I have commiserated in the past about how making the extra effort in your customer relationships as shop keepers I present you with the correct way to present food.
The great wall
lifestyle
Idiotic Small Business Shop behavior
I know there is a recession on, I really do. But there are things to do to cut costs, and there are things that you can do to cut your own throat, and you should never get them confused. I’ve seen a recent example of the later, under the guise of the former. Curry’s in the Ballincollig Shopping Center have chosen to close their shop on Tuesday and Wednesday’s of every week rather than pay salaries to idle staff!
In my past experience with the shop I have often observed 4 or more staff shuffling around their premises with little to occupy their time so cutting staff hours would make sense. But why not shift their hours so at least a fewer staff are on hand on Tuesday and Wednesday’s rather than close the store.
Closing the store is a permanent commitment to earning ZERO sales for two days out of the week. Shifting the worker schedule will not alter the saving earned from reduced staff salaries, while maintaing an open store. Closing for two days of each week will close ANY sale, and will put off ANY future sales from people who will go elsewhere to purchase items.
In other words Curry’s is cutting their own throat!
In this market there are two strategies that you can adopt, reduce costs, and increase customers. Funny, those are the same strategies that you have to employ ALL THE TIME! A recession only makes the urgency more poignant.
And on that point, let me call most Irish shops foolish. Think of a coffee shop or Pub that could offer free refills of simple coffee, how far will that go in earning customer returns and loyalty? Would a shop full of coffee drinkers be more inviting than an empty one? Could you maybe offer them a bit of cake to go with that refill?
What would be the benefit to the shopkeeper to stop charging for WiFi and offer it Free to customers who might like to use it with their coffee and scone? Wouldn’t it be nice to have your office have a meeting in that shop and use the WiFi to conference.
What makes to so hard for the average shop owner to shake themselves out of this ‘Celtic Tiger’, greedy take no prisoners behavior, and get back to being generous with quality customer treatment. (that last, wasn’t a question)
What simple difference could you make to the customer experience that would elevate you in their mind to choose your business over another? (that was a question)
How to Marry
My brother and his lady of 30+ years have finally chosen to finish the job and get married, not that either was anxious of it ever happening. It will come at the near end of their life together, and over a simple piece of paper that could have been done in any lunch hour they could have had free during the last 30 years.
It has been amazing that the social and emotional aspects of a marriage can fully be distilled into a single sheet of paper, when the 30 years of being each others life is never mentioned.
Kindle in Ireland
I was in the Kingdom this past weekend with genealogy tourists from the States and was amazed that they did not have mobile phones, but that they had brought a Amazon Kindle. They were told that it would work anywhere that a mobile phone would work. They did know that their U.S. mobile phones did not work here. But didn’t question that the Kindle would. Very funny watching them walk all over the hills holding the Kindle trying to find a connection. I had to give them a quick course in telecommunications technology 😉
What can you say
I’ve been neglecting the blogging, Twittering, facebook world lately as personal issues have, I was going to say crept into, but it’s more like slammed into, me again. It’s not depressing enough to hear about an incompetent Irish government politicians robbing from their citizens to bail out their friends. Or to hear about the number of mindless multi-nationals stumbling along destroying communities all over Ireland. I must now travel back to the U.S. during a Swine Flu pandemic to prepare for the death of my younger brother from Pancreatic Cancer.
Great, the next time someone tells me ‘things could get worse!’ is going to get a sock in the mouth.
Bed Breakfast and Broadband
The wife and I came up with the perfect new tourist promotion, All B&B’s in ireland ought to begin advertising B&B&B, Bed, Breakfast AND Broadband.
What do you think?
Another mucker for Zanzibar
With all the violence of late, I am reminded of a novel Stand on Zanzibar. It should be required reading, and was a Hugo winner in 1969. But it introduces a concept of the Mucker, a person that is running ‘Amok’ out of control. The cause, in the book, is attributed to social pressure, population explosion and the general degradation of the personal, environmental, social and political world. I’m sure there will be many reasons given for each of these current events, none will be adequate and no one will be satisfied with the answers.
Voting with your feet
It may be a bit premature to talk about the recovery from the recession but it’s not too early to take steps to initiate a decision about the culture and nature of the recovery from the recession. In my time in Ireland I marveled at the concept of the local shop in an estate, and the small shops in general and the culture of such an environment. Now the the incursion of the giant Dunn’s, and the discount Aldi’s and Lidl’s a decision can be made about the nature of the recovery.
