A few years back, I bought an Apple Time Capsule.  I had just purchased a new iMac to replace my Power Macintosh G5.  The G5 had two internal drives, allowing me to use Time Machine (Apple’s automatic incremental backup/snapshot system) on the second drive.  As the iMac has no provision for a second internal drive, my choices were to attach an external drive, or go for the Time Capsule.  I bought the Time Capsule, thinking it would be more useful: it could also back up a few other Macs in the house.

I just bought a newer iMac, and I bought a FireWire external disk for it and migrated my backups.  It’s time to bury the Time Capsule.

First, I should say I didn’t have any problems with the Time Capsule’s reliability—unlike, apparently, a great many people.  It seems that early builds of the Time Capsule were prone to premature failure.

No, it’s the actual usability of the thing that soured me.

The Time Capsule is essentially a wireless access point with an integrated network-accessable storage (NAS) device.  Time Machine is picky; it won’t play nice with many other NAS devices.  However, it doesn’t seem to be a particularly fast NAS device.

My iMac was connected via a Gigabit Ethernet network. While I can copy files Mac to Mac over my GigE network at essentially the limits of the hard drives’ speeds, the Time Capsule is a laggard. It seems like it has an underpowered processor. That wouldn’t be surprising, except that Apple commands a premium price for the device, and Apple now has their very own powerful embedded processor chip, the A4.

The poor network performance pales, however, compared to the way Apple chose to implement Time Machine for networked volumes.

On a system with a directly-attached hard drive for Time Machine, Mac OS X uses features of the HFS+ filesystem to work the backup magic. These features aren’t available to network-mounted volumes.  To work around this, Time Machine creates a disk image file on the Time Capsule in a “sparse bundle” format that can grow and be modified as backups are made.

It takes forever for the system to parse in the disk image. Even with a dual 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo.  Even with a quad-core Core i7. If you’ve changed a lot of files, your hourly backup may take more than an hour.  During that time, your system can be sluggish as it deals with the backups.

But that’s nothing compared to trying to restore a file.

With a directly-attached drive, Time Machine is wonderfully responsive.  You can fly back through time, find your file, and restore it in short order.

With a Time Capsule, you’re going to need a lot of patience.  You’ll click on the Time Machine icon… and wait.  Eventually, you may get a progress bar telling you that it’s working on mounting the backup image.  You’ll wait another minute or two.  Finally, the Time Machine screen will appear.  Twenty or forty seconds after that, the contents of the directory you want to restore may actually show up on that screen.  When you click to go further back than the most recent backup… prepare for lag.  The further you go back, the longer the wait.  Uncharacteristically for Apple, there’s no feedback to reassure you that the system is doing something with all these pauses; if you aren’t within sight of your Ethernet switch to notice the blinking lights, you might think the system has frozen.

Did I mention that it’s even slower if more than one computer is trying to read or write to it at a time?

With the Time Capsule, you have to be truly committed to restoring a file to put up with the delays.

The really crazy part came when I tried to delete the sparsebundle file after using Disk Utility to restore its contents onto my new FireWire drive.  After the Finder warned me that the file would be deleted immediately, and I clicked OK, it took about an hour for it to delete the one file.  (That’s probably because it’s a bundle hiding who knows how many actual files behind one icon.)

It does work, if agonizingly slowly, and it has saved us from disaster once: my girlfriend’s hard drive died, but we were able to restore its contents from the Time Machine backup on the Time Capsule.  Of course, it took the better part of a day to restore under 200GB of data, but she was happy to get her stuff back.

One place where the Time Capsule does fall down is in certain migrations from one Mac to another.  The files on the Time Capsule are keyed to the system’s name and MAC address.  When you move to a new Mac, you may find you have to create a new backup file on the Time Capsule.  While you can still access the old file, Time Machine will no longer automatically prune that file when your backups fill the Time Capsule.  You’ll either have to delete your old backup image, accept a much smaller active backup space, or attach an external USB2.0 drive to the Time Capsule for additional storage.  In my case, I used Disk Utility to “restore” the old image onto a new external hard drive.  When I pointed Time Machine at the external hard drive, it recognized that it contained backups for a Mac with a different name, and asked if I wanted to use it anyway. You don’t get this option if all you have is the Time Capsule.

