Rant: TMobile and Other Wireless Carriers (economics/politics, rambling)

This is about my experience last week as I went to my local TMobile store to add $ to my prepaid cell phone. But more than that, I found out about an industry-wide practice that I think is just wrong and should be corrected.

It all started when the previous prepaid plan I bought had expired. I didn't know it at the time because the only notification I got was one text message. Since I never use the phone for texting, it never occurred to me to open it. While at the store, it didn't help that the salesperson didn't really know what any of the plans/rates were, and kept having to ask the store manager in the back. When she finally pulled up my account on her screen, she said that it showed I was on a 10cent/min plan. Since I don't use this second cell phone very often, I decided to only add $15 worth.

So the transaction is done and then I get a text message notifying me of my balance. Except it lists only 52 minutes for my $15. So the salesperson calls in to customer service, and it turns out that unless you buy the $100/1000 minute plan, the rates are higher. The salesperson didn't seem to be able to do anything about it, and as my voice got louder with frustration, the manager came out from the back.

The solution seemed simple enough to me. I wanted a refund. If I had gotten the correct quote, I probably would have made a different decision, and I clearly deserved the opportunity to make an informed decision. Except that the manager's reply was, "Prepaid transactions cannot be refunded. Every major carrier has this same policy." WHAT!? This wasn't a simple case of buyer's remorse. I informed him that this was their fault since they gave me the wrong quote. To which he REPEATED, "Prepaid transactions cannot be refunded. Every major carrier has this same policy."

At this point, I really was yelling because this was so inane. "Do you think Consumer Affairs cares about your policy? Your salesperson gave me the wrong quote. Call customer service, there has to be someone higher ranking who can fix this." Defeatedly, the store manager calls in to the customer service rep, who gives me 150 minutes for my $15. While I accepted this solution because I didn't want to bother with it anymore, in my mind, this was still wrong. How is it that I still had no choice in the matter? The manager didn't tell me what he was doing until it was done, but what if it's not what I wanted? What if I just wanted to get my money back and take my business elsewhere? How is that not an option?

To sum up all the things I thought were wrong about the encounter:

1. Lack of customer service. It's bad enough that the store manager didn't actually train his employees to be up-to-date on the things they offered, but at least the salesperson tried. The manager should have realized they made a mistake and actively tried to resolve it, instead of quoting "policy" and trying to get away with it until he couldn't.

2. Which leads to a bigger problem with corporations in general. It's all about "getting away with what they can", as opposed to developing real, beneficial relationships with their clients. This happens more often than not, and is shielded by, "Everyone else does it."

3. Which was the exact excuse the store manager used. "Every major carrier has this same policy." How is this even an acceptable industry-wide practice? How can something that (I assume) can be easily reversed in the computer system not have a refund policy of some sort? How does the FTC allow this? Or worse, was the store manager just bullshtting me?

Recent Interesting Articles About Food Part 2 (food, rambling, economics/politics, entertainment, tv)

There were a couple of very interesting articles about food in mainstream media recently. I wanted to share them with everyone because they are thoughtful, interesting reads. I'm also going to offer up my opinions on certain points discussed in the articles because this is Rambling$ and Gambling$ after all and I haven't done any rambling in a while.

This second article is from Grantland on the state of food TV. For Part 1 click here.

It was no longer enough to...instruct. The new goal was to entertain.

Another example of this way of mixing instructing/entertaining that has proven successful is Jim Cramer on CNBC. I think it says more about the way people consume media than about food TV itself.

And so the TV part of the equation began to outweigh the food. Legit cooks...went out the door.

While this is true, the Food Network did spin off the Cooking Channel. There may be no more new episodes of "Good Eats", but you can find reruns, along with new shows that still actually teach cooking, on the Cooking Channel. While I might agree with the conclusion, I don't think it's fair to focus exclusively on the one Food Network channel.

Bourdain was...a thoroughly undistinguished line cook lifer

I'm pretty sure this is just plain wrong. I did read Kitchen Confidential, and I remember he was already executive chef when he wrote it. This just sounds like what someone who watches too much Top Chef would say. They think all real chefs are these endlessly creative artist types. Every real restaurant kitchen has line cooks, and actually running a successful kitchen is a legitimate big deal, especially for a place that did as many covers as Les Halles.

Look, it's perfectly fine for Bourdain to cash in

Yes it is, although my belief is that this happened well before The Taste. The last couple of seasons of No Reservations and The Layover show focused way more on already-known critical darlings than the earlier seasons.

Slumming alongside Bourdain as judges/mentors are Ludo Lefebvre, an actually gifted French chef....

