Bend in the Weather (Entries tagged as shopping)

When customer profiling and targeted advertising goes wrong

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:10:00 +1000

Don't get me wrong... I love a bargain as much as the next guy or girl.

What I don't like however is when a computer system is implemented with little regard and isn't actively checked by a human.
It's one way to make your company look like a jack-ass.

Sorry Woolworths - you've landed yourself in such a category.

Most Australian supermarket shoppers are aware of the fuel discounts offered by Coles and Woolworths, which can slice anything from $0.03 - $0.20 per litre of the cost of your fuel. Something that's always welcome by motorists.

It's the only reason I have an everyday rewards card. Fuel discounts add up over time, even more so for myself, as I drive with LPG the majority of the time, so $0.20 off per litre on LPG is quite substantial.

During the months of April and May Woolies decided that for 8 weeks straight I would like to buy wine. I'm not talking 1 bottle either. Most 'deals' require a purchase of 6 or more bottles in a given purchase.

A sample of the Email contents is included below:

To be honest, I love a good drop of red. Probably more so than the average punter. (We normally have a few dozen on hand in the house). At the end of March I had let our stocks go down over a period of time so had restocked. This seems to have triggered their rewards system to pester me for the next 8 weeks straight. No fuel offers (which was the main selling point of the card), nor any other offer... just grog.

At 6 bottles minimum per Email over 8 weeks, anyone reading my Email from Woolworths, would think I'm an alcoholic!

The crazy thing... It backfired.
I didn't buy any wine during that period. (As I had just restocked my levels.) This form of marketing happens 'after the fact', and as such it fails. If I have already made a bulk purchase, why would I wish to repeat it shortly after, and every week for a period of 8 weeks?

Woolworths reward system needs looking at. (As does Coles for that matter). It would be more beneficial to flag such bulk purchases of your customers, then look at sending it out 'specials' say every 3,6 or 12 months... you're likely to have a bigger uptake. I can't see my car dealership sending out a "buy a brand new car" Emails if I had just taken delivery of a new vehicle.

Certainly for everyday staples, it would be nice to have these filter through regularly. However don't see these, like 25% off either Meat, Fruit or Vegies for a week. It seems to be items like Coca-Cola, Alcohol and other non-essentials. I'm not surprised though... the supermarkets know we need staples.. and are trying to increase our trolley sizes by teasing us into buying these non-basic item.

Certainly I do hope that Woolworths and Coles both learn that their average shopper has the intelligence above that of a broken trolley wheel, as the current marketing strategies to date are quite insulting.

Seen your stimulus package?

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:14:00 +1000

The Australian Federal government announced the $12.2 billion Household Stimulus Package in the wake of the Worldwide Financial Downturn.

Payments are to have commenced during March, and the Tax Bonus for Working Australians in April. As yet I don't know anyone who has received them?

These payments are made up of:

A Tax Bonus for Working Australians of up to $900 for eligible taxpayers, depending on income thresholds.
A Single-Income Family Bonus of $900 to provide additional assistance for families that have one main income earner and may otherwise receive less assistance from the package than dual income families with similar household income.
A Farmer's Hardship Bonus of $950 which will be paid to farmers and others receiving Exceptional Circumstances related income support.
A Training and Learning Bonus of $950 to assist students, those returning to study or training, and some income support recipients.
A Back to School Bonus of $950 per child to assist low- and middle-income families eligible for Family Tax Benefit A with school-age children.

Whether you are for or against them... they are coming.

Has anyone out there received their 'Bonus'?
From all reports they are to be staggered out... yet I don't know an individual yet that has received them.

Would be happy to hear from someone that has got that 'cheque in the mail' so to speak.

Back online after moving into the new house

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 01:44:00 +1100

In my last post, I mentioned I was moving out of the city (Melbourne, Australia) and heading to the country.

Well the transition has occurred and I'm more than happy with the move. Our neighbours two deep on each side have all come out and introduced themselves, and the general atmosphere around the place is warm and uplifting.

The sense of community runs strong outside of the capital cities by the look of it.

Bannockburn is by no means a small town, though it's no thriving metropolis. It's about 15 mins drive from Geelong, but you would think you're thousands of miles away or in a parallel universe. Hand-waves whilst driving, a chat with a stranger (soon to be become an acquaintance/friend) are all common place. At the time of the 2006 Census, the population was a mere 2,486, but has more than doubled in the following two years. By 2015, they are expecting a population of around 15,000. If you're down this way, be sure to drop in. It's a quaint part of town and quite charming.

