The Safeway Club

Woody Allen (and I think Groucho Marx) once said “I would never join a club that would have me as a member.”

There is a special club, however, that I have refused entrance to dozens of times for entirely different reasons: The Safeway Club.

You see, I’m a huge supermarket snob. So much so that I have an entire post saved up which explains the difference between a good and a bad supermarket.

That said, I found myself at my local Safeway the other day. It’s a supermarket I hate for many reasons, not the least of which is their use of the “Safeway Club Card”. I’ve probably been to Safeway about 40 times in the last 10 years and every single time at the cash register they’ve asked me if I wanted to sign up for a Safeway Club Card. The conversation usually goes something like this:

Cute Checker Chick (CCC): Your total is $45.38. Do you have a Safeway Club Card?

Me: No.

CCC: Would you like to sign up for one?

Me: No thanks. I don’t come here often.

CCC: Ok. Thanks for shopping at Safeway.

40 different visits. Always the same result.

But this time, things went differently. I happened to be buying mostly alcohol (shut up… don’t judge) and the cute checker chick noticed that having a Club Card would take about 30% off my bill.

CCC: Your total is $33.29. Do you have a Safeway Club Card?

Me: No.

CCC: Now you do (throws card in my bag). Your total is $21.94.

Me: Ummm, ok. Thanks.

I tried to explain to the checker the significance of what she had just done but the accomplishment was mostly lost on her. One subtle difference in the delivery of the pitch and I am now a card-carrying Safeway Club member. Doesn’t mean I will start going there any more often, but hey, the card’s in my wallet now so I guess they figure that’s the first step in the assimilation.

All grocery stores with loyalty card programs should sign people up in this way. I can’t refuse a card if I’m not even asked to sign up for one.

The New Digs

As I was running after work the other day, I happened to jog by a young couple just as they were getting engaged. I mean, I was about 5 feet away right when the girl said yes. It was pretty cool and made me realize how lucky I am to have found an office in such a great area, and near such a beautiful running route.

A few months ago, when my co-founders and I started this new company, we looked long and hard before finding this space. Several other office buildings would have worked just fine, but this one was perfect. Like Goldilocks perfect. It’s not too small, not too big, and seems to fit just right with what we’re doing. It’s right on the water, near plenty of great restaurants, and is only a six-minute walk from my condo uptown.

Since moving in here several weeks ago, the team has accomplished an inordinate amount of work in a very small amount of time. So much so that we think a launch before the end of the year is highly probable.

But it’s not all work and no play around here. On a sunny day a couple of weeks ago, the crew went out parasailing in front of the office, and we have photos to prove it! Below are some shots of the new digs:

Jet Blue’s Masterful Approach

Photo by Lori Shepler (LA Times)At about 6pm yesterday I got a call from my friend Calvin.

“Are you watching the Jet Blue plane drama right now???”, he asked.

The first thought that went through my head, of course, was 9/11 and the chance that something terrible was happening again.

“Uhhh, what Jet Blue plane drama?”, I responded uneasily.

“A plane took off from Burbank and its landing gear turned 90 degrees after takeoff. It’s been circling above LAX for three hours trying to land. Turn on your TV!”

The first thing I did was check the major news sites. MSNBC.com, to their credit, was showing live video of the plane circling around. To their extreme discredit though, the video wasn’t viewable on a Mac. This is off-topic, but now is as good of a time to bring it up as any: MSNBC, get your shit together. Seriously. I know what it takes to deploy cross-platform video on a major news site. I’ve done it at ABCNews and ESPN. It’s not hard. Even if you use Windows Media as your format. Step it up already and support cross-platform video. CNN is kicking your ass in this department.

Anyway, end MSNBC rant.

Luckily, my new office is a six-minute walk from my place so I jammed home and turned on the TV. The jet was just beginning its final approach onto the runway and the tension was intense. Ordinarily, this would be when viewers might start thinking bad thoughts about Jet Blue. Instead though, here are some of the snippets heard from the TV commentators during the next few minutes:
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Gillette’s Five Blade Folly

What you see to the right is the latest in shaving ridiculousness from the fine folks at Gillette: the five blade “Fusion” razor. That’s right. Five blades. Six if you count the built-in trimming blade. In the battle to out-blade the competition, Gillette’s latest creation leapfrogs the Schick Quattro by one blade and aims to provide an even closer shave to the millions of men who apparently are having trouble with only three or four blades.

Gillette’s previous flagship razor, the Mach 3, has three blades while the Schick Quattro has four, but Gillette president James Kilts insists this latest “innovation” has nothing to do with the competition:

“The Schick launch has nothing to do with this, it’s like comparing a Ferrari to a Volkswagen as far as we’re concerned… There was never a plan to go to four.” — James Kilts.