I hope Apple creates a Time Capsule Version 2 that’s actually useful for backing up and restoring multiple Macs in one household. I’d like to see a version that has two or three 2.5-inch, 10k RPM drives with a hardware RAID, and an A4 processor providing wire-speed networking. It should also implement a network protocol that works natively with Time Machine, not using the wonky sparsebundle format and its speed flaws. (However, it should have some way to dump any given machine’s backups to a disk image, so that users can migrate.

In the meantime, my advice to Mac users is: if at all feasible, go buy external FireWire 800 or USB2.0 hard drives for each of your Macs, and use that as your Time Machine setup.  It will be faster, it will be easier to deal with, and you’ll get more use out of them.  External hard drives are cheap nowadays.

Being the first of several reviews of grocery stores in the Kingston, New York area.

Adams Fairacre Farms is a three-store chain in the Hudson Valley of New York.  It’s really more of a “Super Farm Market,” as they advertise themselves, than a grocery store.

The good

When you walk into Adams, you walk into the store’s best department:  the fruits and vegetables.  Adams works with local farms to stock as much local produce as possible.  In general, they have higher-quality produce than any of the chain stores at any given time of year, even if it isn’t local.  If you care about quality veg, one trip to Adams will convince you to make it a regular weekly stop.

Adams’ meat department is no comparison to the local competition; it rivals any dedicated butcher shop for variety and quality.  They stock both quality “store brand” meat—typically better than the premium national brands found at other stores—and high-end brands like Bell and Evans.  They typically stock a selection of USDA Prime beef, as well as local beef.  The meat department is well-staffed, and they will gladly handle special requests.  There’s also a full-service seafood department.

The delicatessen carries Boar’s Head products as their value line. Again, the quality, the selection, and the service beat the chain stores hands down.  They will make sandwiches to order.  There’s a selection of hot and cold foods.

There’s a cheese department with a wide range of gourmet cheeses.  A very good salad bar.  An on-site bakery.

The rest of Adams’ “grocery store” is relatively small, but they carry most items that a serious chef would need, if not with so much variety as a large chain store.  Typically, what they do carry are premium, local, or otherwise hard-to-find brands.  If you’re making a recipe that calls for an unusual ingredient, Adams should be your first stop.

Kitchen Store

The Kingston Adams has a small kitchen-goods store.  It’s a mixed bag; they carry some decent items, a fair amount of overpriced items (like CIA cookware), and a good dose of high-hype, low-quality items (Food Network branded stuff).  It’s neither as cheap as Bed Bath and Beyond, nor does it cater to the serious cook like local favorite Warren Cutlery.

Garden Center

The other half of Adams is the garden center.  The greenhouse and nursery stock a wide range of plants, all healthier than what you’ll find at the big-box home centers. They carry a range of other garden products, again emphasizing the premium lines such as Droll Yankees bird feeders and the upper end of the Weber grill range.

Checkout

Adams really shines at the checkout.  Although there are fewer lanes than the big stores, they’re well staffed, and the clerks know what they’re doing. It’s rare for lines to get more than two deep, and there’s usually little delay from checking out.  Like much of the store, the checkout is cramped, so bagging can be a challenge.  Many lines offer bagging staff, but you’re welcome to bag your own, and it may speed things up even more.  Adams offers a 5¢ discount for each reusable bag you use.

Unlike the chain stores, Adams doesn’t offer automated self-checkout.  You won’t miss it.

The Bad

Adams day-to-day prices are generally higher for identical items than any other local store.  Many of their products simply aren’t available at other local stores because they are premium or ultra-premium brands, and those products are usually considerably more expensive than what you’ll find at Hannaford or ShopRite.

