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Comment by stacky | Hacker News Reader

Great read. I particularly enjoyed her advice:

> Make it right. The standard reimbursement for moving breakages used to be 6¢ a pound. If we broke a 10-pound table, we’d be liable for 60¢, but that’s not right. So we used to give an “I’m sorry” box to customers, with a coffee mug and gift certificate in it, along with fixing whatever we broke. It made a big difference.

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That seems like a bizarre way to pay for damages considering weight and value are not correlated at all.

Well, they are highly correlated for tables. Or are you selling 10lb tables for 60 cents?

And weirdly, I can’t think of anything I can buy for 6cents a pound.

Adjusting for inflation (using the only date in the article, 1991), that's $0.11/lb in today's money! Hmm, still can't think of anything I can buy for that amount.

Bubble wrap maybe.

Tap water comes to mind as being considerably cheaper than that. I'm pretty sure that gravel and sand are, too.

Three of the less breakable items you could move!

Indeed, and I can't imagine someone paying a moving company to transport any of those three rather than leaving them behind and buying new tapwater, gravel, or sand at their destination!

The X per Pound is just the standard liability insurance. If you have valuables, or items that would exceed that there is a process where by you can buy additional insurance, but the X per pound is normally what is included in the Movers Fees.

More of a CYA for the mover than protection for your property.

I remember flickr said something like "offer support in a way you know won't scale"

The unfortunate corollary to this is, but when you do finally scale, the care goes out the window.

Is this the advice that nascent Google took? Considering they are infamous for not responding to support requests at all now that they're big, it appears they did put in place a support system that didn't scale.

I'd say that "Don't Care, rely on random public people" scales rather well.

That's how all retail businesses are approaching as well- get rid of as many people as possible, and replace with fixed cost machines. It's a great advantage from the business side of things, but really sucks with regards to people.

Google's Project Fi has good support - live chat, phone, email, and social media. Likewise with YouTube TV.

Of course you're paying $35+/month instead of the usual $0-10/month for most of their consumer products.

My understanding is Google’s support philosophy is the same as everything else: only do things that scale massively; as 1-to-1 support can’t scale, it isn’t included except for services where it’s required to be successful.

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