Blog

Small Business Saturday

Posted on by Brian Lee

I like the idea of Small Business Saturday. For those unfamiliar, it was started two years ago by American Express to support small businesses between Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

When you make a purchase from a small business, it helps their bottom line by a much greater percentage than a big box retailer’s. Same in my industry. When we land a contract, it has a larger positive effect on our company than for a large agency.

Of course, I’m not advocating a total avoidance on big box retailers–after all, they were small businesses at some point. But when you can, buy something from a local merchant.

Leave Thanksgiving alone

Posted on by Emilie Buckman

You’re either a person who likes Black Friday or you’re not. I am not. Shopping in crowds of people fighting for deals sounds like an uncertain amount of torture. So when some retailers announced their Black Friday sales would start on actual Thanksgiving, I can’t express how terrible that sounds.

Some people love it and get some sick enjoyment from being pushed around just so they can get a ridiculously good deal on a flat screen TV. While it would never be worth it to me, I get some people derive satisfaction from telling people they fought a middle-aged women for a Wii. (Sorry I couldn’t think of a more recent must have Christmas item.) I just don’t.

Unfortunately those crazy individuals we keep Black Friday going strong But can we keep it to Friday, please? It’s bad enough the trick-or-treaters were not even ringing doorbells and stores had Christmas displays up, but can we leave Thanksgiving alone? Let’ take some time to truly be thankful for Thanksgiving and let people enjoy it with their family and loved ones.

At least there are few stores that have kept the employees and customers’ holiday cheer in mind. Nordstrom’s proudly proclaimed they refused to partake in the Thursday sales to celebrate one holiday at time. I have to say, I like their style.

Either way, I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Good apology by Yahoo! Fantasy Football

Posted on by Brian Lee

Just after 11 a.m. CT Sunday, Nov. 11, I went to the Yahoo! Fantasy Football page to double-check my line-up for any injuries, as I and many others always do. To my surprise, the page didn’t load, and wouldn’t load after many retries. I even tried my mobile app, but that didn’t work either, so I gave up in frustration.

Ken Fuchs, head of Yahoo! Sports, apologized the next day in an email sent to all users. I thought it was well-written: he owned up to the mistake, identified correctly the victims (fantasy football players, NOT Yahoo), didn’t say anything contradictory (e.g. “our servers never fail”) and aligned himself with the victims (“as a Yahoo! Sports fantasy player myself …”).

Two days later, Ken sent another email detailing the problem (new configuration of hardware failed) and offering some compensation (free access to the “Scouting Report” and 20 percent discount to Yahoo! Sports Store).

I was fortunate that the outage didn’t affect me, though I can see how angry some people would be if they didn’t get to set their line-ups prior to the outage. The compensation can’t make up for a lost game, but it can move Yahoo! slowly back in the public’s trust.

My only disappointment was that Yahoo! waited until Monday to say anything. Even some kind of note on Sunday acknowledging that the site was down and was being worked on would have been helpful.

Still, kudos to Yahoo! for how it handled a very tough situation.