Parents of young children must be bad customers

As parents of a 6-month-old, we’ve had occasion to go shopping. A lot. We’ve hit a few local stores—Magic Beans (three locations), Henry Bear’s Park (two locations), Tadpole, Isis (two locations), Wild Child, Giggle, Baby Warehouse, Bellini (two locations)—and it’s been rather startling how restrictive the return policies are. The last one we went into was limited to 14 days, with a receipt, for store credit only.

This suggests that returns are a huge problem for these stores. Are parents doing retail renting? Experiencing buyer’s remorse? Discovering that products aren’t as good as advertised? Or just shopping on Amazon after they get an item home and finding it cheaper there, or showing it off at a playdate only to be told there’s a better choice in that product category, or finding that their child has outgrown the item in just a few weeks (since a lot of baby products are only good for a very brief developmental stage)?

Amazon goes the other way, offering 365-day returns on a lot of baby purchases. They may be counting on a lot of baby purchases being bulky and a pain (or expensive) to ship back, or they may have found that customers buy more when they feel more protected by a generous return policy. Babies R Us keeps track of your purchases for you, takes returns for 90 days, and goes outside that when pressed. But the local stores really act like they’ve been burned repeatedly.

Perhaps we’ve been insanely lucky so far (or very undiscriminating), but we haven’t wanted to return almost anything. We only returned a few outfits that we received duplicates of, and a travel bassinet that the manufacturer said wasn’t safe to use. We enjoy passing along to friends items that David has outgrown, and there are plenty of local swap or donation options if that ever fails. I know this, but I still wonder about a place that only offers store credit for a product returned the next week unopened.

And they’ll grow

Ending the day in Bar Harbor

Photo by Michael

Stepping stones

Photo by Michael

Profanity is not the issue

A woman got on an American Airlines flight wearing a shirt which said “If I wanted the government in my womb, I’d fuck a senator.” The pilot and flight crew retaliated by making sure she’d miss her next flight. They could have simply told her to keep the shirt covered, or to turn it inside-out, or even just to cover the profanity with duct tape while on board. But that would have been about protecting the children from profanity, and the pilot and flight crew’s retaliation clearly wasn’t about that.

So what happens when someone boards the plane wearing this:



Pilots have a right to kick passengers off their own planes. Flight crews have a right to insist that passengers not be disruptive. But that should not extend to demanding that passengers conform to their personal or political opinions, or to retaliate against passengers with whom they disagree politically.

Is the profanity the only excuse American Airlines has for their behavior? So what happens when someone boards the plane wearing this:



There used to be a creeping authoritarianism in this country. It’s no longer creeping.

No stroller for you!

We attended Drool Baby Expo yesterday at the Cyclorama. It was quite the zoo of expecting and new parents, babies, vendors, and heaps of baby gear.

Imagine that you own a very expensive baby store chain like Magic Beans. You could try to get customers to come to your store over a period of time, have lots of products in stock, and have tons of sales staff who know all about the products. Or you could rent a larger space, cram everyone in at once, convince manufacturers to send representatives and samples, charge admission to your customers, and offer 20% to 30% discounts off of many products but only if you place your order immediately. Give everyone free cupcakes, take away the wifi, and with any luck you can create a buying frenzy. Drool was an attempt at this latter approach, and it appeared to be quite successful.

From an economic point of view, we paid $32 each to get in, and we each received a gift bag of random baby stuff nominally worth about $60 on Amazon, some of it actually nice. I quite like the Haba wrist rattle, the Oxo sippy cup cleaning set, the Ty Snoopy, the Melissa and Doug fish toy, and the Skip Hop monkey toy. Those more than made up for the admission cost, so the other random items are gravy. By wandering around and talking to vendors, we got some fun baby food samples to try from Ella’s Kitchen, a few small glass containers from Wean Green, a wooden musical egg-shaped shaker, and info about a baby sign language class. Other people seemed pretty excited about the free cupcakes and Pinkberry, which neither of us can eat.

The highlight of the evening was putting David in a Mountain Buggy Swift stroller and taking him for a test drive. He loved it! But wow, strollers can get very expensive. And the Magic Beans sales reps couldn’t seem to get their story straight on prices, availability, delivery times, or return policies.

I had hoped to see a Tiny Love Gymini Bouncer, but the Tiny Love reps weren’t actually from the company, had almost no samples, and had no product specs. I tried to order one anyway because the Amazon reviews are great and Tiny Love products were supposedly 25% off, only to discover that Magic Beans had jacked the price up far beyond anyone else so that the discounted price would be higher than the list price on Amazon.

I tried to talk to someone from Dr. Brown’s about the fact that our bottles have all started to leak after several months without that problem, only to be told that it was always the customer’s fault when that happens. Way to go, Dr. Brown’s! You really made me feel warm inside for choosing your product and staring at your logo for at least two hours a day since December. I love their formula mixer, but I’m beginning to actively detest their bottles. This rep did not help their cause.

