On a recent business trip, I ended up staying at the Hilton London Islington Hotel, since it was next to the business centre hosting the conference I was attending.

Though by this point I shouldn’t have been shocked, I was nonetheless outraged that a colleague and I paid $57USD for one night of Internet access in our room and also we were expected to pay about $5.50 per minute to call another colleague on his London cellphone from our room phone.  Oh, and adding insult to injury:  we discovered that we had to pay separately for wireless Internet access downstairs; it wasn’t included in the $57 we had just paid.

So this got me to thinking:  Why do hotels charge so much for such ridiculously minimal (and actually low-cost) incidentals and—more critically—how do they get away with it in a free marketplace? And what other industries feature such utterly obnoxious gouging?

WARNING:  Mishmash ahead.
Haven’t yet packed, which means this is the perfect time to procrastinate with a blog entry.  Or something like that.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a two-week work-related trip.  See details of that trip, plus enjoy some of my phone, camera, T-Mobile, and other musings below.

As I’ve written in other entries, I’ve become buried in e-mail, and so my “unsubscribe trigger-finger” has become a bit more itchy.

Often times, I do the (unsubscribe) deed with little remorse.  Hasta la vista, baby!

Other times, though, it’s more of a frustrating decision.  Take Vistaprint, for instance.  They offer well-made products such as business cards and address labels at generally reasonable prices.  My customer service experiences have been pretty decent with them, too.  I’d like to get email updates from companies like this, within reason.

But when it comes to VistaPrint’s email list, they’re like that attractive but thoughtless jerk on the subway who talks your ear off about nothing important every five minutes. 

Okay, let me give some more specifics…

Every day when I drive home from work, I see a painfully intelligence-insulting billboard ad put up by some bank (it’s rather interesting that I can’t even remember which bank, isn’t it?).  It reads something like this: “3 cents back on every debit card purchase?  Just give ‘em a toaster and be done with it!”

So let’s think about this for a moment, shall we, with a few assumptions:

- A typical person makes *at least* 10 payments totalling $100 a week, not including rent or mortgage payments.
- This person could probably get *some* cash-back or rewards non-debit (credit) card.
- Such a card would easily pay 1% in cash or rewards (for instance, on my cards, I get a free round trip airfare for a spend of $25,000, a reward of at least 1.2%).

Given this scenario, practically anyone could make the same purchases on one of the rewards cards and in a year, make (from a *very* conservative estimate) $52 as opposed to $15.60 with the crappy debit card.  Not to mention enjoy far more consumer protections.  And the hypothetical $25 toaster that the ad makes fun of?  It would take 834 purchases on the debit card to earn the equivalent of that toaster. 

* * *

But the latest promotion I just got in my inbox even tops the lameness of the debit card “deal.” Here’s the copy:

It’s easy to get your own space on the Web (Geocities, Google Pages, Live Journal, Blogger, etc.) without cost and without fuss.  So why get your own domain name?

• It can provide you with a nice vanity and (generally) permanent e-mail address… e.g., or
• Same goes for a Web address; also, you can then host your site anywhere you want!
• It’s dang cheap!  $5-$10/year for the domain registration (+ optional Web site hosting costs, usually $2-20 depending on how much space/bandwidth/power you need)

In the rest of this note, I’ll cover very briefly how you get a domain name, and—more comprehensively—some things you’ll want to consider before choosing a domain name.

That was a pretty obnoxious title, wasn’t it?  String a few more sentences like that together, add a bogus (completely fabricated) self-congratulatory CEO quote or two and voila, you have a typical press release.  Including something like this:

“We’re proud that BLADAM is offered in a cutting-edge delivery system that reaches a diverse mix of savvy consumers” notes BLADAM CEO Adam Lasnik “And we’re confident that our unique, patent-pending ContentTextual(tm) presentation will provide a rapidly growing platform for future advantageous growth in this medium.  Oh, and did I mention that BLADAM is Web 2.0?  Web 2.0!  We’re hip!  We’re like Zimeebratr, but better!”

* * *

You’d think that companies would be more clueful today, but alas, even some overall clued-in companies I’ve worked for (and generally admired) spew e-xcrement like this.

I was reminded about how press releases should look when I read this clued-in comment from an entry on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog:

From CMO magazine comes this gem, talking about the opportunities and benefits of using “real people” (I presume this means non-professional actors?) in advertising.

The Dove campaign for its firming cream, for example, has proved popular with consumers, but industry experts disagree on whether the ad is effective. “Using the average person won’t sell anything,” says Gerald Celente, director and founder of Trends Research Institute, a consultancy. “The purpose of advertising is to create desire beyond what the product can actually deliver. Do you want to see the floppy Big Mac that the fast food worker actually packages up and hands to you, or the perfect airbrushed billboard version? People are living lives of desperation; they don’t want to be themselves.”

This comment is so sad, I’m not quite sure where to start.  Indeed, there’s undeniably an element of fantasy involved in advertising; this explains Bud’s attention to buxom bikini babes breasts’ rather than beer drinking guys’ bodaciously bursting big bellies.  With that said, however, I resent and reject the implication that:

- All of us consumers are desperate, lonely, pathetic souls… deriving happiness and self-worth only from airbrushed airheads shilling soap.  Speak for yourself, Celente!
- Such condescending and pittying attitudes from overpaid marketing morons will endear consumers to any brand.

I can only hope that consulting firms such as Calente’s AND the advertisers that believe in such self-defeating tripe will themselves end up living lives of career desperation.

I've had Kaiser health insurance for about three years now, and I thought I'd share some thoughts for those of you who are deciding amongst health insurance plans... and even those of you on Kaiser looking for a few tips.

I just got an autoreply after submitting a suggestion to a company:

Thank you for your note. We appreciate your helping us test out [...]

This is just an autoreply to let you know we received your email.
We're putting most of our energy into improving [widget], so we can't
promise a personal reply to every question.

That said, user feedback is very important to us, and your comments and ideas will be used to improve [widget].

That's actually not so bad... but it could be better. Here are my thoughts on what makes for a good autoreply:

I swear, don't companies bother actually putting ANY of their stuff through QA? Or even CSF (Common Sense Filters)?

I recently bought something at Best Buy locally (darnit, I needed the item immediately, or I would have amazon.com'd it), and while that immediate experience was generally decent, the followup has been so bad it's laughable.