I’ve Moved!
November 20, 2008
So I’m sure that most people have noticed that the site has been offline for a few days. There’s a reason for that, which I will get to shortly. But first, let me just say this:
In fact, I am blogging at a new site I have just finished setting up: kennethhynek.net. A full explanation for the reasons behind the move can be found here
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That said, this is not the end of Time Immortal. My wife Grace has expressed interest in taking over blogging at this domain, and I am working to make sure that she gets set up here as soon as possible.
Also, my profound apologies for the modification to the site face; the move was not as seamless as I would have hoped, and many of the image files for this theme, and in the gallery, were corrupted during the course of their evacuation from my previous web host’s servers. Until such time as I have repaired them, I’ve put a clean-looking template in place of the previous one.
Update: for the purposes of further traffic shaping, new posts from kennethhynek.net will be excerpted below. Full articles can be read at the new blog.
95% of returned products aren’t broken
June 3, 2008
No, really — only about 5% of returned products are actually broken.
Blame it on poor usability or just not reading the frickin’ manual, but it turns out that 95 percent of all returned gadgets actually work despite what customers may say or think. That’s right — of the $13.8 billion worth of returned products in 2007, only 5 percent were because gadgets were truly broken. According to Accenture, 68 percent of all returns work but aren’t meeting customer expectations — or they are simply too confusing to use. The other 26 percent are returned due to straight-up buyer’s remorse (AKA significant other budgetary freak-outs). Accenture executive Terry Steger believes that the complexity of gadgets is to blame here, and not the fickle nature of American consumers who tend to give up on product setup within a few minutes. We believe this ia all actually due to the implicit nature of — ooh, look at that shiny thing over there!
We have become such an ignorant and impatient people. Working in camera retail was sometimes difficult, because too often one would see people coming into the store with more money than brains — they’d load up with a massive, expensive, full-featured camera and a few high-quality lenses…and then use the thing for birthday snapshots, never moving their powerful SLR camera off of its default, JPEG-only “Auto” setting.
More than a few times, I told a customer flat-out that I wouldn’t sell him the product being requested, since it would both be a waste of his money and my time. Funnily, when the customer in question finally did settle on a camera to his liking, he usually kept it, rather than returning it a week later.
