Paul Jacobson

I’ve been a Seattle Coffee Co. fan for years now. My favourite store is the Hyde Park Corner store followed by Rosebank, Nelson Mandela Square and Killarney Mall stores tied for 2nd. I’ve probably been a Seattle fan since the chain opened in Joburg and I have had pretty much the same thing for most of that time. I had an experience at the Killarney Mall store this afternoon that really pissed me off.

I popped into the Killarney Mall store for a tall, harmless, Sugar Mommy latte (my favourite drink) after a little shopping for supper tonight. My first shock was the price. I am used to paying around R25 for one of these latte’s and this one cost me R30 (R16 for the latte base and R14 for the two syrups that make it what it is). I mentioned that this was more expensive than I was accustomed to and the guys mumbled something about a price increase. That may well be true and I have suspected that the cashiers at other stores haven’t been too familiar with what goes into one of these lattes and may have been undercharging me. Anyway, I paid for the coffee and dropped a few bucks into the tip bowl like I usually do and sat down.

The barista brought me my latte in a takeaway cup and set it down on my table. I looked at it and thought it looked too small. I have ordered tall latte’s many times in the past and I almost have muscle memory in my right hand based on a tall takeaway cup. I asked the guy if that was supposed to be a tall latte and he looked me in the eyes and told me it was a tall and went back to his spot behind the counter. I picked it up and it definitely felt like a short cut, not a tall but instead of challenging them, I just had my drink, picked up my stuff and left. In retrospect I should have challenged the guy but I just wanted to have a quiet 10 minutes or so while I had my latte before returning home to continue working.

Barring me having a substantial change in how I perceive the sizes of things, this really pissed me off. Its one thing for a barista to make a mistake but to tell me that it is what it really doesn’t seem to be is just not cricket! Now that I am typing this I times when I get caffeine in my coffee when I specifically say I don’t want caffeine and I don’t get the lattes I order even though I seem to be paying for them. This is probably just about training and if it is, it needs to be sorted out. The Vida e Caffe guys certainly seem to be rocking when it comes to making their drinks. I’d probably defect to Vida except they don’t have the lattes I’m used to at Seattle (ok, I know that sounds a little camp but I do spend a fair amount of time in these coffee shops and I am a little averse to change).

Update (26 August 2009): I just received a call from Barry Parker at the Seattle Coffee Co. about this post. His comment is below and he has undertaken to look into this and make sure that no-one else has had a similar negative experience. Once again an example of social media helping businesses improve.

Image credit: “Look, Seattle Coffee Company in Pretoria!” by firesika licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 2.0 license.

When you are done watching those videos head over to Justin’s blog and read his post about this. I don’t know if this is how chickens are prepared for my KFC lunches here in Joburg but after watching this video, KFC is off my menu.

I would like to know how Nandos procures their chickens and whether the same cruelty occurs at their suppliers?

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Most of the time when I talk about social media and the law I talk about the fine print and how these services are often not subject to your control and all sorts of things can happen to your pages/profiles without your consent. Most of the time I am thinking more about outages and glitches in the Matrix but there is a far more willful course of action that presents a real danger to your continued use of those services.

Facebook booted Rodrigo Shulz, an “Internet entrepreneur and business angel” who has been around the block a couple times for being a little too vigorous with the service. In a nutshell, Rodrigo is a genealogy nut and was trying to connect with members of his family tree and pass some info on to them about a group he created for a branch of the family tree. It turns out he was being a little too social and Facebook disabled his account about 73 seconds after he was warned to take it easy with all the socialising.

This morning I started adding family members again. I got a 2nd warning email today, and a disabled account email 73 seconds later. Waow… As if you read your emails immediately… Worse than a cease & desist.

This is yet another illustration of how users of these sorts of services use those services at the whim of the providers. You simply don’t have an unqualified right to use Facebook and you can expect to be kicked out or otherwise spanked if you step out of line. The message from Facebook seems pretty clear: be social, just not too social.

Oh, and this isn’t just a dig at Facebook. The next service to pull a stunt could be Google, FriendFeed or some other crowd. One way to see what your limits are is to read the fine print, as much of a pain in the butt that is. You are not in control of your profile/online presence and you need to assume your access could be taken away from you. One option is to look for a service that won’t pull a stunt like that for no good reason and without giving you a decent chance to respond meaningfully.

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Simone and Kerry-Anne have cracked this baby wide open! They have conclusive proof that Bolton Deventer is none other than Matthew Buckland! And there I was thinking Vincent Maher was masquerading as Deventer …

At last. It’s official. We know who Bolton Deventer is. Minutes ago a tweet was submitted in Bolton-speak, apparently under the wrong user name, and moments later it had been deleted. Highly suspect behaviour, I’d say.

