Andrew Ferrier

Two recent visits to Wagamama (outstanding noodle bars – give them a try if you haven’t already) have uncovered a strange habit: when asking for the bill, it’s brought immediately to your table, with a slip asking for the tip and a signature. Once this is filled in, your credit card is taken away briefly – presumably to be swiped. But no further signature is required, and even more surprisingly no PIN number is requested. That’s the end of the transaction.

Is this legal? Is it within the terms of the merchant agreement? Is it sensible? Is it secure?

I don’t know, but it’s sure weird. I haven’t seen any other merchant do this.

I’ve written many times before about the poor quality customer service I’ve received from LOVEFiLM, the UK’s largest DVD rental service, and those posts have solicited a lot of complaints from other people too. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and cancelled my account: a combination of frustration with poor delivery times, them never sending me the titles high on my list, and that they won’t allow me to freely suspend my account for a reasonable amount of time. It’s sad, as they used to provide excellent customer service when I first used them a few years ago (when they were small), but acquisitions and growth seem to have made them fat and lazy, and they no longer treat customers with respect – written examples are all over their website, including the veiled threats of continued charges in the cancellation process itself.

At some point, probably once I return from San Jose, I plan to sign-up with Amazon instead, who now seem to be their largest competitor, and stock 2/3 of the titles that LOVEFiLM do, so might still stand a chance of fulfilling my sometimes unusual taste. Amazon have generally provided excellent service in the past, and it’ll be interesting to see if their foray into DVD rental hurts or helps their brand.

I’m not sure what the blogosphere-approved name for it is, but I had my first truly negative comment on this blog the other day. I’m not quite sure why the author chose to leave it, but he’s right in a roundabout way: I do like holding the market to account, like any amateur economist.

To that end, here’s a positive story: if you’re looking for a letting agent in or around the Winchester area, I can’t recommend the Winchester Letting Company highly enough. They’ve been superb from day one: helpful and friendly. The two problems I’ve had so far with my flat have been resolved in less than 12 hours, including when my boiler broke this morning and they resolved it before lunchtime. They charge no ongoing fees, and are generally all-round helpful folks. If you’re looking to rent somewhere round here, give them a try.

Hope that helps tip the balance a little, folks. As always, if you have any thoughts about what I write – good or bad – please feel free to leave a comment.

Faffing with the contents of my wallet today in the supermarket, I began wondering about reward cards – are they still worth the plastic they’re printed on? They’ve been around in the UK for over a decade, and two major supermarkets – Tesco and Sainsbury’s – still use them. I have one of each. However, I sometimes wonder why I don’t throw them away – cash rewards of approximately 1% (presumably all that the supermarkets can afford) hardly seem worth the bother of carrying them.

Safeway (now Morrisons) scrapped their loyalty scheme in 2000, citing that it wasn’t worth the money to run it. They may have been right. Nevertheless, Tesco, now the UK’s biggest grocery retailer, still retains their scheme, and as the Economist states, the information goldmine (the only reason the supermarkets run loyalty schemes) is lucrative – although they don’t say exactly how lucrative. Safeway’s decision indicates the margins can be thin. Despite the low return on hassle I mentioned above, though, there are still plenty of takers – empirical evidence would suggest that more shoppers have loyalty cards than don’t.

There have been other issues; for example, loyalty cards came under fire from David Blunkett in 2004 in a fairly obvious attempt to draw away attention away from the problems surrounding the ID card debate:

Mr Blunkett said the cards produced key details about people’s shopping habits but were accepted because they were run by private firms. People should not distrust ID cards because they are a state idea, he said.

…

Holding up a Nectar card, he said people voluntarily signed up to allow such details to be collected through such loyalty cards by private firms. “There is a real issue about how that should be overseen and supervised,” said Mr Blunkett.

Mr. Blunkett presumably ignored the fact that voluntarily signing up to handing over data about tomato-buying preferences was a more respectable practice than being forced to hand over more medical information to travel. Fortunately, his illiberal idea didn’t seem to gain much traction. In all fairness, though, it’s quite likely than many folks don’t know that their data is used in this way; for that, The Guardian deserves some praise for educating the public.

Maybe reward cards will die out eventually. It’s hard to back that up with public data, although I’m sure Tesco have a hard time quantifying the exact benefit they get from theirs (how do you measure repeat custom accurately – with and without the card?). If I’m right, though, I hope they die because they don’t make business sense – not because the government regulates a harmless practice out of existence. Interestingly, Wikipedia alleges that this has already happened in California.

It’ll be interesting to see where the reward industry is in five years time.

I’ve written several times before about LOVEFiLM and their deteriorating customer service. They’ve just got worse – sometime during or after the merger with Screenselect, it seems that they sneaked in a change – you can now only ‘go on holiday’ (pause the service) for a maximum of 4 weeks a year, and only 2 weeks at a time (with a holiday size measured in units of 1 week). No doubt this is within the T&Cs, but this clearly isn’t going to suit lots of people (myself included), and is just another ill-considered attempt to shave costs (maintaining your account details is essentially zero cost). The only thing that’s keeping me clinging on to LOVEFiLM is their range (the delivery times aren’t getting any better), so I suspect I’ll be ditching them soon. Unless of course they feel like improving? Guys? Hello?

