Monday 16th June 2003
Me again. The hardest-working slacker on the 'net. Three updates in as many days. Behold the wow.
Notwithstanding any competitors, most of whom would require a minimum run of hundreds of units, paid for in advance, the literal cost per unit outside CP--using an inkjet printer to create these things as necessary--would involve the basic materials, the ink, the electricity, and so on.
Erm...the 'no profanity' clause prohibits me.
That last bit about Rodney may require an explanation out of context. Rodney is the moderator for the messageboard this was on. He's pretty fair about editing and deleting posts, but...it's not really a 'but' thing, I guess; in this case, after reading a few hundred posts from a few dozen whimpering sophists, I finally snapped and posted this after seeing a lesser complaint--that postcards are sold in sets, which scares off people only wanting to buy one at a time, followed by the declaration that 'I'm exploring doing postcards/notecards myself'.
This one should be fun....
Okay. Thing one. Yesterday's What's New featured an EMail about Target refusing to fund veterans; since uploading it, I've learned that snopes.com already mentioned it, along with the full story explaining why it's a hoax. My coffeechick and research assistant will be getting a spanking over this.
Nonetheless: I still dislike Target for dropping cigarettes, and I still dislike the military for wasting millions on bombs and getting frugal when their employees can't cover rent. Urban legends aside, there's something very wrong with this planet.
Which brings me to another concern. Merchandising.
In case you haven't noticed, we've got some really cool merch available. Of course, we've also got some really dumb shit no one would ever want. Ironically, the latter category outsells the former. But that's not my concern; I've known that people are weird for a while now.
My concern is yet other people.
It's a longish story....
Once upon a time, I came up with the alarming original idea of putting funny/kooky/upsetting things on shirts. Which is probably second only to the idea that 'I should have my own talkshow' among wouldn't-it-be-great hypotheses. So I put it on hold until I had the means to consider actually doing something about it.
A few years ago, I ran into the opportunity. To end the suspense: it didn't work. I found a company on the 'net [eek] which would allow me to upload jpegs and let them screenprint the jpegs onto shirts for me. Yay. I jumped on it.
The first problem, it turned out, was that the company suddenly decided that, despite the contract in which they'd screenprint our stuff onto black shirts for free, sending us a commission from the retail, it was a far better idea to print ironons and ship those out instead--after we'd advertised screenprinted shirts, based on what we'd agreed to. Which sucked, since the people buying the shirts were taking my word for it that they were prints, and not transfers. So I stopped advertising the merch.
Next: the company sent me my money. As a cheque. Which bounced. Then they DotCommed into extinction. Good for them.
So we moved on. I looked into other options, and worked out that the best deal was to outsource to have stuff screenprinted in bulk. For those thinking this is a good idea: it is. Provided that you have ten thousand bucks to waste on what you hope people will like. It also helps a lot to have a place to put several hundred shirts, and the budget to ship them here and there. Having the money to waste, I wasted it. The system works. The shirts look good; people like them; it's annoying as all hell dealing with processing orders, shipping orders, and so on. It's a fulltime gig. And it cuts into videogame time.
If only someone could do everything that dead DotCom had promised to do, without sucking and/or going bankrupt....
Halfway through thinking that sentence, I noticed that a friend of mine was selling shirts with his website logo on them. A click later, I found out how he was doing it. Such a company existed after all. CafePress.com.
These guys work out nicely. They handle everything, essentially for free. Printing, processing, advertising, shipping, and even returns. The first time money becomes an issue is after someone's bought whatever you've created. So you can test out whatever dumb idea you might have at zero risk. If no one likes it, you're not wishing you hadn't spent thousands to print the stuff up.
Of course, once something sells, they take a largish chunk of the retail. Up to 100%, if you let them. Which is to say that you can let people buy the stuff at cost. Otherwise, you can mark it up to whatever people will pay. Basic capitalism. Great.
CafePress had shirts. That was a couple of years ago. Today, they've expanded into a massive product mix. Everything from bumperstickers and postcards to jackets and framed, matted prints. With more to come. Great.