Many of the companies had genuinely nice people there, though. Mountain Buggy, Oxo, Wean Green, Ella’s Kitchen, SnoozeShade (a product we didn’t know we needed, but that I am really excited about), Haba, Chewbeads, Aden and Anais, Family Music Makers, Healthy Habits Kitchen, Letourneau’s Pharmacy, Sage Spoonfuls: I really liked talking to all of those folks.

And lots of people ooh’ed and aah’ed at David, and he smiled back a lot, and he was generally a fantastic little trooper about this insane environment and about staying up far too late.

And I managed to buy nothing on site. Slight regret today about a couple of small items that I would have bought if the Magic Beans pop-up store and sales reps had been more helpful; now I have to track down a Chew Beads necklace and a couple of other items separately. But it’s nothing compared to the regret I would have felt about spending far too much money on the wrong product simply because I hadn’t had time to do enough research online to figure out if it really was the right product for us.

Would I go again? Maybe. I’d pack a sandwich, since there’s no real food on site. And I’d leave my wallet at home.

Stay safe

Liking the Constitution

When I “like” a page/person/business/group/event on Facebook, I am generally doing two things: I am choosing who I will speak to and hear from, and I am telling other people about it (thereby suggesting that they consider doing the same). I “like” my state representative on Facebook, for example, so that I can hear what issues are important to him, see what other local residents think about those issues, and participate in the conversation myself. I “like” an inn in Maine so that I can hear news from a vacation area I enjoy visiting. I “like” a local contractor so that I can discuss renovation mistakes they highlight along with a group of similarly minded homeowners. And I occasionally “like” a group or event simply as a public statement of support, and then promptly block their updates from my news feed.

This seems to be a perfect congruence of freedom of speech and freedom of association. And yet a federal judge named Raymond Jackson has ruled that Facebook likes are not protected by the First Amendment. Not as (written) speech, not as symbolic speech, not as a conduit to speech, not as freedom of association, not even as a method of petitioning the government for a redress of grievances. I must have missed the day in civil liberties class when the professor explained that the Constitution doesn’t apply to the Internet. It does leave me confused, though, about what happens if I call that federal judge a blithering idiot in this web-based forum. Would expressing such an opinion be protected speech? If expressing an opinion in an electronic way isn’t speech of any sort that the Constitution recognizes, can that opinion nonetheless rise to contempt of court? Because I’m searching Facebook for a group called “Judge Raymond Jackson is a moron,” and I’d like to know if I can safely click on the “Like” button when I find it.

Gore Place

At the 25th annual Sheepshearing Festival last weekend, sheep and goats being herded by border collies:





An alpaca:



Overhead on a sunny day, a red-tailed hawk:



Photos by Michael

Rain falls down

[as a round]

Rain breaks down into two H and one O
Electrolysis makes it so
H makes the cars go
O helps the whole world breathe

Wishing I could root for my local teamsters

In a few weeks, 1500 pounds of books will be on their way from Michigan to my door. Two pallets loaded with boxes. I have to choose an LTL company; LTL stands for Less Than Load, for shipments that don’t fill an 18-wheeler. I have my LTL shipments held at a trucking terminal for me to pick up, because then the delivery timing is under my control.

Prices are pretty similar between LTL companies, so the choice comes down to how convenient and pleasant the terminal is to work with. Last week I went to three local terminals to see which one I should choose. All three turn out to be non-union companies.

Part of the problem I had last year with the local YRC terminal is apparently related to YRC being a Teamsters company. That led to endless internal disputes about taking responsibility for the shipment damage, pissing matches about how long to delay unloading trailers at the terminal, and strict rules about who is allowed to operate a forklift (rules unrelated to who has the training to safely operate a forklift). These seem really important to the workers and the management, which are generally the two sides to union negotiations. But there’s a third side to the business: the customers. The union doesn’t want to negotiate with the customers, or even take the customers into consideration. And the net result is that a union shop is harder to deal with as a customer.

I don’t want it to be that way. I want the union and the management to say “Hi, customers! We know what you want: reliable shipping, with your delivery handled carefully and safely by trained workers who care about doing a good job. YRC can do that, because we’re a union shop.”

Instead I find myself driving into a terminal that looks like it should be condemned, run by a company that frantically advertises for new drivers on craigslist. And thinking that this would be a far better option than ever dealing with YRC again, because at least this place isn’t a Teamsters shop.

Sunlight shouldn’t hurt

A simple set of principles when you’re responsible for public money:

Keep track of the money.
Keep track of your mission.
Be transparent about where the money goes and why.
Don’t take the money for yourself.
Don’t give the money to your family and friends.
Don’t spend the money on something that benefits you, your family, or your friends: no junkets, no office parties, no fancy anything.
Always avoid conflicts of interest.
If it looks bad to people who agree with your mission, don’t do it.

Any others?

The bells of freedom

Let the bells of freedom sound:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

For a thousand generations shall this story be told, each generation to the next:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

We dry at last the bitter tears of slavery:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

And you shall teach your child on that day, saying:
we are free, we are free, we are free.