You can see the key piece of evidence right here …

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bolton deventer, matt buckland, expose, exposed

I think Claire is right! This whole National Boob Day thing is just wrong. It objectifies women, leads to great degrees of sexism in an already pig-dominated country (and not the non-kosher variety in a breakfast sense) and it just can’t be the message we want to send to South African women and chicks generally! Instead, we should take a more responsible line with women’s rights and how women are perceived at places like beaches, pools and the workplace (especially where there is convergence).

Instead the responsible thing to to is to encourage women to dress appropriately …

… and be respectable. In fact, women should play a greater role in policing these instances of blatant sexism for who is better suited to guard against this poor behaviour than women themselves.

I mean, it isn’t like I get to see anything on these days anyway so how worthwhile can it really be. It is just an excuse for Wonderbra to sell more push-up bras and further inflame irrational male desires to see less clothing rather than engage more meaningfully with women!

Sadly it does seem that Claire has allowed herself to be firmly bought over by this objectionable mentality:

I even have a couple of Wonderbras. I wear make-up to work. I’m a bit of a flirt (much more so when I’ve had a few). I have long hair.

This is an unfortunate example of the sort of insidious and pervasive male-dominated mentality that takes us as a nation to a dark place of sex and objectification …

Ok, so the first part of my post is firmly foot in mouth stuff. Speaking as a guy I like the idea of a National Cleavage Day but that is part of the problem. Men tend to dictate how women will dress and present themselves and this is usually based on exploitative sexual practices. South Africa has terrible rape statistics and even worse reporting rates.

Sexism is evident in these statistics as well as in a variety of instances of sexual harassment, discrimination and outright abuse at home, at work and on our streets. I have little doubt it can be a scary place for women.

I will probably take some heat for this post but I also support women who choose to express themselves through something like a National Cleavage Day which is just a big marketing ploy, name a major event on the national calendar which isn’t exploited commercially. What is wrong is where women are coerced or forced to do something they are uncomfortable with. That is just not cricket!

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I came across a post on Andrew Flusche’s blog about the enforceability of website terms and conditions in Virginia in the United States. I thought I’d do a quick post about terms and conditions from our perspective down south.

With a traditional contract that is typed up, printed out and signed, there are obvious indicators that the parties have agreed to the terms in that contract. The document presumably records the terms that were negotiated and the parties’ signatures on the document indicate their agreement to the terms set out in the document. For the most part a contract doesn’t need to be signed or even in writing (there are a couple exceptions).

There are contracts you agree to (or are taken to agree to) by your conduct alone. A good example of this sort of contract is the contract you agree to at places like public parking garages. When you drive into a public parking area in a shopping centre you will be regarded as having agreed to the terms that are usually posted at the entrance. The terms are often printed on the ticket or referred to on the ticket. These sorts of cases are actually referred to as “ticket cases”.

Website terms and conditions are similar to these “ticket cases” because often all you are presented with when you load the site is a link to the terms and conditions located elsewhere. The link is usually part of a sentence that reads “I confirm that I have read the terms and conditions”. One of the important issues when it comes to “ticket cases” is that the person publishing the terms and conditions take reasonable steps to draw these to the attention of the person who is supposed to be agreeing to them (for example, a visitor to your site). So it really doesn’t help to busy the link or the reference to terms and conditions somewhere obscure on the page, especially if a user wouldn’t expect to find terms and conditions or a reference to those terms and conditions on the site and in that spot.

There are a couple things you can do to make sure your website terms and conditions are more likely to be enforced. Andrew sets them out quite nicely in his post so, in summary, they are:

• Show the terms of use
• Use specific language when you refer to the website terms and conditions and what they mean
• Use devices like a checkbox (I like this method as well as or in addition to greying out the “accept” button until the checkbox is checked)
• Keep records of each person’s agreement to the terms, perhaps by logging IP addresses or something along those lines (don’t forget to mention this in your privacy policy)

As a user the best advice is to take a little time to read the terms and conditions on a website before you agree to them and get some help if you don’t really understand them. They may seem trivial but they can have serious consequences if things go badly.

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My wife and I had breakfast at the Mugg & Bean in Killarney on Sunday.  We overheard an anti-semitic comment from someone we thought was a Mugg & Bean person and I published a blog post about it on my personal blog which I have subsequently updated for reasons that will become clear when you read the post.  I am impressed with Mugg & Bean’s management and how they dealt with this complaint.  If anything, that is a good reason to visit not just this Mugg & Bean, but your local one too.

A couple people wanted to comment on the post but are not members of Vox so feel free to comment here.  As always, I recommend that you post something about this yourself.  We are so used to talking about companies that don’t even listen and this is a good example of a company that listens and does something about it.  That is something worth talking about.

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