Free Shipping Social Costs Analysis

I've come across quite a few articles that point out downsides of "free shipping", here is a recent one. One downside is environmental impact--free shipping leads to less efficient ordering (smaller quantities, not bothering to bundle shipments). Free expedited shipping makes this even worse.

Another downside is that it contributes to winner-take-all economics. Amazon can do free shipping much more efficiently than a small eTailer.

IMO, part of the reason "free shipping" has become such a draw lies in the alternative, especially as practiced in the earlier days of eCommerce. Problem #1 is eTailers using shipping as a profit center. So advertising low prices, but then doubling the real shipping cost (in the pre-internet days, this was often referred to as "shipping & handling").

Problem #2 is just the mental model of not knowing how much shipping will cost. It is very tedious and frustrating eCommerce experience to select and configure a few items, perhaps go through a few screens of checkout, only to have the website calculate the shipping at the last minute and see that it will be 40% of your purchase price, causing you to abandon.

So the first problem is a business-model problem. No sympathy on that. Give me straightforward pricing every time, spare me loss-leaders, coupons and cross-subsidies.

The second problem is where Amazon probably has a really huge advantage. The easy solution to post net prices that include shipping, and also factor these into search (show net cost, shipping included). This is what Amazon typically does.

Amazon makes it look effortless, but I imagine there are major complications. First, you have to know the destination address, so it helps if the shopper is already logged in--advantage Amazon. Second are the algorithms. E.g., how much you get charged for shipping would typically include how many other items you purchase. I imagine Amazon uses algorithms to come up with a single, flat number. Sometimes too high (multiple items same shipment), sometimes too low (multiple single items). But it all evens out. That would be very challenging for any small eTalier to implement.

Hopefully over time, enabling platforms, such as Shopify, will emerge to help equalize some of these things. But it may be a very long journey, particularly for specialty eTailers. I.e., the pattern for one specialized product may be very different than another specialized product or a more general-purpose eTailer. It could take a very long time for Shopify, et. al., to get enough data to make correlations.

24-Second-Rule-Like Feature for Words with Friends

The Scrabble-like games, when played by experienced, highly competitive players, often devolve into trench warfare at the end of the game. Neither player wants to play anything besides the most trivial 1-2 letter words, for fear of opening up the board to a lethal end-strike.

While that style of play has its charms, it can become a bit dull. I have an idea to fix it. If you play a word that is less than 50% of the maximum points you could earn, you pay a 1/3 penalty on the difference. So for instance, if you could play EXIST for 48 points, but you choose to play only EX for 18 points, then you get a 10-point penalty.

Silicon Valley Overrated and Certainly Overpriced

Finally!

Ideas to Tweak the Power of Executive Clemency

The governor of Kentucky recently granted some questionable scandalous pardons. I haven't thought or studied much on the general subject of executive clemency. But it seems like the spirit of that  power could be upheld while introducing some moderate checks-and-balances, to avoid misuse of power and outright corruption.

The most basic idea is that some modest, minority support in the legislature would be required to sustain the pardon, where a pardon is challenged. If there is no challenge to a pardon, it is effected.

So imagine for instance that a legislator challenges the pardon for child rapist Micah Schoettle. That would be put to a vote, and at least 20% of Kentucky representatives would have to affirm the pardon.

So the barrier of affirmation is still very low, low enough that party-line votes wouldn't be sufficient to overturn the executive clemency decision. But high enough that a meaningful number of legislators would have to be willing to go on record as sustaining a given pardon. (There is no science behind my opening bid of 20%, it just seems like a reasonable number to accomplish those objectives).

I Hate Powerpoint

I'm not a big fan of Powerpoint. Obviously it has its place, which is visual speaker aids for presentations, and perhaps highly visual topics (although it is a terrible drawing tool, IMO). But in corporate life, at least where I work, a "deck" has become a substitute for a written memo.

I think this is bad and wrong for multiple reasons. Nobody expects to read a Powerpoint, so text within a deck must, by convention, be much abbreviated. As a writing tool, Powerpoint is inferior and inconvenient. Of course, that also contributes to excess brevity and glossing over the details.

Why do people use Powerpoint this way, and what can be done about it? I believe one reason Powerpoint is attractive is that fixed pages, vs scrolling content, serve to anchor the reader. Given that even a deep, multi-page corporate memo is not going to be a novel, I think that is fine. But there is an easy solution: create page breaks. I think if Word did more to encourage a page-oriented writing style, including Powerpoint-style display only one page at a time, it would help.

Then again, there are other reasons that will be difficult to overcome. One is that many corporate authors probably view Powerpoint's brevity as a benefit. Either because they aren't good at real writing, or because they want to leverage its built-in potential for brevity to elide difficult or inconvenient details. Then of course there is sheer habit--if management expects analyses to be delivered via Powerpoint, it is hard to buck the trend. Especially if doing so subjects the recipient to the need for deep reading.

I take consolation in the fact that one of the very biggest, most successful and innovative organizations in the world bans it.