GoodBuyGuys Blog

Proctor and Gamble has made a major move towards confirming rumors about the sale of its Duracell division with the announcement that The Blackstone Group has been retained to advise it on finding a buyer. The Duracell brand generates  over $2 billion in annual battery sales, so this is a very big deal. The sale price may reach as high as $7 billion dollars.

While Duracell remains healthy, it apparently is not generating the sort of growth numbers that P&G expects to see. It has been clear from the point of view of distributors that P&G did not meet the same standards for dealer support that had been provided by Gillette when they owned the brand. It will be interesting to see if a new owner can improve product delivery.

P&G has owned the ProCell brand for well over a year, yet there is still no reference to the product on their own web site. Not even a link directly to the duracell.com/procell web site. A “brand” search at the P&G website doesn’t even acknowledge the Procell brand.

The Blackstone Group is an international leader in the area of mergers and acquisitions, so the public announcement that they are involved in this project means that a change is inevitable. Check back here regularly for updates.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. We’re a great source for entertainment industry news too!

One of my favorite household products is WD-40. I probably use it everyday and you might find a dozen or more cans around my house and shop at any given time. There’s not much it won’t do. It’s sort of like duct tape, just in a spray version.

I bought a new can yesterday and was amazed to see that they still attach the nozzle to the side of the can with a piece of cellophane tape. The same as they have done for 40 or more years. Its not a good solution.

Believe me, I’m all for anything that uses tape, and the makers of WD-40 must use miles of the stuff, one inch at a time, to attach these removable nozzles. The nozzle (just a plastic straw, really) is necessary to get the lubricant/solvent/penetrant into hard-to-reach places but there’s no place to put it when you want to put the cap back on the can. So, you lose the nozzle long before you use up what is in the can.

Rumor has it that the WD-40 company is preparing to release a new type of can with a feature called “Smart Straw“. I hope it works as well as WD-40 does.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. We’re here with great supplies for work and home.

Occasionally, I get a call (a complaint, really) from a customer who is unhappy because a tape product they ordered was described as being two inches wide, but turned out to really be only about 1 7/8″ in width. They’re not happy, and I don’t blame them. This is usually someone who wants to use tape as a trim or binding product rather than for securing cables, and they discover that they did not get what they expected. All we can do is apologize, refund their money and honor our guarantee.

We’ve been selling tape for a long time and the change in width came about 5 or 6 years ago. Rather than raise prices, all the major US domestic tape manufacturers changed their standard from being two inches wide to 48 mm wide. For most users, this did not really impact their ability to use the tape and they never noticed the change.

Unfortunately, the tape makers changed the width but did not change the description. The metric equivilent is usually marked in parentheses on the box (each 1 inch in width is actully 24 mm) but this info rarely appears in the tape description and some manufacturers fail to acknowledge the disrepancy at all.

Odder still, while tape makers converted to metric equivilents for tape widths, they continued to use the imperial measuring standard for lengths. Most tape continues to be offered in the industry standard of 60 yds. Nobody really has an explanation for mixing the two standards. It really servers the manufacturer and no one else.

We have include info on this width standard in our website, but as long as the major manufacturers continue to label standard gaffers tape and duct tape as being two inches in width, we’ll have to stick with their standard.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Look to us first to meet your gaffers tape needs.

We’ve been trying, with some success, to establish an Ebay presence for some time. Our Ebay store, BuyMicStand, has had some limited sales success and I guess we will stick with it for awhile longer. The difficulty of posting. selling, communicating with customers, etc. is so harder on Ebay than running your own ecommerce site with a shopping cart that is difficult to understand Ebay’s success. We’ll probably eventually add items like mic stands and extension cords, but it is so difficult to do that I keep putting it off.

I guess that if you have only a single item to sell or you only sell occasionally, then an auction site makes some sense. But Ebay stores are entirely different. They almost always use the “Buy It Now” concept, so there is no real auction going on, and the fees that Ebay forces you to add in order to list your product are far beyond those that are necessary if you run your own shopping cart.

