Chasing your customers

Poor, poor JPMorgan Chase. For all their squillions in assets, and the billions they pay their senior executive team, they just do not get this whole social media thing.

It’s been five and a half years since someone thought it would be a good idea to have an Ask Me Anything Twitter session with the investment banking side’s vice chairman Jimmy Lee. Before he even got into his corner office that week, Twitter had dumped so thoroughly on the concept that JPMorgan cancelled the session.

I’m proud to say that I joined the squadrons of trolls and did my part, my first experience ever with drawing even a tiny prick of blood.

It was a classic misstep—a total fiasco—and they don’t appear to have learned from it. Because on Monday, the consumer side of the megalith tweeted something that someone thought was clever advice for their struggling customers—under the hashtag #MondayMotivation—and the response was so [predictably] overwhelmingly negative, that they took down the tweet in less than three hours.

But of course, the evil that tweets do live long after their bones are interrèd. Twitterati continued to pile on to screen caps of the tweet, and here are some of the examples:

Two members of Congress who have been forthright in their criticism of Big Banks (both, coincidentally, women and Democrats) had a few thoughts to tweet. First up, Representative Katie Porter, who only a couple of weeks ago dragged JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a House committee hearing by running him through the parlous financial situation of one of his actual employees in her Southern California district. She repeatedly asked the guy who received a compensation package of $31M last year what advice he’d give this bank teller on how to make ends meet. And he repeatedly replied, “I’ll have to think about that.”

Presumably he’s thought about it and would now advise his employees to eat the food already in their fridges and stop taking taxis for three-block rides.

And then Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who famously told WellsFargo’s then-CEO to his face that he should resign over the bank’s massive and systemic fraudulent practices, had something to say:

At some point during the day, a somewhat chastened @Chase posted this non-apology:

But here’s the tweet that pretty much sums up the world’s reaction:

As for JPMorgan’s social media woes: womp, womp.

Logistics

The move a couple of weeks ago wasn’t the worst one, but it also wasn’t the best. Considering all the recommendations I’d got for this moving company, and their advertising on local PBS stations about how much care they take of your possessions, the lasting impression that JK Moving gave me was that my business is not really worth their time.

I mentioned before how they gave me a quote for cross-country relocation that was way over the odds of what other companies estimated. (And some of those other companies were reputable, even.) And that, not content to charge me more than 20% of my interstate costs, their final price for a 20-mile move was 12% over the estimate.

But over the weekend I discovered that one of these movers had jammed a yoga mat and its carrying bag into what the Container Store calls a Vertical Gift Wrap Organizer. Along with a used plastic water bottle and candy bar wrapper, packing tape roll and other trash:

And when I say “jammed”, I mean with such force that the container broke at the bottom:

Now, here’s one of the things I hate about movers—and in fairness to JK, every moving company I’ve used in the past 20 years has done this—they know when they’ve damaged something, but instead of fessing up to it, they try to hide it. Does this stuff come out of their individual pockets?

(For my relocation from Virginia to Seattle, the Mayflower unloaders actually put a floor lamp they’d bent in transit behind a wall of cartons in a backyard storage shed. Like I wasn’t going to notice that the one source of light for the living room was missing and go looking for it.)

Sure enough, my trained professionals put the bin, smashed side to the wall, in a closet. And left me to dispose of their rubbish when I opened it up to see why it might have broken.

So, not that they care, I won’t be recommending them to anyone in the near future.

It's 2016: do you know where your money is?

Here are some numbers from the Wells Fargo & Company widespread fraudulent practices that brought CEO John Stumpf to Capitol Hill yesterday.

- Phony accounts created without customers’ knowledge or permission: 565,443 credit cards, 1.5 million deposit accounts.

- Fees charged to customers/victims over a period of years: $400,000 and counting (including annual fees, interest charges and overdraft-protection fees)

- Credit scores lowered or ruined: unknown

- Fines assessed to WFC by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: $185 million, which they’ll find between the cushions in the sofas in the executive lounge 

- Low-level bank employees fired…two weeks ago: 5300

- Senior managers (or even mid-level ones) who’ve had their salary, bonus or job security affected: bloody sod all.

