The large break in transmission has been due to one very good reason....nothing interesting happened in July. Typically for this time of the year, everyone has gone into hibernation and exciting and blog worthy events have been few and far between. The story of the month is about business. Normally the customers I have to deal with are OK by and large but last month brought an influx of idiots who can't or won't follow simple instructions. I think that these people are always there but during busy times you don't notice them so much. You can safely ignore them and their unrealistic demands when you've got plenty of reasonable customers. When times get quiet, like during midwinter, the ratio of morons to good people seems to increase exponentially. Which brings me to the subject of doing business on the internet or as the IT geeks call it, E- commerce.
Because of the anonymity of Email people will write things that they would never have the balls to say to your face. The weakest and meekest become fearless warriors when parked safely behind their keyboards. In this way ridiculous offers and unreasonable demands can be sent in the rudest fashion without the danger of facing the outraged other party. They know they are being unreasonable but the system both allows them to do it and protects them from any repercussions. They do it because they can. For them a conversation on the net is not a real conversation. Most email enquiries now lack even the most basic of courtesies such as Hello, Please, Thank you, Name or a contact phone number.
Instead a typical email enquiry will be something like this...
“ $4500 CASH?” or “Whats your lowest price?”
even worse are the emails that are complete gibberish ...This is an actual email that some halfwit sent to me..
“wat is yr add i wnt to hv look the v n is it c.v .t transm”
I have no idea what that means.
Like most businesses I have a phone and a mobile phone and my adds all clearly state what the number is. Why people need to send incomprehensible TXT messages on their computer keyboards is beyond me. The internet has made it possible to be rude and discourteous on a grand Scale.
Anybody who has ever been to a real life auction knows that its usually hours of boredom with a few seconds of excitement thrown in when you get to bid on the item you want. I doubt that the creators of the first internet auction sites would ever have dreamed that their efforts would give birth to a new phenomenon…. Auctions as entertainment. Karl Marx once said “religion is the opium of the masses”. In the late 20th Century TV replaced religion and now in the 21st the internet auction is becoming the new religion.These days instead of watching Soap operas on TV, people are watching auctions on the internet. It seems that people prefer auctions to TV because it can be an interactive experience. A good indicator of the number of people doing this is the Question and answer section of each auction. A quick study of the average auction shows that the people who ask questions rarely actually bid. For them, just participating is entertainment enough and they usually have no intention of buying the item. Then there's the kind of internet/auction/consumer law/car geek know-it-all who tries to turn the Q&A on your listing into a forum where he can express all his opinions and prejudices. They have no intention of bidding or buying anything but like to try and sabotage other peoples business just for fun or because they have an axe to grind. I also regularly encounter the dumbest kind of people who just look at the pictures and don't read the listing. These can be identified by the stupid questions they ask which are invariably about things that are clearly spelled out in the listing.
Another consequence of the internet auction phenomenon is the rise of worthless rubbish. In years gone by, clothes that didn’t get worn were given away or thrown away. Now they are sold. Old clocks, shoes, cups and plates, mattresses and garden tools and all manner of things that would previously have been classed as junk and simply disposed of are now listed and sold. Before the internet nobody would pay to advertise something that was worth only a couple of dollars. Even if it’s just a $1 reserve, everything now has a value. Great for the recycling movement but bad news for the economy. Economic growth comes from production and consumption of new items not the endless exchange of old goods.
The other thing that has changed is peoples appetite for risk. Ten years ago nobody would buy anything that was pre-used, be it a washing machine or a car, without first inspecting it. It now seems that people are happy to bid and buy on the strength of a photograph on the internet. Unfortunately, the appetite for accepting the consequences of such a strategy isn't so strong. I had one particular idiot who after looking at the pictures of a BMW decided that he didn't need to bother himself to come and check it out for himself. After winning the auction and (outbidding some people who had come and seen it) he then showed up and proclaimed that he thought the colour was a different shade of blue and that he would not pay for it as he didn't like the colour it actually is. Not only did he waste everybody's time but I also lost the underbidder who went and bought another car the next morning. Tyre kickers and timewasters now don’t even have to leave their living room in order to be a nuisance.
I've said it before to colleagues in the industry and I'll say it again here. The Internet was the worst thing that ever happened to business. Everyone in my industry has to work harder, longer and for less than before. Customers have become ruder, more demanding and unreasonable.
E- commerce has turned the whole thing into a race for the bottom.
In the old days, when business was done face to face, things where far simpler. Sure, you had to deal with idiots back then too, but they were more polite and actually had to get off their asses and travel to you during business hours. This meant that there tended to be fewer of them as it took some effort and expense to to find out what was for sale and to asses the quality of it. This in itself tended to weed out the timewasters, wannabes and out-of-town tyrekickers.
Now, it's an avalanche of crap...24/7... from all over the country.
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