All the majority of our daily needs are here (local Woolworths, petrol, green grocer, butcher, baker, vet, auto repair, post office, pub, restaurants, fast-food, legal and accounting services,etc can all be found in the town). Those not here (ie: the not-every-day purchases) is only a 15 minute car-drive into Geelong.

I'm loving the lack of police sirens/choppers and cars doing wheelies until 4am most nights. The only noise we hear at present is the 6-7am chatter of the native birds found in abundance. (Not a real problem -- we're up at 6-7am anyway -- working through to late at night getting the house set-up).

Bannockburn for me was a natural choice. It's closer to loved ones, as well as the type of environment, community I would like to raise a family one day. The hustle and bustle and dog-eat-dog attitude that the big cities portray is not the values I would like to instil into my own children.

So how did the move go on Friday? As many know there was a deluge across a lot of Australia. In our neck of the woods we had the pitter-patter of a few rain drops from about 10:30am whilst filling the removalist's truck. By 3:15pm they had finished unloading the truck and literally seconds after the truck doors had been shut down it bucketed!

I'm glad we got our water tank hooked up prior to the move. Those 24 hours resulted in approx 70mm of rain. The tank is now full!
That much rain ensured we had a natural inground swimming pool over most of the backyard. The dogs found this too irresistable (they had never seen so much rain in their young years), and decided it was time for swimming. Shortly after we had dual-coloured dogs.... The original colour on their top half and a nice brown/muddy underbelly.

Saturday/Sunday saw us return to clean up our vacated premises. On Wednesday we return the keys to the landlord. It's a great feeling moving out of the rent cycle and into our own home.

Monday I had our networking guys in to terminate off our wired house. We now have 48 GigaE running throughout the house. The 19" racks I have in the garage look all very impressive now. I'll take some photos in the next few days and post them up for all to see. (Once I find the box with my camera data-cable! )

The new 48-port GigE Managed Switch also has PoE on all ports, and makes powering the Snom VoIP phones a breeze with no need for a power pack anymore (frees up on power point, and also one less cable to tangle unde rmy desk!). Cabling the house was a great idea -- being able to just plug an Ethernet cable into the wall in nearly every room of the house is just a god-send and something I would recommend to anyone who's building (do it during the framing stage, prior to the plastering).

The mountain of boxes strewn around the house are slowly disappearing. It will take us some time but we're hoping by Christmas to have everything fully unpacked/setup. That will leave me with the daunting task of establishing our gardens/plants/lawns outside during this crazy drought/summer. Something I am looking forward to getting up and running.

One of the benefits is since moving that my ADSL1 connection is indeed faster and cleaner here than our previous location (though we are about the same distance from the exchange (1-1.5kms). I'm pulling down pretty much the physical limits of ADSL1 and squeezing 100-150Kb/sec more then I previously have. Once ADSL2+ becomes available through my provider (Internode - due in the next few days), I may consider the move up if the price is 'reasonable'.

The garden shed and vegie garden will probably be first off the ranks, with the rest to follow after that.
I'm seriously considering putting in a large sandpit for the dogs so they can dig til their hearts content (and not in my lawn/vegies/plants! )

Though, all in good time. In the interim, I'm just enjoying country life, and not missing the glare of the city at all. A few more weeks of setting up house and I'll be as happy as my dogs running around in mud!

10 year anniversary

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Fri, 02 May 2008 01:38:00 +1000

How time flies.

Tomorrow (2^nd May) Pauline and I will have been married for 10 years!
It only seems like yesterday that we were two scared kids wondering what the hell we were getting ourselves into.

We can honestly say that it's been a great 10 years. Whilst like every couple we have our ups and downs, we generally have more ups then downs. We've both grown together and stronger as individuals.

This year, is a big year for us. We are building our first house, and potentially may start a family after that. So life moves on, always throwing more challenges and adventures.

To celebrate the milestone, we're heading away for the weekend.
I'm taking a few days off work to extend the stay. We're not heading too far, but enough so that we're out of mobile phone range and the hum of computer power supply fans for a few days.

We've decided to head up to Healesville. For those unaware, it's located North-West of Melbourne in the Yarra Ranges.

View Larger Map

There is tonnes to do there, and we indeed to make good use of our time! We're hoping to get to Healesville Sanctuary (Pauline is an animal loving nut - this is a must stop for us!), The Hedgend Maze, The Yarra Valley Railway (time permitting), as well as visiting a bunch of wineries in the region (Map here) (I wish to stock up the ever diminishing supply of good Australian Red/White wine I have.)