Stumpf spent about an hour dodging questions at a Senate hearing, mostly from Democrats; Republicans may have been busy planning their next statement on why they’re not considering the President’s nominee to SCOTUS. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., gave Stumpf an earful, as he kept maintaining that he and other executives knew nothing about the systemic practices, even after they launched a half-hearted “investigation” into allegations…back in 2013, and that it’s up to WFC’s board to make any, you know, decisions on whether anyone with a C or a V in their title should expect a lower bonus this year. Not his.

(Warren used words on Stumpf that he is probably and surprisingly unused to hearing. "You should resign. You should give back the money that you took while this scam was going on, and you should be criminally investigated by both the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission." Warren has a bigger set of brass ones than all 99 of her colleagues in the Senate have rolled together.)

No, he doesn't know anything about making monetary decisions, as the CEO of a major financial institution. “I’m not an expert in compensation,” he said.

But I’ll bet he checks his direct deposit notifications religiously and accounts for every penny in bonus and executive entitlements.

I wonder if his accounts are with WFC?

Stumpf’s disclaimer and crocodile apology (“I am deeply sorry that we failed to fulfill our responsibility to our customers, to our team members and to the American public. I want to apologize for violating the trust our customers have invested in Wells Fargo. And I want to apologize for not doing more sooner to address the causes of this unacceptable activity.”) follows the usual pattern for his ilk. He’s not sorry that his company of 265,000 employees embarked on a multi-year predation of the most vulnerable of its individual customers; after all, think of all those years he was raking in his salary and bonus. He’s not even sorry that they got caught at it. He’s only sorry that it’s looking like there might be some negative consequences to him personally.

He doesn’t give a rat’s about anyone else, up or down the food chain.

Those numbers at the top of this post? None of them is of the least concern to Stumpf. The only one that matters is that he keeps his $19.3 million annual package.

You know what’s really wonderful about all this? As in “I wonder what the actual fuck is going on”? That it’s 2016, nine years after all those too-big-to-fail banks and brokerages were first exposed as engaging in industrial-strength long-term fraud. (And, when caught, went all Uriah Heep in the company of their multitudes of attorneys.) 

And yet here we are again.

WTAF.

Rag trade

This piece ran in Sunday’s Washington Post Opinion section, and it sparked a veritable storm of comments. Because it points out a fact of contemporary life that is blindingly obvious to every woman over the age of 30: the ready-to-wear clothes we’re being offered everywhere from Banana Republic to Ann Taylor are ugly, over-priced, shoddy and not designed for actual female body shapes. And the buying public are therefore declining to pay good money for schmattas that pill, rip, shrink, fade and otherwise fail to fulfill their function.

Ergo the more than 2000 responses from WaPo readers who do not want to wear low-riding jeans, transparent knit off-the-shoulder or sleeveless tops, mini-skirts or other garments that make you look like you’re on the game. Especially when worn with the four-inch heels that seem inescapable in either shoes or boots.

(Seriously: I get the feeling that the fashion industry thinks that the only women with money to spend on clothes are stick insects with the sophistication of Hannah Montana. What makes me really uncomfortable about this is that “the look” is decidedly sexualized, like tweens on parade on websites that I don’t really want to think about.)

Sales are down noticeably in these retailers, but evidently not enough to get them to start asking what women actually do want, which is an interesting business model. Because what they want are clothes that fit a variety of body types (some of which encompass curves), in colors that flatter and realistic sizes, and that don’t start falling apart the moment you walk out of the store. Quelle idée!

Here’s une autre idée: the retailers might consider the buyer experience. Because that, too, is clearly targeted at the younger millennial. You walk into any store in a mall, from Forever 21 to Nordstrom, and ear-damagingly loud music of some indeterminate origin assails you. It’s basically screaming (um): “We don’t want your money! Go away! You can’t handle the hipness!” When Nordstrom replaced their live piano with ersatz head-banging crap throughout the store, I recognized it as a sign of the End Days. So I just don’t go in there.