While Adams has excellent vegetables, the small size of the chain means that they sometimes don’t have all the vegetables you might need for your menu.

The hot foods available range from good to merely edible.  This has gotten better over time, but it’s still a very hit-or-miss proposition.  The cold prepared foods are likewise highly variable.

Adams has a longstanding habit of not complying with the Ulster County retail pricing law.  It’s not unusual to find products that have no marked price, and no price on the shelf.  This is especially true in the frozen-foods and dairy areas.

The store gets very busy on weekends, when it draws a lot of traffic from New York City weekenders.  Unfortunately, that crowd has a… different standard of grocery-store etiquette.  This can make it frustrating to navigate the store and the parking lot.  The store’s parking lot becomes overcrowded at certain times on the weekends, around holidays, and most especially when the store runs special events like their annual garden show.

There is no dedicated bottle-return area.

Suggestions

Here’s what I’d like to see Adams change:

• Try to negotiate more competitive prices on some commodity items, like soda.  Work with vendors to ensure those items are consistently stocked.
• Improve the signage in the parking lot, to ease the traffic flow issues at peak times.
• Build a more consistent quality in the hot foods, perhaps preparing less at one time so it doesn’t dry out in the steam case.  (Go tour the Wegmans store in Pittsford, N.Y.; that’s how you do it.)
• Consider installing WiFi in the store.  Adams appeals to affluent buyers—the type that have iPhones and iPads and such, and WiFi appeals to them.
• Tell the folks at the deli counter that some people are hard of hearing, and they should push the button to advance the “take a ticket” number before they call it out.

Having lived in Rochester, I can’t help but judge every grocery store against Wegmans.  Wegmans isn’t perfect, but they’re better than everyone else.  In many ways, Adams comes close, albeit on a smaller scale.  That’s especially true in the vegetable department; not surprising, since both companies started as farm stands.  For me, saying a store is “like a small Wegmans” is high praise indeed.

Before I got my iPad, I didn’t think I’d use it much for reading books.  I love books.  The house is full of books. I’m proud that I am perennially short of bookshelves.

Now, I find myself leaning toward buying books via the iPad more than going to the bookstore.

The thing is, I usually have my iPad with me.  It’s easy to carry. That means I can read nearly anywhere, and as a result I can read more often. I’m already a devout reader, so this just feeds the addiction.

Of the available readers, Apple’s iBooks is my favorite.  By no means is it perfect, but it’s good enough.  With the right font, and the right type size, I don’t find the iPad’s LCD objectionable.  It certainly gets dim enough to read comfortably in bed. (It lights up the room considerably less than the LED miner’s lamp I use for reading physical books in bed.)

Where iBooks falls down is in the texts themselves.

Texts

Some publishers are doing right by the electronic reader, and are releasing books that match the formatting and copy-editing of the paper version.  Others are taking various shortcuts.  Browsing the iBookstore, you’ll find many bestsellers getting poor reviews because of editing and typographical errors.  I suspect some publishers are sending off their uncorrected galley proofs for digital conversion in the name of speed, hoping that the electronic buyer won’t notice or won’t care. I suspect those publishers are wrong. I certainly avoid those electronic texts, and as a result those publishers have to wait until I’m done reading eBooks and get to the store… or sometimes, they don’t get my money at all.

Note to publishers: An impulse purchase is a potential sale only so long as the impulse exists.

Even otherwise well-done books have odd flaws.  For example, Preston and Child’s Fever Dream on iBooks looks very close to the print layout, except that the word “fixing” is set as “fi xing” throughout.

Some of the texts from established e-book vendors are highly uneven. Baen Books has embraced free e-book versions of their authors’ back catalogues for some time. They even bind CD-ROMs of their e-book library to new hardcovers for some titles.  Some of these versions are well formatted. Some are okay, but are missing niceties like “curly quotes”—something forgivable on a blog site, but uncomfortable in a book.  A few have obviously taken a detour through plain-text-file-ville at some point in their life, making them awkward to utterly unreadable.  (Imagine reading a book where all the extra line breaks signifying a change in scene or point-of-view have been elided.)