It will be good to get away for a quiet retreat and leave computers, mobiles, television and most of the usual suspects that distract us.

Matt's new watch that Pauline gave him to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary.

As I've already blogged, I got Pauline an eternity ring to mark the occasion. Pauline returned the favour by surprising me today with my own present!

She came home with a lovely watch. My existing watch had been banged up quite a bit and was in need of a new battery (though it did tell the time correctly twice every day!).

She couldn't wait to give it to me (she was planning on surprising me on the day and had to show me straight away!

It is indeed lovely, it's quite easy to read, balanced beautifully and quite an attractive piece of jewelry. I'm extremely happy with it. (I would of personally picked something like this - she has got my taste down pat!).

It's fantastic, we now both have something lasting to remember the milestone.

So we've packed our bags, getting the dog looked after and heading out early tomorrow. (Friday).
The camera has been thrown in so we will hopefully take some photos of the picturesque country that is the Yarra Valley.
Pauline's selected a lovely apartment for us to stay in, and it's been furnished in a lovely traditional Japanese style. I'm looking forward to staying there, as it looks divine.

I won't be near a computer or Internet access for half the week, so I suspect the Email will still keep rolling in.
For those of you wanting a response, please SMS me (I'm not sure when we'll have coverage), or wait for our return.

Whilst the weather forecast isn't ideal, it is strangely very similar to the weather we had on our wedding day! In any event we have a number of indoor and outdoor activities planned so I'm sure we'll have a blast.

It's my birthday!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:56:58 +1100

Well I turn the big 3-5 today. I'm starting to feel old... well not young anymore!

I've already been spoilt... Pauline has given me my pressie and I just love it.

I have so many geeky 'toys' that I really wanted something non-geeky for my b'day this year. Another geeky toy just means I'll be spending more time on the computer... and I do enough of that already!

We saw some artists painting several months ago and in passing I mentioned to Pauline 'I'd love to do that as a hobby!'

You know the drill, away from the computer, out in the country-side taking in some sun and fresh air.

Well it looks like it will become a reality now! Pauline bought me a French Easel Art Set.

Click image for a larger view.

On top of that she also gave me a bunch of paints, brushes and a bucket to wash out the paints in... all very cool!

As I'm moving down to Bannockburn later this year, it will be great to actually get out easily to places like the Otways, Steiglitz and the Brisbane Ranges National Park to do some painting.

Whilst I'm a beginner, it's more for the enjoyment and the great-outdoors. I'm likely to enroll in a short-course to pickup some technique but I expect it's something that I'll improve on with practice over time. (lets hope!)

So I'm all raring to go and paint myself silly! It will be a good break from the keyboards and a nice way to relax without any electrical devices within miles. (The mobile will stay home those days!)

My own personal Atom bomb!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 20:23:00 +1100

We have all grown up thinking an Atom bomb is a bad thing!

I've since learnt that you can indeed get a 'good' Atom. My bomb helps take the hassle out of the gardening.

I purchased an Atom Edger (well I got it for my birthday!) The thing is incredible! We have very tough buffalo grass that has just taken over in some parts of the yard.

However this little marvel is an Aussie invention that takes the back-ache and pain out of doing your edges.

Similar machines are almost double the price, and with their Australian and World-wide patents on the 'wheel-barrow' design they are exporting it around the globe.

In recent time, Atom Industries have been advertising on Australian TV. The model listed is their 2-stroke, 31cc petrol engine version. It's a pleasure to start and extremely easy to operate.
I've tried using a whipper-snipper previously but found the buffalo grass was so woody in parts that I just couldn't cut through it. I spent more time feeding the reel than actually cutting!

Not now! This device makes life a breeze when it comes to keeping the edges looking great, whilst keeping the grass at bay.

Here is a before and after view of the Atom in action.

As you can see... it makes a big difference! There was a footpath under all that. You can see where the grass was on the 'after shot' by the dirt marks.

It was the first attempt at using it, so I suspect over the coming weeks I'll get better and the edges will be more defined and sharper. For a first go I can't be more happier.

It's great to actually be able to walk on some footpath again!

The best feature, it's so easy to start, and easy on the back and arms... much better than the twisting required when using the whipper-snipper that left me with a sore back and dodgy edges!

So you can expect me to be using my Atom bomb more often to take the war of the lawns to a new level!

Memory card - resolved

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 15:48:25 +1100

I attempted to call the Highpoint DodoWorld store yesterday. I was supposed to receive a call the previous week to let me know the status of our return. This never eventuated...