There is so much information pushed at a merchant who is trying to manage his online store, that you sometimes feel like you are going to go blind trying to find the link you need to manage one aspect of the store. The user interface is rarely updated and the result is that Ebay pages are so stuffed with images and text that it is impossible to focus on any one thing. This may be okay if you are shopping, but if you are a merchant, its different. You should be able to link to a page where primary merchant functions like adding an item or adjusting a price can be done without having to seek these functions out among others like “Eligible for Relist Fee Credit” and “Change my cross-promotion preferences“. These may be useful tools for power sellers but they shouldn’t be given equal status with user functions like “Sell My Item“.

Ebay has continued to maintain its dominance for online sales but they are ripe to be challenged by someone who does it better.

We continue to suffer fallout from the retiring of Permacel as the brand name for 665 gaffers tape. While customers who have agreed to be shipped the Shurtape version of this product seem satisfied, the long range prospects for this product are clearly in doubt. It didn’t have to be this way.

Lots of our large volume purchasers of gaffers tape place their orders on a quarterly or semiannual basis. The ordering is done by a large (and often offsite) purchasing office and their purchasing decision quite often has little to do with the actual needs of the “hands on” users of the product. These folks in purchasing write specifications for a product and once they have approved a specific product and its specs, then this information is embedded in lots of documents and procedures that control what can actually be bought.

Even though we have assured these customers that the products are identical, their procedures and purchasing manuals don’t allow for a quick and simple change from one manufacturer to another. The process of approving a new product may require writing new specs, submitting their purchasing needs out for new bids and getting approval from folks far removed from those who use the tape. This decision making can take a long time and sometimes the results are not what anybody really hoped for.

Because the brand name “Permacel” was so deeply entrenched in the purchasing process of large institutions it can’t simply be replaced with “Shurtape“. Permacel was the dominant brand for gaffers tape for so long that their name had become synonymous with the term “gaffers tape“. Since distributors were given no warning that this change was coming, we did not have a chance to get samples into these buyers hands in time to aid in a smooth transition.

We are hopeful that, over time, these loyal customer can accomodate this change and we can pick up these relationships again. These were good customers and we miss them.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other cloth tapes.

It seems that Portland Oregon, the home of the Rose Festival Parade is ready to go to war over duct tape. For years local tradition has allowed parade attendees to mark out and reserve prime parade viewing locations with duct tape so that they don’t have to wait hours on the curb to see the parade. The town is up in arms over attempts to end this tradition and it has escalated to the point that its is being viewed as a dispute over private ownership of public property.

Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard reports that what he calls the “duct tape affair” has generated more public comment than discussions about the Iraq War and the FBI’s anti-terrorism force combined. This has become such a big deal with Portland locals that the town council is actually going to have to pass a resolution for or against this practice.

While we are all for the use of as much duct tape as possible, this is one issue where the solution seems so self-evident that it wouldn’t call for wasting the time of a legislative body. If someone is willing to wait by the side of the road for a parade, it certainly isn’t fair for a last minute arrivee to push them out of their place.

Duct tape can do a lot of things for you, but standing in line is not one of them.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other tape products.

For several years we offered our customers a tape called SafeOff for use in temporary layout of gym floors. Lots of school and college gyms have to accommodate a lot of sports and you can only paint so many courts on a floor before no one can tell where they are supposed to play.  Temporary floor tape was the solution.
SafeOff was advertised as having an adhesive that would not damage the floor when removed, and it served our customers well for a while. Unfortunately, as schools migrated from oil-based to water-based polyurethane for floor finishing, SafeOff did not keep up. Consequently, several of our customers who refinished with the new product suffered floor damage when removing the tape. This was embarrasing for us and caused some real problelms for these schools.

Attempts to work out this problem with the manufacturer went no where, so we had to drop the tape.

Apparently the only other tape that had been approved by the US Volleyball Assoc., a 3M product, was dropped by the manufacturer.  It was a type of safe release tape intended for painters, and 3M apparently didn’t think that the floor marking tape business was worth supporting.

We’ve continued to try to find a solution, working with a number of volleyball coaches, as well aus USA Volleyball.  We hope that we finally have a solution.

The product is Shurtape 724 (formerly Permacel 724), a tape that we have sold for years, primarily for temporary labelling of sound and lighting equipment.  It has an adhesive that is described as “repositionable”, meaning that it can be cleanly removed from a piece of equipment and then put back on.  It comes up clean and the adhesive is aggressive enough to stick to a smooth, clean floor, but not so sticky that it brings up the floor finish when its removed.

