benvanderbeek

This week I found a book called “let’s go all around the neighborhood” and read it to my 3 & 4 year old sons. It’s from 1982. A girl and her mother walk around doing errands. Mailing a letter at the post office. Buying shoes at the shoe store. Playing at the park. Eating at a restaurant. Going to the library. Buying an eggbeater at the hardware store. Stopping at the fruit and vegetable stand. They interact with humans at most stops.

I thought - in 2026, we can instead text, buy shoes and eggbeaters (?) online, stream / scroll content on devices, order restaurant food on DoorDash and groceries on Instacart.

We’re told “you’ll no longer have to” and “now you’ll be able to” with each new technological development. But there’s always a hidden “now you’ll have to” and “you’ll no longer be able to”.

Plane trips and long car rides are screen free with my 4 young kids (3-9) but that’s more about gluttony for punishment than principle.

The problem isn't the lack of workarounds. The problem is that we have all departments - Purchasing, Marketing, Operations/Warehouse, Sales, Finance, IT - working with sku's in spreadsheets. Every single time, every single person needs to know the workaround(s), and as other people are mentioning, you then have to hope it's not somehow saved as something else. And also as mentioned, if someone else has worked with the data before you get it, good luck restoring it to what it was before.

But yes we'll probably stick a letter in there.

My company's part numbers are in the form 00-0000. After enough conversations about how to convert back to this format from the date Excel changes it to, we've finally just decided to change our sku format. A rolling change though, so we'll still be dealing with it till the current 5k sku's are all EOL.

I also hate the scientific notation default, in addition to the leading zero. Guess what, UPC's exist and no one wants them in scientific notation.

Postini setup process and support are a joke. You can call someone who tells you to look at a help file, and the help files point to help files, which have no screenshots, and reference menu and navigation options that don't exist. Also asking them how to get Postini to work with Google Apps was like speaking a foreign language to them, as if we were the first person to need this. Despite the fact that it was up-sold to us as an add-on to Google Apps.

Other than Postini, though, I do like Google Apps.

I have an iPad 3 and a Chromebook. I like and use the Chromebook much more, because of the built in keyboard. I know plenty of people who would hate using a Chromebook and much prefer their iPad for everything. To each his own.

"you can choose the left or the right lane of the conveyor belt to the butcher house."

I am going to use this phrase, thanks.

Regarding the unhelpfulness of online reviews, my company has problems with manufacturers/sellers writing 5-star reviews of their own product listings (ASIN's) on Amazon. We've begun (manually) data mining 5-star reviews to identify whether each 5-star-reviewer has any other reviews (or wish list, to indicate the possibility of a real user account), then calculating the % of reviews written by no-history user accounts. Of the ASIN's we've assessed, the gut-level-doesn't-seem-like-heavy-review-fraud listings can be in the 6% range, whereas the looks-like-review-fraud ASIN's are above 20%. We're working with Amazon to identify and penalize these manufacturers/sellers, but internally at Amazon the Seller Performance team is separate from their Community (user review) team, so it presents a challenge. Also hard for them to separate valid complaints from sour grapes complaints.

My friend works for ALEKS. I agree it's a very solid approach.