Okay, but those are free e-books, so you have to make allowances, right? Unfortunately, I’ve found the same flaws in Baen’s paid DRM-free ePub e-books as well. If I’m paying for the book, I expect a well-edited text that is properly “typeset.”

If e-Books are going to take off, publishers have to make them as close to the print version as possible, especially in terms of layout and editing.

Readers

I’ve tried the big three iPad e-book readers: Apple’s iBooks, the Barnes & Noble eReader, and Amazon’s Kindle app.

All have flaws.

iBooks limits you to a small handful of fonts. Only one of them resembles anything you’re likely to find in a well-designed mass-market book: Baskerville. I suppose Palatino and Times New Roman aren’t horrible, but they aren’t typical book faces. Cochin is too ornate to be comfortable as a text font, and Verdana… well… it’s Verdana. It’s an ugly Microsoft sans-serif typeface designed for reading on Windows 95-era CRTs.  I suppose it has its fans, but then, the same could be said for velvet paintings of dogs playing poker.

On the plus side, iBooks does a very good job rendering those fonts. Apple’s Type Services are used to full effect; you get ligatures (fi and fl instead of fi and fl, for example) automatically. The letters are well-kerned, and the line-spacing generally matches what you’d expect in a real book.  The result is comfortable to read, especially in Baskerville.

The B&N eReader gives you more font choices: Amasis, Century Schoolbook, Georgia, Joanna, Times New Roman, Ascender Sans, Gill Sans, and Trebuchet MS. With the exception of Trebuchet, all are reasonable fonts. The serif fonts wouldn’t be out of place in a real book. However, the font rendering is fatally flawed. The lack of ligatures is bad enough.  However, except for Century Schoolbook, none of the fonts provided will display italics. Any italicized text gets rendered as plain text.  This can render a book utterly incomprehensible.

Even Century Schoolbook is flawed. While you can make out italic text in Century Schoolbook, it isn’t set in a true italic face. Instead, the font is mathematically slanted (“oblique”) to make a pseudo-italic appearance. The result is ugly, and very reminiscent of early Mac typography circa 1984. The poor typography of B&N eReader is indefensible in a book-reading application.

I also find the line spacing and page width options uncomfortable.

I quickly ruled out the B&N app.

The Kindle app gives you one typeface, reminiscent of paperbacks from the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not bad for reading, but it is what it is. It also comes with relatively unimaginative page design as a result. However, it does scale to small sizes very well, and is very legible on the iPad’s screen.

Like the B&N app, the Kindle app fails to take advantage of iOS’s built-in support for advanced typography, such as ligatures.

The B&N and Kindle apps both lack an in-app bookstore, forcing you to jump out to Safari and use the vendor’s web site to purchase new books.  On the other hand, both the B&N and Amazon web sites are far easier to browse than Apple’s iBookstore.  Trying to “browse the shelves” in iBookstore can be infuriating, as you see only a fraction of the content unless you perform a search.

All three apps have a common failing: None of them implement proper hyphenation. This leads to some ugly typography, especially for certain texts at certain font sizes. I don’t find it as objectionable as some, but many book snobs find it painful. The B&N app offers an option to display ragged-right text, which reduces the need for hyphenation; the other two only offer full justification.

* * *

So far, all three readers are flawed, but I find iBooks’ flaws the least objectionable. It looks good, it works well, and it feels polished. B&N’s app is decidedly half-baked, and not up to professional standards—never mind professional book publishing standards. The Kindle app shows more experience with e-Books, but is definitely “Kindle lite” and short of the mark.

I look forward to future versions of all three, hopefully combined with a more serious commitment to quality from the publishers.

Since I got my iPad, I’ve been a bit worried about dropping it.  The aluminum back doesn’t give one a lot of confidence; while I’ve not dropped it yet, it sometimes feels distressingly like it could slip out of one’s grasp.

