Hong Kong's skyline, featuring dozens of brightly-lit high-rises wrapping around Victoria Harbor, is justifiably famous, and one of the main draws in the city's $37 billion tourism industry. Unfortunately, Hong Kong's recent urban haze is more than just a health hazard: It also ruins perfectly decent photo opportunities.
So in an inspired attempt to placate disappointed tourists, large, blue-sky banners of the skyline have appeared along the city's harbor-front walkway. For these tourists, it's a perfect solution -- so long as the actual, gray sky doesn't creep into the shot.
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
Friday, August 23, 2013
The Magnificent Nightmare of the Billy Bookcase
Ikea is so good at so many things. Why is it so bad at delivery?
By Jessica Winter|Posted Thursday, Aug. 22, 2013, at 2:53 PM
A woman sits at a model room in an Ikea store.
Courtesy of epsos.de/Flickr
It all started because I wanted the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. Not a new, licensed reproduction—I wanted the scuffed-up, 1960-vintage Nelson Swag Leg Desk I found on eBay. It seemed to me mostly irrelevant that I could not afford the Nelson Swag Leg Desk. But my husband suggested a budgetary adjustment: Instead of pairing the Nelson Swag Leg Desk with pricey custom-built bookshelves as planned, we could economize with a jumbo set of Ikea’s Billy bookcases, which fit the appointed space almost to the centimeter. At first, I resisted this financially expedient arranged marriage of a modern-design icon to a prosaic dorm-room staple that I associated with beer pong and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss. Eventually, though, I started talking myself into the compromise. I tried to think of it as a chic high-low flourish, like Anna Wintour pairing couture with jeans on her first Vogue cover,or Mike D plonking a Target pouf smack in the middle of his otherwise ultra-customized Brooklyn townhouse. Or something.
We completed the order, absorbing the blunt force of the flat $99 delivery fee. But the odyssey of the Billy bookcase, we discovered, had only just begun.
June 7. We buy the bookcase.
June 13. We receive an email from Ikea: “Your order has departed from the IKEA Distribution Center.”
June 16. We receive an email from a company called UX Logistics stating that our order is ready to deliver.
June 16, Part II. Email from Ikea: “Your IKEA order is ready to be delivered. … You will receive a call within 2 to 3 business days to schedule your delivery date.”
June 17. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 21.
June 21. Another email from Ikea, asking to confirm our order.
June 21, Part II. UX Logistics confirms via email that our delivery is set for June 26.
And on and on and on. Each afternoon, my husband would call UX Logistics, who’d say something like, “We can’t deliver your item because it hasn’t arrived,” then call Ikea, who’d say, “They do have it—you need to call them back and find out why they’re not delivering it,” and so forth. At one point, my husband asked Ikea to cancel the home delivery so we could arrange to pick up the bookcase ourselves. Easy for all concerned, right? Wrong: Ikea claimed that cancelation of the delivery was impossible, because the bookcase had already been delivered—to UX Logistics, who said they didn’t have it. Even if we canceled the order outright, Ikea told us, we’d be on the hook for the delivery to the delivery company who hadn’t yet received the delivery.
It turns out that Ikea is not just a furniture retailer. It is also an epistemological time machine, casting into doubt everything we thought we knew about semantics and the space-time continuum and the ding an sich of particle board.
The nightmare of Ikea delivery is a truth so universally acknowledged that even the company cops to it. Chief marketing officer Leontyne Green talked about her own “very frustrating” Ikea delivery experience in a December 2011 Ad Age profile, which stressed the firm’s ongoing efforts to improve delivery and overall customer service. But as anyone who has found herself dissolving into the hypnotically well-appointed cattle chute of an Ikea showroom can tell you, this is not a company that does things by accident. The who’s-on-first shambles of Ikea delivery isn’t the flaw in the Eivor Cirkel rug. It’s instead a case study in how a large retailer can succeed by failing. Here are five reasons why.
Ikea has no rational economic motive to offer halfway-decent delivery. Like many big-box retailers, Ikea outsources all its delivery. “With sporadic orders over a wide geographic area, Ikea would need a fleet of trucks that might be idle one day and not able to handle the load the next,” says Robert Shumsky, a professor of operations management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.
Of course, other furniture retailers such as Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn juggle similar logistical challenges, but have nothing like Ikea’s reputation for delivery debacles. Ikea may be OK with this because it doesn’t have much competition in the bargain furniture business—there’s no one else selling couches quite so cheap. The company sees its customers as fundamentally different: thriftier, for sure, but also stronger, more resourceful, stoic in the face of challenge! According to Santiago Gallino, also a professor at the Tuck School, “Ikea’s target customers are consumers who prize ‘value,’ and are willing to spend their own time to save money”—by pulling items from the warehouse, assembling the items themselves, etc. “Asking the customer to spend time to come to the store is consistent with this segmentation strategy,” Gallino says.