You can't actually call the store... instead you ring head office who then have to put you through. Strange but true. When I asked if I could have the direct number I was politely informed that they can't give me the number and that it can only be given by someone at the store...

I was put through to the store, and spoke to another 'store manager'. (we've spoken to some 3-4 'store managers' now. They are more useless than the staff!) He had no idea, and I was lucky to find the original person we spoke to.
He ummed, erred and generally couldn't recall it. He finally remembered it was a product return after I went through the ordeal with him and he promptly put me on the 'returns guy'.

Simon (our returns guy), turned out to be the only person who actually knows how the process works...
After giving him the details, he quickly brought up the record and sighed.
"Yeah come in tomorrow, I'll swap it over for you", was the response. He also informed me to ask for him by name as no-one else there knows what is going on with returns.

I went in this afternoon... handed over the RA form and 5 minutes later had the replacement card in my hand.

Seems you can get it swapped over, though the general 'DODO' staff don't know it.

Whilst I'll never shop there again due to the poor service we received, it was refreshing to speak to someone who was competent and could actually assist a customer.

Kudos to Simon... you've returned my sanity.

To the other Dodo-World staff... thanks for nothing! This was a 90 minute round-trip I could have done without if you actually were competent!

I'm happy in the end... I now have a working camera in time for the upcoming birthdays!

Pauline's father's 70^th birthday is on Saturday, so at least I'll be able to take a bunch of photos there!

DodoWorld, DodoWorld - Service that stinks!

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 11:31:00 +1100

Dodo Internet is a fast growing ISP in Australia.

They have grown quickly do to a couple of reasons:

1. Extremely cheap Dialup Internet
2. Advertise heavily on television, so much so that their name and silly jingle is now a household name.
3. Next to none customer support.

In the ISP field they do quite well.. as the majority only want a relatively simple Internet account.

Recently the company expanded their business into Consumer electronics shores (similar to Harvey Norman, Tandy and Dick Smith). Called DodoWorld one can buy various computer, mobile phones or electronic gadgets from there.

We recently purchased a 256MB Secure Digital Card. The card comes with a 5 year warranty. Generally Sandisk are faultless, unfortunately we weren't so lucky.

We purchased the card for our camera and noticed whilst we were away that it was faulty. As the card went > 200MB in use... it took a long time to save.. It resulted in 'half-photos', and not being able to copy the files off the card.

We purchased it at at DodoWorld at Highpoint so we had to wait until we were heading back out that way. We thought this would be a simple exercise... swap over the card and away we go. How wrong we were!

Under 'Dodo policy' - we can only return a product it it is faulty under 10 business days. That's stated by their website, however in the store in person they will tell you 7 days.

We have basically been forced to hand over our sales receipt to them, fill out a form and told to 'wait'. The wait is due to the fact it has to go back to the manufacturer. That's fair, though it took us 30 mins to have the form filled out.
I claimed I'm disappointed to have a product that I can't use, and told it will 'take about 2 weeks'... Particularly as I have a bunch of birthdays coming up in February where I want to use my camera.

I have a photocopy of the return form, and what gets me is that they insist you sign a form stating that they aren't responsible if they lose it during the process.

The whole process wasn't straightforward, was painful and could be seen that it was not something staff wanted to do.

I find it frustrating that sales staff are quick to want a sale, yet think you are a leper if you ever need to return a product.

What is more frustrating is that the sales staff member left a note for the store manager to call me regarding the return . HE was supposed to call on Monday. It's now Wednesday and I'm still yet to get a call. This strengthens the belief that they can't be bothered dealing with me as a customer post-sale.

Ohh... and for the record. A Dodo was a flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius. They became extinct in the 1700's. The main reason for their extinction is due to the fact they were not afraid of the humans that hunted them!
Dodo took its name from the Portuguese word for "fool".

So basically they have called their stores 'Fool's World'. I certainly feel like one since shopping there, and after this experience it is likely I will never shop their again.

I recommend all readers to consider twice prior to shopping there... particularly if you would like some after-sales support.

It will be interesting what becomes of this all. I'll keep you informed.

PC Build and the smell of coffee

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 04:28:11 +1100

What a day!
I headed down to Geelong first up to pickup our new coffee machine. Pauline stayed home as we were expecting the delivery of John's (her brother) replacement machine to turn up, and she was going to build it.

So off I headed... on a very nice, extremely hot and windy day!

