GameStop’s Pre-Order Madness

March 15, 2010

Last December, one of my kids (yes, I have kids, scary but true) decided to spend his Christmas money by preordering a Pokemon game at GameStop. He wanted to do this so he wouldn’t spend the money before the game’s release date. He paid the $35 and got a receipt so that he could pick the game up when it came out in March. Yesterday the game was released. My wife went in to pick up the game for him and they asked for another $5.48. It turns out that since December, the price of the game had gone up by five bucks and despite the fact that my kid paid his money and got a piece of paper saying he bought the game and only had to wait until it was released to get it, they would not give her the game until she paid the additional money. 

When I’m not writing about my car or books about how to do the wrong things the right way, I work at a company in Kent dealing with inventory and purchasing. In one way or another I’ve been dealing with inventory work for the last five years. So I know a little about it. I understand vendor relations, pricing, iventory management and everything related to those processes. And regardless of what you’re selling, these processes are very similar.

While a case could be made that the retailer is being charged more for the game and thus must pass that cost on to the customer, let’s talk a little about pre-orders. The only real advantage to a customer for pre-ordering something is that they are guaranteed to get it even in the event of a sellout. However, from a retailer’s standpoint, a pre-order has all sorts of advantages. As a retailer, a pre-order means you have a guaranteed sale. This item isn’t going to use up valuable shelf space. It also means getting the money before the item is sold which can often make or break a small business. It’s a lot easier to buy inventory if you already have the customer’s money. So if you’ve already paid for an item months before you actually get the item, you’re doing the company a big favor. They don’t have to stock the item in hopes that it will sell. They don’t have to put a price tag on it. They don’t have to spend time putting it out on the shelf. They don’t even have to pay for it with their own money. They have yours.

Now, given all of that, let’s take another look at this situation. A 15-year-old kid takes thirty-five dollars cash and gives it to GameStop in December. Sometime between December and March GameStop buys a the game from the software developer. It’s more than they expected to pay for it, but odds are it’s still under the thrity-five dollars they pocketed back in December. I know this because you can buy the same game from Amazon.com for $32.54. So GameStop’s increase in purchase cost did not exceed the purchase price. It only cut into their profits. And yes, those profits are needed both for business and for overhead, but as I mentioned before with a pre-oder there’s almost no overhead. The employee simply needs to open the box they came in, pull out a game, and hand it to the customer. Still, instead of just eating the five dollar profit loss, GameStop’s current policy is to stick the additional cost to the customer, even when that customer is a fifteen-year-old-boy. They do say that whenever this occurs, an automated service calls all the pre-order customers to notifty them of the price change, but my kid never received such a call.

This is a short sighted way of dealing with customers. Yes, it avoids a small profit loss on a new and popular game, but what GameStop isn’t paying attention to is the one thing that is most important in business: Customer Relations. Someone who pre-orders a game isn’t likely to be just a casual video game player. The sort of customer that pre-orders is an avid gamer and the sort who probably spends more money than average on games and gaming devices. A customer like this is likely to spend more than five dollars every time they walk in the door. Not to mention the fact that a customer like that probably uses the Internet more than average and is likely to tell others about their experience. When you look at it like that, maybe taking that five dollar hit wouldn’t be such a bad idea. Instead what has happened is that GameStop has five more dollars than they would have and has lost the business of my family. In the twenty-four hours since then, my wife has told everyone in her family, on her Facebook page and on her Twitter. And now I’ve posted this.

-Jack

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Ford Galaxie Year One (Part Eight) Conclusion

February 13, 2010

My first summer with my 1965 Galaxie was almost over and things seemed to be going well. A rebuilt radiator, new gaskets, repaired brakes, a new throttle cable, and a dozen other little things had turned my classic car into a fairly reliable vehicle with a lot of style. I’d gotten used to the new ‘hot rod’ sound. Even if it did tend to wake up the neighborhood when I left for work in the morning.