It seemed like a silicone slipcover would be just the ticket.

I bought the Incase Grip Protective Cover at an Apple Store. Admittedly, I confused it with the almost identical Incase Protective Cover.  It was the Protective Cover I was really looking to buy.

I have several Incase protective cases, and I’ve been happy with their design and construction.  But…

The Grip Protective Cover isn’t just a straight silicone slipcover.  It adds two humps near the top and bottom of the iPad.  They provide a bit more heft to grip the iPad when it’s held in landscape orientation.  Some may find they help in the normal portrait orientation, as well; I find them sort of awkward.

There are two major flaws with the Grip Protective Cover:

1. The humps add weight.  A noticeable amount of weight.  With the cover on, my wrists complain more quickly and more loudly about trying to hold the iPad one-handed.
2. It doesn’t fit tightly enough.  If you hold the iPad in portrait orientation with your hand about halfway up the screen, your grip will tend to peel the Grip Protective Cover off the side of the iPad.  It could stand to be a good deal tighter.

There’s also the common flaw to silicone slipcovers for any iPod or iPad: although you can use a docking cable, you can’t use a dock without removing the cover.  This is especially true for the Grip Protective Cover; the humps eliminate any question of docking.

I’m not impressed with this product.  My objection to the humps are my own mistake, but the loose fit is a problem.  I recommend passing on this product.

I first started cooking for myself in high school.  I think the thing that got me started was making homemade peanut butter cookies for a girl I was sweet on.  (She enjoyed them, but not enough to dump her boyfriend and take a good hard look at me.  But I digress.)

In college, I lived in a dorm that was at the outskirts of campus, a 20-minute walk from the nearest dining hall. This was in Rochester, NY; for those not familiar with the area, Rochester is famous for its lake-effect snow.  It usually starts snowing in late October and lets up sometime in April.  This dorm was originally built as graduate housing, so each 2- or 3-bedroom suite included a kitchen and a bathroom.  I very quickly decided to take full advantage of the kitchen, and I almost always cooked my own dinner.

My early companion in learning how to cook was the venerable Joy of Cooking.  I’m not going to link to that book; you can find it easily enough at any bookstore.  Why not?  Because I now know that a lot of the advice in that historic tome is just plain wrong.  I weep for the number of home cooks that have been lead astray by that book.

When I really decided to take my cooking past the “competent at preparing basic food” stage and learn how to truly cook, I was heavily influenced by Alton Brown and Iron Chef.  But there was one discovery that truly helped me take it to the next level.

Cook’s Illustrated.

I’ve said it dozens of times: When I make a Cook’s recipe, I may find that what I make isn’t to my liking, but it will be a really, really good example of this particular dish that isn’t to my liking.

If you’re interested in cooking, I strongly recommend that you start reading the Cook’s Illustrated magazine.  You should think about signing up for the website.  You should buy “The New Best Recipe” and start with that.  You might even look for the companion TV show on PBS, “America’s Test Kitchen.”

Why does Cook’s get my recommendation?  What sets them apart from other cookbooks and cooking magazines?

• They don’t just cough up a recipe that some chef somewhere claims is a good one.  They set out to make a dish, and then they will try dozens of variations until they find the best way to make it.
• Each recipe is accompanied by an article explaining how they perfected the recipe.  Sometimes, the best part of the recipe is the journey taken to the final version. A chef can learn a lot from the techniques that failed, and those that worked.
• The articles also touch on the food science behind the recipes, where appropriate.  Again, this is information you can apply to other recipes on your own.
• The recipes are very clear about what you need to do, what you need to look for, etc.  Many other cookbooks assume you know what the author means by certain terms; Cook’s explains in clear language, and provides illustrations where appropriate.
• Recipes often come with brief tutorials on cooking techniques appropriate to the dish.
• Cook’s also reviews ingredients and cooking tools.  Want to know the best brand of chicken broth, or the best measuring cup?  They run scientific tests, and tell you.  They’re almost always right.
• They don’t accept advertising.  When they recommend a product, there is no conflict of interest.

