Written August 2008
By Cliff Feldwick
Well, Dell and others have finally made good on their threat to stop selling Windows XP, thus making their masters at Microsoft happy. Yes, we’ll all march together off that cliff into the sea. Or … maybe not. Because, for $99 more, you can get XP pre-loaded with an upgrade disk to “make the transition to Vista when you’re ready”. Excuse me, how about never. Is never OK with you? Sorry, you still have to pay extra and get the “upgrade”. So it seems the dynamic duo of Dell and Microsoft has devised another way to extort $99 if you don’t want to be forced where you don’t want to go. Bah, humbug.
What can you do about it? If you’re inclined, you can still buy bare-bones systems from places like Newegg and load your choice of operating system on it. Maybe better let your teenager do that for you of course, but it is an option. If you want a ready-made system, particularly a laptop, you can look for Toshiba models that still have XP. Go to their website, use the locator to find a local distributor and call them. Hint – there’s one in Hanover that still had nice systems with XP loaded, and at a discount from list. No, I don’t have any interest in them, financial or otherwise.
The oblivious factor, summer version
You really have to wonder where some people live, mentally. Walking through village center parking lots at lunchtime, I have passed vehicles (usually larger ones, thus magnifying the effect) with the engines running so the occupant could eat lunch with the air conditioning on. With gas at record prices and conservation the patriotic thing to do, what were they thinking? Besides, the heat from their engines adds to the overall swelter. Bah, humbug again.
And now for an opinion
I have watched, as a local resident, the efforts of local food union officials to block, on all sorts of grounds, the zoning for a new Wegmans. Their reasoning is simple – it will probably pull people from the unionized Giants and Safeways they represent. And so it will. And even though in a perfect world you could have both (a fine store with union employees), it is still time for them to shift their focus to the things that might actually make people come back to their stores and save their jobs.
A story in the Sun recently recounted how Giant was continuing to lose market share despite efforts to upgrade the look of their stores, reduce prices (both very worthwhile ideas) and even make portable scanners available so you could ring up your items as you shopped to speed up checkout – an idea that has at it’s core the reduction of employees on registers, thus transferring the work to you. Not so great, but optional.
Part of it comes from, finally, some competition from places like Trader Joes. How and why Columbia and surrounds has managed to not have a Fresh Fields or Whole Foods (or is it Whole Fields, now that the merger has been approved by an anti-trust department that seems capable of twisting blatant monopolies into OK ideas through Alice-in-wonderland logic) for so long has spawned vast conspiracy theories for years. Excuse me – highly educated, usually highly paid people with a desire for fresh, often organic food – being unserved forever. But I digress.
If you’ve been to Wegmans in Hunt Valley or elsewhere, you know why they’re worried. My daughter lives in Rochester, home of Wegmans, and I have seen what they are and can become – the flagship store up there takes up 70% of a shopping center and features a separate take-out store and a sit down restaurant called Tastings that is quite good. But even if there was “just” a grocery store here, it would be quite a draw. Why is that?
Well, first off, if you’re looking for straight produce, theirs is cleaner, more varied and cheaper than the competition, with organic alternatives everywhere. So if you do your own cooking, you’re way ahead. And the vastness of the selection of international foods is astounding.
Where they make their money is the prepared items. All the stores now are emphasizing this, with rushed people willing to spend more on things they can just take home. But Wegmans really, really shines, with herds of people making arrays of alternatives, and condiment bars that sell guacamole and other things by the pound – and not cheaply. I’m sure that the average bill there would make the competition drool with envy. So what could they do?
Simple. First, continue to clean up their act. Newer, brighter stores will help make you happier to be there, and I’ll bet you spend more. Widen the aisles so you can pass someone, and more importantly, stop putting things in the end of aisles that constrict them so only one person can pass. Do they really think that you’re going to pick something off a rack that annoys the hell out of you?
Mostly, however, go back to selling food. Get rid of the tacky blow-up Christmas lawn decorations with snow endlessly falling on reindeer, and actually stock the kind of salad dressing I’ll buy. Stop selling lawn furniture and deck table sets and have a few more kinds of soap. I’ve even seen a computer printer in one Giant. Who goes there to buy a printer?
Maybe they think that’s where they make money, but it’s self defeating. Sell food, or sell junk? They seem to have made their choice. No wonder so many people, like me, look forward to being able to make ours. Bring on Wegmans.
Cliff Feldwick is president of Riverside Computer Consultants and does network set-ups, computer troubleshooting and data retrieval, when not eating. He can be reached at 410-880-0171 or at cliff@feldwick.com.