Some people at work had even begun to admire the car. One of my older coworkers asked me to pop the hood one afternoon as I sat warming it up. I got out, opened it up and watched him look under the hood. After a few seconds, he said, “Are you gonna fix that exhaust leak?”

“What exhaust leak?”

“Right here. “ He pointed to the right side of the engine.  “Put your hand there.” I put my hand there and felt the exhaust hit my hand. “There’s supposed to be an exhaust donut right here between the exhaust pipe and the exhaust manifold.”

On the way home, I called my brother. He said it’d be a relatively easy fix and we should just do it at his house some Saturday. Saturday rolled around and I pulled into my brother’s driveway. We got the car onto a couple of struts and crawled under the car. Not only was this the first time I’d been under the Galaxie. It was the first time I’d been under a car. I was enthralled.

We decided to do more than just work on the exhaust pipe. We checked fluid levels, checked and replaced the spark plugs, and while we were at the auto parts store, we bought a new air filter as well. Now it was time to deal with the exhaust pipe.

The exhaust pipe did not want to disconnect from the exhaust manifold. One of the two bolts was stripped and it wasn’t in the best angle to get at anyway. By the time we were done with it, one bolt was completely unusable and the other was stubbornly hanging on. We realized that in addition to the three dollar donut part, we were going to need some new bolts. The stripped bolt would neither loosen up enough to come off nor retighten. This was going to take tools and time we didn’t really have. My brother called a mechanic friend of his. He was out fishing, but could look at it Sunday.  My brother found another bolt and we decided the best thing to do would be tighten the bolt on there and I’d bring it to his guy tomorrow.

We got the bolt tightened back on and I started up the car. My brother told me to rev it a couple times just to make sure everything was working. I hit the gas and suddenly my brother yelled, “TURN IT OFF!!!”

I turned the key and took it out of the ignition. It didn’t help. I could hear something splashing on the pavement. It turned out to be all of my water. A freeze plug had blown. My car had gone from loud but drivable to completely undrivable.

We laughed at our luck and then spent the next hour or so trying to find an auto parts store that hadn’t closed. We were not successful. We decided the best thing to do was to take it to my brother’s guy tomorrow and get it dealt with then.

My brother’s guy turned out to be a good guy, but the whole mechanic thing was sort of a weekend thing with him and he didn’t get it done on Sunday. So it was another week before I got my car back. My brother gave me a ride out to see the guy and pick up the car. He’d put the donut on with new bolts and replaced two freeze plugs. He’d checked the other freeze plugs and when he tapped on one with a screw driver, it blew out. He charged me $150 for his trouble and my car was back up and running.

The first thing I noticed was that as soon as I started it, it was back to that low hum it had before. It suddenly dawned on me that the morons I’d taken my car to a couple months earlier had probably just taken the donut off when they were replacing the gaskets and never bothered to put it back on. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that what they’d really done was put on some gaskets and then a bunch of things to make a guy who doesn’t know any better think they’d fixed up his car. The paint and the sound were just there to distract me from the fact that what they’d done probably shouldn’t have even cost half as much as I paid.

It turned out to be one of the last times I’d have my Galaxie at the mechanic’s shop. It was becoming clear to me that working on cars is just like working on websites or any other skill. If you don’t know how to do it, it seems complicated. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s fairly simple. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was learning and I was smart enough to have people around me who knew more than me.

A few weeks later my car didn’t start. I called my brother over to help me troubleshoot it. He found that the starter was okay. We replaced the solenoid and the battery cables. This seemed to help. About a week later, I was having trouble getting it started again. My brother took a look at the battery. It had 425 cranking amps. My brother said, “Let me guess, you have trouble starting it on cold mornings.” I nodded. He said, “This isn’t the right battery for this car.”

I flashed back to the jerk at Napa who had told me I’d gotten a bad deal. The asshole had actually sold me the wrong battery. I wanted to go back and throw it at him. After making some calls, we went to a place my brother was familiar with called The Truck Shop. A hundred dollars later we had a truck battery that had 900 cranking amps at zero degrees.

