T-Mobile and SMS rates. 30 cents per message! Are you kidding?

In short, without any special announcement, T-Mobile (IIRC) more than doubled my family's text messaging rates. We used to pay 5 cents per message, then 10. Then, T-Mobile started charging for both inbound and outbound messages, which is unlike Internet access, Local/Long distance phone service, or postage services.

T-Mobile now charges 15 cents to send a message and 15 cents to receive one. So for a husband and wife to text each other costs 30 cents - more than to send a physical post-card thru the mail (26c)!

When you consider that SMS is limited to 160 characters, and most text messages I've ever sent or received are under 50 characters (i.e. "on the way home, anything from the store?"), T-Mobile is now charging my family a cent per character! This has to be the greatest ripoff of all time in the telecomm industry.

T-Mobile, if it wasn't for your funny sales staff who keep accidentally giving us discounts on phones without a contract in the store (they couldn't care less), we'd leave you in a heartbeat. In fact, we almost did for the iPhone and probably will when rev 2 comes out.

Firefox hangs & crashes on Mac OSX - Solved!

If you're reading this, you probably have at least one of the issues I had with Firefox on Mac OSX.

In short, there are two problems that can absolutely cripple Firefox on the Mac (Intel MacBook in my case).

1. Anti-Phishing tool causes browser to hang, presumably while checking with a server somewhere about the pages you are on. I found this one widely reported on the web and it did improve my FF for a while.

2. Corrupt profiles. If you can live with re-installing your plugins, and exporting / importing your bookmarks, this is an easy fix to try. It took me about 2 minutes to complete the fix for this. All you have to do is:
* Organize bookmarks, then File -> Export bookmarks (some file)
* Quit FF
* Remove your profile folder from Mac HD -> Library -> App Support -> Firefox (I removed this entire folder)
* Start FF, then import bookmarks from organize -> import (same file)
* Finally, add any plugins you want again.

#1 removed some of the spinning beachballs of doom, while #2 completely fixed FF in my case.

Hope this helps someone out there. Cheers!

Now I really hate paypal.

In a previous post, I mentioned how annoying it was that Paypal made it so hard to use your credit card and so easy to accidentally use your bank account to pay for an item.

Now, I'm really annoyed with them. It turns out it's going to take them 4 business days (quite possibly 5-8 real days due to the coming weekend, to clear the funds. Thus, the item I purchased online yesterday, hoping to have it for this weekend, will take an additional week to arrive.

Thanks Paypal! You suck!

Paypal sucks, in case anyone else is searching.

Paypal sucks. What a scam for merchants, and bad for customers as well.

After years of not using my Paypal account, I found an item on eBay for much cheaper ($90 off of a $400 purchase) than anywhere else. The only payment option was Paypal so I thought "what the heck, I'll use them".

First, their UI hasn't improved much in the several years since I've used them, with the exception being annoying fade-in / fade-out popups. They show you an advertisement on logging in for their private label credit card. Once you try to check-out, they make it extremely difficult to change your payment method from "Bank account" to "Credit card". I don't know about you, but who the heck uses their bank account for ecommerce these days?

At least with a credit card you can contest the charges, but with bank draft, Paypal has your money whether you get your goods or not. Trust me, I spent months battling with them over a $1000 keyboard 7 years ago, and they were worse than useless.

Why Costco is a bad deal for consumers.

Growing up, I remember going to Costco and Price-Club with my parents. There were good deals to be found and we would often visit both back-to-back, getting good prices on gigantic bulk quantities of stables (Food, Toilet Paper, ...). Then one day, they merged and competition in this market died.

Today, my wife, self, and 10 month old visited a Costco. We selected roughly $50-$100 of goods that were perhaps at a 10% discount over Target. Of course, we were waived thru the entrance with our "membership" card without even a glance or scan, but at checkout were asked for a $50 renewal fee. Are you kidding me?

Think about this for a moment. $50 / year = $4.16/mo, for the privilege of shopping at a store? I wonder how many people would choose to pay $50 to renew, if Costco told them the new price (and their membership status) at the door instead of at the register after an hour of shopping?

Reasons why I'm not going back:

• $50/year or $4.16/mo for the privilege of shopping somewhere is ridiculous.
• Amazon Prime is $79/year with unlimited 2-day free shipping.
• Lines for everything: Food, Cashiers, Leaving the store, etc...
• Even the tire center has long enough waits that we've never used them.
  
• Costco is almost always located in inconvenient areas, with bad parking.
• The deals aren't good anymore. At best, we saw a 30% discount on a toy. Most were ~5%.
• Bulk quantities are a burden on many of us. We really don't need a five year supply of Ketchup.
• The people. No matter how wide the aisles, you always get stuck behind slow people at Costco.
• Buying crap you don't need, and way too much of it. Do you really want to try that new "health-food" bar, in 96 count quantities?
• Shopping there is a serious investment in time. It's impossible to park, enter, shop, wait in line, pay, wait in line to exit (receipt inspection), and leave in under 45min.

Costco is currently the darling on Wall Street, with a P/E approaching some dot-coms and a market capitalization approaching Amazon's at $26 Billion. Doing a search for "costco sucks" on my favorite search engine found 553 results. Clearly, Costco is insulting it's most important asset: it's customers. Until today, I was a life-long customer of Costco (and before they merged, Price Club). After today, I don't plan to ever return.

I would state here how Costco could re-earn my business, but I think it's their failure to evolve that separated them and me as a business / customer relationship. Unless they figure out how to eliminate their membership fees and bring back the deals, I won't even consider going back. Even then, they would somehow have to convince me to do so, which is unlikely. Given that fantastic web commerce companies such as Amazon emerged with excellent deals and often free shipping, Costco has almost certainly lost this customer for good.