.:wal-mart: cheap and…cheap:.

UPDATE: looks like someone decided to take a tiny bit of initiative and at least set up some code to detect what browser you’re using, which then gives you a message that it’s not compatible with anything but IE. it’s a step, but still weak. 

i hate wal-mart. as a matter of fact, i loathe wal-mart. i dislike everything about how they do business. i hate their store atmosphere. i hate the way they treat their store employees. they exemplify everything that one should not do when it comes to ethics. i could go into a lot of detail and give a lot of examples, but that’s not the point of this post.  no, friends, the point of this post is to point out yet another example of ‘cheap’ not necessarily meaning ‘better’.

lets take a gander at the latest embarrassment that wal-mart has put out.  i would like for you to click here. view it now in all of it’s glory…wal-mart video downloads. good times! no doubt, if you are using internet explorer, you’re viewing it in all of it’s glorious splendor. now, this is a hot thing to be in the market of now, this whole downloading video thing. apple started it, and now everyone is following suite, including amazon with their unbox service (they partnered with TiVo) and netflix to name two big players. and, of course, wal-mart has to jump on the ‘effing boat too.

now…here’s the thing. i’m all about competition. i like the idea of all of this big companies competing for my business because i’m the big winner when that happens. however, what i’m ultimately going to pay for is service that actually works. call me crazy, but i’m willing to pay a few extra bucks here and there if it means that i’m going to spend a larger amount of time enjoying that particular service or item and less time trying to fix it or get it to work the way i want. case in point: the iPod…or really just about anything made by apple. you pay a premium…but you ultimately get something that you spend more time actually using. it’s the whole idea of keeping something simple, of keeping something functional and focusing on doing something really well that should be a priority, and that’s why apple has had as much success as it has.

but then you’ve got wal-mart. wal-mart has to be this super-giant poo-flinging half-retarded monkey screaming to the world that they have everything…that you should come buy from them…that there should be no question as to where you shop, you should just go to wal-mart. but this is wrong!  and here’s yet another example of why this is wrong. if you have firefox, i’d like for you to go ahead and open it and copy the following link into the nav bar…

http://www.walmart.com/videodownloads

….

this…is something of a debacle. i cannot even begin to tell you how horrified i was when i saw that. i am horrified because, as a person who works in the interactive industry, i can tell you that it wouldn’t have taken much to make sure this wasn’t a problem. it’s really just a matter of, well, pride. what’s worse is that it has been known for a couple of days now…and still…no one…has…fixed…it.

sure…i know it’s not completely wal-mart’s fault.  it’s really their agency’s fault. but, frankly, i would say that if you hire an agency that does not have the core competency of some simple QA, of testing on multiple browsers, that doesn’t say a whole lot about your overall business. the bottom line is how can i trust a service like that to work how i want when i can’t even do a simple thing like be able to use it in a more common browser?

i’d avoid this service like the plauge.  stick with iTunes, or check out amazon’s service if you want something you know is going to work.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under General, Cool thing of the day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.