Ikea, unlike so many other retailers, has little to fear from Amazon. Consumers are increasingly conditioned to assume that virtually any product—even heavy, unwieldy products—can land on their doorstep 24 hours or less after purchase. Just one case in point: the frighteningly fast and cheap deliveries of heavy bulk purchases available via the Amazon subsidiary wag.com. But Ikea is, at least for the time being, immune to these expectations. According to Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei, “Amazon can disrupt anything that doesn’t have to be assembled or curated”—in other words, anything that isn’t Ikea. But heavy flat-pack furniture deliveries are a conundrum even Jeff Bezos hasn’t yet solved, and the most dazzling page of Amazon can’t begin to compete with any given IKEA alcove. “Yesterday, you didn’t know you needed a new strainer,” Frei says, “but today you do, because of how it was curated in the Ikea kitchen. Amazon can’t do that.”
Making you wait might make you happy. The longer we waited for Billy, it seems, the more we pined for Billy, which heightened our satisfaction when Billy did finally arrive. “The advantage of making people wait is that it creates a sense of anticipatory excitement,” says Michael Norton, a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. Norton and Elizabeth Dunn’s recent book Happy Money makes the case that a pay-now-enjoy-later model of consumption leads to greater customer satisfaction than the enjoy-now-pay-later logic of, say, Amazon Prime.
Making you work might make you even happier. The 2011 article “‘The IKEA Effect’: When Labor Leads to Love”—written by Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely—argues that successfully assembling an Ikea product can lead us to value the item more than if the item arrived on our doorstep camera-ready. I jokingly ask Norton if my husband’s unpaid internship as an Ikea fulfillment manager might have created its own Ikea effect. “I’m not so sure the answer is no,” Norton says. “It was a real pain in the butt, but we do misattribute effort to liking, so he might actually like the bookcase more because getting it was such a hassle. There’s something about service recovery that creates a different, more meaningful experience.”
Or not. “Working as Ikea’s fulfillment and transport manager had no impact on my enjoyment of the shelves once they arrived,” my husband said in a statement to Slate.
Being icy and withholding is part of Ikea’s unique alchemy. “Ikea refuses to expose itself to the idiosyncracies of its customers,” Frei says. “There is no way they could do their own delivery with that signature Ikea crisp efficiency—there are too many variables. So they make you conform to them.” Ikea makes great stuff cheap—and that is the draw. Helping you obtain that stuff, or even find it in their store, is not part of their mission, which also explains why you’ll rarely spot an Ikea employee who isn’t either working a register or hauling purchases to the parking lot. “If you come to their showroom seeking out a specific thing and you can’t find it,” Frei says, “you’ll probably just go and buy an adjacent thing.”
Without meaning to, I recently tested this last hypothesis at my local Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Shumsky had mentioned that he’d wanted to purchase a Spoka nightlight for his daughter, but Ikea doesn’t deliver this item and his nearest showroom is two and a half hours away. I’m only about five miles from mine, so after checking online that the Spoka was “most likely in stock” in Red Hook, I hopped on my bike to go buy one for him. But once I’d slowly wended through the endless floor displays to the lighting emporium, I couldn’t find the Spoka nightlight, or any nightlights at all, or anyone on the floor to help me find the nightlights, so I bought and ate an Ikea cinnamon bun and got back on my bike and rode home. I know that Ikea won’t lose any sleep over me and my failed nightlight quest (which cost them all of $15) or the Billy breakdown. But it’s still a little strange—a little analog, a little pre-Amazon and pre-Apple Store—to realize that a bad customer experience is part of the design of a good business strategy.
In a poignant and powerful plea for immediate action, living legend Stephen Fry has called on the International Olympic Committee to institute an "absolute ban" on the Winter Games set to take place next year in Russia.
Addressing the IOC's members in a moving open letter published on his personal website, Fry urges the committee not to turn a blind eye to the injustices being committed by Russia against its LGBT residents, as the Olympics organizers did with Hitler in 1936.
The Olympic movement at that time paid precisely no attention to this evil and proceeded with the notorious Berlin Olympiad, which provided a stage for a gleeful Führer and only increased his status at home and abroad. It gave him confidence. All historians are agreed on that. What he did with that confidence we all know.
Putin is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law.
Fry says it is not enough to simply guarantee the safety of foreign athletes — the IOC must "take a firm stance" on the matter by banning Sochi from holding the Games.
"Stage them elsewhere in Utah, Lillyhammer, anywhere you like. At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world," Fry writes.
I am gay. I am a Jew. My mother lost over a dozen of her family to Hitler's anti-Semitism. Every time in Russia (and it is constantly) a gay teenager is forced into suicide, a lesbian "correctively" raped, gay men and women beaten to death by neo-Nazi thugs while the Russian police stand idly by, the world is diminished and I for one, weep anew at seeing history repeat itself.
"All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing," so wrote Edmund Burke. Are you, the men and women of the IOC going to be those "good" who allow evil to triumph? [...]
For there to be a Russian Winter Olympics would stain the movement forever and wipe away any of that glory. The Five Rings would finally be forever smeared, besmirched and ruined in the eyes of the civilised world.
The cultural icon in his own right goes on to remind the IOC of the "oaths and protocols" [pdf] it has sworn to uphold, including the promise to "act against any form of discrimination affecting the Olympic Movement."