So you can imagine, knowing the alternative, how irksome it might be to see other users complaining about this free service. If not, it's this irksome.
People complain that the wholesale cost of some of this stuff is higher than the retail cost of things they've found on sale at WalMart. Why? Lots of reasons. Primarily that this is a company investing a lot of money into a lot of machinery which never gets used until someone has ordered a single product. The basic system works like this:
Think of something to offer. We could offer bumperstickers. Bumperstickers exist. We're not really inventing something new here. It's possible.
Find out how to make bumperstickers. By paying people to go find out. Find out what sort of gear is required to make them. Find out what the gear costs. Find out what the materials cost. Find out what the ink costs. Find out how you UVCoat the vinyl once it's printed. Find out everything there is to find out.
Figure out the total startup cost. Machinery, supplies, software, training, et cetera. Concept to first order, what's it going to cost to make this an option.
Buy all this stuff. Train all these people. Debug all this software. Make all this happen.
Open it up. Announce that bumperstickers can be made. Announce also what the wholesale of the bumperstickers, based on the materials, machinery, staff, processing, and so on are going to cost, along with the basic mathematical need to make a little more than you spend to stay alive. It doesn't take a genius to work out that the wholesale cost of a custom-printed prototype of commercial retail value is going to cost more than a dime or two.
Or, maybe it does.
Because every fucking day another whimpering moron claims that they could do all of this with nothing more than OfficeMax, a Lexmark, and Mom's basement. Who knew a teenager could singlehandedly produce all this shit for a few cents when it cost me thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to do it before I started letting these guys do it, risk-free, for the majority of the retail price.
Which inspired me to snap. And which rant resulting from which snapping will probably get deleted by the moderator before it goes fully flamewar. So I'll reprint it here, where it won't seem quite so personal against anyone in particular....
I'll take the liberty of assuming that no one is going to cut down and mulch trees to make the cardstock, extract the ink from octopi, or hire a team to turn the cranks on generators to accomplish all this; it's easier to outsource to Mead, Canon, and Excel.
That cost diverted to other companies, we may have to order enough materials in advance to keep up with the desired demand, should this postcard endeavour really take off. Of course, in that event, we could go back to preprinting the things for a few thousand bucks. Either way, we may have to find a space large enough to store the raw materials until we have a reason to use them.
PayPal.com, and other user-to-user merchant services will save us some money; it used to cost about a thousand bucks a month just for the ability to take plastic, not including the transaction fees of two to five percent.
Shipping, in and out, has a cost. The cost is a writeoff, like most of this is, but it still exists. Factor that.
And we're almost done. Except that no one knows or cares. Because most people aren't capable--with or without FrontPage--of writing a website, integrating the creditcard SSL, setting it up to be spidered and catalogued quickly and precisely by yahoo/google.com, and so on. Set aside about $150 per hour to have someone do that for you; count on about ten hours of coding, or more, depending on your needs.
When that's all done, take another look at CP. Giving them the lion's share of the retail suddenly doesn't sound so bad.
Yes: we put all the effort into designing the merch. Good for us. But there's a lot more to the process than creating and uploading an image for a postcard. Or a CD. Or a TShirt.
I know a little about this. I freecoded gremlin.net in WordPad: the hypertext, the JavaScript, the Perl...it takes time, testing, and, for most people, money. I've outsourced for TShirts, paying in advance for screenprinted designs on black shirts; they run about four bucks each, before shipping, as long as you buy at least seventy-two of each design, of each size. Which means that I've spent ten thousand bucks on shirts and countless hours on coding, just to get to the precise point, on my own, at which anyone else starts with CP. Believe it or not, I kinda prefer the ability to think of something I could put on a shirt at three in the morning, and have the design done, uploaded, applied, advertised, and available by four. For free. With no personal concern for the demand. Worst case, people dig it and buy it, and I'm out seventy-five percent of the retail price, making only about five bucks. To me, that's better than risking ten to twenty thousand bucks to leap into six weeks of downtime while the shirts are preprinted in bulk and shipped to me so I can first find a place to put a couple hundred cubic feet of boxes, and next hope that they actually sell to a world which has probably never heard of them.
