Great job, Midas!

Posted on by Jeff Posted in Uncategorized — No Comments ↓

goodbuyguys.com spokespersonIf you follow this blog at all, you know that I don’t hesitate to slam a service or product if I feel that good value or customer care are not part of the equation.

Well, it only seems fair that when I come across a really exceptional product or service, then that should get fair coverage as well. I’d always rather write about something positive.

It would be hard to write too many positives about my recent experience with the service department of Midas, the company that makes high end sound reinforcement mixers.

We were involved several years ago in the upgrade of the sound system at Kenan Stadium, the football stadium at UNC Chapel Hill, my alma mater. There had been a problem with the Midas Venice 2400 that had been installed during the upgrade and it became necessary to return it to Midas for service.

We contacted the regional Midas rep who not only arranged for us to get priority treatment from the Midas service center in Minnesota, but also provided, at no cost, a loaner Midas mixer for the stadium sound crew to use until the repair could be made.

After shipping the mixer (using the online service form they provided was simple), we were able to get updated status info on the repair every time I gave them a call. No being put on hold. No voice mail. No “we’ll get back to you”. Just friendly, informed technicians who knew exactly what was going on with the mixer.

When Midas found out that this mixer was in use in a 60,000 seat stadium and UNC was in the middle of the football season, their techs assured us that the mixer would be back in time for the next home game. They got it back to us a full five days before the promised date!

No quibbling about warranty-we were half way through a 3 year warranty period. No problem with return shipping-Midas paid it. No problem with follow up information-Midas told us exactly what the problem was and what they did to fix it.

We have a Midas Venice 320 in our rental equipment pool and I am looking forward to our next mixer purchase. It will be a Midas!

Got a story about great customer service that our readers might find valuable? Let us know!

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 useful production supplies

look out google, here we come!

Posted on by Jeff Posted in Other News — No Comments ↓

spokesperson for goodbuyguys.comImagine my satisfaction in discovering this morning that one of our goodbuyguys.com sites, buybattery.com, has achieved page two ranking in google for the search term “duracell”. This is amazing, particularly when you realize that entering “duracell” in the google search engine returns 9,550,000 hits.

Our web developer, Dale Norris, has been working on this site since June and he has followed all the generally accepted search engine optimization strategies to achieve this ranking. No secrets. Just hard work. His attention to detail never ceases to amaze me and his ability to stick with a task day after day is amazing to behold. No one web master has a complete knowleged of how to achieve top rankings in search engines (no matter what your email may say.) Dale is part of a really amazing community of open source web developers and he gives as much to this community as he gets. His contributions to goodbuyguys.com reflect greatly on the open source community.

Goodbuyguys.com is a collection of web sites (including buytape.com, buybattery.com, buymicstand.com, buyextensioncord.com, buyaflashlight.com and buywireties.com) designed to deliver a great selection of entertainment production and audiovisual supplies.

In the coming months, we look forward to adding sites like buygels.com and buywirelessmic.com to our goodbuyguys roster.

Dale will continue to work on buybattery.com until its page 1. Keep checking at google. I know he can do it.

A warranty not worth the paper it’s printed on!

Posted on by Jeff Posted in batteries, Other News — No Comments ↓

Buybattery.com is about batteries. Duracell Procell batteries. The kind you use in flashlights, wireless mics and electronics. We don’t sell automotive batteries, but maybe we should.

Here’s what happened to me yesterday.

I have to keep lots of vehicles on the road. Seven at the moment. They all need batteries. In fact our trucks all use dual batteries.

I bought a battery for an older car that I don’t drive very often, so I decided to get a really good one so I could start this cart up every month or so, even if I wasn’t driving it regularly. I went with Interstate, supposedly one of the best batteries you can buy. I got a 75 month model, one of the best you can buy.

Well, after 34 months that battery failed. It wouldn’t hold a charge. In fact, it wouldn’t even take a charge. Since I thought I had gotten the best warranty available, I assumed that I could just take it back to the dealer and get a replacement-with some sort of pro rating, of course.

Boy, was I wrong. Since I had bought the battery through our company account, the manufacturer, Interstate, claimed my car was a “commercial vehicle”, so the warranty was immediately cut in half. Interstate would not offer any warranty support. The dealer, a company that I had done business with for years, simply washed their hands of the whole matter, so I was out of luck.

Interstate, a privately held company with $650 in annual sales could have solved this problem for just a few dollars and made a customer for life. Instead, they claimed more warranty exceptions than any warranty I have ever seen.

The results:

~I will never buy another Interstate battery. That’s a fleet of seven vehicles, and growing, that will never use another of their products;

~I will never buy another battery from this local dealer, a company that has had my business for over 20 years;

~I will take every opportunity I get to make sure and tell this story to anyone who will listen.

Interested in how a honest warranty that really cares about the customer should work? Here’s ours.

