Month: January 2017

January 12 2017, 15:24

“…A couple of years ago, Dave Lewis, the newly-minted CEO of the UK’s largest retail chain Tesco, made a crazy anti-capitalist move. He removed a third of the product assortment from supermarket shelves. He discarded 30,000 product listings. For example, where you could previously choose from 28 types of tomato ketchup at Tesco, after the reform, this was reduced to 5-6. And so on, across the entire product range.

[proof – http://www.greatleadershipbydan.com/2017/01/6-essential-characteristics-for-leading.html?m=1 //Rauf]

And what about the customers? Did they not revolt due to the limitation of choice?

On the contrary, they became happier. A satisfied customer is a generous customer. As a result of reducing the number of product positions, the average receipt at Tesco increased.

This secret was long known to specialists in the field of behavioral economics. For instance, Barry Schwartz in his book “The Paradox of Choice” cited results from such a natural experiment. In a grocery store, they set up two displays where buyers were offered to taste jam and receive a $1 discount on a jar of jam for doing so. At one display there were six types of jam, at another — 24. Accordingly, from people who tried the jam at the display with six types, one in three ultimately bought a jar, whereas at the display with 24 types, only 3% of tasters made a purchase.

The reason is twofold. On one hand, choosing requires cognitive effort, and the wider the choice, the more thinking and comparing is necessary. This is a very energy-consuming process. On the other hand, the more alternatives there are in front of one’s eyes, the easier it is subsequently to imagine that among them there was an unnoticed option that perhaps was better than the chosen one. Consequently, people feel more distressed thinking they made the wrong choice, and it greatly upsets them.

Thus, a wide selection can make us unhappy because of regrets, guilt, and missed opportunities.

[@[100001385384991:2048:Anna Parshina] – remember, we discussed this at Enter-e?]

Furthermore, it creates a new problem — elevated expectations. Because the wider the range of options, the stronger it seems that a perfect ideal is attainable. But in real life, such an ideal is never encountered! And new disappointments are quick to poison the joy of purchase.

This is why even when we finally make a choice from a vast number of possibilities, we feel less satisfaction from the outcome than if we had chosen from a smaller number of options.

So what’s the conclusion?

We believe that a choice, made after carefully comparing alternatives, should bring the expected results — happiness, safety, pleasure. We trust that, by making the right choice, we can avoid troubles, risks, losses. But in reality, it turns out quite the opposite: when people are confused by a huge choice and worry about it, more often than not, denial, ignorance, and willful blindness emerge.

(…)

“

(http://a-nalgin.livejournal.com/1293007.html

http://a-nalgin.livejournal.com/1293007.html

January 11 2017, 22:22

Published an article about data migration: best practices, tools, architecture of my custom tool, and a lead-up to the next part where I will discuss “big software”: Pentaho Data Integration.

The article isn’t 100% about Hybris, nor is it very geeky, so I hope it will be understandable and interesting to anyone who knows what “data migration in a web project” means.

https://hybrismart.com/2017/01/10/best-practices-migrating-content-to-hybris/

January 10 2017, 16:31

The next step in car navigation includes accounting for the green wave and automatically finding a free parking spot. In some countries, it also involves automatically reporting violations and issuing fines to their owners.

Nine years ago, I published ideas for GPS navigation. What do you think has come true? 🙂

I know about POIs along the route, time calculation taking speed limits into account… and that’s it.. I haven’t seen the rest anywhere else.

http://rauf.livejournal.com/262024.html