Do you save yourself a bit of change and buy cheap, or spend it at the local shop? Do you want to keep that cultural icon of local shops and merchants alive, or support the mass market monster. The application of your food budget to supporting your local may tax us all, but could well to the means of survival for the little shop keeper. The same could be applied to your favorite small cafe or restaurant, voting with your feet may be your only option if you want to continue to visit them.
I’m not saying that it’s the ‘Patriotic’ duty to shop in the Republic, there has been entirely too much disparity allowed to creep in there. But if you have the change, maybe it’s best spent in the local shop, rather than the big chain store,
The Tao of IT problem solving
At the Cork Open Coffee today there was discussion about how the University of Cork could be utilized to solve real world business problems, with a counterpoint that the University also was a resource for IP that was underutilized or not exploited at all. Answers without questions that had been explored and solved, but not yet marketed and deployed. And I thought of how that could happen.
I have always been boring, in most conversations I almost never initiate a subject, but I can always contribute (read; shoot my mouth off). This is true in my IT skills. I know many things, but I don’t create many new things, but I can solve most puzzles and resolve problems. And in reviewing them, I find it’s more to do with not having an agenda, or operating under a set of predefined solutions. I examine the issue, then produce an alternative resolution. I become creative in my solutions, I invent extraordinary resolutions. I remain empty, of any preconceived notion of a solution (not empty of ego mind you) but I exploit the Tao of the problem. Hence I don’t project a topic of conversation, or add a new project, or imagine anything extraordinary until I have a problem to solve.
This was my dilemma about the university folks, creating answers, where there were no questions (yet?). Applications, without anywhere to apply them. For me, IT problems ARE the mother of invention.
The Tao is like a well:
used but never used up.
It is like the eternal void:
filled with infinite possibilities.
Cork Cliques
One of the first things I had heard about Co. Cork is the Cliquish nature of Cork. Everyone is always saying Cork is a small place, but when you are out in Cork, you are out forever. There are no open doors here, and no friendship extended. If I and my wife were not already rather private and reclusive, Cork would surely make us very lonely, and she grew up here. We have many times the friends online than we have in the whole of the Cork. Still it bugs me, but efforts to extend our circle have been proving fruitless and a waste of time as exampled in my last post.
The Recession and Comfort food
I’m making a bold prediction that this Recession with bring on a resurgence of Comfort food in the Irish diet, and really the world. Many exotic restaurants will begin to feel the pinch long before the local carvery closes it’s doors. The question you could ask, can you still find proper Comfort food these days. I was reminded of this after the wife prepared a fine feast of Shepherd’s Pie and bread pudding.
WordPress MySQL exercises
Not that this is going to be instructive, but about a month ago I thought that separating my technical blogging from my ‘life’ blogging would improve the clarity of my thinking. But it has not, it was a distraction, and a bit schizophrenic, and actually an inhibitor to posting. I can’t really separate my techie from my personal opinions. They are intertwined and interact on more levels than would seem, at first, to be evident. So in that vein, I was required to reintegrate the two blogs.
This looked easy, but since I had included all the posts from my three or four years of blogging, selected from each by their respective ‘slants’. It was not a simple dump and load of the MySQL database in which the content resided. So I downloaded the latest MySQL community server and various tools and recreated databases containing the two dumps from the blog databases and cross seeded them to patch them back together. Simple! Except that the original blog was wordpress 2.6.2 and I had built the second one as 2.7. Guess what, my original MySQL dump that included ALL the compied posts before the split, was a different schema from the the newer dumps. But owing to the fact that I’m a brilliant DBA, it only required two days of backbreaking, mind exercising MySQL learning to solve the issues 😉
Now I’ll never be a WordPress expert, but I actually liked the work. It’s refreshing to learn, that I can learn new things at my age. While I am an excellent Sybase DBA, and now feel very good about knowledge of MySQL also.
They just have to fix this one quibble or two I have with MySQL where it involves ……
Number Six is dead!
Patrick McGoohan, who has died aged 80 Obituary: Patrick McGoohan
The Prisoner was one of the early television programs that can be directly correlated to early corruption of my trust in authority. I still remember most of the programs, intermixed with images from the original Star Trek and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
be seeing you, Number 6
The Real, root of all evil.
I’ve been just watching The Root of All Evil on RTE, of all places, I’m surprised that the Catholic Church allow them to broadcast it.
I more or less believe this to be the case for years, there is Reason and then there is Religion, Good verses Evil. Christian Fundamentalists, Islamic Jihadist’s and any other religious belief system taken to an extreme is evil. Plain and simple, lesser measures of religion are merely irrational.
You can have morals without religion, you can have the rule of the laws of man without religion.
Branedy office
The view from the office.