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 useful production supplies

A good product is hard to find

Posted on by Jeff Posted in Other News — No Comments ↓

mic stand mikeI took a call this morning from a customer interested in our M1 Adhesive Remover. We have just recently added some cleaning products to our web site, and this led to an interesting discussion with our new customer.

First off, his application for M1 was the removal of mildew. Most of our customers use it to get adhesive residue off their cables, so mildew removal was a new application for us. I am going to give it a try. This customer says that it is much better than chlorine bleach.

The more interesting part of our discussion was posed by his question “Why is this stuff so hard to find?”. M1 is made by a small company in Georgia and you won’t find their products in Home Depot or Wal Mart. No surprise there. These national retailers make you jump through lots of hoops to get on their shelves and lots of small manufacturers don’t even try. Even if you do succeed, pricing pressures by the retailer may mean that you never really make any money.

He found us on the web, using a Google search . I tried it myself, and was amazed to find that our site, thetapeworks.com was the first site on the page. It struck me as odd that we would score better than the maker of the product. In fact, the maker of this stuff could not be found anywhere in the first five pages of search results. I finally got tired of looking.

While we are happy to have a page 1 ranking, it is really surprising that so many businesses continue to miss out on such a powerful tool for building brands and selling their products.

Got a suggestion for using M1 or an observation about brand building on the web? Let us know.

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 useful production supplies

Laser microphone technology

Posted on by Jeff Posted in microphones & mic stands — No Comments ↓

One of my favorite blogs is engadget. Every day brings info about a “must have” item or something that I wish had been available when I was working as a sound person.

I got out of the sound business at about the time digital consoles and speaker management really began to overtake the sound reinforcement industry, so my background in “hands on” experience with this type of equipment was really limited. Still, I understood that regardless of how great the digital signal path was, sound reinforcement (or recording) still remained analog on both ends. On the input end, a diaphragm in a microphone had to vibrate, based on air movement, and a diaphragm (in this case a cone) had to vibrate, again exciting air movement, in order for someone to hear an amplified, or recorded and played back, sound.

Now it looks like there are finally some real options developing in the microphone end of the equation. The engadget posting is about a microphone that would use a laser to read data and it sounds pretty strange.

Here’s what they have to say: This device will reportedly stream damp air containing microscopic water particles through a tube, while a laser diode beams light through the vessel onto a sensor located on the opposite side. When sound waves enter the tube, the vibration of the droplets will cause the sensor to detect changes optically as the beam is disturbed, supposedly resulting in near-perfect vocal reproduction.

The inventors name is Dave Schwartz and he has a patent on the design.

Okay, lasers, streams of water, and millon dollar mics aren’t exactly ready for prime time, but at least someone is working on solving the front-end-of-the-amplified-chain problem.

What’s next? Digital gaffers tape?

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 useful production supplies.

good publicity for gaffers tape

Posted on by Jeff Posted in gaffers tape — No Comments ↓

spokesguyI wouldn’t be one to say that “any publicity is good publicity” but publicity like this is great.

We were mentioned in a recent print addtion of “Better Homes and Gardens-Wood ,a magazine about woodworking as a source for gaffers tape. I don’t really know if may of our customers use this great product in woodworking, but it is a great solution for all kinds of shop problems. Our companion site, thetapeworks.com was actually the site the magazine referenced in its Pick the Best Tape for Every Job article. The article is on page 30 of the summer print issue.

We enjoy hearing from customers outside our core group of audio visual and entertainment production technicians who use our products for lots of applications that are new to us. It is a great way to expand our customer base and it often leads to new products that we add to our catalog.

Got a suggestion for a new use for our products. Let us know and we’ll start a “tips” page at GoodBuyGuys.com.

Here’s what Better Homes and Gardens has to say about gaffers tape. They call it “Heavy Duty Duct Tape” and recommend that “when standard duct tape won’t hold, use its big brother“. “Heavier fabaric and twice the adhesive create a firm grip on rough surfaces. Use it to: reinforce tool handles and hold together metal pipe sections and fittings for a dust collection system.”

“Thank you”, Better Homes and Gardens. It’s great to get noticed by such an important publication.

Rechargeable AA from Moxia Energy

Posted on by Jeff Posted in batteries

battery bobWe have avoided selling rechargeable batteries because we just really didn’t feel like the technology currently available gave good value to the customer. The combination of the cost, the decreased battery life over time, and the inability to predict performance over time has meant that our primary battery customers-those who use batteries in wireless microphones-couldn’t count on rechargeables to dependable meet their needs.

While we still don’t recommend rechargeable batteries for wireless mics, I just came across a rechargeable battery that may be just too cool to pass up.