We got back to the house and hooked the battery up. The Galaxie started instantly. There’ve been a few problems over the past few months, none of them major, but with the new battery, the car always turns over.

As fall turned into winter, I was afraid that something major might break on my car. I don’t have a garage and the weather is not always kind. It turned out though that I was right. The first year of owning a Classic Car is a learning experience and it’s expensive. The next year has so far been very good.

I check all the fluids at least once a week. I listen for uncommon noises. I put fuel cleaner in my gas tank every three or four tanks. I start it at least once a day. Old cars aren’t maintenance free, but that maintenance has its rewards. Every car I’ve owned before this was just a means to get from place to place. It could be any car in the world and if it got wrecked, I wouldn’t care once I got another car. When it comes to cars, my Galaxie is my first love. I don’t just drive to get from place to place. I drive to drive. When I’m driving my Galaxie, I don’t always need a destination.

-Jack

Note: Thanks for sticking with me through this. When I got my car, I’d tried to find something on the net about the first year of owning a classic car and couldn’t find anything. I promised myself I’d write one for those who were interested. On another note, I’m planning on making some significant changes to this site. I hope you’ll stick around to see them. As always, you can write me at jackcameronis@hotmail.com .

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Ford Galaxie Year One (Part Seven)

January 23, 2010

I’d had the Galaxie about seven months. In that time I’d sunk about as much money into repairs on the car as I had on buying the car in the first place. I didn’t mind though. I knew going in that there’d be all sorts of things to fix up. It’s part of owning a classic car.

Unfortunately, another part of owning a classic car is going to start it one morning and having it not start. This can be a problem when you’re doing things like trying to get to work. While it was still running fairly well, it didn’t seem to want to start as reliably as I’d like. So I thought it was time to take it in for a check up. It’d been over a month since I last had to do any work on it, maybe a fresh set of eyes might help.

I drove up to my mechanic’s garage and found that Larry, the old mechanic wasn’t there anymore. It turns out that he and the new owners didn’t get along. When I asked what shop he was working in, they said they had no idea.

The new guy at the shop had a 1969 El Camino. This gave me hope that maybe he knew what he was doing when it came to classic cars. He opened the hood and remarked about how incredibly dirty the engine was. He wasn’t wrong. I’d never washed it and I have no idea when or if the previous owner did. As he looked around at the engine, he said that most of my gaskets were going. He touched one and part of it literally fell off. He told me to go up the street to the car wash place and clean the engine, then bring it back and he’d take another look at it.

Looking back at this now, I see all sorts of red flags that I was just too inexperienced to notice. The problem with trying to learn how to do something like take care of a car is you need to listen to everyone in order to get good information. Eventually you learn to weed out the bullshit. I hadn’t gotten to that point yet. I’m pointing this out because a lot of what I write next is going to make me sound stupid. It’s not that I was stupid. I just didn’t know any better.

I went to the car wash place, popped the hood and sprayed the engine wash stuff on it followed by some water. It made a significant difference. I got into the car and tried to start it. It didn’t want to go anywhere at all. After trying for about ten minutes, I called the mechanic and said, “Dude, you told me to wash this thing now it won’t start. Get over here and help.” So the mechanic showed up in his El Camino a few minutes later. He fiddled with a few wires near the battery terminal and said, “It looks like it’s still got a spark. Do you have a screwdriver?” I had a whole set of tools in my trunk. I handed him a screwdriver. He hit it on something causing a big spark and burning off the tip of the screw driver. He handed my now mostly useless screwdriver back. He popped the distributor cap, took a can of air to dry it out, and started it right up. I then followed him back to the garage.

The guy told me that changing all the gaskets and doing a general check up would cost about four hundred dollars. I told him that was fine and to call me if anything came up. He told me the car would take about three days to finish.