We’ve put samples into the hands of a number of former SafeOff customers and hope that they can confirm the results of our early tests.  Check back here to see how things work out.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and  other floor marking products.

No sooner had I written about being taken in on an April Fools hoax for a “wireless extension cord” than I come across this.

The article was about a product that can wirelessly transmit power for recharging to any device that is equipped with a special Powercast module. While this device doesn’t have the ability to transmit large amounts of current like the wireless extension cord promised, it does have great potential for ridding us of all the cables needed for recharging our wireless devices.

Powercast has been nameda “Best of CES 2007″ designation from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, so I guess that this one is not a hoax.

A device like a cell phone or an MP3 player which has the powercast module included can communicate and receive power from is charger wirelessly via radio waves. Products enabled with Powercast Technology will make it to the marketplace before the end of the year.

This technology has generated lots of interest in the tech publications industry. Popular Electronics says that Powercast is capable of delivering up to two watts of power, using transmissions in the 915 megahertz range. Power can be transmitted over a range as great as 10 feet and multiple devices can be charged (each with its own Powercast) at the same time. Its even considered safe enough for you to charge your cell phone while it is in your pocket.

While there doesn’t seem to be any device that can replace the extension cord on the horizon, the prospect of getting rid of all those little cables attached to device chargers is really intriguing. Battery chargers are really hard to keep organized, so the concept that each device might be able to keep track of its own charger, without the user constantly plugging and unplugging could be a real boon to the growth of wireless, battery powered devices.

I hope my new theme song is “He won’t get fooled again“.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands , and batteries for lots of wireless devices

It may be the last day of April, but I just fell for a great April Fools Joke. It started when I googled “extension cord” to see how we were doing with that search engine. Much to my surprise, one of the page one search results took me to ThinkGeek for an ariticle about “wireless extension cords.” That’s right. WIRELESS EXTENSION CORDS!

When much of your business is based on cables and the tape that is used to temporarily affix them to the floor, then a concept like this is pretty scary.

I immediately sent a link to this article to one of our resident gadget geeks and asked him if he thought that this was possible. His analysis was “possible, yes” “safe, no.” He even referenced some work by Nikola Tesla from the late 19th century to support his opinion.

While it does appear that common household current could be turned into microwaves and transmitted wirelessly, it would create all sorts of electrical havoc, as well as more than a little risk for anyone who got in the signal’s path.

I couldn’t resist doing a little more research and found that lots of gadget oriented web sites like digg.com and the daily giz whiz had picked up on this article as well. Everyone had an opinion.

When I realized that the price for this potentially revolutionary consumer device was only $34.99, I couldn’t resist so I clicked on “Add To Cart”. Instead of a confirmation of my order, here’s what I got:

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands .

You can file this device under “wish I’d thought of it first“. Monster Cable, the company known for its high end (and high priced) audio cable has released their “Outlets To Go Power Strip“, a stripped down, light weight version of the “found under every desk” AC power outlet strip. This device is designed for travelers who run out of outlets in their hotel room or airport boarding lounge, but don’t want to lug around a full sized outlet strip.

I came across this device while listening to one of my favorite podcasts, The Daily Giz Whiz from TWIT.TV. They review an interesting new tech gadget almost every day.

Monster has managed to use half the plastic and half the cable and sell the device for twice the price of the original. They tout their FlatProfile Plug and FlatWrap Cord (both trademarked names) as making this device the perfect tote-along for power hungry road warriors. That there is a need for this device is unquestioned. The $29.95 price (about 4 times what you’d pay for a standard 6 outlet strip at Wal Mart), is another matter entirely.

Monster has done an amazing job of using their branding strategy to convince people that a wire isn’t just a wire. There has been an ongoing debate for years in the audiophile community about whether Monster Cables, particulary their speaker cables, improves sound quality. Regardless of how you might feel about that argument, the Outlets To Go strategy has nothing to do with wire quality or audio signal flow improvement. It does, however, give them the power to charge almost $30.00 for their better mousetrap.

I usually agree with the opinions voice at The Daily Giz Whiz, but I’m afraid they are willing to pay too much for not enough.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other power distribution products..