book sales, which increased during the middle of last decade, are now down to what they were 10 years ago. e-Readers are great, but they’re still not books.)
Category Archives: rants
Best Buy Experience? Still Not At Best Buy But …
… if you were one of the lucky ones, at least this time you got a few free iPads to give to people in need instead of getting nothing or unexpected free porn (as some people did earlier this year, as chronicled in Best Buy Experience? Not at Best Buy! Part I) or, in some cases, getting completely ignored (as chronicled in Best Buy Experience? Not at Best Buy! Part II).
As chronicled by Mark Rush over on Evan Schuman’s StorefrontBacktalk next year, now Best Buy has an iPad Dilemma. Apparently they shipped at least five iPads to at least two customers who had only ordered one. (See a recent article on iTechPost titled “best buy ships out free ipads accident discounts iphone 5 holiday season 2012” for example.) But at least this time they owned up to the error right away and instead of insisting that the customer ordered five and needs to pay for five, or pay the return and handling fees to return four, they decided to take advantage of the holiday season and find a little holiday spirit. They told the customers to “keep the additional iPads and give them to people in need” and get some valuable good press that they desperately need, ignoring the fact that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Q&A stated that federal law required that the consumer could keep the extra iPads and not pay for them, referencing laws intended to punish retailers from shipping items to people who didn’t buy them in an attempt to extort them for payment later.
Now, as noted in the article, Best Buy could probably have gotten the issue to court noting that the customer did order one item, but I would have to think in this case that, given the nature and value of the item ordered, the court would reasonably conclude that an end consumer didn’t want more than one and the company should have appropriate checks and balances in place to appropriately manage such valuable inventory. Thus, it is likely this is a case Best Buy wouldn’t win.
My conclusion? They weren’t being generous and simply making the right decision to circumvent the PR nightmare that would have inevitably resulted had they handled it any other way and they still need to fix their systems. I could be wrong, but Amazon does a lot more shipping and seems to make considerably fewer screw-ups, or at least deals with them better as I haven’t seen nearly as many articles about Amazon screwing up compared to Best Buy in the past year.
Blue and Brown Make Dark Brown
Not Green! Someone over on Supply Chain Digital either needs a refresher course on the visible spectrum, or, if a discussion of electromagnetic radiation is too difficult for them, a kid’s paint set. What am I referring to? This recent article over on Supply Chain digital on how “UPS and USPS Begin Partnership to Reduce Emissions”.
I really like this idea in theory, but in practice, I wonder if it’s really going to reduce emissions or just create a lot of hot air.
Here’s the quandary. If the average UPS and USPS truck is going out half empty, than this is going to reduce the number of trucks on the road, and it’s a good idea. If the average UPS and USPS truck is going out over half fill, USPS will now need two trucks and the emissions will just be shifted from UPS to USPS. The other issue is that the packages have to get from the USPS network to the UPS network. How closely are the networks synced? Not only does a package now have to go through location B to get to C from location A, which means that UPS won’t be able to retire may trucks (as it still has to get the packages to USPS), but if A to B to C is twice as long as A to C, and this is the case for a majority of packages, are emissions really saved?
Also, with respect to the second part of the partnership, will the USPS be able to redesign its network to efficiently take advantage of UPS’ efficient global distribution capabilities? If USPS can, this will be great because UPS is much more efficiently structured to get a package to the right country given its focus. But if USPS can’t, it’s more hot air.
And all hot air does is scorch the earth, and turn it dark brown.
I hope for the best, but what’s the real incentive for these two companies to cooperate to the level necessary to really make a difference?
Wrong on So Many Levels
Editor’s Note: Today’s guest post is from Dick Locke. Dick, who has delivered seminars to over 100 companies across the globe, is a seasoned expert on International Sourcing and Procurement who wrote the book. (Check out his archived posts.)
The fire that killed 112 Bangladeshi garment workers has brought out some appalling purchasing practices that seem rampant in the garment industry. And this is the second such fire in three months. The previous fire killed more than 300 people in Pakistan.
The New York Times has had several articles on the issue. Here are some quotes. This picture is wrong on so many levels.
From one article:
| “… mounds of flammable yarn and fabric were illegally stored on the ground floor near electrical generators. Had the fabric been stored in an enclosed, fireproof room, as required by law, the fire could have been contained and the workers could have escaped.”
“After the fire, Walmart, Sears and other retailers made the same startling admission: They say they did not know that Tazreen Fashions was making their clothing.” “Much of the factory’s business came through opaque networks of subcontracts with suppliers or local buying houses.” “The factory’s owner, Delowar Hossain, said his managers arranged work through local middlemen. ‘We don’t know the buyers’, Mr. Hossain said in an interview. ‘The local man is important. The buyer – I don’t care’.” “The Bangladeshi government has started inspecting the country’s 4,500 garment factories; it has already found fire code violations in almost a third of the hundreds it has examined.” |
From another article:
| “Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a Walmart director of ethical sourcing, along with an official from another major apparel retailer, noted that the proposed improvements in electrical and fire safety would involve as many as 4,500 factories and would be ‘in most cases’ a ‘very extensive and costly modification’.
‘It is not financially feasible for the brands to make such investments’, the minutes said”. |
Folks, this is so basic. You need to know your suppliers personally, wherever in the world they may be. You also need to know where your products are being built. It’s time to bring garment purchasing into the modern world. If you can’t afford to have your own people in the suppliers’ country, you can’t afford to buy there.
Thanks, Dick. (Global Supply Training)
Got Cloud? I Got Mail. Your Mail!
And that’s just the beginning. I’ve warned you before that you can’t control the clouds and that they are inherently insecure. But did you listen? Nope. Clouds are gaining in popularity, and, consequently, every day more and more data is there for the taking, by experienced AND novice hackers alike.
As per this recent article in the (MIT) Technology Review, on “How to Steal Data from Your Neighbour in the Cloud”, a recent study (by researchers at the Universities of Wisconsin and North Carolina) has proven that software hosted in one part of the cloud can spy on software hosted nearby.
This study conducted an experiment in which malicious software was run on hardware designed to mimic the equipment used by cloud companies such as Amazon. The software was able to steal an encryption key that was used to secure e-mails from software belonging to another user. This allowed the researchers to decrypt e-mails sent by the user (which are easily captured by packet sniffers on a compromised machine attached to the cloud).
As per the article, the new attack undermines one of the basic assumptions underpinning cloud computing: that a customer’s data is kept completely separate from data belonging to any other customer. This separation is supposedly provided by virtualization technology. However, because virtual machines running on the same physical hardware share resources, the actions of one can impinge on the performance of the other, an attacker in control of one virtual machine can snoop on data stored in memory attached to one of the processors running the cloud environment (that is used as a cache in a trick known as a side-channel attack).
Remember this before you go for a full-fledged cloud solution. SaaS from a private data centre run by a single vendor is probably okay if they maintain separate database instances for each client (with their own, separate, encryption keys). But shared services on a cloud are probably not a good idea. At least not from a security perspective.