I've been talking and Twittering and Facebooking quite a bit lately about my summer project, a rewards site I've been building with some friends. Now that it's alive and working, I want to share it with you and get your feedback.
If you've never used a rewards site in the past, you really should give it a try. I didn't know this until recently, but rewards sites can do a good job of aggregating some of the best deals on the Internet. With the economy the way it is, it seems that suddenly I'm paying very close attention to the price of every little thing. Using rewards sites, especially ones that offer coupons in addition to cash back, has saved my family some real money. Just the other day I saved over $300 buying business cards for the fly shop and that doesn't even count the reward money I earned in the process.
LiliDeals is the newest and most exciting (I know, I know, I'm officially going over the top now but I can't help myself, I'm excited about my little project) entry in the rewards business and I hope you will give us a try and let me know what you think. Feedback is very important at this stage and while I've learned some good things from a few insider friends, I need to open the circle, so the rest of you can open my eyes even wider. You can leave your feedback through the site, as comments to this post, or by private Vox messaging. No matter what form your feedback takes, please know that I am grateful to you for taking the time to check out LiliDeals and give me your opinion. Thank you!
Cassandre lost a tooth at fish camp and came home with it in her pocket. Juju lost her second tooth today. Which makes it a busy week for the tooth fairy and it's costing me a bundle.
I have a checkered career as a tooth fairy. I don't make a very good Easter Bunny or Valentine, either. Thankfully I'm not a bad Santa Claus or there'd be no good holiday around here. It's not hard to be a good Santa as long as you bring presents. While the job sometimes requires assembly, it also requires cookies and milk. It's hard to complain about cookies and milk even at 2am on Christmas Eve.
But to be a tooth fairy requires skill.
The first is memory, something that fades over time, just when you need it the most. Not only do you have to remember that there is a tooth under a pillow somewhere, but you have to remember it during the day so you are sure to have $5 in hand for later. Then you have to remember again that night, after the little children and your obligations have you exhausted and wishing only for sleep. Finally you have to remember which child actually lost the tooth.
You need cat-like stealth. Children who have lost a tooth do not sleep soundly. They are determined to catch the tooth fairy in the act and make sure that, contrary to what their friends have said, the tooth fairy is not you. Any movement, like say a hand sweeping under their pillow looking for a tooth or leaving money, is likely to rouse them from a dead sleep.
Which leads to stamina. In order not to be caught you will have to stay up late, because little children who have lost a tooth cannot be trusted to sleep, even when they look like they're sleeping. They close their eyes and fake it so they can finally witness the magical exchange of teeth for money.
You need to be creative in order to answer questions like "Why does the tooth fairy want MY teeth anyway? What does she DO with them?" Later the questions get tougher: "Why do you have teeth in your jewelry box? Whose tooth IS that? IS IT MINE?" That's right, little children love to snoop and little girl children love nothing more than to snoop in their mama's jewelry box.
Last night's tooth fairy mission was a total FAIL. Cassandre put her tooth under her pillow and the tooth fairy forgot to come. Cassandre woke up, grabbed the tooth, wiggled it at me and announced with a big smile "You owe me five bucks." Underneath that statement was the understanding that Juju could never find out the truth. I say when you're old enough to blackmail the tooth fairy you're old enough to do laundry and get a real job.
Tonight the stakes are even higher than usual. First because of the previous night's failure, and also because Juju did a test run with the tooth fairy last night in the form of a written tattle. She left a note for the tooth fairy letting her know that her friend Midori left a paper cutout of a tooth under her pillow and the tooth fairy left money for her the next morning. This has offended Juju's sense of right and wrong and her note said:
Dear Tooth Fairy,
Do you know that Midori tricked you?
From Juliette
This morning Juju awoke to a note from the tooth fairy effectively telling her (nicely) to mind her own business. This afternoon the tooth that's been dangling from her gum finally fell out.
Wish me luck.
I have to confess it kind of creeped me out when the supermarket checkers started thanking "Ms. Car Bonnet" for shopping at their store. Not just because they butchered my name, but because I felt it was a strange attempt to create a relationship more meaningful than the one that could ever exist. I don't shop very often and when I do I rarely get the same checker twice. We don't know each other and we're certainly not friends. This insistence on personalizing my experience was clearly the brainchild of a marketing person who probably felt that recreating the "we know you" shopping experience might encourage loyalty. It can, done well and under the right circumstances. Reading my name off a grocery receipt is neither.
