Background Noise

Dr. Google

The whole family was in Destin, FL last week for Spring Break, and about midway through the week I got a crushing headache. Not your run of the mill tension headache, but a pretty localized splitter that literally shut me down in a dark room for the whole night. It subsided a bit by the next day, but two days later it was still there.

Being the inner nerd that I am, the first thing I did was fire up my laptop and consult Google. Not to go into too much detail, but I could easily describe where the pain was, and Google returned a TON of information from various health and medical sites. To summarize what I was led to believe by Dr. Google, my diagnosis was one of the following:

1. A benign (yet severe) tension headache brought on by an increase in blood pressure or stress or sinus condition...blah, blah, blah. Take some Ibuprofen and ride it out.

or

2. A life-threatening condition that requires immediate emergency attention, otherwise your head will explode with a 100% chance of death.

Needless to say, I went with diagnosis #1 and I'm still alive and kicking.  Turns out it was a  nasty sinus infection,  according to my family doctor.

It made me wonder though - how many people today consult Google instead of a doctor when they have a problem, and then show up at their doctor or E.R. convinced that they have some malady based on a self-diagnosis via the Internet.

God, I would hate being a doctor in the information age.

Operation: Healthier Eating

Today begins our family's journey towards what we hope is a healthier lifestyle, at least in terms of the food that we choose to put in our bodies. This isn't just some knee jerk reaction to the USDA beef recall or whatever the latest food scare is, but is more of a conscious decision that we've been working towards over time. We're not turning into vegetarians y any means. It's just a matter of eating less bad food and more good food.

As with exercise, this takes some planning and dedication and we have a lot of forces working against us:

1. We have small children, which can always prove to be a challenge when trying to get them to eat anything remotely healthy. Fortunately, our kids are pretty adventurous when it comes to eating but it certainly adds a degree of difficulty.


2. I like to cook. A lot. While you would think that this would normally be a good thing, I'm not exactly pulling recipes out of Cooking Light for the dinner table. This should be the easiest behavior to fix, as I'm looking forward to cooking things that our outside my comfort level.


3. We live in Indianapolis, IN, the chain restaurant capitol of the world. It's not like they're handing out free Hardees Double Bacon Thickburgers on every corner....but it's close. Finding a restaurant that serves remotely healthy food in moderate portions is pretty tough. Finding one that also happens to be kid-friendly? Forget about it. There is no Whole Foods (yet). We had a Sunflower Market, but it closed. We do have a Wild Oats Market, but it's nowhere close to being convenient to shop there. Finally, our two primary grocery store chains, Marsh Supermarkets and Kroger, are horribly inconsistent. I have an ongoing hate-hate relationship with my local Kroger, which is less than 1/4 mile from our house.

It's the grocery store thing that has pushed me over the edge. Even on their best day, I just don't trust the food. Reading the article, "Don't Eat Anything That Doesn't Rot" by Michael Pollan made me want to do something about it. As luck would have it, a friend told us about a local company called Farm Fresh Delivery. The concept is just great, and totally fits our lifestyle: Organic and locally produced groceries delivered to your home. It took me very little research on the site to realize that we need to at least give this a shot. I signed up for the service a few weeks ago, and set the date for our first delivery for the week of March 24th. Delivery for our area of town is set for Tuesday, and we received our first bin of goodies yesterday!

We decided on the Small Farm Fresh Bin, which contains all organic fruit and vegetables, and one dozen locally produced eggs from pasture-raised hens with no hormones or antibiotics. The bin is $35, and the eggs were an additional $3.50. We decided on an initial bi-week delivery, but I would anticipate that we'll move this to weekly at some point.

Here's what was in our bin:

1 pound Asparagus
16 oz. Strawberries
2 pounds Red Potatoes
1  Jumbo Yellow Onions
3 Golden Delicious Apples
1 Bunch of Broccoli
1 Bunch of Carrots
1 Lemon
6 oz. Spring Mix
1/2 pound Mixed Mushrooms (Oysters and Shitakes)

Everything is delivered in an eco-friendly reusable bin. Produce is packaged separately in what is essentially a brown paper bag, which you can return with your empty bin instead of throwing away.

