Sears, Roebuck vs Amazon Drones......

Logistics is the new industrial revolution.

If I were still a young man in the mining industry I would get up tomorrow morning and set my cap for moving into the process of delivering goods and services from the giant mass of providers to the giant mass of goods and services consumers in the quickest time.

We are experiencing a giant paradigm shift in the way goods and services are ordered and provided.

The first true paradigm shift in getting goods and services to market came from Julius Rosenwald, who was the true visionary behind the giant Sears, Roebuck Company in Chicago. Rosenwald saw an emerging market for goods and services in the western areas of the United States areas where the railroads were expanding and set about creating a logistics solution for this need.

First, Rosewald invented the concept of the printed catalog containing images and descriptions of those products and services meant to lure potential users into a sales contract with Sears. Then, he sent those printed catalogs, by rail or mail, to anyone and everyone on the rail line who requested it. And, this worked.

Buyers pondered the giant Sears catalog by kerosene lamp in those quiet times at night away from the hard chores of farm survival in the west, and ordered their desires by mail the following day.

Today, we are moving toward another paradigm shift in marketing where the physical store experience of going there, browsing and touching our potential purchases before purchasing is becoming less interesting. The internet has become the new Sears catalog where we browse, imagine ourselves using those products and finally committing to a purchase. No need for a printed catalog when that catalog is online.

Our purchases today are brought to our doorstep not by a railroad train but by a delivery van which is connected to realtime to a cloud-based scheduling and logistics app and is using maps technology and traffic reporting to assess the most efficient way to get your order to you.

We now talk of order delivery in terms of aerial drones and self-driving vehicles but the value proposition here is immediacy. How quickly can you deliver my purchase request? Can I have my order this morning, or this afternoon?

Those who abandon job descriptions in waning industries in favor of anything to do with logistics and order fulfillment will be purchasing a ticket on the train which delivered Julius Rosenwald's Sears catalogs idea so successfully to the American public.

© 2017, Jefferson Martin

Bad Marketing Done Badder

 

Rumors of Radio Shack's demise may be premature. At least according to CNBC's websitehttp://goo.gl/AY5hnR

For those of us who soldered together Heathkit crystal radio sets and constructed multi-stable flip flops on breadboard, Radio shack was a great place to visit for all those electrical and electronic parts needed to build those devices. For those who don't know a flip-flop from a inductor coil, you may not think so highly of Radio Shack these days.
Somewhere along the way, Radio Shack seemed to lose its way. Over time personal computers, boom boxes, Walkman knock-offs and cell phones pushed electronic parts and tools to the low traffic confines of the back corner of the store. Computers were sexy. Commodities were not.

But what really killed of Radio Shack for me was the silly insistence on giving up personal information in order to make a purchase. 'The system requires you tell us this in order to ring the sale', a clerk once told me. Well, one phony name, address and phone number later I was allowed to go free with my two dollar battery purchase vowing to never return.

Whatever the Radio Shack Big Brains expected to learn from gathering phony data from unwilling customers is still a mystery.

Point of sale systems could surely provide deeper information about hot items and not-so-hot items, or sales per square foot of sales area. But tracking someone who was already in the store contributed little to getting other non-customers to show up, as well. It was a stupid program and hurt the company in many ways.

I just hope that the new owners of the brand elect to not repeat this ugly piece of marketing history. Now, back to my ham radio set.

#radioshack   #bankruptcy   #micromarketing

Virtuous Cycles and Making Electric Cars

On Virtuous Cycles and Apple Cars..

On occasion, a little hyperbole can make one feel better. But malaise gives way to molar grinding when slavish sycophantism is offered up, instead.

Now that Apple has run out of roadmap for its flagship computer/smartphone/tablet hardware line, it makesperfect sense for the company to go make a car.

You know: if eBay money qualifies you for space travel, then iTunes lucre should get you at least a car company. And the sad thing is the press buying into this hook, line and sinker.

MarketWatch writers have even coined a new term to serve as the mantra for the We Must Be Smart or We Wouldn't Have All This Money dogma: Virtuous Cycle. Read here: http://goo.gl/Nud0K2

Now, I am old enough to have witnessed a couple of these virtuous cycles come and go. Not the least of them was Enron whose black box model for changing a gas pipeline company into a virtual energy company (their words, not mine) which could do no wrong in business was certainly a virtuous cycle. Of course, we know which square Enron landed on when the cycle's end became inevitable.

Forget that Apple has no experience making big things. They'll find folks who do, right? Sure.

Forget that we are nowhere close to being able to supply electrical power- from any combination of sources- to power a complete transition to electric vehicles in the next one hundred years.

And, forget the fact that a company which has never, ever successfully operated a commercial software initiative is expecting to enter into embedded, life-critical software applications development?

Must miracles abound to make this happen? Or just properly shaded glasses?





#apple   #applecar   #enron   #virtuouscycle   #iphone  #ipad   #macbook   #elonmusk

Is Apple's retail store doomed?

 

My first experience with Apple's retail store was in Timonium, MD. I went there to pick up a new PowerBook Titanium laptop.

Waiting for my order to be filled, I strolled between the stylish tables bearing laptops, towers, massive displays like a newly arrived Cardinal swaggering through a Vatican library. The deities were surely smiling down upon this place.

I admired the boxed software arranged neatly into wall shelves as I would have a Pollack or a Raphael. Yes, the current selection was slim but I knew this would be remedied as this new OS X operating system surely became the industry standard. Software providence would abound.

Cue Reality
Apple hardware suffered the same failures as any PC did; OS X wasn't really that much better than Windows and most business software tools we wanted never showed up for the Mac platform.

In the Apple stores, software shelf space shrank and computer hardware gave way to iPods, iPhones, iPads and headphones. The word entertainment made more sense than computing.

