PSoTD

Last night I spent about 15-20 minutes going through Yahoo's Local Section for restaurants in the Camp Hill, Pennsylvania area, giving up to 5 star reviews to some of my local favorites. It's a quite underutilized feature, which is a shame, since there are many restaurants around here that we haven't tried and that a consensus "star" review would be very helpful.

On the other hand, I think it's a little silly that people will take the time to give a review to a national chain restaurant, particularly giving them 5 out of 5 stars. Denny's, Baskin-Robbins, Waffle House... it makes me wonder if someone was tasked with the job of just giving out perfect ratings to some of these chains. The whole point of a restaurant chain is to provide a consistent level of restaurant service and ingestibles across the entire group of restaurants, so if you eat at Burger King in Atlanta you know what to expect at a Burger King in Carson City. So why would anyone bother giving a chain a local rating, unless it was below standard or for pay? I know I wouldn't. There's nothing truly "local" about the chains.

So why is Doing Business so anti-worker protection?

Received this email from United Airlines last night:

Support United's bid for Dulles to Beijing route

United is petitioning the Department of Transportation to be allowed to be the first domestic carrier to have a direct route between Washington, D.C. Dulles (IAD) and Beijing, China (PEK). Right now, 28 other world capitals have this route to Beijing; Washington, D.C. deserves to be next!

We are asking our members to please add their name and support to this initiative. It will only take a few moments of your time.

Maybe DC deserves the flight, maybe it doesn't, but United Airlines surely doesn't deserve it. They can't get me from Philly to Bakersfield in under 26 hours with perfectly good weather, and they want me to help them get MORE passengers? Why should they be provided additional opportunity to completely screw up international traffic?

If there was a petition that said under no circumstances should United be allowed to have that route, I would go sign it.

I have spent a lot of posts kvetching about airlines. I just want to say that Southwest Airlines did exactly what we needed for this trip - relatively low priced tickets bought at the last minute because of the urgency, direct flights, no delays no hassles no problems. Thanks.

Remember the good old days when airlines offered bereavement fares?

I wish whoever associated with the Video Professor would quit spamming bulletin boards that have nothing to do with his service. Sell to goobers, fine, but quit spamming bulletin boards.

From the Boston Herald:

As college students returned over the past week, cable and telecommunication companies were battling it out around campuses.

Companies like RCN Corp., Comcast and Verizon Communications were carrying out big guerrilla marketing campaigns in an effort to woo college students to their cable, Internet and phone services.

"This is by far our busiest time of the year," said Paul D'Arcangelo, Comcast's regional vice president for the Boston. "We anticipate about a quarter of a million students that migrate into this area."

And each one of those students represents a potential customer, he added. So the cable company rolled out various attention-grabbing tatics around the city's colleges, including flying airplane banners over the streets and handing out fliers from Comcast-branded Segways.

RCN also had big plans, passing out over 3,000 branded backpacks full of coupons, handing out free pizza and hosting an MTV2 video jockey contest, said Peggy Nickerson, director of sales and marketing for the Boston market.

Verizon Communications set up tents and parked a branded Ford Explorer or General Motors Hummer on college campuses, while passing out frisbees and hackey-sacks, said Tom Orzo, Verizon's group manager for the New England marketing team.

Wow! I guess we know where some of the old radio station marketing honchos have ended up...