Everything Or Less and it's mostly less service in Retail

Everything Or Less, originally uploaded by ⓅⒶⓎⓅⒶⓊⓁ.

Retail is funny because on one hand the Customer must be served. On the other hand, production goals, whatever those may be, preclude the customer from getting the best of service. Employees of retail and any customer service related business are forced to meet ever changing "Performance Metrics". To meet these and keep their jobs many employees are forced to cut corners and do low quality work. Management tends to look the other way because production goals will then be met.
If you don't cut corners and try to do a good job both for the store and for the customer, you are deemed "slow" and may not retain that retail job for very long. So instead, you do things on the quick-quick, not taking the time to do the job right, cut off the customer on the phone or in the aisle and hope to see another day and another tiny paycheck.
True, there isn't much profit in retail. Markup on most items for the store is about 5 percent. There is a lot of competition for that small piece of the pie. Managers get a bonus at the end of the year for meeting production goals. This is an incentive to sharp practice. Not all retail is Wal-Mart, where in some stores managers force workers to work off the clock so they can meet those production goals. There have been about 10 lawsuits on that matter in the past 10 years. Nonetheless it's mostly less that the customer gets. It's less service, less information and less quality products. Am I being too unreasonable to want everything and more?

Via Flickr:
Everything Is Less Than Zero.
Hey! Hey, hey!

Blasting Away At Madness: This Shopping Cart Is In The Dumps

Blasting Away At Madness: This Shopping Cart Is In The Dumps

This Shopping Cart Is In The Dumps

This Shopping Cart Is In The Dumps, originally uploaded by ⓅⒶⓎⓅⒶⓊⓁ.

The NYPD have nothing better to do than harass a photographer taking photographs of this trashed shopping cart. It's been sitting on this grassy patch on East 12th Street in Brooklyn for the past 4 days. It's filled with materials probably discarded by one of the disreputable and fly by night building contractors that work in my neighborhood. Office Sukhu was attempting to intimidate me today, implying that I was responsible for dumping this cart here. What right have the cops to ask me questions as to why I'm photographing anything that is on a public street? They have no right to harass me, ask for ID or make other assumptions about my character. Office Sukhu even questioned whether I belonged here in New York City. "You don't sound like you live here in New York" he said. I told him I was doing my art and he used that statement to imply that I was the one who dumped these materials. He and FOUR other officers from the 61st Precinct surrounded me and threatened me with a summons. The kind of cavalier attitude and leading conversation I suffered under their scrutiny has reinforced my negative opinion of the NYPD. There is no "Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect" coming from the NYPD anymore. I doubt there ever has been any but now even more so since Bloomberg declared the NYPD to be his "Army".

Google represses Flickr Images!

The Very First Slinky, originally uploaded by ⓅⒶⓎⓅⒶⓊⓁ.

Google has relegated images from Flickr to the bottom pages if they are to be seen at all from a Flickr image search. If a search is done for "popular toys of the 1940s" on Bing the image above will be shown. Not so for a Google image search where the image does not show up at all. See the differences here:

The Bing Image Search:

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=popular+toys+of+the+1940s#x0y5814

The google image search:

http://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1156&bih=716&q=popular+toys+of+the+1940s&gbv=2&oq=popular+toys+of+the+1940s&aq=f&aqi=g-S1&aql=&gs_sm=s&gs_upl=3029l3029l0l4592l1l1l0l0l0l0l193l193l0.1l1l0

I thought I was mistaken the first time but this has happened more than once. Time to send Google a message loud and clear. Stop manipulating web search searches for your own profit. Google doesn't like Yahoo!, which owns flickr, so they will use their misbegotten power over the Internet to wield undue influence on the websites we go to.



Via Flickr:
The toy was invented and developed by naval engineer Richard James in the early 1940s and demonstrated at Gimbels department store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in November 1945

Slinky Jingle:

What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing!
Everyone knows it's Slinky.
It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun, it's a wonderful toy.
It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun, it's a wonderful toy.
It's fun for a girl or a boy.