Research by Home Security.net

Here’s to turning lemons into lemonade.  Zappos’ sister site 6pm.com recently flubbed up their pricing calculations, capping all sales at $49.95 regardless of total price.  Rather than hassling their customers or hiding their heads in the sand, they took the loss and addressed the issue quickly and transparently.  Kudos to them.  Below, the note from their exec on the topic:

Hey everyone – As many of you may know (and I’m sure a lot of you do not), 6pm.com is our sister site.  6pm.com is where brandaholics go for their guilt free daily fix of the brands they crave.  Every day, the site highlights discounts on products ranging up to 70% off.  Well, this morning, we made a big mistake in our pricing engine that capped everything on the site at $49.95.  The mistake started at midnight and went until around 6:00am pst.  When we figured out the mistake was happening, we had to shut down the site for a bit until we got the pricing problem fixed.

While we’re sure this was a great deal for customers, it was inadvertent, and we took a big loss (over $1.6 million – ouch) selling so many items so far under cost.  However, it was our mistake.  We will be honoring all purchases that took place on 6pm.com during our mess up.  We apologize to anyone that was confused and/or frustrated during out little hiccup and thank you all for being such great customers.  We hope you continue to Shop. Save. Smile. at 6pm.com.

Cheers!
Aaron Magness
Director of Brand Marketing & Business Development
Zappos Development, Inc.

Found this recently, and it brought me back to high school in the 1980s, when punk rock was still fighting the good fight against the evils of the music industry.  These days, it seems they won the war ;-)  “Home Taping” has such a ring to it…

I believe that this is from Intel’s lobby.  Really puts Moore’s Law and the explosive expansion of technology in perspective.

Epic British test drive.  The Ford Fiesta put through the paces.

Brutal.  I remember seeing a blurb about this Canadian guitar player a while back – he flew United and they broke his $1200 guitar and refused to fix it.  So he wrote a song about it and posted it up on YouTube.  5.8 million views later, United wises up and invites him to their HQ to discuss reparations.   On the way out to see them, they lose his luggage.  Oy Vey.  Great article about it in the NY Times.

Something about this makes me giggle.  The carpet doesn’t seem to match the drapes, so to speak.