Philip J Mikal

Via @dochugo on twitter:

The oldest currently registered .com domain name is ‘symbolics.com‘, created 3/15/1985

Aardvark couldn’t have found anyone better to answer this one:

aardvark:
You there? I have a question about *credit* that I think you might be able to answer.

(Type ’sure’, ‘pass’, or ‘busy’.)
me: sure
aardvark: (From Timothy G./M/ManhattanBeach,CA)
How can I pay my mortgage with my credit card to earn points when my lender doesn’t accept credit cards as payments?

(Type ‘pass’ to skip, or ‘more’ for extra options.)
me: chargesmart.com
aardvark: Great — I’ve sent that to Timothy. Thanks for the fast answer!
(Type ‘Timothy:’ followed by a message to add something, or ‘more’ for options.)

(Tip: would any of your Facebook friends be helpful on Aardvark? You can invite them easily at http://vark.com/a/qUyQ15G)

In the last few weeks, Dr. Scholl’s has been buying prime-time advertising to promote their new orthotic product. It supposedly starts with a kiosk that recommends one of fourteen products based on a computer weight distribution of your feet that they call Foot Mapping. While nothing beats a pair of my Toschi dress shoes with carbon fiber inserts for comfort, I’ve plenty of other shoes that could the same treatment. So after seeing four or five commercials, I pulled up the website, entered my zip code in San Francisco and found no results in the city. Looks like they are only available at CVS. No problem, plenty of CVS stores in the east bay.

Plugged CVS into the car’s GPS and found myself at an Alameda strip mall. Walked around the store a few times, but no sign of the kiosk. But the website said it’d be here…. hmm. I asked an employee and got the low down. Out of the 10 or so CVS stores in the Bay Area, only two have the kiosks and both are broken. Customers have been regularly asking about both the product and the kiosk, but it’s not available, even despite it saying so on Dr Scholl’s website.

Hopefully it’s not this bad outside Northern California, but certainly they have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more, on driving customers into stores to frustrate them with no product availability or worse yet for the 2 stores that have the kiosk, a poor user experience.

Riding my bike home today – ran across Attaboy updating the 1am SF store mural for his upcoming show at the gallery this Friday, August 14th.

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