PlusNet, who also failed on the customer service front a while ago when they failed to fix my broadband for almost two weeks, have just published some fairly detailed statistics on their claimed improvement in problem turnaround time. Whether they are true is difficult to say, but it’s certainly interesting to see them being so open for once.

Update 2006-12-23: Some people still don’t like PlusNet much though.

Correction 2007-01-05: You can suspend your account for longer than two weeks, but LOVEFiLM charge £1/week for this – plain cheek, since the cost to them is obviously next to nothing.

I’ve written before about my mixed relationship with LOVEFiLM. It’s now becoming obvious that, as I suspected might happen, the turnaround time for sending out DVDs is worsening again – my last five or so have all taken several days longer than they should have, and the delays are getting longer each time. I’m far from the only ex-Screenselect customer to see this. If this continues, I’ll be cancelling my account. Please, LOVEFiLM, get it sorted.

Some of the marketing efforts I’m most impressed by are the little, obvious things. I recently ordered some replacement ink cartridges from The Ink Factory (excellent service, by the way – next day delivery and cheap prices, as well as good quality non-OEM cartridges). I’ve ordered from them twice now – this time round I had to dig out their name from my email archives – searching Google for printer ink uk brings up a lot of sites. They’ve now sent me some tiny stickers, with their website and phone number printed on them, one of which has now gone on the inside of my printer hood. Next time, I won’t have to do that hunt. So obvious, so simple, so clever.

Of course, I barely use my printer these days, but that’s another story.

Update 2006-11-30: It appears Epson is trying to pursue some manufacturers and importers of cheap ink cartridges via the US legal system, alleging patent violation. It’s well known that printer manufacturers make a large portion of their profit from cartridges, so this shouldn’t be too surprising. I’m not sure I have a clear opinion on this issue.

A sign in the Winchester branch states that WHSmith have joined the list of retailers who have stopped accepting cheques – Shell made headlines when they announced they were to do the same back in September last year. Apparently WHSmith are concerned about fraud, and this news story implies that it’s only an experiment, but it wouldn’t surprise me if part of the decision is also related to the cost of processing and handling, and that this will become permanent – after all, it’s rare that you see a cheque being used in a shop now, and with good reason – they are tedious, awkward, and slow to process.

To my mind, WHSmith have a bigger problem, though – they are getting boring and desperate. My stationery purchase was accompanied by two exhortations to buy other, totally unrelated, products. As Seth Godin has explained at length, this kind of marketing out of context just doesn’t cut it any more – and it annoyed me. I’m not really clear any more what it is that WHSmith sell, but I rarely go there – certainly high street branches – to buy anything, and this kind of behaviour doesn’t endear me to them. As their product set begins to die out (CDs are dying, DVDs will, papers and magazines will, books will, stationery will), it becomes hard to see what areas that can invest in.

Do WHSmith have a strategy for the future?

My recent posting regarding the Screenselect/LOVEFiLM merger elicited a lot of (mostly unfavourable) comments from strangers regarding LOVEFiLM’s poor service. So far I hadn’t seen any of that, but their website has just refused to downgrade my package (i.e allow me to reduce my spend with them). I’ve sent an email, but as others have pointed out, they have pre-prepared excuses ready about the high volumes of email they are getting (hint: this isn’t OK, LOVEFiLM, you should have expected it). We’ll see how fast this problem gets sorted: is this the start of a slippery slope which ends in me cancelling my account? Time will tell.

Just before a trip to London a few days ago, I inserted my Woolwich card in an ATM near Winchester Station. I hit the ‘balance on screen’ button, and saw ‘your card issuer has declined your request’. A bit mysterious. I don’t normally keep much money in that account, but obviously I still wanted to make sure that someone wasn’t in the process of stealing it. So I phoned up the ‘lost and stolen’ line on the back of the card and explained the problem. I was told that, because I wasn’t an Openplan account holder (whatever that is), it wasn’t possible to do any telephone banking past 5.30pm. Although my security details could be verified, I was told that no further information could be given. The card could be cancelled, and a new one sent out, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle for the risk attached to such a small sum of money.

My worries were further compounded when I phoned during office hours the next morning to check again. They could find no record of the card being declined, or an explanation as to why it was. The only suggestion I was offered was: ‘try it in another ATM’. Well, duh.

I’ve no doubt my card will probably work again next time I try it, and this was a one-off glitch. It’s not entirely reassuring that the problem doesn’t seem to have been recorded, but what is surprising is the illogical service I was offered by the Woolwich. This isn’t price discrimination, this is just stupidity: with 24-hour callcentres and computerised records, there is no excuse.

This type of problem in the past has been one of the things that has encouraged me to keep multiple accounts with different banks (so I can get at money when I need it). I suspect the Woolwich might soon lose its place in my portfolio, though. Any recommendations for a replacement?