My only complaints about Cook’s: They release a lot of cookbooks, and inevitably many of them contain substantially the same recipes, so there’s a point of diminishing returns.  They advertise the cookbooks in the magazines, often at a steep discount, but if you read carefully you can’t buy just one book—your order signs you up for a book-of-the-quarter-club type deal.  And if you sign up for the website and don’t opt out, you will get spammed to death with cookbook offers and other stuff.  Plus, the website costs money, and then they want more money if you want all of their recipes (including the ones in the books, or the ones from their spinoff publication “Cook’s Country”), and it starts to add up.

Even so, “The New Best Recipe” is known as “the Bible” in my kitchen.  It’s cooking gospel.

This is an unsolicited endorsement. I am not employed by, related to, or in any way affiliated with Cook’s Illustrated, and no compensation has been received for this endorsement.

After two weeks, I still really like my iPad, and it has replaced my Mac for a lot of things. It’s with me almost constantly. In many ways, it is the revolution of computing that it’s made out to be. There are still some rough edges, though.

I’ve gotten more used to the onscreen keyboard. It was great to discover that you can type an apostrophe by touching the comma key and sliding your finger upward. That was one of the most glaring problems I’d had—having to go into the numeric mode to type punctuation. There are other shortcuts like that hidden throughout the keyboard.

Even so, the lack of number keys still bothers me. Even more is the semi-smart behavior of the numeric mode. It’s hard to predict exactly when it will decide to switch itself back to the alphabetic keyboard. Typing an apostrophe seems to trigger an immediate switch when you’re in the middle of typing a word. Typing a space does it reliably, which is really annoying when you’re filling out a form with a phone number.

I just picked up an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, and I’m using that to write this blog entry. So far, it seems like an improvement as far as typing goes… but it does bring up the fact that the iPad desperately needs some sort of stand to use with the keyboard. The reason it needs a stand so desperately is the high-glare screen.

Apple’s worst design decision with the iPad was the high-gloss glass screen. Yes, it feels slick to the touch, and it’s probably easier to keep clean than a matte finish. However, it’s also utterly impossible to use comfortably under office lighting. Any sort of overhead light, or lighting behind you, or for that matter sunlight, will make it difficult to impossible to see the iPad’s screen. If someone comes out with a good antiglare overlay, I’ll buy it in short order.

Mobile Safari works well. It’s particularly good at pointing out web pages whose authors have made unwarranted assumptions about screen size and CSS layout code. There are a lot of web pages that are illegible upon first loading. Thankfully, the double-tap-to-zoom function works brilliantly.

The AIM app is a big disappointment, although some of that has to be laid upon how AOL has implemented multiple sign ins. When you leave the AIM app to do something else, after a while your buddies may not see you online, which makes the push notification feature a bit useless. When you get a push notification, you’re offered a choice of “view” or “close.” If you choose “close,” the IM may disappear from the iPad without a trace. OK, I thought, I’ll leave iChat logged in on my Mac to catch those messages. Well, no matter what AOL claims on their website, it seems essentially random as to which AIM session, if any, will receive messages when you do this. Apple and AOL need to collaborate on making multiple logins more useful in the context of portable devices.

Too many apps “drop state” when you leave them to check something in another app, especially if you’re in an “add item” or similar composing sort of mode. This becomes annoying quickly, and is probably the biggest reason why the iPad’s lack of multitasking is an issue.

If you walk around with an iPad, you’ll attract attention. The one thing you won’t hear, however, is “What is that?” It’s a testament to Steve Job’s marketing prowess that everyone you meet will instead say “Isn’t that the iPad?” It seems like everyone knows about the thing and can recognize it even if they’ve never seen it. The next question is almost invariably “Do you like it?” Yes, I do, for all that I see the rough edges.

