Starbucks decaf coffee

I had a whole mental post composed about Starbucks decaf coffee, and the difficulty of finding out how much caffeine is in it. Turns out their site is much easier than I remembered it, and regular coffee has about 330mg, while decaf has 25mg. Coke has 45mg. The decaf numbers are about double what I've seen for other brands.

Bad discounts

I'm not going to mention the name of the online retailer with this promotion, but they're currently offering a $25 gift card with $100 purchases. I count at least a dozen products with $99.95 price tags, and 4 or 5 with $100.00 price tags. It's probably a deliberate strategy to make sure they don't have to discount electronics products with poor margains.
Only the $100 products are eligible for the gift card, leading to a prolonged mental debate among your average consumer of a) does shipping count? b) does giftwrap count c) is there a $5 product on the site? The answer to all of which is no, leading to what I'm sure are substantially lower conversion rates, due to frustrated consumers.

When We Left Earth

Be sure to watch When We Left Earth tomorrow night on the Discovery Channel!

National no call list

If you're looking for information on the "national no call list", it's available at donotcall.com. Several of my direct marketing friends have pointed out that if you've done business with a company in the last 12 or 18 months, they're exempted, so you might not get the reduction you were hoping for.

Twitter

Well, I've signed up for a Twitter account. It seems mainly useful for following other folks who either post useful links, or obsessively update what their up to. I rarely even update Facebook status, so there probably won't be much posting from me.