Terabytes strorage

My first harddisk was a mere 40 Megabytes in the 90s. I used a AT-286 PC with DOS operating system (no windows yet). I couldn’t find a way to fill the harddisk as much as I want to. Bear in mind there was no MP3, No CDroms, and No digital camera yet.

As a couple years went by, I got a 486 with a 13 Gigabytes harddisk. Again, I had the same problem, I did not know what situation I would need all the storage offered by the harddisk. Before pentium started, MP3 started to make way into the Internet. My 486 struggled to play a MP3 music, I can’t touch the mouse or keyboard or run any applications while a MP3 music was played. If I did anything while listening to the music, the music played will be interrupted.

In early 2000, I bought a 120GB exteternal HDD from Iomega at a price about US$ 300. It was big and I like it. Within a  year, it has filled with all my documents, photos, backups, etc. I purchased newly launched 250GB external HDD from iomega at early adopter price US$ 600. Can’t get enough and I bought 4 of those in the next 1-2 years time frame.

Storage prices kept falling down even now. It may be worth to purchase new storage then try to squeeze and clean-up the mess in the current HDD for weeks. Yesterday, I made a bold step by skipping a 1TB harddisk altogether and get 2 TeraBytes harddisk.

How big is 2 TB? Well, it’s about 2,000,000,000,000 Bytes/Characters. It’s about 500 times of my first harddisk (40MB) and 150 times of my second harddisk (13GB) and 8 times of my Iomega 250GB harddisk.  Can you believe that? How much it cost me to get 2TB harddisk? Less than the price of 250GB Iomega harddisk I bought 3 years ago!!

Why would I need that massive amount of harddisk? Well, Photography using DSLR takes a lot of storage. One picture at 12Mpixel is sized about 10MB, while shooting in RAW (uncompressed photo) can takes 60 MB per photo.

Practical Advise:

1. Storage price are falling and will keep falling. Buy what you need for short-term.
2. Invest in a good harddisk brand with 3 or 5 years warranty. Trading a few dollars saving for shorter warranty period is not worth the saving.
3. If you need USB interface only, you can get cheaper external harddisk. HDD sold at higher price usually include a firewire (needed when using MAC) or eSata. If you don’t need it, just for USB one if budget is a concern.
4. Bigger storage translate to bigger increase of data corruption or failure. Buy a second harddisk to backup your important datas. Photos are one example where when lost can’t be recreated.

Books prices and marketing strategies in Singapore bookstores

I have been observing prices on two largest chain of bookstores in Singapore – Borders and Kinokuniya.  Read more to find out what I have found.

Borders

Borders in singapore once achieved the most profitable store by area size in the world.  It generated more revenue dollars per square meter or square feet than any other stores.  I personally like Borders as they have a large store and allows most of the books to be browsed.

While some people do try to exploit the goodwill e.g. stacking many books and read them at one corners for hours or whole day long, it provides many genuine customers an opportunity to read and evaluate if they want to buy the book. Sadly, recently, they started to wrap some of the books but this is still quite minimal compared overall numbers of books.

It also concentrates on English books and no Chinese or Japanese books are on sight.

For many years, Borders did not have any discount or membership cards. Last year, they launched Borders Preferred card. The card holder is entitled to have 10% further discount from book price or after any ongoing store discount.  This is pretty unique.

It entices customers to come to their stores. Almost every month, an email would be sent with a e-coupon for a big discount on purchase of one book.  Yesterday, I just bought 1 book with 25% discount voucher and additional 10% with the card.  I also bought two more books at a normal discount (see how it works to attract customers with big discount of one item and customer tends to purchase more?)

Kinokuniya

It has the largest bookstore in Singapore by area and located in Ngee Ann City (Takashimaya). Many o fthe books are wrapped so one can’t really browse the content to evaluate. Larger and more complete collections are offered here ranging from non-English books to less popular interest.

Kinokuniya has a long-running membership program that entitles the members to have 10% discount of normal book prices or 20% during certain promotion period (over the weekend usually).  The books they have is more complete while borders usually stock 1-3 copies and stop selling if it has slow turnaround time.

Facts

Book prices in Singapore from those two bookstores are excessively expensive. A book that sells for US$ 29.90 (~ S$ 42) would be listed at S$ 60.00. This mean most of the books are have 50% over their RRP in the US. Compare this with Amazon price, you’ll know that even the RRP is already high. Amazon never sells at RRP, simply because RRP (Recommended Retail Price) already have a significant margin included for bookstores to make money.

Typically, a book can provide at least up to 30% margin for the retailers. So in this case, the bookstores grossly increased the price by 80% to Singapore local price. It can even be higher margin if the publisher provide a special or higher discount for the retailers for buying in bulk.

Now, provided that the bookstores provide 10% discount, they store still earn at least 70% in gross profit margin. I would believe they earned a hefty amount of money even after substracting all operating expenses. No wonder Borders in Singapore can achieve the most profitable store in this small-population country.

So the next time you buy books even with 35% discount, think that you may be still contributing 50% of your book to the bookstore. It is a good deal but not a great deal.

One may argue that buying from Amazon is cheaper but become more expensive when added with shipping cost. True, but I still feel that companies should maintain a reasonable profit margin and no higher than that. Obviously reasonable could be different from consumer and seller point of view.

Platinum Concierge (American Express vs VISA) Part II

I returned from Japan and it is much clearer for me now. Apparently, American Express uses International SOS to liaise with the shop person by email. The shop person gave me a feedback that it’s quite difficult to correspond by emails, as he doesn’t have email address and only his manager does.  So this explains, why there was a delay of days for each correspondence attempt.

When I asked him on how Visa contacted them, he said by way of phone and he liked it that way. It’s faster and easier for him to reply.  I got most of ordered stuff including the last minutes one. Visa Infinite concierge did slip on one item that has to be pre-ordered. I ended buying on the street shop and cost me about twice more than if I were to pre-ordered from the store.

So what’s the next challenge? My company is trying to organize a conference for our colleagues all over the world. I was torn if I should contact both Amex and Visa concierge to solicit for proposal. I was hoping that they can leverage on their existing partnership with hotels in 2 Asian countries.

I went ahead with VICC (Visa Infinite Concierge) and they managed to secured me at least 8 proposals. They mentioned that they didn’t have any partnership with hotels, yet they find some good hotels and relay my requirements.  Within a week, I got almost all but a couple of proposals.  Thumbs up! Good work.

Amex was not contacted as I don’t want hotel to be contacted twice and also to waste any resource on either side.  I wonder if Amex concierge would perform the same.

Despite so, Amex has its own travel agency which is quite reputable globally. I need to make changes to my relatives flight on tickets that were not bought from them. They did helped me and spared me from long hold time by Singapore Airlines.  In peak season, one can be on hold for more than 30 minutes and not connected to any agents (call can be disconnected after ‘exceeding waiting time’).

Practical Advise:

1. Knows what services are offered by your concierge. There could be more than one concierge from your card
2. Leverage on each concierge stregth to effectively get assistance from it.
3. Knows when to back down and switch over the another concierge
4. Do not waste people’s time and efforts by getting multiple concierge doing the same thing.