[Putin] is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it.
[photo via Getty]
Seven Rare Steve Jobs Videos That Show How To “Think Different”
Steve Jobs was skilled at many things--technology, marketing, and managing just for starters. But while his talents could be attributed to many factors, one that surely played a role in his success was his ability to consider things from perspectives no one had. Here are seven rare videos which span his career and take us behind the scenes of his famous slogan.
This video shows rare footage of Steve Jobs from 1980 giving a talk about starting Apple. What’s particularly striking is Jobs’s explanation of man’s skill as a toolmaker to amplify his inherent ability, which he says is why Apple was formed: not as many other companies were--to create a product--but instead to create tools that enhance man’s innate talents.
In this video from 1982 (actually, an audio-recording-as-video) Steve Jobs talks to the Academy of Achievement about what makes a person intelligent. He contends that a lot of it has to do with memory and the ability to make connections. However, he says in order to make connections that are innovative, a person must not have the same experiences as everyone else or else everyone will just be making the same connections. The key, he says, is to get an many different and wide-ranging experiences as possible.
As an entrepreneur, I know the dread you feel why you are going over the numbers deciding if you have enough to start a company. Indeed, “What if I spend all this money and I end up with nothing?” is a common refrain I hear whenever I talk to others deciding to go all-in on an original idea that more often than not has an equal chance of failing or succeeding. In this video of a talk Steve Wozniak gave to the Colorado School of Mines in 1984, Wozniak reflects on how Jobs turned the table on his thinking when he expressed the same fears. “Yeah, we [might] lose all our money,” Jobs told Woz, “but at least we’ll have a company.”
This is a great video from 1985 that shows Steve Jobs talking to academics from Lunds University in Sweden and it should be required viewing for anyone who says, “Yeah, but Apple hasn’t innovated in years!” Here Jobs talks about how the mid-1980s were seeing a lack of major advancements in the computer industry. However, he was quick to point out that all industries go through slow periods, though even when they do there is momentum behind that that eventually leads to new spurts of innovation. Extra points to the video for shows Jobs arriving by helicopter.
This is perhaps my favorite Steve Jobs video. In it you see a bearded Jobs from 1994--one of the most powerful and creative people the technology industry has ever seen--speaking about not being afraid to ask for help. In Western society--especially in America--asking for help often has false connotations associated with it that you aren’t smart, clever, or rich enough to do it on your own. But Jobs knew there was no shame in asking for help and here explains that the ability to ask for help is often the difference between the people who accomplish something and the people who accomplish nothing.
This is a video of a keynote speech by Steve Jobs at Siggraph '95. In it, Jobs talks about an upcoming movie his new company, Pixar, is making called Toy Story. The speech is rare in that it shows Jobs's masterful understanding of industries other than technology. In this case, it’s the film industry. Here he opines that the future of films will increasingly rely on animation instead of its traditional role as just a tool for children’s films. This was a groundbreaking assertion in 1995, but today it seems obvious as virtually every film made today features some type of computer animation--with some relying completely on it.
In this amazing speech from 1997 in a Town Hall meeting room on the company’s Cupertino campus, Steve Jobs launches the most iconic marketing campaign in the company’s history: “Think Different.” Jobs reflects on the difference between using marketing to sell a commodity and using marketing to impart the ethos of a company to its users. You can see the correlation between the Think Different campaign and the speech Jobs gave 17 years earlier about man’s role as a toolmaker. This is the birth of Apple conveying its ethos that the company is a simple toolmaker for people with the passion and ability to change the world. (Extra points to Steve for the dig against the milk industry).
Thanks to David Blake of Degreed, who suggested some of these videos. Degreed is a new service that helps users tell the story of their life's worth of learning and helps them track, measure, and share everything they learn. They have launched a series of case studies on the lives of interesting people, including Steve Jobs. The case study features 50+ articles, videos, and book excerpts that highlight the influences in his life, the pivotal moments in his education and career, and highlights his legacy today.
Mon dieu! New campaign urges French to eat more bread
Eun Kyung KimTODAY
Video: Just 100 years ago, the average Frenchman ate more than three entire baguettes a day, but today the average has declined to just a half, prompting a new campaign to encourage more baguette purchases. NBC’s Michelle Kosinski reports.
Got baguette?
The French are eating less bread these days, and bakers have launched a national campaign to fix that.
The average Frechman now eats half a baguette a day, compared to an entire loaf in 1970. A century ago, the average was a carb-loading three per day.
The trend to eat less bread is more pronounced among youth, a generation that can’t be bothered to stop by their local boulangerie after work to pick up a baguette. So bakers and millers have launched a new national campaign to encourage people to put away their pasta and pastries and eat more fresh, fat-free bread.
Modeled after America’s “Got milk?” campaign, the French are being asked: “Coucou, tu as pris le pain?” – or “Hey there, have you picked up the bread?”
The slogan can be found on billboards and inscribed on bread bags in cities around the nation.
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
(Alex Hofford/CFP)