Now I’m no Schick fan, but I am a Volkswagen fan, so this comparison of Schicks to Volkswagens troubles me on an automotive level. What troubles me even more though is the outright lie that going to five blades had nothing to do with Schick’s four-blade model. So we’re supposed to believe that studies in Gillette’s labs showed that a 1, 2, 3, or 5 blade razor is great but a 4 blade razor isn’t? This launch has everything to do with Schick, and I think at 5 blades we’ve officially reached the point of imperceptible returns in the razor blade industry. Seriously. If you can’t get a close enough shave with 2 or 3 blades, maybe God is telling you to grow a beard.

I am no authority on close shaves since I currently sport a beard, but I have definitely gone through my paces with razors. I started with the Gillette Atra Plus in high school and never found anything easier on my face. I’ve never liked Schicks, thought the Mach 3 was pretty good, and absolutely hated the Sensor. Can’t do the electrics either… don’t have the right sort of face for it. So anyway, that’s my razor preference: What’s yours? And would you try a 5 blade model?

*Note: This is not part of an organized effort to hype the Gillette Fusion razor within the blade-enthusiast community. I do, however, recommend trying out some Mint-flavored shaving cream.

Google Redesign or Stealthy Affiliate Program?

So I’m at the Blog Business Summit right now, courtesy of Byron, and in my A.D.D. 2.0 haze, I’m getting a really weird version of Google right now.

Here is what I’m getting.

My first reaction was that Google had been redesigned… rather poorly in fact. I asked Mike Rundle if he was getting the same page. He said yes. Then, I instant messaged a few people who weren’t in the conference. They were all getting the regular page.

So then I thought maybe Google was testing a new design on a small percentage of the population. Companies like Amazon have been known to do this. As I queried more people, it seemed that everyone in the conference (all connected via the same wifi network) was getting the weird version and all people outside were getting the normal version.

So I suppose two things are possible:

1. Google is indeed running this test and they are doing it by IP address. Hence, everyone in the conference is getting the weird page.
2. The wifi provider (AnchorFree), is doing some funky proxy stuff and essentially routing all Google searches to an “affiliate” search page powered by Google… and collecting click fees. What’s weird though is that people on the outside get the same IP address when they ping google.com as I do.

Anyone have any insight into this? If the first scenario is happening, oh my god, change it back. If the second scenario is happening (which seems more likely), is this even kosher with Google? And furthermore, if it *is* kosher, are we going to see more of this? Why wouldn’t Comcast or any other huge ISP do this? Is this part of the future plan for Google?

Anyone have any insight?

MercuryCloud is Hiring

My friends at MercuryCloud in Seattle are looking for some good print and interactive designers. As is evidenced by this photo — taken yesterday from their 4th of July party — they have some pretty sweet office space and they are not afraid to host kegs in it:

James Robinson and Will Prater are the principals of MercuryCloud. They are great guys, and if you’d like to work with them on some high-profile, high-caliber stuff, click the “Continue Reading” link for a full job description.
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Nike.com: Still Confusing After All These Years

I’ve been a critic of Nike’s online presence since the first time I tried to find out about a shoe seven years ago and was greeted instead with a confusing Flash movie having nothing to do with shoes and leading me around in circles until I had to go to Google. “Design vomit” is what I call that stuff, and most things Nike did back then reeked of it.

Over the last few years, the company seems to have gotten more web-savvy and now produces a good mix of design-driven and utilitarian interfaces depending on what the marketing goals are for any particular sub-site.

Wanting to give them another shot, and needing a pair of running shoes now that I actually have time to run, I checked out nike.com and found this really cool shoe that you can custom design for yourself online.

Great!

I spent the next 10 minutes choosing the colors of every single element of the shoe, right down to the lace eyelets, through a very slickly done Flash interface. I went to the University of Washington for my undergrad degree so the shoe I created was black, purple, and gold. The process couldn’t have been any easier… kudos to the Flash team on configurator:

Then came the breakdown.

There was no “add to cart” button anywhere. There was a “store locator” button so I assumed they wanted me to go down to Niketown or something and try it on first and then maybe order it from the store. Luckily, I have a Niketown about a 15 minute bike ride from my place so I pedaled down there and tried on a non-configured version of the shoe. Size 11, great. I asked the guy how to go about ordering the customized version and he told me to go online.

I said “You mean you actually do the ordering online?”

He said “Yep.”

I said “Ok, I’ll look again, but I didn’t see that option.”

He said “Yep, that’s how you do it.”

So I ride home and reconfigure my shoe from scratch again. I hit the “Review” button and up pops this error:

Eh? A non-specific error message? According to the message, the item is either unreleased (which I know is not true since I just saw it in person) or, whoa, they “reached their made-to-order limit for the day”???

