Secrets of the City

James Lileks bought a fridge from Best Buy, and it turned out to be something of a clunker. He wanted to company to swap it out for a brand that worked a little better, and discovered that Best Buy would  rather repeatedly fix a broken fridge than give you one that works. From his open letter to the Best Buy CEO: Now. I don’t run a big company, and I have no inside know-how on the vagaries of handling customer complaints – Gosh, I bet you get a lot! But I would suggest, with all due respect, that the customer profile database be tweaked somehow so you can see, for your own benefit, that a customer who bought two top-of-the-line appliances has had failures with each one, and tie this information into a repair / failure database. Surely some program could tell you that the cost of satisfying the customer NOW is less than the cost of making four trips to repair the SAME. STUPID. POORLY. DESIGNED. PART, and said customer might buy another appliance, or speak favorably of the experience to others, or refrain from issuing twitter updates to 10,000 people.

Reading the Strib comments on the Red River flood, James Lileks, who has family in the area, has been unusually stung by something the rest of us noticed quite a while ago: That a good number of the comments on the Strib site are the semi-literate mumblings of ax-grinding morons. So he offers a bit of advice: Log off, idiots.

This is just what you’ve been waiting for: the Strib breaks bold new ground by having James Lileks read the news for a webcast.

Note the first story in this ground breaking new media effort is a salacious shooting story about people we care deeply about, and an admonishment to check back often for updates about things we don’t care about at startribune.com. “Straight from the source, it’s your news now.”

Time Magazine has declared their top 25 blogs for 2009, and James Lileks’ The Bleat is among them. What are your top local blogs?

James Lileks saw a UFO tonight. He is not alone; others have seen spacecraft passing overhead in Minnesota. There are videos. Have you seen anything strange in the skies?

James Lileks takes a look back at a swinging architectural monstrosity called The Gobbler. Behold the cavelike hallways! Thrill at the passion pit, with its massive white circle bed! Gawk at the futuristic supper club! Tasteless, perhaps, but it makes the present look so very boring.