I actually did not like Ludo when he first appeared on Top Chef Masters. I thought he was playing a character. But I think he's rediscovered his passion for food and has won me over, especially with his appearance on the Burgundy episode of No Reservations. I do watch The Taste (it's an easy show to have on in the background), and he's the only guy on there whose taste I trust even a bit. I think Bourdain's taste buds have been killed off by the all the alcohol he's drank over the years.

Bourdain's Rolodex is put to good use, too, as a dazzling assortment of legitimate geniuses, from Gabrielle Hamilton to David Kinch....

Those are some nice names, but did you know that "Master Chef", the Fox show about HOME COOKS, once featured Guy Savoy, Alain Ducasse, and Daniel Boulud as judges? That's a combined 33 Michelin stars. (Recent review of Boulud's restaurant Daniel here)

The main takeaway here is that amateurism just isn't all that interesting.

That to me was the best part of the article and my main takeaway as well. Unfortunately, he then loses me when he heaps praise onto Chopped and Top Chef. While the contestants on Top Chef do tend to be stronger as a whole than other shows, let's not get too carried away. There's a reason that every fcking season someone gets reprimanded for not seasoning their food. As for Chopped, I'm just not a fan of the whole food challenge thing. It goes back to this focus on chefs as artists, and forgets about chefs running a restaurant and feeding people. Even though Fox focuses too much on the whole cursing Gordon Ramsay schtick, both Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares do illustrate what it's like to run a kitchen professionally. The BBC versions of these programs, where the Ramsay character is dialed down a bunch, are very watchable.

Again, I think this article speaks more to how people (Americans in general) consume TV media than specifically to the state of food TV.

Recent Interesting Articles About Food Part 1 (food, rambling, economics/politics)

There were a couple of very interesting articles about food in the mainstream media recently. I wanted to share them with everyone because they are thoughtful, interesting reads. I'm also going to offer up my opinions on certain points discussed in the articles because this is Rambling$ and Gambling$ after all and I haven't done any rambling in a while.

The first article comes from the New York Times and is adapted from an upcoming book about the snack food industry. It's a long read but well worth it. For part 2 click here.

He drew a connection to the last thing in the world the C.E.O.’s wanted linked to their products: cigarettes.

I thought this was very interesting. But to me, it also adds a new question. Is it the food making part of the company that's at fault for making such unhealthy things or is it the advertising part that's at fault for selling them? At least with tobacco there's no delusion of a life-sustaining product whereas food is sustenance, no matter how much of it is chemically created.

“Don’t talk to me about nutrition,” he reportedly said, taking on the voice of the typical consumer. “Talk to me about taste, and if this stuff tastes better, don’t run around trying to sell stuff that doesn’t taste good.”

But that's the crux of the problem. Does this stuff actually "taste" good? Or does it just make you feel good? There's a distinct difference but the food companies would have you believe it's the same. By focusing on making things addictive, what they're doing is making you feel good. For something to taste good, you need to be able to discern tastes, and I'm not sure the target demographic is very good at that.

He fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy

Again, the focus is on making people happy. And people do, in fact, play a role in this. Culturally, I think it is a very American belief that more/bigger = better. So the companies, all major corporations, not just the food industry, give them exactly that.

Lunchables were born. The trays flew off the grocery-store shelves.

My mom was a full time housewife and a great cook, but I still had my share of these during my childhood. I remember bringing one of these with me every day to summer camp. This is on a bit of a tangent, but one of the fundamental things that people are willing to spend money for is convenience. There is nothing wrong with that. But there is a big difference between "I am too busy to cook" and "I am too lazy to cook". I think that many of society's problems come from the fact that people as a whole have gotten lazier, and that laziness is continually reinforced by the people looking to make money off it.

Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job!

Once again, from both the consumer and producer side, we are taught more is better. Actually, not just taught. We are conditioned to think more is better to keep our jobs.

So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers.

That will never happen in the US. I have no delusions about that.

Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips....

One of the great takeaways from this article is the realization of how much thought goes into every aspect of what seems to be a simple everyday product.

Imagine this...A potato chip that tastes great and qualifies for the Clinton-A.H.A. alliance for schools

This is another part of the problem. When we do have regulations and guidelines, a huge amount of money is spent trying to backdoor an existing product into qualifying, as opposed to creating new, better products. The most well known example being the "ketchup is a vegetable" controversy.

In Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta, the biggest consumers were referred to as “heavy users.”

Because, frankly, if you buy it, they don't care if you drink it or shoot it up your butt. Reminds me of an episode of ABC's Shark Tank, where a jewelry designer is looking for an investment and the "shark" says, "So what happens if I invest in you and then you get hit by a bus when you leave here?" Investors want corporations to have easily replaceable units and many corporations view their customers in the same way.

Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water.

That's just downright scary.

A Quick Comment on the US Economy (economics/politics)

I was at the mall a couple of weeks ago doing some shopping and doing my part to stimulate the economy. Actually, I hate that term. Politicians and CNBC talking heads keep going on and on about stimulating the economy. That, to me, implies that the economy is like some stalled car that just needs some minor adjustments. I don't buy that. I think the engine is completely under water and totaled. Even if the original model did work (which I question), I feel that it is certainly broken now by the events of the last five years.

To use another analogy, the current belief is similar to saying the economy is like some dominoes set up where we just need to stimulate it by tipping over that first domino, and the rest will continue falling. My view is that given what has happened, people are far from incentivized to keep those dominoes falling. The setup itself is broken.

Anyway, back to the mall. So I'm in Foot Locker trying to buy a new pair of basketball shoes. I see all these Nikes, classified by LeBrons, Kobes, Jordans, etc. None of them looked like they would actually be great for basketball. Is this what the kids are buying these days at $150 a pop? So I ask one of the salespeople which are the most durable basketball shoes, considering that I actually plan to play in them. Obviously noone has asked such a question before, so he went and asked another salesperson which of the shoes are durable. Her response? "What does that word even mean, durable?"

Which leads me to wonder how we can classify this economy of ours? Are we a service economy? Because such lack of knowledge about the product doesn't feel much like service to me. Are we a manufacturing economy? Seems like the majority of the stuff we manufacture is not practical if the basketball shoes we are selling are not really good for basketball. I guess we're just the economy where we're trying to sell anything we can to the next schmuck (like our debt and money printing). Sooner or later, we're going to run out of schmucks to buy our crap, right?

Do you get better value with more expensive ingredients? (food, economics)

As I was looking back on my New Year Michelin restaurants countdown, I pondered the wide range of costs across the featured meals, especially the prohibitively more expensive Masa. Kajitsu seemed the cheapest in comparison to all the others, and I attributed that to their base ingredient costs being lower as they did not use any meat or fish. The meal at WD-50 also did not really feature very expensive ingredients, but the higher cost seemed justified by the use of techniques exclusive to the restaurant and its chefs. Masa, on the other hand, while definitely showcasing some technique, felt like much of it was based off of expensive ingredients such as white truffles and fish flown in from Japan.

My first thought was that restaurants make money off of food and wine markups. So it seemed to me that Masa, where I felt we were really paying for ingredients, offered the worst value in that the money was going to the part of the equation where the restaurant makes the most money. Thinking about it a little more, I don't think that's right. The difference lies in the fact that cheap food is in fact really cheap. Because of mass production, many basic meat and vegetable ingredients are so cheap that it allows regular restaurants to have markups that are many multiples of the ingredient cost. I don't think that a markup of an expensive ingredient can reach as high a multiple. For example, just recently, a bluefin tuna sold for a record 32.49 million yen (just shy of USD$400,000) at auction. I wonder how they will recoup their investment, let alone make money.

Of course a restaurant may sell one rare item, such as the aforementioned bluefin tuna, at cost in the hopes of creating business by generating more wine sales or just increasing publicity. However, a restaurant takes much more risk when dealing with rare, expensive ingredients. As I mentioned while discussing fresh fish in Hong Kong, there's often no second chance when cooking with these ingredients. You can't just refire a dish because you overcooked it or undercooked it.

Now, value is in the eye of the buyer, and of course the difference in cost between a meal at Masa and a meal at your local sushi joint will vary in significance for different people. But, ceteris paribus, is there a reasonable argument that there is actually more value to be had at expensive restaurants serving expensive, rare, perishable ingredients?

Will The Government Stop Wasting Our Money? (economics/politics)

Everything the government has done has been to throw away money.

Job creation? This isn't creating government jobs like back when we built the highway infrastructure. We're essentially paying private companies to pay us back in wages, losing money along the way.

Cash for clunkers? Making people take on more debt to help the auto industry which doesn't look like it's repaying our "loan" anyway.

Home buyer credit? From the expiration of the tax credit to now, the mortgage rates have gone down so much that I wonder if the home buyers lost money in the turnaround. So who made that money? The loan originators getting the propped up rates. The banks.

The biggest injustice I feel that occurred during all of this was the government's inability (or just lack of trying?) to negotiate at all. They had to pay out AIG's creditors in full? They couldn't get any of the unions (auto workers, civil servants) to back down? Pathetic! And then today I'm watching more stupid "hearings" on CNBC and one of the old guys goes, "So if this Congress hadn't acted in the way it did..." like he was still looking for a pat on the back!