I do wish I’d waited for the 3G model. There aren’t as many wireless hotspots in my area as I’d thought, and where there are hotspots… the iPad’s internal antenna is… quirky. Sometimes it works quite well. Often, it fails to pick up signals that laptops pick up fine. Occasionally it will ping-pong back and forth between strong signal and no signal while you hold it stationary in one spot. When it switches base stations, it interrupts your work with a “Connecting…” message for a second or two. This annoys me, because I have two base stations in the house for coverage. They’re on the same network and have the same SSID. Every other WiFi device I have switches seamlessly between them, but the iPad struggles with it. I hope Apple will release a firmware update that addresses this.

But, although I complain—products can’t improve if people don’t complain—I still love the thing, it’s my constant companion from the time I wake up to the time I sleep, and it’s definitely the future of computing. It won’t replace my desktop computer, but for most of the day it does supplant it.

I like to grill in the summer.  If it’s not raining, I’m more likely than not making dinner on the grill.  So, a few years ago, my birthday present to myself was a top-of-the-line Weber Summit Platinum D gas grill.

It’s a great grill.  It grills evenly, it has predicable heat, it can sear like nobody’s business and give you beautiful grill marks.

And yes, it cost a lot of money.

Last year, one of the burners no longer wanted to light.  Weber’s instructions include detailed annual-maintenance tear-down instructions.  I found that one of the ignitors had a cracked insulator.  This happens with gas grills; I expected that I just needed an inexpensive part.  It’s the sort of thing that one would consider a “wear item.”

Now, Weber doesn’t have an online store for their spare parts.  You have to email customer service.  Normally, I’d complain about this.

In Weber’s case, though, it seems that customer service usually replies with “that’s covered under warranty.”

They sent me a new ignitor at no charge.

I love this grill.  I do a maintenance every year, taking it apart and cleaning out the burners.  Even with this, two of the burner tubes have clogged up so that they don’t burn evenly any more.  Once again, I emailed Weber to get the price for two new burner tubes.

I didn’t include a serial number or anything.  I just said I needed the price for a burner tube part number such-and-so.

Paraphrasing: Well, Mr. Levandowski, our records show your grill is still under warranty.  How many do you need, and are you still at the same address?  We’ll ship them right out.

Wow.

There are a lot of companies that are willing to charge you tons of money for a product that’s top-notch when you buy it.  Sadly, it seems like few of those companies are interested in doing anything after they have your money.

Weber isn’t like that.  They understand: I paid top dollar for a top-of-the-line grill.  Even though this is a very durable grill with an impressive warranty, some day I will be in the market for another grill.  Or I will know someone who wants a grill.

When that day comes, I’ll be remembering that Weber didn’t nickel-and-dime me with spare parts — they went out of their way to save me money and keep me happy.

If you’re looking for a gas grill, buy as much Weber as you can.  It will be a good investment.

In 2003, I wrote the following blog entry:

I’ve recently inherited a house. The air conditioner, a jumbo window model from Carrier, is operable, but the mode selector knob is broken. Although it can still be used with judicious use of a pair of pliers, I wanted to get a replacement knob.

It turns out that Carrier understands a key tenet in customer service: Don’t sweat the small stuff. Even though this air conditioner was made over a decade ago, it won’t be a problem for me to get the knob. In fact, Carrier will send one to me at no charge. They make replacement knobs for all their room air conditioners available for free, just for the asking. Their web site offers instructions for requesting new knobs online.

This is how you make customers happy. A small, inexpensive part that would be hard for service centers to stock, creating a logistics nightmare… is instead centralized and turned into something that makes customers feel “taken care of.” This kind of small gesture is what leads to repeat customers.

Sadly, since the original blog entry was written, Carrier has taken down the web page that allowed you to order replacement knobs for their air conditioners. I suspect that the short-sighted bean-counters won out over those who understand that the little things—like knobs—are what help you retain customers when you offer a premium product during hard economic times.