Funny then, now that we are going to the farmers' market every week, to discover that many farmers also need help understanding this idea of being personable. In the Bay Area the food at the farmers' market is rarely cheaper than the market. It's usually good quality and fresh, often organic and we pay for all of that. At times the prices are even higher than Whole Paycheck's. The people we meet at the market are the same every time, and this familiarity often brings a sense of friendship or at least affinity. Take, for example, the woman who works at the Afghan food stand, one of my favorite places. She dresses in tight, rhinestone studded t-shirts and says things like "Come here, let me feed you." The whole family adores her. She remembers us, is nice to the kids, feeds us delicious combinations of bread and sauce and has been, in her friendly way, opening our eyes to the diverse flavors of Afghanistan. And so we have become loyal customers.
Another guy I love is a vegetable guy. His prices are reasonable, his veggies fresh and delicious and he offers the girls cherry tomatoes. When I asked recently about the lemon cucumber, he picked one up, told me how to serve it and dropped it in the bag - for free. Now whenever we buy veggies, we go to him first.
Then there is this baker. Stereotypically French and surly - right out of a Disney movie. I saw him chew out a woman because her kid touched one of the pastries. Sure, he shouldn't have touched it, but the kid was like three years old and this guy served up a lecture that gave proof to the idea of a haughty, intolerant French people. In a few words he turned that mother into his enemy, you could see it on her face even though she said nothing. Afterward Xavier talked to the guy in French and gave him our order. I thought this might soften him up a bit, to have a fellow countryman to talk to. Not a chance. He complained about his work, the people who buy pastries and how awful it all was. We tried again another time and got the same reaction. Now we don't want to talk to him in any language, much less buy his expensive pastries.
Nearby are the egg girls. As lovers of farm eggs, we started out as very enthusiastic buyers. It didn't matter that the eggs cost twice as much as other eggs, they were totally worth it. The women sold strawberries too. Delicious Albions that we bought repeatedly by the flat. We asked if they wanted their egg boxes and strawberry baskets returned to them and they said yes. We brought them back, even though it was kind of a pain to do it. I didn't expect much when I returned the items, a smile perhaps, a quick thank you. But no. The women will hardly even look at us. They accept the boxes almost without a word and get visibly impatient when we take too long trying to figure out which strawberries to buy and do we need one box of enormously expensive eggs or two.
In a word, these people are not nice. And consequently, now we only buy eggs from them. Nothing more - certainly nothing that can be purchased anywhere else.
Xavier, when he's in France, always goes to les halles to purchase food. More like a permanent farmers' market, les halles exist in most french cities and it's where the majority of people buy their produce and meat. Supermarkets are for cerial and aluminium foil. A necessary evil but not really useful for food.
Once when Xav was shopping les halles in Tours with his father, they went from stand to stand, bypassing others who had, by the looks of it, delicious things to offer. "Don't go to that one," his father advised "they are not nice." And by nice he did not mean anything about the food, he was talking about the people. Now the French, you may know, are not known for being "nice" in the American sense of the word. They are, however, exceedingly, wonderfully polite. Almost without fail, they greet you, thank you and bid you a "bonne journee.' So when a french guy says the people in the french market are not nice and he won't buy from them, well that's saying something.
It seems so simple and obvious: when you are selling to people and you want them to come back, it's an easy thing to make them feel welcome. There are various level of niceness, ranging from Miss Bling Bling Afghanistan to the tamale guy who simply asks how many you want and thanks you for your money. Xav and I are not particularly needy people. We don't need anyone to tell us how fabulous we are and we're certainly not at the market for small talk. It doesn't take much to win our loyalty, just don't be jerks. Say hello. Say thank you. Say goodbye. Or even just one out of the three.
The farmers market is supposed to represent old-world community. The farmers are the same every week and the customers are mostly repeat and local. While these customers may be committed to the idea of buying from the market, that doesn't mean they are loyal to any one stand. Loyalty must be won, today more than ever. And once you have it, you have to win it again every time in order to keep it. A smile, or a word of greeting, is a small price to pay in my book.
As the saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If you can't muster up a real smile to be nice, at least be polite. If only for the sake of your pocketbook.
Ps. to the egg girls: the minute anyone - and I do mean anyone - starts selling farmers eggs in San Carlos, we'll be there with our wallets open.
If you look close, you'll see a couple of stitches under his left eye in pretty pink thread. Gringo's okay, he just had a skin tag growing near his eye that we had to get rid of before it turned him into a cyclops. He also had a tooth extracted and the rest of his teeth cleaned. Needless to say, yesterday was a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and now he feels like crap. (The medication does appear to help.)