Four days later I had a coworker drop me off to pick up my car. The mechanic I’d talked to wasn’t there. Some other guy was. He handed me the bill. It was five hundred fifty dollars. I understand that sometimes things get a more expensive, but a hundred and fifty dollars more than the estimate without any notification was insane. I told him I’d pay him four hundred now and the rest later because I simply hadn’t budgeted that extra money.

I popped the hood to see what work they’d done and was shocked. They’d painted the entire engine Ford Motor Company blue. It looked great. I started the car and it roared to life. Before, I’d start it and the engine would have this smooth low hum. Now it sounded like the Millennium Falcon. I smiled a little and drove out of the lot thinking yes, it had cost me more than I expected, but the results were pretty great.

I stopped by the Safeway near the shop to pick up some groceries. As I walked down an aisle I heard someone say my name. It was Larry. I told him that I wished I run into him a few days ago. I told him the whole story and asked where he was working now. He said he’d bought a new garage in the parking lot of the Safeway. Larry had moved exactly one block from these other guys. Larry told me to come by the shop anytime and that he wouldn’t be charging the sort of rates he had to charge when he did the brake job. I got his new card and decided that the next time I needed a mechanic, I’d call Larry.

To Be Concluded…

Next week is the final chapter of Year One of owning my Galaxie. You’ll learn what the new mechanics really did to my car and how a Saturday spent working on your car can turn into a week of working on your car.

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Ford Galaxie Year One (Part Six)

January 17, 2010

Drum brakes are one of the first things you notice when you start driving an older car. As previous entries have shown, I’m not a mechanic so I can’t really tell you the mechanical difference between drum and disc brakes. I will tell you there’s a definite difference. For starters, drum brakes means you’re not going to stop on a dime. You can still stop and stop quickly, but it’s nearly as precise as when you stomp on the brakes in a modern car. In fact, if you spend most of your time driving a vehicle with drum brakes and then drive a modern car, you’re likely to accidentally screech to a halt just out of habit.

Hills are the other thing you need to be aware of with a car with drum brakes. When going down a hill most drivers in modern hills tend to ride the brake down the hill. This is NOT a good idea in a car with drum brakes.

I’d been driving around a lot one day and I’d noticed that the brakes were not responding very well. I had to push the brake pedal almost to the floor to come to a complete stop. On my way home, I could barely come to a complete stop at all no matter how hard I pressed the brakes. This led to some creative driving and some shot nerves. I got home, parked the car, and hoped that once the car had cooled down, things would return to normal.

The next morning I put the car in reverse to pull out of my driveway and when I applied the brake, nothing happened. I threw the car into park and stopped it in the middle of the street. I put it into drive and idled it back into the driveway. My brakes were gone.

A few hours and a tow truck ride from my brother later, I was talking to my mechanic. His name was Larry. He was a good guy and I’d dealt with him a few times with some other vehicles. He took a look at the brakes and told me my brakes were almost entirely gone. The repairs were going to cost about six hundred dollars. At the time I remember thinking about a coworker whose car had a sensor go out and it cost them fifteen hundred dollars. Yet again I was impressed with how inexpensive things on the Galaxie were even when they were significant.

While it was less expensive than I thought, money was still tight and six hundred dollars wasn’t nothing. So I asked Larry if maybe we could make some sort of payment arrangements. He said normally he would, but he’d recently sold the shop to some other people and he was no longer owner of the garage. I asked him if he was planning on sticking around and he said, “We’re feeling each other out.”

A few days later I picked up the car and drove it down the hill from the shop with no worries at all. I felt good about the car even though it was costing me more and more money. I was still of the opinion, I’d rather pay these bills and own a classic car than a generic car and a car payment.

A couple weeks went by and the car performed well. I regularly checked the oil and antifreeze and added fluids when it needed it. I put thirty bucks of gas in it every week. I drove it to and from work and occasionally into town. It was during one of these drives that the car had a problem. I pressed the gas pedal and nothing happened. In fact, it very much felt like when I pressed the gas pedal, something had snapped. Its ability to stop was repaired. Now it was having trouble with its ability to go.

