Entries Tagged 'opinions' ↓

Recently I’ve been noticing TD Canada Trust pushing a marketing campaign that they are the superior bank because they have the longest hours. They are open “8 until late”, which is apparently open 50% longer than any other bank. I’m sure this sort of campaign might be very useful for a company like Wendy’s (ughh), with their “Eat Great, Even Late” campaign, but I fail to see the relevance for a bank in 2007.

When is the last time you actually had to see a teller? The fact is, more and more people are doing all of their banking online, or through a bank machine, neither of which depend on a branch’s hours. One of the only reasons to see a person at a bank, is for opening an account. Oh wait, you can apply for that online now too. I think their marketing dollars would be best used elsewhere, such as continuing to promote clients to use online banking. Not to mention, TD Canada Trust has one of the worst fee structures of any Canadian bank. Even students are paying $3.45/mo. if they can’t keep a minimum balance of $1,000. How many students do you know with that kind of money?

Considering they are one of the most popular banks around, it’s hard to believe they aren’t adapting as well as they should be. We don’t want longer hours, we want cheaper banking! Everyone knows that bankers work from 12:00pm-1pm every day.

Dear Canadian Retailers,

I just wanted to write you a quick note to let you know that I’m going to try my best from now on to avoid purchasing items from you. This is specifically due to your inability to properly recognize that the exchange rates between the Canadian and American dollar are almost equivalent, and that your prices should be adjusted accordingly.

To support my point I would like to identify a few examples. Yesterday I walked into Chapters to buy a new book. After looking at the price on the back of the book, I promptly walked out of the store. The price was $24.99CAD and $10.99USD. This clearly is not the exchange rate. Recently I was doing research for a client on a Nikon D200 model camera. The price of the camera is $1099USD, and in Canada, is sold for over $2000CAD. As a result, my client has opted to buy it from the US, and have it shipped here. It is still cheaper, even with having to pay duty.

As far as the book goes, I decided to order it online from Amazon. I ended up paying $22.93CAD total, including shipping and taxes. This saved me over 15%. Now answer me this, why would I pay this extra 15% when it is clearly just an extra 15% markup on the price? You are taking advantage of your customers, and before long, they will start to catch on. Once upon a time this was an acceptable price because of the exchange rates, but let’s face it, the times have changed. The Canadian economy is stronger than ever, and your pricing structures should be altered accordingly.

I purchase and resell electronics from my suppliers for my clients upon their request. We make a very good profit margin on our sales, and we still beat prices by over 100% in some cases compared to retail giants like BestBuy and FutureShop. These stores can make over 400% in markup on some of their sales. The prices in the United States are still high, but they are much more reasonable.

For the time being I’m going to order the majority of my goods online from wholesalers.

Sincerly,

Dave Lahn

Last night I was reading Business 2.0 magazine, and there was an article about an upcoming search engine called ChaCha. The idea of the search engine is that you type in what you’re looking for, and a live guide will do the search for you in order to get the best results. They said that eventually they wanted to enable you to phone a voice-automated system in order to conduct your searches, and that this would essentially replace 411.

I think that this idea is absolutely terrible. It’s one of those things that you try once or twice, but eventually they lose their novelty. I remember trying a similar phone service located in Toronto called VoiceGenie. I ended up just being on the phone yelling into it for 20 minutes to get one stock quote.

“N…..T…..”
“NC… is that right?”
“NO! N….T….”
“I think you said NC … is that right?”

The technology is just not advanced enough right now to make this idea useful. With pretty much every cell phone offering internet service right on the phone, this has become a better alternative.

In the article, it was mentioned that “This was going to be the next Google”, or something to that extent. Once again, this is false. Google is successful because it provides a useful service and makes it extremely easy to use. If you compare the Google and Yahoo websites, Google is 100 times more simple and clean cut. That is the sort of website you want to see when you open up your web browser. Not Yahoo, and definitely not ChaCha.

I was recently listening to the RandomShapes.com podcast and something to the extent of “People in business are usually good looking, that’s why people listen to them”, was said. At first, this comment made a lot of sense to me. It wasn’t until a little bit later that I got to thinking about it. I went through the list of the world’s richest people, who all happen to be in business, and I realized that this statement is not true at all. Let me exhibit some of the world’s richest people and let you see for yourself.

Bill Gates

Larry Flynt

Warren Buffet

Donald Trump

The Sultan of Brunei

The Pope (Yes, he runs a business)