The worst part is that he has to wear one of those inquisition-era elizabethan collars for 10 days, which of course he hates. From the moment we put it on, he was crashing into everything and tripping down the stairs. He gave up trying to do anything after a while and just sat at the bottom of the steps and sobbed -- all night. None of us got any sleep. Luckily Deb made us aware of a new invention - the inflatable e-collar - and I bought one today. You can see he's feeling a little better about the situation.
I read an interesting article about a woman who went hiking with her husband in the woods not too long ago. He had a heart attack on the trail, far from help, and she remembered a public service announcement that advised her to do CPR in time to the tune Staying Alive (oh come on, hit the link, I know you want to. It's the BEE GEES!).
She did as the PSA advised, kept her head and sustained her husband's life long enough for the pros to keep him that way more permanently (go ahead and click that link, who can resist a title that reads "Disco Tune Saves Man's Life").
And all that was pretty interesting to me, but the most interesting part came at the very end of the article. While the PSA advised viewers to pump at 100 beats a minute (the pace recommended to maintain a life) to the tune of "Staying Alive," the doctors themselves apparently sing a different tune. It also runs 100 beats a minute.
It's called "Another One Bites the Dust."
Talk about the glass being half full or half empty.
Back in the day, we saved our cans and newspapers and took them to the official recycling center. That place was never close to home and piles of recyclables would stack up, waiting and dripping and decomposing until there was "enough" to justify the drive. Recycling was a dirty but noble business.
Nowadays the collectors come to your door and take the recyclables away with your trash, but rather than being a community oriented, let's-all-pitch-in-and-do-the-right-thing activity, it has become an obligation filled with pious righteousness. Neighbors look at each other's bins and measure them against their own "yep, we're greener." Judgements are made about whether one reads newspapers or magazines and how much we're drinking and of what quality. Wine labels are quickly scrutinized through the slitted eyes of the dog walkers. Our lives, or at least the things we consume, are quite literally there for the evaluating, the night before trash day.
Being a private person I'm not a huge fan of this, but being a lazy person there is no way I'm going to give up the convenience of curbside pickup. I make this privacy trade off because at the end of the day I'm more lazy than I am caring of my neighbors' opinions. I collect our recyclables every day, sort like items into bins or bags and prepare them for the bi-monthly pickup. Wait a minute, did I say "bags?" Can one use bags for recycling? Why, that would be an ever so convenient solution for the weeks when we have been reading or shopping or drinking more than usual and cannot fit everything into our color-coded bins. It seems obvious to me, paper is recyclable, and putting paper inside of paper can't be a bad thing, can it?
Ha.
Yesterday, our trash/recycling day, I came home to find that while my neighbors recyclables had all been taken away, mine were left to languish, rejected and embarrassed, on the sidewalk. Rejected by the recycling demigods. They left our not properly sorted or stored or something recyclables on the curb as a warning to others: do it right, right being whatever we decide it is, or we won't take it away. (P.s. we won't tell you why.) Which prompted me to write this on my Facebook status:
Dear Redwood City Recycling Czars: I sorted everything so nicely for you this morning. And yet you left it all sitting on the curb because it wasn't in your precious plastic bins. Here's the thing, when I'm recycling paper bags, I think it's ok to put them in paper bags. Is that so crazy?
Recycling bureaucrats, you are ridiculous. Perhaps you will like it better when you find my recycling in the garbage.
That's right, I picked up everything and put it straight into the garbage bin, seething. Two weeks of sorting for nothing but contempt from the trash police. Here's the thing: I know they sort all of the garbage at the plant. And I know they charge me for that service. So when I sort my garbage to keep the recyclables separate, I'm really just saving them money and time. I think this should be appreciated. Not with a discount, or even a thank you, but with a simple gesture: take it away from my house twice a month. And hold the attitude.
Way to take the shine off a good deed, kiddies.
Speaking of trash police, did you know that San Francisco is literally creating such a force? I pay attention to this kind of stuff because it's only a matter of time 'till it rolls down the hills of San Francisco and into the suburbs where I live. The SF garbage collectors are going to be allowed (in 2011) to write tickets to those people who do not separate their food waste into a special composting bin. The idea is to eliminate landfill (a very worthy goal), but there is also a nice, multi-tier revenue opportunity for the city: those who don't compost can be fined (up to $500) for not participating and those who do will have their compost sold to local farmers (up to $500 a truckload).
Have you ever worked at a company that composts? I have, and while it is certainly great for the outside environment, it is hell on the inside environment. Oh the smell. Oh the flies. It will take more than a bin to manage all of that.