The USB Cell from Moxia Energy, a British company, uses a computer USB port to recharge a AA battery. What could be handier than a battery that can be recharged while you work and doesn’t require a dedicated charger. While this battery may not have a discharge rate that is reliable enough for a wireless mic, there are lots of applications where it would be great.

People who travel with lots of electronic devices can now leave the battery charger at home and walk right by the overpriced batteries at the airport kiosk.

Unlike most rechargeable batteries that must be fully discharged, the USB cell can be inserted into a computer port for just a few minutes for a quick “top off”.

This item could save tons of money for gamers, and anyone who travels with both a computer and an MP3 player or radio that uses AA batteries. Cameras, flashlights and remote controls can all use the USB Cell.

We are in contact with the UK manufacturer, in hopes of becoming a US distributor. Check back here to see if we can make this available.

Proctor and Gamble – Duracell

Posted on by Jeff Posted in batteries

battery bobI got the answer to my question about copper in the CopperTop a lot sooner than I expected and it certainly wasn’t the answer I had hoped for.As you may well be aware, Gillette, the maker of Procell Batteries, has been taken over by Proctor & Gamble, one of the largest consumer products companies in the world. They are now in the process of implementing this take over with their distributors (including goodbuyguys.com) and the first thing they did was announce a price increase, effective 1 January 2007. Welcome to the neighborhood! In their letter to us they cite the increase in raw materials to justify the price increase and specifically reference an increase of 128% in the price of copper, as well as an increase in the costs of zinc and nickel. Both Duracell and Procell alkaline batteries will feel this price increase at the first of the year.This is our first experience with P&G and it remains to be seen if they honor the pledge outlined in the price increase letter to only raise prices to recover costs already incurred, rather than to do it on speculation.We are hopeful that a company with the resources to provide both product and info on a massive global level will be willing to serve the small but growing distributor at the same level Gillette has served our market. Check back here to see how they are doing.

Durham Art Project

Posted on by Jeff Posted in Other News — No Comments ↓

spokesguyTo tell you the truth, selling audio visual supplies is not always the most exciting thing in the world, even when you are working with really great customers.

That is why we jumped at the chance to be involved in a really exciting art project in Durham, a city just a few miles from here that is enjoying a wonderful arts-centric revival in its downtown area.

I got a call recently from a good friend-Frank Konhaus, a former co-worker of mine at Duke University and the founder of Kontek ,an audio and video design company located in a beautiful award winning restored building in Durham. Frank and his wife Ellen Cassilly were organizing a project for downtown Durham that would bring French installation artist and photographer Georges Rousse to town to do installations in a number of historic buildings that were slated for renovation. That was good news. The great news was, The Rousse Project needed tape!

Let Frank tell you a little more about how the GoodBuyGuys got to be involved in something really cool.

“Among the many things requested by French photographer and installation artist Georges Rousse when he came to Durham to do 4 site-specific

public art projects was tape of various types. We called Jeff and he

sent us a box of Gaffers tape, painters tape,caution tape, duct tape,

marking tape, glow tape and some other mystery tape.

We have used EVERY ONE of them! We are using the barricade tape to mark

off the public access routes to the sites, the gaff tape to block out

windows, the painters tape to mark off all painting patterns specified

by the artist, the caution tape to keep folks away from the critically

positioned tripod, and the duct tape for everything else. Thanks to you

guys for helping us make this happen.”

If you would like more information or would like to make a donation, you can visit rousseprojectdurham.com or contact Frank at info@rousseprojectdurham.com.

The project is ongoing right now and there are a number of events open to the public. Dont miss the chance to see this exciting work.

Harrison Bros. and GoodBuyGuys.com are grateful for the support we receive from lots of local arts organizations-groups like Carolina Ballet, Duke University Special Events and the UNC Center for Public Television. They have helped us grow and we are proud to be part of such a vibrant arts community.

Is there copper in The Coppertop

Posted on by Jeff Posted in batteries — No Comments ↓

battery bobMy musings on how the price of copper (Aug. 8 blog) has had an impact on extension cord manufacturing led to another question that has me scratching my head.

Duracell has been calling their line of consumer alkaline batteries “The Coppertop” for years. Is there any copper in The Coppertop?

If yes, then when should we expect to see the volatility in copper pricing impact this product line?

According to the Duracell web site, copper is not part of the equation. It would appear that the metals in this popular product for consumer electronics and flashlights are zinc, potassium and manganese.

More than likely, the alkaline line of batteries is nothing more than a very effective marketing idea that appears to create a loose link in the consumers mind between the Duracell product and the metal that we all associate with electrical conductivity.

Hopefully, battery prices will remain stable for a while longer.

Unfortunately, there is still a big “X” factor on the horizon. Gillette, the company that owns Duracell, has been acquired by Proctor and Gamble, the huge consumer goods company. Continual consolidation in the consumer goods industry can’t be dismissed when trying to look into the future.

More about this in a future blog.

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