A few days prior to our delivery date, we were sent an email message with a delivery reminder and a link to modify any part of our order. This is a very nice touch - there are a number of items that you can substitute for anything in your order, assuming you make the change in time.

Here are a few pics of the delivered product:

We had the Spring greens as a salad w/pasta last night, and they were very nice! A mushroom and asparagus risotto is on the menu this weekend, and the kids have already dived into the strawberries.

Next up in our plan is to switch to a combination of free-range and grass-fed meat, some of which is available via Farm Fresh Delivery.

Obviously, all of this comes at a higher cost than buying mass-produced products, but in the end the trade-off is a healthy lifestyle, which is worth the price.

The Long Tail vs. The Paradox of Choice

I was catching up on some blog posts after returning from vacation, and was intrigued by Chris Webb's take on Borders' decision to display more book covers in their stores, which in turn will reduce a typical store's inventory by 5% to 10%.

There are a lot of different opinions on what kind of effect this will have on not only their in-store business, but the web business as well. In my opinion, this is a big fat WIN all the way around for Borders.

In-store: In a physical store - even a "big box" like Borders, you have limited shelf space to merchandise your product. This environment is where you see The Long Tail and The Paradox of Choice collide.  Borders can cram every book they can on their shelves in order to maximize inventory, but it's all for naught if the end result is a shopper so bewildered by choices and poor merchandising that they ultimately elect not to make a choice.

I think there several reasons to applaud this change:

• It's a ballsy move, and goes against what most consider to be conventional wisdom.
• They actually tested their front-facing strategy and saw a 9% increase in revenue in those stores. Border's 2007 revenue was just north of $4.1B. You do the math.
• They increased revenue in those stores, while reducing inventory. A 9% increase in top-line revenue while decreasing your cost of goods by 5% to 10%?? That's real money, baby!
• Customer research in these test stores revealed that most customers left with the perception that they were actually stocking more books, not less!

So, what does this mean to their web business? At this juncture, probably not much. On the surface, it would appear that a drop in inventory levels should have a negative effect on web sales. But, this is also a business where it's pretty easy to leverage distribution channels with Ingram and Baker & Taylor to model a "virtual" inventory system.

In the end, I don't think it will have a negative effect on their web business because up until just recently, they didn't really have one. If you look at Borders' last quarterly report, it shines a light on their web business through last year:

" The Company, through its subsidiaries, has agreements with Amazon.com, Inc. ("Amazon") to operate Web sites utilizing the Borders.com and Waldenbooks.com URLs (the "Web Sites"). Under these agreements, Amazon is the merchant of record for all sales made through the Web Sites, and determines all prices and other terms and conditions applicable to such sales. Amazon is responsible for the fulfillment of all products sold through the Web Sites and retains all payments from customers. The Company receives referral fees for products purchased through the Web Sites."

This, folks, is what we call a glorified affiliate program. No risk - no reward, and you pass on what could be your best customers right through to your biggest competitor.

So, did they make any money in their relationship with Amazon? You tell me - remember, this is a $4B retailer:

"Other revenue for the Borders and International segments primarily consists of income recognized from unredeemed gift cards, as well as revenue from franchisees. Other revenue for the Borders segment also includes wholesale revenue earned through sales of merchandise to other retailers, as well as referral fees received from Amazon as part of the Web Site agreement. Other revenue in the Waldenbooks Specialty Retail segment primarily consists of income recognized from unredeemed gift cards. Other revenue has increased $2.0 million, or 31.3%, to $8.4 million in 2007 from $6.4 million in 2006."

