McFly

 Bikes, Gadgets  Comments Off on McFly
Jul 032012
 

You’re looking at the new DeLorean bicycle. Yes, that DeLorean. After the streak of genuinely interesting brand collaboration bicycles that included the mini-moto Audi/Ducati bike and the Aston Martin Factor bike, I’ll admit I’m having a bit of trouble situating the stainless steel DeLorean somewhere on the continuum between “losing all desire to live” and “hey, that’s pretty OK.”

Normally, it’d be a goof-magnet, and at almost $5500, it certainly meets the Decadent Excess criteria, but I’m thrown off by the president of DeLorean, Stephen Wynne’s meta-like realization that he’s being asked to participate in the bullshit fashion world accessorizing of bicycles:

When Wynne was first approached about the idea, he was skeptical. ‘I basically, said, “Yeah, I’m interested, but I don’t want to do a $5,000 bike that’s really a $200 Asian bike with a badge on it,” he says, ‘which you customarily see from other brands.’ Wynne was quickly persuaded, however, that expanding the DeLorean name from four-wheels to two wouldn’t be a shameless, superficial exercise in branding. This is because the bike and the car share a core strand of DNA: the stainless steel body.

‘They said, “No, we want to do a stainless steel bike because stainless steel is the new cool, if you’re into bikes,” he says. ‘It’s sort of taken over from carbon fiber.'”

All this begs the question, “Is it still a shameless and pointless tie-in if you know it’s a shameless and pointless tie-in?”

Or if you believe stainless steel has “sort of taken over from carbon fiber.” Nice as it is, stainless steel certainly won’t be replacing carbon fiber any time soon, but I can just picture the bullshit meeting at which a line like that squeaks out into the room. Besides, everybody knows it’s granite, not stainless steel, that’s taking over from carbon fiber.

Best to ponder that while we move to SRAM’s 1×11 group, which is apparently going to be a reality, based on some near production looking photos popping up at Bicycle Retailer, Bikerumor and Bikeradar.

Remember the impromptu and completely unprofessional poll I took on the 1×11 group, in which the vast majority of readers needed to know the cost, but many others just plain hated all over it? Based on current info. I doubt those original results are going to be overturned. SRAM’s beast of a cassette will, it appears, require a proprietary hub from one of a few wheelset manufacturers (DT Swiss and SRAM are mentioned, but by now we all know Mavic is also fond of longer than currently fashionable cassette bodies, too). So it’s coming, and it’s going to need a new kind of cassette body.

The problem I see here is that if you can’t show a new item with at least some connection to Enve Composites–and preferably sporting the Enve rims–it’s not technically possible for anyone to consider it cool. Here then we encounter the unfriendly intersection between Proprietary Cutting-edge Gadgetry and Artisanal Badassery–at least until somebody somewhere can capture a photo of the igloo-sized Powerdome 11-speed cassette on a wheel sporting an Enve rim.

For what it’s worth, my own wide range cassette idea–zip-tying a 53t chainring directly to my spokes and running it just inside my 34t “large” cog–is unable to be patented due to some extremely narrow-minded thinking on the part of the U.S. Patent Office re. the use of zip-ties as “structural members.”

But they’ll come around eventually.

Brick and Mordor

 E-commerce  1 Response »
Jul 022012
 

Pringles, trail mix AND $4.00 DVDs? I have no idea why Best Buy is losing share to online retailers.

I had to use a Best Buy recently, which I think is the digital consumer equivalent of admitting you had to go to the doctor to have an ass boil lanced. Having read various articles predicting the demise of big box consumer electronics stores in the age of online retail, I was curious to see if the experience was any less horrible than my last trip. It wasn’t.

I’m pretty sure I’m well below the pay grade of any decision-makers in the Marketing and Merchandising division of Best Buy, but I think if my business were on the edge of extinction due to online retailers, I’d be inclined to move away from the “dimply lit yardsale filled with talking gnomes” model and toward something resembling a positive consumer experience. I know everyone goes on and on about how pricing is what’s killed the brick and mortar retailer, but I really don’t think that’s it.

I think they’re killing themselves.

And I’m not just talking about the new “retail walk of shame” Best Buy seems to have borrowed from Barnes and Noble–only without that fussy, English-professor-esque whiff of class and relevance. Instead of running the B&N gauntlet of tote bags, coffee mugs and bad post cards, trying to escape Best Buy, I was forced to walk though the silly maze of closeout crap you see above. At Best Buy, the merchandise on the RWOS isn’t even relevant to Best Buy, let alone my life, but I don’t think they mind. In fact, Best Buy doesn’t even try to hide that fact that they’re routing you away from the cash registers and then back toward them through a shit pile of bad merchandise on the off chance that you’d suddenly want some $3.00 headphones or potato chips. The impression is that you’re in a store that’s going out of business, which is, of course, the case.

But the store is the least of their problems.

More than any other store, Best Buy forces me to avoid “customer service” people, and while I’ve not had as appalling an experience as described in Larry Downes’ Forbes article from last December, few places cause as much sales agent anxiety as Best Buy due to the fear of what Downes aptly describes as “anti-service.” Simply put: you’re more likely to come away from any experience with a sales agent at Best Buy less satisfied than you would be if no one spoke to you during your visit.

Reasons for this are many. Unlike the thoughtful and reasoned analysis Downes offers, though, I can simply resort to crude short-hand: Best Buy is still acting like a big company, and there are no more “big companies.” They seem to have failed to grasp the most substantial change the Internet has caused: we expect personal service. With the exception of Wal-Mart, who’s done a masterful job of targeting the ever-shrinking base of consumers who don’t realize the Internet exists, there is no such thing as a corporate retail juggernaut any more–a place capable of winning sales and loyal customers without engaging with those customers are people.

Ironically, the sure sign that you’re about to be treated like cattle is the “greeter.” Both Wal-Mart and Best Buy have them, and they’re appalling. Does anyone under the age of 80 honestly feel more warmly welcomed just because a front door lurker offers a “hello”? It’s the biggest kind of phony bullshit service, and the post boy for where they’ve gone wrong. When logging into an e-commerce site posts a “Hello Chris” account link in the upper corner of my screen, it means my shopping history and preferences have been queued up, and that my records and info. are available for me to review or change. The Best Buy equivalent isn’t similarly “social” because it doesn’t actually involve knowledge of me or my shopping at all. In fact, the greeter invariably gets in the way of my shopping experience, if you want to call it that, at Best Buy. It tells me Best Buy values paying a kid to stand around saying hello all day more than it values paying salaries for employees willing to genuinely be helpful.

In other words, you can’t fake giving a shit about people, and when it comes to customer service–more than pricing or sales tax–online retailers are so far superior to companies like Best Buy that the contrast is almost shocking.

How it’s come to this, I don’t know, but Best Buy and other big box retailers have failed to turn their storefronts into assets, allowing them instead to become major liabilities. Wild pipe dream or not, imagine for a second what a positive, consumer-driven change would look like at Best Buy. Realizing you need a product, you’d be able to quickly and easily verify that your local store had what you needed in stock. If they did, you’d order, walk in to a pick up area, swipe your card for ID and be handed your order. If the nearest store didn’t have what you needed, an inventory transfer would put it there within a day or two and send you a text message to let you know it had arrived.

In both cases, gone is the greeter. In his place is a way to get the items you wanted and get the hell out of the abandoned airplane hanger that is your local Best Buy. Come to think of it, maybe a few extra light bulbs wouldn’t hurt, either.

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