Max is an OK Shmo

I’ve made a stupidly simple service at plotdat.org — post your data, receive that data plotted as an image file in response. It’s built using matplotlib, and a couple of other cool things.

It’s also got a tumblr and twitter, oh my!

If you consider the spectrum of experiential services that salesfolk are employed to sell, gyms can have pretty fatty profit statements. While gym memberships have material value, gyms have all the wrong incentives. To the gym—like many business—their profits derive from two activities:

(1) marketing, and

(2) customer retention.

Running a gym is probably goddamn hard, however, gyms are also one of those fundamentally flawed businesses for whom it’s in their best interest to discourage customers from using their service once they’ve bought it.

If you consider two gyms: one whose customers never attend, and one whose customers always attend, you’d be an idiot not to identify the former as being more profitable at scale than the latter.  Whence why there’s only so many times you can listen to “that song” or smell “that disinfectant smell.”  Those are the sounds and aromas of a mature, money-making gym.

The investments that a gym places in its perceived quality to customers are to optimize profit-generating activities (1) and (2)—any nice equipment or towel service is in support of those activities.

On the other end of the sales spectrum, you have sporting events. Their profits derive from the exact same activities:

(1) marketing, and 

(2) customer retention.

There are two big differences that event salesfolk face. One is that a far greater share of their sales are from individual-use tickets, unlike gyms (“memberships” being comparable to a season ticket). The other is that they have an interest in you using your ticket. The more people that attend, the more desirable attending the sporting event becomes. It’s not altogether untrue of gym sales (that popularity is a good thing and that physically present customers can be monetized better), but the degree to which it’s true of ticketing events is enormous:

These two facts combined make sporting event ticket sales a more customer-friendly activity than peddling gym memberships, though a less healthy one for sure.

“Yes boss, I’m having fun!”

I tried chatting up a competing telecom customer service rep through their website, checking what pricing alternatives I have to my current service provider’s contract. Zero pricing flexibility. Zero effort.

Apparently there are no alternatives. Before receiving any service, it’ll cost me baseline $40/month—simply to keep the phone I bought two years ago. Their data pricing is in line with my current service provider’s (at ~$65/month for 3 gb of data). Why am I posting about this? More as a bookmark in time, for two decades from now when these prices will sound atrocious and I can reminisce about how bad we had it. Two decades? Tick tock.

It would not surprise me in the slightest to find out that Amazon has a wide net of “affiliate” sellers with who they share cookie data about users’ viewing patterns—colluding on price and paying a commission back to the cartel on sales made at the colluded price (which was enabled by information sharing).  The amount of demand inelasticity that exists for some information products can be steep, like the difference between $10 and $50 for a used textbook.

The amount of price experimentation and discrimination happening in today’s markets is insane.