I popped the hood, pulled off the air cover and took a look at the throttle. I had mixed feelings when I saw that the throttle cable had snapped. I was happy that I could easily identify the problem. I was not happy that my car needed another tow.

After just spending six hundred dollars on brakes I really didn’t want to take the car back to the mechanic. Not only that, but it seemed to me that replacing a throttle cable on a ’65 Galaxie shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

I looked online and found a used one on ebay for fifty bucks plus shipping. I was convinced I could find one cheaper than that. I went to Napa Auto Parts and the guy looked through his computer and came back with a throttle cable. As soon as I tried to install it, I could tell it was all wrong. I took it back.

I did some more research. Finding a local replacement throttle cable for a ’65 Galaxie was looking less and less likely. Ebay was looking more and more likely. Then I had an idea. Throttle cables probably broke all the time on all sorts of cars. It’s just a cable that connects the gas pedal to the throttle so the car will go. If you really had to, you could use a good piece of string. It seemed to me that someone would have made a universal throttle cable. A quick search online found the Spectre Universal Throttle Cable. It was twenty-five dollars.

I picked it up fifteen minutes later at an Auto Zone. I got home, opened up the package and had this:

It gave no instructions. All I had was the old broken throttle cable and this new one that was supposed to work on practically any car. I made a few modifications. I cut some extra cable. I attached it the best I could, but it was clearly not secure. I called my brother and he asked if I thought it would hold long enough to get to his house, I told him I’d call him if it didn’t. I got there and an hour later we had the throttle cable installed. It was not easy, but it was also only twenty-five bucks.

Once we had the throttle cable properly installed, we decided to test it out. I put my foot on the gas and kicked gravel all over the place. All of a sudden, my car had some power. It turned out that the old throttle cable had so much give to it that it made the Galaxie perform poorly. It wasn’t until I put the new throttle cable in that I actually felt like my car was just a bit of a hot rod. A twenty-two foot six thousand pound hot rod, but it wasn’t slow.

The next few days, I played with the Galaxie, launching it off the line at green lights, racing it down the freeway at 90 mph. And it still rode very smooth. I was in love with my car all over again.

The one thing I did notice was that when I put the pedal down, it tended to stay that way. So even when I was idling, the car was still going thirty or forty. A quick look under the hood showed me that the throttle return spring was all but gone. This was the spring that made the gas pedal snap back after you took your foot off of it. Learning from the throttle cable thing, I didn’t look for a throttle return spring for a 1965 Galaxie. I found a Universal Return Spring for a couple bucks and installed it easily. It took a few tries to see what notch the return spring needed to be on, but once I got that, all was well.

I now had a classic car with good breaks and a fast throttle. And it was almost summer time. Things were looking good.

Next Week….The Bad Mechanic

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Back in 2010

December 23, 2009

Don’t worry. I’m not done with Year One of the Galaxie. Just dealing with Holiday Stuff. I’ll be back after the New Year or perhaps just a little before.

You can still my book for FIVE BUCKS until then.

If you’ve found that I’ve won the Nigerian lottery, don’t hesitate to write me at jackcameron.com

-Jack

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Ruin Your Life….FOR FIVE BUCKS!

December 2, 2009

For the month of December I’m offering my first book, Ruin Your Life for $5.00. That’s half the cover price. I promise you this is the lowest price you’ll ever see it.

All you pay is $5.00 plus shipping.  If you’re looking to buy more than one copy, email me at jackcameronis@hotmail.com and I’ll get you a deal on the shipping.

If you’re wondering if Ruin Your Life is the sort of book you want to own or give as a gift, click the Ruin Your Life tab above and you can download a .pdf of the book for FREE.

- Jack Cameron

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Email

September 15, 2009

For reasons I can’t figure out and don’t understand, my jack@jackcameron.com email hasn’t been working for about a week. So please send any email to jackcameronis@hotmail.com .

Thanks.