I Emailed the buyer late last night to say I was coming tomorrow (hence Friday) but as he didn't read it til Friday morning he understood it as Saturday!

I just rang Pauline to tell her it was a no-go after knocking on the door 3-4 times (in case they were out the back) when they pulled up in the car! I managed to pickup the item as a result.

I dropped by my folks on the way home just to say howdy. Didn't stay too long as I needed to get cracking on John's new machine.

By the time I arrived home, Pauline was putting the finishing touches to the machine.

It was over to me to install the OS, drivers and patches.

I tried our original version of XP with John's CD-Key... no go.. couldn't find the SATA hard-disk. No drama... put them on a USBKey and read them. Windows picks up the drivers lists them, but can't install them (for some brain-dead reason they need to be on Drive A:).
The problem was... we didn't have a floppy drive in the machine.

After many hours of trying various options.. even Slip-streaming Windows XP Service Pack 2 into the CD... we still couldn't get it going. (More of SlipStreaming tomorrow!)

Pauline scrounged around and found a spare floppy drive.. so we stuck that in. That's when the fun began... sometimes we would see the drivers to select, then they would refuse to install, sometimes we couldn't see them at all. After several hours of mucking around... we ditched that floppy drive and stuck in another.
Worked first go! Seems the first floppy drive was faulty.

It took about some 4 hours.. but I was finally able to start the Windows install.

Lesson: Always have a floppy in a machine... no matter how little you use it. It's bound to be required when you don't have one.

The good thing is that I had Service Pack 2 on the install CD.. which saved me installing that seperately.
I added Office 2003 to the build and then applied the Office 2003 Service Pack 2 Updates to the Office build (I had them on CD).

Now... Windows Update... It seems our newly build machine needed some 39 critical updates for Windows and 4 for Office!

I got a bit smart then... instead of just downloading them... I took note of their KnowledgeBase numbers and downloaded the lot from the Microsoft Download site.

This will mean in future when I build another machine, I can just use these instead of wading through Windows Update and chewing up my valuable download quota!

Some 250MB worth of updates later and it's fully patched!

I've now burnt a DVD-RW with all the updates one needs to bring a SP2 machine upto a fully patched state as of 20/01/2006.

Now... to learn to automate applying them directly after SP2 and it should really cut down the time to deploy a machine. (I know with some of the automation tasks for admins this is possible... just never needed to do it!)

John's machine is now ready and raring to go! I think we'll probably drop it over on Sunday for him if he's free.

As for the coffee machine, it comes with a coffee grinder so we can bu real beans and grind them. Pauline's still playing, but we've had a few coffees already and it's quite good! It's much quieter than our last machine, though it seems to take a little longer to heat the water. All in all it was really cheap and ensures Pauline's able to make her froth again (our frother was broken on the old one... and they wanted $60 to look at it).
It's worked out not much dearer buying a new one.. that includes a coffee grinder. Talk about a throw-away society!

Price shopping

mbottrell@gmail.com (Matt) — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 11:39:15 +1100

Yesterday Pauline and I went in search of a lawn edger.

We have buffalo grass that loves to creep over anything.

We thought we could get a petrol lawn edger for ~$200-$250. Seems we were quite wrong!

The Atom apparantly is 'the best'. Everywhere we went people recommended the Atom. It's an Aussie invention and has patents world-wide. Whilst it's the best it's also one of the cheapest and most reliable.

If you've never seen one before they do look weird! It's like a wheel-barrow with 1 wheel and two handles that you use to push it along. The others brands (and more expensive) work like a lawn mower with a blade sticking at right-angles to the ground. These 3-wheelers however are not the easiest when cutting around curves (which our footpath has a lot of!)

We rang around and visited a bunch of mower shops yesterday in the vain hope that we could get a cheaper edger. There were attachments that fit onto whipper-snippers however everyone cautioned against them for two reasons.
1. Not easy to use.. and gives you back-ache after some time using them.
2. Are notorious for breaking down.

We found that the 2-stroke Atom retails for $429.00 though we located a store in Essendon that will do it for $399.00 with next day delivery.

It's a lot of money.. and whilst it will make life much easier we have to weight up if we really need it.

Currently I use a whipper snipper, but find it's a slow and painful job. I normally find it takes 45-60 minutes to do, and the job is not a clean, straight cut. I also use a lot of whipper-snipper reel and the buffalo grass isn't the easiest to get through. There is some areas I just can't get through at present.

If we do get it ... it will be my birthday pressie. Though I'm wary of spending so much money on it.