Changed World
Since Apple opened its retail stores the world has changed in ways which leave these outlets less useful.

Android has devoured the mobile market leaving Apple with but 12% of the global share. This means consumers are actually choosing between the three major platforms - iOS, Android and Windows - and this is being done at Target, BestBuy, the carrier's retail store or online. Not at the Apple store.

Adding to these woes, Google's Chromebookecosystem is chipping away at Apple's market share in the hardware channel. Microsoft's beta release of the cross-platform Windows 10 is experiencing record-setting downloads which may foretell a shift of Apple hardware users back to the PC fold. Happened to me!

Bricks & Mortar No More
Apple seems to be guiding itself toward revenue streams which offer little to draw consumers into their retail stores. Apple Pay and a new music delivery system won't need bricks and mortar to thrive.

Considering the costs to maintain these properties in high traffic, upscale areas, a shrinkage of the Apple retail system is inevitable.

The deities may no longer be smiling down on the Apple retail stores, perhaps.






#apple   #appleretailstore   #android   #chromebook  #windows10   #ipad   #ipod  

Snuff Dipping Man Stories

Ninety-nine Year Old Snuff-dipping Man Stories
Or, 150 Years Is a Long, Long Time

As a five year old, I met a ninety-nine year old man who enthralled me with stories about his days as a boy drummer in the Confederate army.

He was born and lived his life in a hand-hewn log cabin where he claimed to have hidden gunpowder and ammunition stolen from the Union soldiers underneath the gray, weathered porch boards. There may be some literary license in that tale, I caution you.

The old man reminded me of Popeye the Sailor with his long, jutting, stubbly chin and crooked toothless smile. I was also mesmerized with the little snuff dipping stick lodged in the corner of his mouth floating up and down against gravity with his every spoken syllable.

I have to come to realize that my life stands squarely between two extremes. Behind me I can reach back to the year 1853, or so, through the remembrances of an old man, and before me is a seven year old child who could live to be ninety-nine, too, carrying with him these same stories: crossing a 150 year time span.

I was among the last people to hear Uncle Elijah tell his stories before he died sitting in his rocking chair, creaking across those same gray porch boards of his childhood home.




#civilwar   #conferedatearmy   #drummer  

Note: While I am waiting for my nueropathways to re-map, I am recycling some very old blog posts from the past.

From Jellyroll to Jagger

Our seven year old is infatuated with the Rolling Stones circa 1965.

He has a vintage (read that, old) Sony stereo setup with a great vinyl turntable which has not stopped turning since the holiday school break began.

While listening to his favorite Rolling Stones song,Satisfaction, from the album Out of Our Heads for the six hundredth time, something dawned on me: that song is fifty. years. old.

Would anybody in 1965 have been listening to Jelly Roll Morton, Al Jolsen or Irving Berlin songs from 1915 on the hi-fi and dancing around the room? I doubt it and there must be some meaning hidden deep in the grooves of vinyl LP's that we just don't understand quite yet.

Puzzling us is the nature of the game.

Image: Songwriter Jelly Roll Morton ca 1915 and Mick Jagger ca 1965.


(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, Words & Music Keith Richards & Mick Jagger, ©1965 ABKCO Publishing

(With a professional songwriter as a significant other, I am conditioned to add songwriter attribution wherever and whenever required!)

#rollingstones   #mickjagger   #satisfaction    #jellyrollmorton  

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Touching Enola Gay

Atomic Secrets
Who gets tossed out of a museum?

I'll admit it. Aside from me, I know of no other person tossed out of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. I blame it on atomic energy.

Most folks traverse the wonderful exhibits at Air & Space maintaining a sense of decorum. And most are satisfied to admire the various aircraft and spacecraft from afar. But, not I on that particular day in 1998.

My downfall was the Enola Gay exhibit in Gallery 103. Somehow, standing next to the very airplane that dropped the first atomic weapon in history drew me to that decision point where bank robbers open bank doors and regular schmoes like me become willful scofflaws. I decided to touch the airplane.

I milled around the exhibit casing the joint and waiting for the crowds to thin a bit before making my move. I located the barrier with the least distance between me the plane's nosegear.(see the attached image)

I considered the length of my arm's reach against the fulcrum presented at my stomach as I leaned in and determined it could be done.

I looked at the nosegear, then I looked at the security guard standing in the shadow near the main entrance door. I narrowed my eyes, fixed my glaze upon him and he upon me likewise in the fashion of two cowboys facing off in the dusty street in front of the saloon. It was him or me now.

The guard took a step forward from the shadows never breaking his gaze on me. "You aren't going to touch the exhibit are you?", he asked. "Yes, I am.", I croaked in my best Harry Callahan voice.

Doing so, he informed me, would be sufficient cause for him to escort me to the front door of the museum and throw me out. I replied, "That's fine."

At that precise moment I leaned over, stretched out and touched the nosewheel assembly; the guard grabbed me under the arm the way law enforcement officers are trained to do, and we silently made our way to one of the entrance doors on Independence Avenue. He released my arm and pushed me through the open door and I landed back in sunshine. 

I turned around as he called out to me. "You can go around to the other side and come back in. I know why you touched it but I gotta do my do my job. Just don't touch any more exhibits today, brother." 

I thanked him then walked around the building and re-entered the museum on the Mall side with a scofflaw's spring in the step and atomic glint in the eye. I had touched history.

Current Enola Gay exhibit at National Air & Space Museum: http://goo.gl/x4iwmE

Image: National Air & Space Museum, Washington, DC website.


#enolagay   #nationalairandspacemuseum  #hiroshima   #littleboy   #atomicenergy  #atomicbomb   #b29   #tibbets