Something new here!

Yep, 2009 brings a new look to the old Tretakoff Musings. First, answering some of your complaints, I've eliminated a lot of the slow widgets that were making page loads a beast. Second, I've moved to the 21st century with CSS instead of kludgy HTML. Finally, I've shifted hosting of the blog over to Blogger's hosted BlogSpot domain, to enable easier editing.

Special thanks to the folks at InfoCreek for the gorgeous Aspire theme. It took some serious hours of monkeying around with it for a non-HTML pro like myself to make it just right, but I'm pretty happy with the result. I hope you are, too! I still need to add back in links for my fellow bloggers, but hey, I couldn't wait forever to post this.

Of course, with migration comes a bit of pain. First, while the old RSS feed at http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TretakoffMusings should continue to work, if it does not, please update your RSS feeds to point at http://tretakoff.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default instead. If you are using the mobile version, there's a sparkly new version at http://tretakoffmusings.mofuse.mobi/ that better reflects the site's look and feel. Some of the relevant navigation elements from the old site, like links to Josh's resume or those stunningly well-edited home movies, are now off to the right, in the Tretakoff Links section. I'm fairly sure my old cool JavaScript the automatically updated the webcam image every 30 seconds has a few glitches, so I'll be working on that. Of course, if you head to tretakoff.com, it will automatically redirect here, so enjoy!

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Loyalty Review: Kohl's Yes2You

As some of you know, I've spent over 15 years in the customer loyalty space. So, when I come across a new retail loyalty program, I can't help but see the pluses and minuses. After this many years, it's kind of ingrained. Periodically, I'll share my thoughts with you. Today, it's Kohl's turn under the scope. Let's have a look, shall we? I've divided the review up into three sections: what's good about the program, what's bad about the program, and what I'd change about it. That last one has some actual value: I charged hundreds of dollars per hour for loyalty program consulting, and had over a dozen clients, before I moved to JustAnswer FT. But, being a pandemic and all, I'm giving it away for free here. Kohl's, you're welcome. Here we go! The Good Sign up is opt in Seems odd to praise Kohl's for this, but in department store loyalty, this is a rarity, and a smart one. It means the customers who are opted in are already prime...

Revisiting Star Trek: The Next Generation: Season 1

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The Icarus Effect

This morning's news started with the latest grim proof of overdevelopment in a tough sector: SkyBus Airlines shut down , less than year from when it started. Never heard of Skybus? Not surprising; they chose to focus on trips from Ohio to the West Coast for ridiculously low fares. Yes, you read that right: the airlines' unique niche was that they focused on trips from Ohio . Was air travel such an amazingly profitable business that we needed that much segmentation and focus? Of course not. A year ago, when Skybus was just getting off the ground (har har), fuel costs were at an all time high. United was still in bankruptcy; Delta, a fellow airline with a major hub in Ohio, was just exiting Chapter 11. And yet, "irrational exuberance" led investors like Nationwide Mutual Capital, Huntington Capital Investment Co., and Battelle Services Co. to ignore the obvious signs of risk, and dive into what was a dubious investment. Today, they, and the passengers who were lured by ...

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