Let no one doubt the power of faith. Our bodies were broken by hard labor, yet now we are free. Our children were slaughtered, yet now we are free. We were there, yet now we are free.

We fight to give our children a better life, just as our parents fought for us, just as their parents fought for them, all the way back to our ancestors enslaved in Egypt. We are taught that we were there ourselves, that each generation must face that struggle, must rouse and rise up and search for freedom. And now we are free.

I have never seen a righteous man forsaken, or his children begging for bread. Is that line more difficult than the statement that we are free? We jail more than a million people a month in our country. I went to high school with 1500 other people. That’s how many people are locked up every hour. Do we understand freedom differently when so many of us taste imprisonment?

Serious people argued in the Supreme Court just last week that our only real freedom resides in our right not to act. Is that what we now mean by freedom? Has the famous American optimism been transmuted into a faint hope that we won’t have to leave our homes?

Each generation faces the struggle for freedom, just in a new form. May remembering our ancestors in Egypt give us hope and give us strength. We have faced worse, and survived. We have taken many steps towards freedom. We celebrate each of those steps towards freedom, and say dayenu even as we take the next step. And we proclaim our freedom in order to claim our freedom. We are free, we are free, we are free.

Happy Passover.

An audience talk-back

Meg Taintor of Whistler in the Dark Theatre asks:

When you enter our theatre as an audience member, what is it you are looking for?

I am looking for someone else’s story to occupy my mind fully for a time in a way where I don’t mind the occupation. I find that possible with many sorts of live performance, whether theater or dance or music or circus, though theater obviously tends toward a more structured narrative than other performance modes.

I am looking for my own story and the stories of those close to me to stop occupying my mind. Not because I am unhappy with those stories; I do not seek less theater when life is going well. But it’s why I hate a distracted or unattentive audience, and why I dislike the multitasking involved in having food or drinks during a performance. I want to forget about myself.

Ultimately, that tends to make audience interaction less successful for me than I want it to be. I’ve read more than I care to about the barrier created by the proscenium, but I like the comfort of being an anonymous audience member and the pretense that I am an observer of the theatrical performance rather than a necessary component of the experience. That comfortable pretense allows me to embrace my role properly, to laugh out loud, to clap enthusiastically, to gasp or startle or otherwise reflect back to the stage. Of course this is contradictory, but performance anxiety is precisely why I am on my side of the proscenium. I want the illusion of invisibility. The thrust stage and the myriad of seating arrangements employed in black box and non-theater spaces can work wonders, but primarily if the audience remains safely wrapped in relative darkness.

I want to see performers who are fully immersed in the performance, even when they aren’t in the spotlight.

I would love to find a unifying theme to what I want from the theater, but I enjoy farces and musicals and dramas, all for many different reasons.

Meg cites Simon Callow’s claim that performers should feel compassion towards the audience rather than love. While I wouldn’t want to see that compassion slide towards pity, I do appreciate a sense that the production has considered the needs of the audience to see and hear the performers and avoid serious physical discomfort. There are far deeper reasons to want compassion from the performers, of course—to ask the performers to help us as audience members to see their stories, not just their faces.

I want to be able to keep track of the characters, to follow their individual arcs, to have them be distinct from each other. And I want to care about at least some of them. The notion of compassion as an essential element of theater goes both ways. The characters on stage are generally strangers, and feeling compassion towards strangers can be a challenge in our hectic and too often hostile society. When theater allows us as audience members to feel compassion towards strangers, it restores part of our humanity. That may be a heavy burden to ask of the theater, but the wonder is in how often it succeeds.

What are the chances?

Last week I read the new Matt Ruff novel about 9/11, an alternate history focused on examining its own premise.

On Tuesday evening, a huge billowing cloud of smoke displaced the usual traffic in photo after photo looking down Newbury Street and Boylston Street. The view from across the river showed the smoke spreading over Boston. People were evacuated from a large swath of the city, work and life were disrupted for tens of thousands of people, a number of roads and subway stations were closed, and there were early warnings that the smoke might be particularly harmful though the government was quick to dispute that (while also asking people to stay out of the area).

Then I went to a show last night. I arrived early and talked a bit with the person who was filling in as house manager since the house manager was having trouble getting to the theater. Conversations as people arrived were about trying to reach friends and colleagues, traffic disruptions, power disruptions, and cancelled performances.

This all led up to seeing the show “Recent Tragic Events” last night, which was set in an apartment the day after 9/11. The lead character is trying to reach her twin sister, who lives in New York and has not been in contact. A show set the day after the city I know was filled with smoke, which I’m watching the day after the city I know is filled with smoke. And it was absolutely creepy how easy it was for me to go back to that time. Was it all the priming and context? Was it the television on the set playing CNN from 9/12/2001 for two hours? Was it the powerful performance from Aimee Rose Ranger? Regardless, I was relieved to return home to my infant son, to my wife of more than 10 years, and to a television which is no longer tuned to CNN.