-Jack Cameron

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Never Forget

September 11, 2009

neverforget

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Still Alive

January 31, 2009

Sorry it’s been so long since my previous post. I’m working on the novel and promised myself I’d work on nothing else until it’s done.
-Jack

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The Other Victims

September 12, 2008

The following is a short fiction piece I wrote a few years ago. It’s pretty much the only thing I’ve written about 9/11.

The Other Victims

By Jack Cameron

copyright 2005

 

My name is Paul Newman Jr. My father is not famous. He named himself after his favorite actor when he came to the United States. He said that he wanted to fit in and that every American he’d ever met could never pronounce his name. And so four years later when I was born, he gave me this name as well. I’m not entirely sure why I’m writing this or why it has taken three years for me to do so. They say there is a time for everything and I think the time for this is now. My father died in New York on September 11, 2001. He was forty-seven.

 

They say that no one will ever forget September 11th and the media seem to want to make sure of that with news specials, retrospectives, online timelines, commemorative magazine issues, and things like that. I’m not sure we really need it. I know I don’t. Honestly, it’s a day I want to forget.

 

I remember how they read off the names at Ground Zero. I remember how my father’s name was not on there. They talked of financial ‘compensation’ for the families of those who had been killed, as if money could compensate for a life. It didn’t matter though. They never contacted me. And I knew why.

 

September 11, 2001 was a day like any other. When my dad got into his cab, I’m sure he didn’t expect that he wouldn’t be home that evening. He didn’t know that halfway through his second fare in the morning, he’d be dead. Neither did I.

 

At the moment of my father’s death, I was in Oregon at Reed College probably smoking a morning bowl of pot, wondering if I was actually going to go to my Greek class. I remember turning on the television and finding every channel exactly the same: The absurd images of planes crashing into buildings. I think even without the pot, it would have taken a little while for it to register the magnitude of the whole thing.  I didn’t go to my Greek class.

 

It wasn’t until evening that I got the call. At first there was just crying and I thought it might be Mindy, my drama queen of an ex-girlfriend.

 

“Junior.” The voice croaked out through sobs.

“Mom. Mom what is it?” My mother was the other woman in my life prone to hysterics.

“It’s-It’s your father. He’s dead.” Great. This whole thing must have unhinged her more than usual. They moved upstate years ago.

“Mom, dad’s not in the city. He’s drives upstate. Remember?”

 

It was then that she told me what happened. He’d been shot in the back of the head and robbed. While the whole world watched the towers fall, petty thieves and murderers were still plying their trade.

 

It was two days until my father’s death reached the papers. Even though they lived upstate, he had made arrangements years ago for our family to be buried in New York. Even so, the circumstances made it difficult. The New York funeral home business was having their busiest week in history and prepaid or not, logistics were still an issue. The home finally agreed to have the service but the only time available was the morning of September 13th. The police said they wouldn’t be done with my father’s body in time. So the funeral would have to happen with the burial later. 

 

I emailed my professors and let them know I needed to go back for my father’s funeral. I packed a couple bags. Smoked another bowl to settle my nerves and called to make plans for my flight.

 

It wasn’t until that moment that I realized no planes were flying. And they weren’t sure when they would be and when they were, there’d be days’ worth of people who needed to get to New York and everywhere else. I couldn’t drive across the country in a day and a half and they couldn’t reschedule the funeral. I wasn’t going to be at my father’s funeral.

 

It took me two weeks to get out to see dad’s grave. By then he was in the ground and the police had already caught the guy who did it. Seems the camera in the car got a good look at him. It didn’t matter. Just like those who lost people in the towers weren’t comforted by the fact that the hijackers who did it were dead. It doesn’t change the fact that I’d never see my father laugh again.

 

They say that there were almost 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001, but they’re wrong. The truth is there were hundreds more killed across the country, around the world, and in upstate New York. And it continues to happen every day, but it doesn’t have the impact that 9/11 had on everyone because it’s just not as fantastic. They were right that September 11th was a day just like any other. I just wish it hadn’t been.

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