Category: Commerce

Products, services, marketing, names

The handouts

beach, Atlántida, Canelones, Uruguay
Foamiest I’ve ever seen the beach.

Walking home in front of the Zoológica (Atlántida’s little zoo), the parking attendant gives me handouts:

handouts

Addiction treatment. Save your life or that of someone who needs it.

handouts 1

A chance for the ultimate in hair restoration. USD 160. 100% limp? Something must be lost in translation. Regardless, I’ll pass.

handouts 2

Stonework, plus cleaning, fill, ponds — which reminds me our tajamar in the campo, bone dry two weeks ago, is more than half full after the recent rain. More on the tajamar here, here, here, and here. Anyway, no more for now. Thanks anyway.

handouts 3

Funeral services. More personal • more humane • cheaper. Than what?

handouts 4

Parcels and freight, moving. Daily, door to door. Now this might come in handy if someone in Montevideo wants to buy the freezer we have for sale.

Might.

Selling stuff online

This is from my latest sale on mercadolibre.com.uy. A portable disk drive.The buyer sent me money through the ubiquitous Abitab. There would have been no charge had he used a Banco Republica and transferred it to my account. I then dropped the package at Tiempost for delivery to his local branch in Pocitos (Montevideo neighborhood). He can track the package online.

tiempost-abi

My last sale was yesterday. A radar detector. The buyer came to my house. Although he lives nearby, he lives on the other side of the peaje (toll booth), so he might not have been so eager … except that yesterday was a national strike, and the peaje was wide open.

The sale before that was to a guy who lived near the airport. a GPS unit. I told him I had to take a friend to a flight in a few days. He didn’t mind waiting. I phoned him from outside the airport and five minutes later he was there, and the transaction done.

It’s not Paypal and the USPS, but it’s possible.

 

 

Correa de secadora

Last Saturday, our clothes drier stopped spinning. Not entirely. Just when it had anything in it, the only time that matters.

I tore into it, took the breaking belt to find a replacement. Not happening in Uruguay, in a smallish town, on a Saturday. So Monday I went to the local appliance store. Nope. Have to go to Montevideo. How, I asked, do people in Rivera and Artigas (places several hundred km away) live, if everything has to be done in Montevideo?

The answer: telephone.

By now, I’m comfortable in person in Spanish, but I’m still a little hesitant to phone, because if you get a speed-freak mumbler on the other end (the phone company, a government entity, comes to mind) , you’re going nowhere fast. In this case, I was in luck. I confirmed datos by email, transferred money to their bank account online, and at 9 AM the next day heard a beep-beep of the truck delivering the belt.

Which was not the size I had ordered.

I emailed the company, and long story short, two and a half days later we’re up and running again. They paid the second shipment, and the return of the first.

Kudos to AMT Aspiratutto SRL!

 

 

Wow — customer service in Uruguay!

I bought a bread maker from Tim and Loren, who returned to the Untied Snakes couple months ago. It’s been great, but of course had no manual (no used bread machine ever does), and I was too dense to figure out if it would do just dough (yes, of course), so I emailed the Uruguayan company through their web site asking about a manual. More then once. With no result. Months ago.

I figured I’d try one more time before resorting to the phone. I can manage most affairs in Rioplatense, the local bizarrely accented Spanish, just a couple days ago completing some legal affairs without any English backup, but the phone can be weird if you get someone who decides your obvious non-native status is reason to speak as fast and unintelligibly as possible. Which I find to be the norm.

Off went the email. And less than four hours later, a series of scans of the manual. JPEGs, not the original PDF, meaning someone actually had to make an effort to scan a physical manual, and did.

Bravo! Seriously. I’m profoundly impressed and grateful.

 

 

Cheap Chinese shit redux

When my second little key chain flashlight (in four years) went dead, I looked closely and realized it could be taken apart and the battery replaced. A replacement battery would cost almost as much as the flash light, but if I can keep even one little bit of plastic out of the landfill, it’s worth it, right?

Wrong. I sent this image to the eBay seller, saying the batteries they sent were either counterfeit or expired. I bought a new flashlight to make the comparison. They refunded my pocket change immediately.

flashlight

I’ve been enthusiastic, amused, and reflective about my purchases of cheap Chinese shit in the past. Who knows, maybe one day my 100 LR41 batteries will arrive, and the cat be entertained to his heart’s content, once again, by the laser pointer.