This is a quarterly report, so you can probably extrapolate some annual number out of this and get to about $40M, which lines up with their Income Statement disclosure of "Other Revenue" accounting for 1% of total company revenue. And keep in mind that this number includes revenue from unredeemed gift cards, international segments, wholesale, etc. and not just Amazon referral fees.

I'm guessing that in just a couple of years, Borders will be in a position where they will have no choice but to consider the effect that a decision like this would have to their online business, but today it's a zero-sum equation...and then some.

The Idiocy of Crowds

"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one!"

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" - Charles Mackay, 1841

One of the most amusing pastimes for me the last few days, is to follow what has been going on at SxSW via some of my Twitter friends. Actually, I haven't had a lot of say in the matter because that's just about all I have heard over Twitter. The sonic boom of the interactive portion of SxSW was the Mark Zuckerberg keynote, which was moderated by author Sarah Lacy.

I wasn't at SxSW and I obviously didn't attend the keynote. All I know is what I've read in various tweets and blogs, and what I can glean from watching the video, but my first reaction is that this is was a ridiculous overreaction.

I won't defend Ms. Lacy for a second, but what I heard via Twitter and what I watched in the video were two different things. She obviously went for the whole "casual fireside chat" route, and it failed miserably. But then again, Zuckerberg is notorious for being a very difficult  subject to interview and he clearly could have opened up a bit more and actually answered some of the tough questions, but that's not his style. In the end you have what seems to be a rather boring interview of  someone who doesn't want to be interviewed in the first place, and the crowd goes ape shit near the end because they don't like how the session is going. Boo-farking-hoo.

(Memo to the Web 2.0 crowd: If this story winds up being the hottest news to come out of the biggest conference in your space, you might want to knock the dust off of your résumé.)

I found it even more entertaining to hear about even worse behavior at a panel  on analytics. Second verse, same as the first. You have a bunch of people backchanneling in the audience, and they start revolting as soon as they don't like where the session is going. The difference between the keynote backlash and this one, is that these geniuses were intentionally disrupting the session on queue. Fortunately, the panel ended before the crowd got to close with their big finish by dropping their pencils off their desk at the same time.

Look, I get it. Backchanneling a live event isn't exactly a new concept, and tools like Twitter and Meebo are huge enablers for this, but it doesn't give you a free pass to act like you're twelve. Conferences on the scale of SxSW are a logistical nightmare to put together, and it's incredibly rare that every speaker will nail each topic to the satisfaction of the crowd. The only thing that these petty backchannel outbursts accomplished is that they will make it harder to round up speakers next year that are willing to put up with it.

Hey, Is This Thing On?

This feels a bit weird....I haven't posted to my blog in almost a year. I had all but abandoned her. My work and family life was eating up all my time and energy, and I found that I had very little to say. Not to mention that I felt like I had about 10 people that read it on a regular basis.

I started this thing back when I was preparing to leave the job that I held for 7 years, which was the closest thing to a "career" that I think I ever had. I had no idea what I was going to do, but I wanted to use the blog to help figure it out. It was either something that I could point potential employers to, or simply build upon if I ultimately decided to hang my own shingle out. In the end, I took on a new role as an E-Commerce Strategist with ATG, and found myself neglecting the blog. Like an old friend that you just stop communicating with, the longer I was away, the harder it was to convince myself to reconnect.

Two things changed all that recently:

1. At a recent E-Commerce conference, I ran into some people who said that they actually read this thing when I was posting regularly. Wait...what?
2. More importantly, I began using Twitter.

The act of "micro-blogging", if that's what its called, has convinced me that I actually have thoughts and ideas that are impossible to constrain to 140 characters. So, I figured what the Hell. Let's see if I can't kick-start this beast again!

So, for those of you who manage to stumble across this for the first time, I have a couple of disclaimers:

• I have no idea how often I will post.
• I have no idea what the content will look like. It might be technology-related. It might be about food. Beats me...
• My writing style and overall ability to be grammatically correct at all times sucks. Deal with it!