Colin Charles Agenda

There is a lot said about Boxing Day sales in London and the great shopping experience you can enjoy. I got to be part of this on the 26th of December 2012.

First thing you should know about most of Central London. A tube strike has been happening for several years now. The unions want to ensure people get paid better to work on this day, but there’s been no solution. As a consequence, most central tube lines or areas stop functioning.

Buses work. Taxis work. Taxis are also on regular metered fares on the 26th, which is unlike on Christmas Day (the 25th). 

Getting to Harrods (Knightsbridge) or most of the High Street (Oxford Circus, Bond Street) is a challenge if you can’t use the tube. So use a taxi.

What about the sales themselves?

Some stores have genuinely good discounts. Some stores like Selfridges also have an online presence, so whatever you get in store is also available via online delivery.

The crowds are insane. Walking around Bond St will confirm that. Many queue to get into stores, seen at Next & Selfridges, but for the latter there are other entrances so use common sense.

I get the feeling that Londoners usually don’t shop on this day. Its mostly out of towners or tourists.

Many stores continue to have sales right up till January. Same prices, same deals, even on January 4 the following year! Just no more crowds :)

John Lewis apparently remains closed on the 26th, electing to open on the 27th only.

Overall, its OK if you want to get 30% off something at Dior/Chanel/Hermes/Prada/etc. It seems those brands generally don’t continue sales maybe past that day. But for anything else? I’m not so sure…

Watches are also on sale. But I’ve never paid retail prices for nice watches to begin with – shops usually provide discounts anyway.

Should you go for the experience? Only if you enjoy crowds & sale bins. You will queue to go in. You will be shopping in a rush. You will queue to pay. Bring entertainment to quell the waiting periods!

I just saw a preview on BBC for The Paradise. It is a costume drama about an upmarket department store. What impressed me was how Denise Lovett (played by Joanna Vanderham) made a sale of a tea dress (see a video of what’s behind the character of Denise). She had great tenacity and drive in what she did.

It goes something like this: Denise is the new salesgirl at The Paradise. A snooty rich woman comes in and the sales lady tries to tell her to buy an off-the-shelf dress. Miss snooty is taken aback that a woman of her stature would buy something off-the-shelf. The sales lady commands the girl (Denise) to show how the dress will look on an actual live model. Denise takes too long and realises that she can’t fit into it as its two sizes smaller. Then she speaks up and makes her forthcoming pitch. About how the dress will look well on Miss snooty. How that is all that matters. How its been curated/hand-picked by the store owner. How its the talk of the town in Paris today. How it will be the talk of the town in London next month. How it can be sent to her home to try herself. And she tops it off with a guarantee – if you don’t like it, the sales lady will relieve her of her position. Miss snooty agreed.

It reminded me of what’s wrong with retail experiences today. It showed me how it would be nice to fix it. Most retail experiences today are no different to buying online.

In the old days (at least on this set), to sell a dress there were 3 people. Two sales assistants, one “girl”, who would live model clothes for you. Contrast this to today where sales assistants usually do not even bother to talk to you. When was the last time a sales assistant knew a lot about the product and sold you on it based on her knowledge?

I can’t find The Paradise on BBC’s iPlayer, so I’ll try to go old school and look for some DVDs. Season 1 is 8 episodes, and I reckon you can mine a lot of interesting sales advice from it. Its renewed for Season 2 as well from what I gather.

On the 24th of December 2008, I came back from my little hiatus in Georgetown, Penang (in where I discovered the heritage and history of the city), and immediately started ringing up Apple Authorised Resellers to find out where in the blue hell, the new MacBook Air was. (Emphasis on the new, because all the resellers try to push the old one, to clear out their stock – in fact, they actively discourage you from getting the new one, saying the only modifications are the bigger hard disk, and better video card. They don’t mention the new Trackpad option in System Preferences, that leads you to four finger scrolling which allows you to bring up Expose or switch between applications – Mac+Tab).

Its constant delays, the fact that it was supposed to be out after Thanskgiving weekend, and so on, started really getting on my nerves. I had been waiting for this feather-weight laptop for a while, since the announcement.

Machines had none, and didn’t know when it was coming. EpiCentre had none, and didn’t know when it was coming. So I thought I’d take a chance at calling up the Apple Store Malaysia at 1800-80-6419. They even advertise saying things like “Kami juga berinteraksi dalam Bahasa Malaysia!”, which I loosely translate as “We can interact in Bahasa Malaysia too!”.

I get someone who barely speaks any English. But she has an accent. I ask her why they don’t sell any Air’s, and the fact that Christmas is tomorrow, how am I supposed to make my loved ones happy? She tells me she has no idea why and EpiCentre is the best place to ask. If they don’t have it, no one else will.

I say I will come into their office to pick a unit up. They tell me that that is not possible, they’re not Apple Retail. I say I know where such an office exists (I’ve vaguely remembered it from eons ago), and then she tells me she’s in *drumroll* Singapore.

So there, Apple’s support line for Malaysia routes to Singapore, and they’re generally not very helpful. And apparently, their QA on language skills is just not there. In fact, had I started off a conversation with her in Bahasa Malaysia, I have a feeling she wouldn’t have survived – Mandarin, maybe.

