In a perfect world, every word and sentence in your emails, web pages, and proposals would be checked and re-checked until it was 100% error-free. But what do you do if you have a gigantic document, and there simply isn’t enough time to give every section the same attention? I’d say focus on the beginning […]

Here are three businesses I’ll never buy anything from, or that I’ve vowed never to visit again: – A restaurant that charges $10-15 for a typical breakfast – A barber shop where a men’s haircut costs $25 – A doctor’s office that inflates their prices to at least twice the going rate, presumably hoping to […]

They’re getting ready to open an impressive new building in my neighborhood. Known as “Aqua”, the facility includes rental apartments and condos in an 80+ story tower, along with a grocery store and other retail establishments near ground level. Like many new buildings, it’s being marketed as environmentally-conscious, with energy efficient climate control and sustainable […]

Have you ever thought about going to a restaurant, but decided otherwise when it looked totally packed from the outside? That happened to me a few months ago, and I wasn’t in the same neighborhood again until this past weekend. The restaurant didn’t look very crowded this time, so I walked in to assess the […]

In my opinion, most outdoor advertising is quite uninspiring. I think this is a by-product of how outdoor ads are sold. The campaigns tend to be very localized, so they either get assigned to a mediocre local agency, or some big agency handles the job but has to cut corners to produce the thousands of […]

While some airlines advertise their best deals in terms of round-trip costs, most airlines seem to focus on one-way fares. And almost nobody includes taxes and fees in the advertised price. However, if you go to a travel comparison site like Kayak, you’ll see everything in terms of round-trip costs, including all the taxes. Why […]

After seeing some confusing tracking information on the US Postal Service website, I decided to give them a call. But despite plastering their toll-free number all over the website, the automated phone system said no details were available regarding the shipment. When I tried to press zero to speak with a real person, I got […]

Trying to buy an item, only to find that it’s out of stock, can be frustrating — especially when it’s something that you purchase regularly. Amazon and other stores realize this, so they provide an option to notify you when the item is back in stock. However, this won’t do you much good if you […]

Every month or so, I get a book of coupons in the mail. These come in a few flavors, but they have one thing in common: every business advertising in the coupon book is decidedly second-rate. In other words, they probably aren’t places you’d go to on your own, and it’s pretty clear they have […]

I saw two people riding Segways on Sunday. They weren’t part of a larger group, so I can only imagine they rented, leased or bought the strange contraptions on their own. I immediately felt a disdain for these people, and later, I wondered why I felt that way. After all, I’ve never had a Segway […]