The blog of Dave Lahn

Last week a letter came in the mail at work and has been making it’s way around the store. It’s a typical scam letter where someone has died and you can now inherit 77.7M dollars. I’ve scanned it for your enjoyment. It’s quite a good read.

The funny thing is that some people are gullible enough to actually fall for something like this. I found it quite surprising that it actually came through the mail. Usually you just see something like this come through into the junk folder in your email, and you don’t even give a look at it.

You would think by now that there would be legislation against this type of activity, but the police don’t seem to want anything to do with it. It’s one thing if it comes through as an email, but coming as a letter, you are sure to scam more people than usual.

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

The Results Only Work Environment is a system implemented by BestBuy’s corporate offices. It is fairly self explanatory, but in short, employees are just expected to produce good quality work on time, they are not expected to be at work for a set amount of time.

For the longest time, working 7.5 hour days was expected of you. This is becoming optional in a lot of businesses as of late. BestBuy’s experiments with this system has shown about a 35% increase in productivity, and a decrease in turnover rates. Some employees at BestBuy are even working from home, and only go into the office for meetings, which are also optional.

Face it, meetings for the most part are a gigantic waste of time, and usually can be resolved by a simple e-mail, phone call, or a short face-to-face conversation. I suggest reading Kill Meetings to Get More Done at Lifehack.org.

I personally think that this is a system that we are going to see more and more in the workplace. This system empowers employees, and allows them to manage their own time without the feeling that someone is always checking up on them. I hope that I have some of this flexibility when I move into the workforce permanently because I personally work more productively in the morning. By 3pm I’m usually in the mindset to call it quits for the day.

Has your workplace adopted anything like this yet? Is this something you would want to do?

As most people know, one of the most influential shows on TV has come to an end after 6 seasons. In my opinion, it certainly did not end in a bang. The ending simply consisted of Tony Soprano sitting with his family in a restaurant. The screen suddenly went black, and the credits rolled in silence.

Perhaps I have to watch it again to try to make some more sense of it. The series however, ended exactly how it began. It started with Tony Soprano just living his life and trying to figure things out, and it ends exactly the same, with him just living his life.

It has been one of my favourite shows, so I am sad to see it end. I guess there is still hope for HBO’s Entourage, which has also made its way into my TV watching schedule.

Last night I decided to see what movies were available on TMN On Demand and decided to watch Sidekick. At first I was a little bit reluctant to watch the movie because the plot line didn’t sound all that interesting, but it turned out to be a pretty funny movie.

Mild-mannered computer consultant Norman Neale has two great loves in this cruel world: Comic books and his office’s effervescent main receptionist.

The movie is about Norman trying to train a normal person who has super powers, in order for him to be able to become their sidekick. Unfortunately for him, things go very wrong. The movie lends itself well for a sequel.

On another note, the series finale of The Sopranos airs tonight at 9pm on TMN. I can’t wait to see how it ends. It’ll be very interesting to see how they tie up all of the loose ends. I haven’t posted anything about The Sopranos so far because I’ve been waiting until the very end to comment.