As an aside, EpiCentre in Pavillion had a couple of units available on 30/12/2008. I think as of today, they have one unit available… Go, go, rush to get ’em :-)

Om Malik’s blog design, and themes as a business
I stumbled upon Om.Is.Me…, Om Malik’s private blog, and was taken away by the design. For one, its hosted at wordpress.com (something I’m thinking I might do at some stage, if it was less rigid). But more importantly, what I noticed was the design – I was really taken away by the blog theme. Its designed by GNV & Partners, and it looks snazzy.

Is there big business in WordPress themes? If their website was in English, I’d be a little more interested… Largely because I have to theme at least two WordPress sites in the near future, and I’m not looking forward to mastering CSS, etc.

What do custom WordPress themes go for? How many folk pay for themes?

Hackerspaces
Found this via Twitter (thanks @achitnis), and it Hackerspaces reminded me a lot of coworking. When in Melbourne, I always pined of a co-working space (I believe, Joe’s Garage came close to it – upstairs, anyway). Now that I’m in Kuala Lumpur a lot more, I am wondering if a warehouse somewhere, might make sense…

Cybercafes in Japan, offering physical addresses to the homeless
Read Cyber cafe offers address to homeless. I didn’t know that cybercafe’s in Tokyo gave away a free email address (maybe they don’t, but they might give you access to one), but I was impressed that comic books and unlimited beverages were a norm. Kudos to Cyber @ Cafe offering long-term lodging and an official registered address (important, when PO BOXes aren’t acceptable or you’re homeless).

Takemitsu Karitachi, used to sleep on park benches, but he doesn’t have to anymore:

This simple service is vital for the 50 semi-permanent residents of the cafe, many of whom have taken refuge here after being laid off abruptly during the current recession.

Takemitsu Karitachi, a contract worker at a nearby factory, is one of the many people who have been sleeping at the cafe every night for the past two months since he lost his office job and his apartment.

Karitachi, who used to roam the streets and hopped between various Internet cafes for months, says he is now relieved to have found a more permanent home — even if it’s a cubicle just slightly bigger than the back seat of a car.

BMW India sales records
It stunned me when I found out that in 2007, BMW only sold 1,338 cars, and in 2008, plans to sell 2,800 units. The sales ratio between the BMW 5 and 3 series is 55:45 (so the one’s buying a BMW, actually have a lot more disposable income than one would think).

I don’t know the cost of a BMW in India, but if its prohibitively expensive as it is in Malaysia (what is it, up to 300% excise duty?), I’m surprised the numbers are a lot lower. Seeing a BMW (or a Mercedes) on the road in Malaysia is very common – yuppies are driving 3-series cars (BMW 320), straight into their first management job, willing to fork out RM220,000+, and paying it off over seven or nine years.

Lucky for me, I don’t think of a car as a status symbol (and think that people that do, are rather daft).

After Credentials
Read Paul Graham’s After Credentials. It is probably his best essay in recent time, and its very pertinent to those living in Asia.

Not only in South Korea, but in most parts of Asia, education is touted as being very important. Quotes like “In our country, college entrance exams determine 70 to 80 percent of a person’s future,” don’t surprise me. Paul thinks its old fashioned – I tend to agree. Today’s universities are not more than cram universities.

The problem comes when parents use direct methods: when they are able to use their own wealth or power as a substitute for their children’s qualities.
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Let’s think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn’t need them.
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This doesn’t work in small companies. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they’d soon be parted from you if your performance didn’t match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed.

In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don’t care whether you’ve even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization.

The whole article is interesting. There is a good analysis of the big company versus small company paradigm, as well as the fact that people want instant (and not deferred) rewards.

I predict that within Asia, in the next two decades, hiring based on your after credentials (first bachelors, then masters, possibly doctorate eventually), are going to be a thing of the past.

Lawyers use Facebook to serve notices
Via The Age:

Canberra lawyers have won the right to serve legally binding court documents by posting them on defendants’ Facebook sites.

In a ruling that could make legal and internet history, a Supreme Court judge ruled last week lawyers could use the social networking site to serve court notices.

Email and even mobile phone text messages have been used before to serve court notices, but the Canberra lawyers who secured the ruling are claiming service by Facebook as a world first.
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“The Facebook profiles showed the defendants’ dates of birth, email addresses and friend lists and the co-defendants were friends with one another,” a spokesman for the firm said.

On perfumes, and smell
This is interesting, The scent of a man. Very captivating, here are a few select quotes:

They already knew that appropriate scents can improve the mood of those who wear them. What they discovered, though, as they will describe in a forthcoming edition of the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, is that when a man changes his natural body odour it can alter his self-confidence to such an extent that it also changes how attractive women find him.
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They found that those who had been given the commercial fragrance showed an increase in self-confidence. … What was surprising was that their self-confidence improved to such an extent that women who could watch them but not smell them noticed. They were, however, unable to distinguish between the groups when shown only still photographs of the men, suggesting it was the men’s movement and bearing, rather than their physical appearance, that was making the difference.
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Perhaps the greatest takeaway was: “The sexes themselves smell different, too, and women can glean information about a man’s social status from his smell alone.””

Women can smell success?