Could we maybe sell you the same thing twice? Or more?

    Don’t companies know anything about their customers? With customer relationship management, targeted & personalized advertisement etc increasingly important, I fail to understand how some basic stuff can be missing.
    Like, for example, two months after ordering Helsingin Sanomat, why do they send me – me personally, named envelope and all – an ad and an offer to order Helsingin Sanomat? Uhh, hello, Earth calling the Customer Database?
    Or why does Elisa send me an ad for faster broadband speeds when they know well I already have their fastest line?
    Not only are they wasting money doing this, they’re giving off an amateurish image. It’s kinda like they don’t even know I’m their customer – except when it’s time to send the bill, of course. (Okay to be fair, they do deliver the service also – paper comes in every day, and bits go in and out.)

Payson enables online fraud

    I’ve been fighting a payment to a Swedish merchant for non-delivery of goods, and learned the hard way that payment processors come in more than one variety. To make a long story short, I bought stuff from the merchant who used Payson as their credit card processor. I didn’t think too much (i.e. enough) about it, and made the payment. Never got the goods despite inquiries, so I called my credit card company. Alas, they cannot do anything as their customer (Payson) has transferred the money exactly as they should. It’s the merchant that sucked.
    But no luck with Payson either – they also think they did everything right. While theoretically that is true, I consider Payson acting as an intermediary to be an enabler for online fraud, happily processing fraudulent payments. So what makes this loophole possible? Payson doesn’t store the credit card number as a part of their user account so VISA regulations don’t apply.
    Idiots. I’ll know better next time. PayPal, the most popular intermediary, is better in this regard as the card is part of the account and normal regulations apply.
    So avoid Payson. And any merchant that deals with them.

Would we be better off looking beyond the quarters?

    Recession is fast becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. With every newspaper touting every single decline as “huge”, companies are hitting the panic button everywhere. But just how bad have things gotten? Take retail in the US, where talk has been of a major collapse. Figures of double-digit sales declines from last year do indeed seem dramatic. But we can also take another view into the situation. Here’s a quote from today’s NY Times:
    According to the Commerce Department, retail sales for 2008 fell 0.1 percent from 2007 [..] Much of December’s drop in retail sales came from falling gasoline prices, which have tumbled to a nationwide average of $1.79 a gallon from their peaks of $4.11 in July

    0.1%? Oh yes, a fully valid reason to panic, is it not? Is it just me or does that suddenly not seem so dramatic at all? Seriously, are we forgetting that prices of lots of things went up absurdly in the past 24 months? Spiraling costs were considered bad news then. And now that they’re returning to more reasonable levels, that’s also bad news?