Of course, this point has been exhaustively investigated. But it never seems to sink fully in. Of course I'd prefer the ability to print whatever I like on whatever I like in whatever colours I like; I'd like that to cost me nothing, before or after the sale; I'd like the availability of this wondermerch to be advertised on every major network once an hour and twice during the superbowl; I'd like to do nothing more than think things up, say the word, and forget about it until I get my monthy cheque for ten million bucks. I'd also like a flying car and a summer home on Mars. Until any or all of those options become available, I'll stick with what I've got.
Of all the options I've got, the ability to go from concept to to sale in under an hour and less than a cent is one of my current favourites.
[response] OK, but what do you REALLY think?
To be honest, my thinking is that the people complaining about this free service have no idea what the alternative is. My thinking [read: hope] is that the majority of people complaining about CP's policies are kids playing corporate. My thinking is that the complaints that CP charge $X for what they do, or prevent people from putting the Hulk on a shirt, or take their time perfecting the bookprinting process before opening the option, or 'suck', very nearly, yet not quite, completely defy rational response.
Which is not to say that I'm naming names. I don't mean to imply that this particular thread is exclusively deserving of my thoughts. It's just the latest in an endless series of bitching and moaning about the real world, which is apparently shown to these people only by CafePress.com. Posting it as a standalone would be definitively offtopic, so it ended up here, in the last thread I saw before either explaining this or breaking something I'd like to keep.
Ironically, my largest concern isn't that CP don't take us seriously, but that they do. My concern is that every time someone with CP sees one of these complaints, the potential exists for CP to drop things like postcards and bumperstickers and all the other things we all wanted, which some of us still really like having, just because all the feedback is so negative.
I'm not with CP; I'm just another user. I have a few issues with CP, on occasion, just like anyone else. Usually, the issues I have can be resolved by a single EMail; I even had to call them once to keep someone on the phone and accountable until the problem was fixed. Aimlessly complaining--particularly with nothing resembling a logical alternative--accomplishes nothing useful. What it does is convinces other users and potential users that CP suck; and, with no one speaking positively about the services the majority of us actually happen to like, CP themselves could take these baseless complaints to mean that none of us wants the service to remain.
In reality, it probably doesn't matter much. People have complained for the sake of complaining in the past, coincidentally about products which later became unavailable for unrelated reasons; then, suddenly, the same people complain about the products disappearing. CP have probably worked out that the majority just complain to justify their posts.
Today, people complain that the books aren't out yet. Tomorrow, the same people will complain that the books cost too much. Next week, they'll complain that the books are no longer available. And so on. It's simply the trend. And it'll probably never actually die out.
Still: there's only so many times you can see the same basic whimpering before you kinda have to step in and call, erm, 'nonsense'. That's what I really think.
If this all seems directly exclusive to a couple of reasonably innocent concerns about the necessity of selling cards in bulk, then realise that it's not the specific complaint, but the general one.
I'll leave it to Rodney to decide that, though. If this works as a standalone, he can move it to its own thread; if it seems malicious beyond need, he can delete it. It's his call and I'm okay with whichever he decides.So the rant mirrorred above was inferred to be in direct response to that, although it was really in response to the multitudinous bullshit I've been seeing for years now. Which may have been a mistake.
Could be worse, I suppose. I could have complained that the wholesale cost of a single shirt is oddly higher than Hanes charge per unit if you buy a million at a time. Especially if I posted the complaint under something like Website Suggestions, or something. Oh well.
So I'm moving it here, instead. Where people are a little less shocked, after all these years, to see me complain about idiocy.
And, you can too. Yes, it's time once again for the Daily Caption Contest. Which is not necessarily daily, and isn't really a contest. If you haven't caught on by now, we give you an image to look at, and you come up with a caption explaining it for us on the messageboard.
Here's today's jpeg. What could possibly be going on here, do you think....
More later....
--Gremlin