A commenter, dm, added the following:

You know, I had a very similar experience with Bose … I have a pair of Bose 201 Series II bookshelf speakers circa 1987 or so. About a year and a half ago, I blew out the fuses inside the speakers themselves (uhm, oops. Pearl Jam’s “Ten” warrants Excessively Loud Volumes!) Anyway, the fuses are a custom job — hardwired & encased in glass. So I called up Bose, explained the situation to the customer service rep, and all he could say was “Wow, I’m really sorry that happened. This shouldn’t happen. I’m going to overnight FedEx you a pair of fuses, and a few extra too, just in case. Is that OK?”

I asked “How much are the fuses” and he laughed and said “Oh, no charge at all. We’re just sorry you had this problem with our speakers! If you have any problems at all after replacing the fuses, please, give me a call back and we’ll see what we can do from there. (He gave me his name, which I’ve forgotten by now)”

Now *THAT* is customer service!

I wish more companies would take that lead!

(Not that I can personally recommend Bose. In my opinion, most of their products are overhyped and overpriced.  Have you ever noticed that Bose displays in stores are usually set well apart from the competition’s products?)

Since that blog was published, I can add another example of a company that understands customer service.

A few years ago, I purchased a set of Klipsch Synergy speakers for my home theater. I found that they were a good balance of sound quality and price, and they are readily available at the neighborhood big-box electronics retailer. I was very happy with them…

Until I realized, after just a few months over two years of enjoyment, that the bass seemed awfully weak.  In fact, the Sub-10 subwoofer had stopped functioning almost entirely.  With the volume cranked, I could barely perceive any vibration of the woofer cone with my fingers.  Checking my receipt, I found that the subwoofer’s amplifier had a two-year warranty.  It had expired a few months before I realized the problem existed.

Checking Klipsch’s customer-support forums online, I found that many other Sub-10 owners had experienced a failure of the sub’s built-in amplifier. It seems that there was a run of Sub-10s, shipped to big-box retailers on or near a Black Friday sale, that were turning out to be faulty.

I e-mailed Klipsch support, expecting that I would have to pay to have the unit repaired, and hoping that there would be a local repair depot—shipping a big, heavy subwoofer module back for repair would obviously be costly!

Steve Phillips from Klipsch replied:

Hi Rob,
If you can provide use with a receipt and you are handy with a screw driver, we should be able to help.

I got Steve the information he requested, and he shipped me a new amplifier module at no charge.  They provided instructions for replacing the module—not “easy,” but within the grasp of a do-it-yourselfer. Klipsch didn’t even want the old module back.

The new amplifier has a very different design, making it obvious that Klipsch believes in continuous improvement.  This is reassuring—I’m not so worried that this amp will have the same failure two years down the road.

I had a good opinion of Klipsch based on their product. After this, I have an excellent opinion of them based on their customer service. I know that if I buy or recommend a Klipsch product, they will stand behind it—even if it’s one of their inexpensive mass-market lines, instead of the high-end audiophile stuff.

Policy vs. “Policy”

In the case of Klipsch, we see an enlightened attitude toward customer-service policies.  Many companies would stop at the “Warranty Policy:” “We warrant this speaker for two years from the date of purchase as indicated on the original sales receipt.”  If you had a speaker fail after two years and one month, you’d be out of luck with such a company.

Of course, then you’d need to go buy a new speaker… and it almost certainly wouldn’t be another one from that company!

Too many companies stick to “policy” even when the result is losing a customer, and all their potential future purchases. Companies that hold to “policy” in every circumstance wind up being perceived as heartless, uncaring, and out to rip off the consumer.

Enlightened companies, like Klipsch, have a higher form of policy. They have a policy that customer satisfaction can be more important than the “warranty policy.” 

Klipsch isn’t required by warranty to replace an expensive faulty amplifier at no charge—not even shipping costs!—when it dies after 27 months, but they understand that it just isn’t right to do that to a customer.  Better to implicitly acknowledge that the amplifier was a bit flakey, eat the cost of the replacement, and keep the customer.  Then, when the customer decides they need a bigger, better system, they’ll look first at Klipsch’s bigger, better, more expensive lines… instead of the competition.