Then there’s the third-world feeling of shabbiness you get when you walk into a store with jumbled merchandise on tables and overstuffed racks, the entirely predictable outcome of corporate stinginess in staffing. A friend of mine in the Valley They Call Silicon used to pick up some extra cash working at Macy’s in the Stanford Mall during the holidays. Stanford Mall draws upscale shoppers, but that Macy’s looks like your average Kohl’s: clothes littering the sales floor (not just the dressing rooms), racks so crammed you can’t pull something out…ugh. Beth had a completely Sisyphean task of trying to make things neat, because she was the only one covering several departments.

And it’s not limited to that one store. I was in the Macy’s in Pentagon City at the weekend, with a 25% discount card. Between the fashion offerings and the slightly grody environment, I could not get out of there fast enough. I handed off my discount card to a trio of British tourists coming in as I was leaving.

Also—the industry’s humiliating approach to sizing might be worth a revisit. Marilyn Monroe was a size 12. These days retailers disdain to carry any double-digit sizes, even though it’s not a very well-kept secret that the American population is expanding in waistline as well as numbers. Why would clothing manufacturers and retailers basically fat-shame women by telling them that if they want something above a 10, they need to take their money and go online?

Moreover—these days a Size [whatever] is not a Size [whatever] across the board. Even from a single manufacturer, since the label goes on hundreds of items that actually come from factories wherever labor is cheapest, and China, Mexico, Ghana, Vietnam, Bangladesh and other places are not standardizing cutting templates. Nor, let it be noted, are the label-owners interested in paying for standardizing, since every nickel they shell out means that much less profit.

This means that trying to buy anything without trying it on first is a crapshoot with the odds decidedly not in your favor. Who has the kind of time to burn that allows you to take three sizes of everything into the dressing room until you hit lucky? Or to return items bought online in the vain hope that your guess on size would be right?

When I posted the WaPo story on Facebook someone said, “That’s why Goodwill is the way to go.” Well, except that thrift and consignment stores are hit and miss: Yes, you can find some good quality things, but the retail gods must be smiling directly upon you for you to strike while there’s something you like in your size. Plus, when you factor in their usually limited hours, if you’re working a 9-5 M-F gig, you only effectively have Saturday to make the rounds of second-hand stores. I, for one, don’t have that kind of energy or time.

If any retailers or manufacturers were reading the comments to the WaPo piece, I hope they were wearing protective eye gear, because there were floods of caustic words flowing. I also hope they take on board some of the sentiments: Holy crap, people: don’t treat the money-wielding market like we should be ashamed to want apparel that suits us, whatever we look like. This is pretty basic market awareness; think you can manage that?

Oh, and for the love of God, would you give us pockets?

Back to the stone age with Verizon

When I was working for a college newspaper, the professors/advisers used to threaten less conscientious reporters with going to press with a huge white hole in a page, slugged “This blank space brought to you by [name of reporter who didn’t get copy in by deadline].”

Well, today’s hot steaming pile of white space is brought to you by Verizon FiOS, a company that has accomplished what I had not thought possible: it’s made me wish I had Comcast back.

Both phone and Internet service went belly up on Wednesday. When I called their we-won’t-help line and got Eric somewhere in the Philippines, he ran a line test and informed me that the problem was with “the big box”. (Not the first time since I moved in two months ago that I’ve had to call Verizon about equipment failure.) This turned out to be the high-rise apartment building equivalent of the customer premises equipment (CPE) box that regulates the “last mile” of wire from a central line to each customer’s unit.

And Verizon would have a technician out to look at it…sometime between 0900 and 1700 on Thursday.

Checking yesterday on the Verizon trouble ticket got me this:

Their idea of "working hard" is a possible fix two days after the failure is reported.

So, without access to my normal blogging device (i.e., personal laptop), I’m doing a quick bootleg post from work.

Where I’m also checking out Comcast services. Because their equipment is working fine in my apartment building.