What?

I don’t even know what that means. Why wouldn’t you just put my order in queue and manufacture it as soon as you can find the requisite child-laborers to build it?

So instead of putting my order through and shipping it to me when it’s ready, Nike instead gives me three options:

1. Try again tomorrow when they’ve “reset their capacity”?

2. Email the design to someone… presumably with the accompanying note “Hey, look at what I can’t order from Nike!”

3. Print the design out so I can hang it on my wall and be reminded of how much I want it.

I just don’t get it. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of exactly why Nike would put such an error message up and I can really only think of one possibility: whoever designed the database and backend for this system built it so that it can literally only store X number of orders per day. This just seems ridiculous to me though as databases should theoretically hold an unlimited amount of data.

Any ideas?

On MouseOut…

In an amusing twist of irony, my nameplate (pictured above) arrived last week, 4.5 years after I first ordered it.It is with both sadness and anticipation that I announce my departure from The Walt Disney Internet Group after four and a half years of employment. It’s been a great half-decade here and I can’t thank The Walt Disney Company enough for giving me the opportunity to work on such high-profile projects with such high-caliber people. In my time here, I’ve helped lead the standards-based redesigns of ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, and many other Disney-owned properties, as well as play a hands-on role in the design and development of all-new technologies like ESPN Motion, and countless unannounced products still in the pipeline. I owe all pride from working on said projects to the incredible teams of people across the company in Seattle, North Hollywood, New York, Connecticut, Orlando, England, and Japan who continue to make it all possible.

That said, I’m moving on.

So why would someone give up a six-figure job that they love, working for a company that they love, in a city that they love?

Two words: Opportunity Cost.

There’s something big I want to build, and now is the time to build it. I’m not going to say any more because I’m leery of getting caught in the hype machine, but you can expect a launch later this year. Watch this space for details as they become available.

As for blogging on Mike Industries, it’ll be business as usual for now. The iPod contests will continue (of course!), and my posting frequency should remain steady at several posts per month. Additionally, if I’ve turned you down for an interview or speaking engagement in the past, feel free to ask again as I no longer have a PR department to deal with. Disney’s policy required me to refuse almost all such requests in the past, so it’s nice not to have that restriction anymore.

And so with that, I begin anew on something I’m very excited about. If all goes well, it’ll grow like a Vine.

MouseOver. MouseOut.

Is Gold Really Worth Anything?

Mark Cuban is full of a lot of things. Lots of great ideas, lots of money, lots of love for NBA officials. Just lots of “stuff”. A veritable box of inspiration, really. The other day, he wrote a post about something I’ve thought about for quite some time: the present day value of gold.

Hundreds of years ago, gold was treated as a global currency because it was relatively rare and it helped produce items which indicated social status (viz. jewelry). If your family had a lot of gold, it was considered rich. If your country had a lot of gold, it was considered rich. Eventually, when everyone moved to paper currency, the idea was that each unit of paper was “backed” by one unit of gold in the treasury. The concept being that if the entire global economic system were to break down, we’d still have the gold to trade with.

This concept, however, is almost completely obsolete in today’s society. In the case of a global economic meltdown, who is going to care about collecting bars of gold? These days, it’s things like oil, enriched uranium, and natural gas that become the real currency of survival in such dire times.

Cuban takes things a step further though and brings up something I hadn’t thought about: given that gold has little substantive value anymore (it’s not even close to the most precious element), why not take our entire supply and sell it off at $420 per troy ounce while it’s still worth something? Maybe pay down the national debt a little?

It’s been many years since I took my last macroeconomics class so I’m sure Cuban is probably missing something here that would throw the world into a tailspin, but it really doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to me… in theory at least. The toughest part about it, and possibly the deal-killer, seems like the process of unloading it. The U.S. obviously couldn’t just announce one day that all of their gold was for sale. Perhaps in steady chunks over a long period of time though, it might work.

Anyway, I’m way out of my “element” here… just wanted to mention this interesting idea.

How to Snatch an Expiring Domain

I recently found myself in the position of wanting to register a domain which was owned by someone else. The domain was set to expire in a week, and I figured there was a decent chance that the person who owned it wouldn’t be renewing it. Upon consulting the WhoIs registry on the current owner, I discovered the guy was a bit of a domain shark and didn’t seem to be around anymore.

So I placed a backorder through GoDaddy for $18.95 thinking that was all I needed to do. During the week that followed, I learned a lot about the domain expiration process. Two and a half months and $369 later, I am the proud owner of a shiny new domain. A really really good one.

This article will explain the domain expiration process and what you need to do in order to use it to your advantage.
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