Credit card companies whine to press

Yesterday’s New York Times covers changes to credit cards. They spoke with David Robertson, publisher of the Nilson Report, which tracks the credit card business.

Robertston lays it on thick:

People who routinely pay off their credit card balances have been enjoying the equivalent of a free ride, he said, because many have not had to pay an annual fee even as they collect points for air travel and other perks.

He’s claiming I’m getting a free ride. As if the poor credit card companies somehow aren’t making money off me because I pay my bills in full. This is, of course, complete crap.

Suppose I spend $10,000 and my average transaction is $25. That means I’ve made 400 transactions. First, American Express makes 25-50 cents per transaction. Next, AmEx’s discount rate is just above 2.5%. Adding it up, they have $256 from their discount rate + $175 in transaction fees. So AmEx has made $431. That’s not bad for sitting on their butts.

The Times ends by talking to a more sensible voice:

Austan Goolsbee, an economic adviser to President Obama, said that while the credit card industry had the right to make a reasonable profit as long as its contracts were in plain language and rule-breakers were held accountable, its current practices were akin to “a series of carjackings.”

“The card industry is giving the argument that if you didn’t want to be carjacked, why weren’t you locking your doors or taking a different road?” Mr. Goolsbee said.

Caltrain bike car update

Back on February 5, Caltrain agreed to expand the capacity of all their bike cars. Older, Gallery cars would go from 32 spots to 40. Newer, Bombardier cars would go from 16 to 24 spots.

Turnaround was quick, with the first expanded car spotted in the wild just 13 days later:

NB275 one old gallery – with two additional racks! Capacity for 40 bikes!

While Caltrain hoped to complete the expansion by the end of last month, we’re not quite there yet. Many tweets had been exchanged about expanded Gallery-style cars, but the newer, smoother Bombardier cars were holding steady at 16 spots a piece.

I checked with Caltrain’s Special Assistant to the CEO, Mark Simon. Here are the current capacities:

no bike spots classic expanded percent done
Gallery 0 7 20 74%
Bombardier 2 54 01 0%14%
Total 2 11 21 62%

Simon told me the first expanded Bombardier cab car would hit the rails next week.

But: just before 6 PM today, a very excited tweet came across the bikecar feed:

79 1 new (24!!!!) T17:59

If that tweet is accurate, the shop got it out ahead of schedule. Sweet.

Weird jobspam of the day

Why am I getting recruited to be a physical therapist?

Return-Path:
From: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 14 May 2009 12:32:21 -0400
Subject: Nationwide Physical Therapist Search
Reply-To: [email protected]
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: [email protected]

Hello!

My name is Tonya Greene and I am currently conducting a nationwide search for Physical Therapist. RCI is not a travel staffing agency. We have been retained by this healthcare facility to assist them in locating qualified candidates for their permanent job opportunities.

I have current open PT positionis the below areas:

Easton MD
Toledo, OH, Charleston, SC
Park Falls WI
Winona MN
Renselleur, IN
Kingsville, TX
San Antonio, TX
Savannah, GA
Bronxville, NY

I found your contact information and hoped we could set up an appointment to speak about your future career plans.

Please contact me right away by calling me at 404-963-1703 or reply to this email with your resume and the best time for me to call you!

I look forward to hearing from you!
Sincerely,

Tonya Greene
RCI Recruitment Solutions

550 Heritage Drive Suite 200
Jupiter, Florida 33458
Main 404-963-1703
eFax 866-723-1164

Translink, you’re breaking my heart

I finally (finally!) got my Translink card. So excited! It now joins my BART EZ Rider card, my MBTA CharlieCard and my WMATA SmarTrip card.

(Aside: TTC and (NY)MTA, get on this.)

Inside the envelope are several letters and brochures. I head to the Translink web site to add funds to my card.

Fail #1 Nowhere on the front page do the words “add funds” or “add value” appear. If you go to site map, aside from the two “Register your card” links, under “Get TransLink®”, there’s an Add value online link. Finally!

(Please drop the ®. It’s unnecessary, ugly, and impairs readability and scanability.)

But, there were two problems. First, they don’t take American Express. Boo. But the larger, more catastrophic problem:

Fail #2: It may take up to 72 hours for the value you ordered to be added to your card.

Seriously? Funds need to be added in real time. Period.

There are a few more problems with the web site. On the home page, there’s a box with contact information, including an email address. But they’ve made it so hard to use. The email address isn’t even a link. (And selecting it is hard, too, because it’s buried under several layers.) Look:


<li><span class="standout">Email:</span> <a href="mailto:#" accesskey="e">[email protected]</a></li>

And when you hit the home page, you get five different 301 or 302 redirects:
http://translink.org/
http://www.translink.org/
http://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb
http://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/
http://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/index.do
https://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/index.do;jsessionid=tCfKg-cBzZp4P1P1GuMtBQ**

Seriously?

What kind of a URL is https://www.translink.org/TranslinkWeb/index.do;jsessionid=tCfKg-cBzZp4P1P1GuMtBQ** anyway?

Recommended reading for the Translink webmasters: URL as UI and Cool URIs don’t change.

Sabre doesn’t get it

NBC in Dallas ran a piece called “Airlines Rethinking Customer Care. In the piece, they talk about airlines using customer data to personalize the customer experience.

Yawn.

Places like OpenTable and Wyndham have been doing this for years. Great restaurants kept detailed notes on their best customers with pen and paper.

The anonymous talking head from Sabre — which makes that awful flight reservation system used by Alaska, American, etc — thinks that the best way to use all this data to make up for an error is to — wait — give customers “a scripted apology.”

Mike Lazaridis is on crack

Mike Lazaridis:

A: I look at it this way. I say that our browser technology was developed with very different requirements. By writing our browser in Java, that provides our CIOs and wireless managers the assurances they need, to allow the browser to access internal information at the same time it accesses external information. So the overriding design criteria for our browser has been to not compromise on that experience in the enterprise phase.

I couldn’t make sense of this.

Tony explains: “he just had to get the words java, enterprise and assurance in a sentence.”