Israelis, as a whole, are very loyal to their country – but Ikea is by far now the most popular furniture store in Israel. Why have Israelis abandoned Herzl St. in Tel Aviv, the country’s furniture center, for Ikea? What does Ikea have that Israeli furniture stores don’t?
Variety – that’s what they have! Israelis want nice homes with knick-knacks and bric-a-bac, and they’re willing to pay. Until Ikea opened here a few years ago, Israelis would journey to the U.S. and Europe and bring back what they could – usually little items – to try and distinguish their homes from others. And when they were finally able to get the “big ticket” items that they couldn’t shlep on the plane, they descended on Ikea like hungry wolves.
You’d think other retailers would have realized by now that Israelis are ripe for the plucking, but so far no other major international chains have opened here – although Israeli furniture retailers have gotten the hint and have significantly updated their offerings.
Why am I going on about furniture? Because Ikea proves that choice and competition work; you get more for your money when companies have to compete for your business, and businesses that do not have to compete in this way feel they can inflate prices as much as they want. Take treadmills, for example; why are they triple and quadruple the price at Megasport than they are at Sears? Because. Whaddaya gonna do about it?
Well, Megasport’s day of reckoning – and the day of reckoning for many other retailers – may be coming soon, thanks to an Israeli-invented company called FiftyOne. FiftyOne runs a service that allows U.S. retailers to sell and ship goods around the world. I interviewed Mike DeSimone, the CEO of the company for Israel21C, and he told me all about it. They have several dozens stores – many of the ones you see in U.S. malls – as well as some big online retailers, like Overstock.com and Shoes.com. They will soon be adding retailers like the Gap, Macys, and Bloomingdales. And, they also have Sears.com, which by itself has tens of thousands of products!
You can connect to all of these retailers’ international sales services directly from FiftyOne’s merchant page. When you make a purchase, you’re essentially making it from FiftyOne, which keeps the books, determines the shipping (to Israel it’s usually five to fourteen business days) and the customs duties and VAT. It’s all determined before you place your order, so you know exactly how much you’re spending (not all stores ship to Israel, but enough do). Not all products are available at all sites; for example, we’ve been wanting a futon, which seem to be unavailable in Israel, but I couldn’t find one Sears was willing to ship here. On the other hand, I could have bought all the beanbag chairs I wanted.
The prices at Sears looked to be what they would in the U.S. (where most shipping is free) but the shipping pushes the price way up. Depending on the item, though, it might still be cheaper to order it online than to buy it here, even with the shipping and taxes. An exercise cycle, for example, came out to about $400 – NIS 1,500 or so – from Sears. I can’t imagine it costing less here.
Not all the prices were that great, however; Overstock.com seems to have more expensive prices for its Israeli customers, and a laptop I checked out there cost more than $200 higher than it did on Amazon. To order from Amazon, you can use the Mustop service – and when their shipping was added to the price of the laptop, the two figures weren’t that far apart.
But I’m willing to give FiftyOne some time – to get more stores and better (ie cheaper) shipping options, especially for bigger (and bigger ticker) items. Sooner or later, we’ll be able to import Kenmore washing machines and dryers directly into Israel!
I’m always amazed at how Israelis can do so well raising money or selling stuff abroad with such poor English. Especially people, like angels who are trusting high-tech people with their money; angels are very picky when it comes to deciding with whom to invest money, and they make judgements based on all sorts of criteria that are more impression than fact (I got this from more than one angel).
So imagine my shock when an angel investor who has put money in a number of companies – ie he is a person of some means – makes a presentation in front of about 100 people, and in his slide show puts up a cute picture of a bear, with this caption:
“a vision without an action is mearly a dream”
Just looking at that sentence I can find five things wrong with it (“mearly” is the least of it!). This is a person who interfaces with lots of American and European investors, and you have to figure that if he could make such a mistake in a presentation he had to prepare for (he was invited, planned out his presentation, used PowerPoint to make the show, etc.), he’s probably making mistakes in spelling and grammar left and right!
Okay, maybe the guy was in a hurry. But what about the many websites I see by Israeli companies with atrocious English? Like this, from a website for a company that is a fairly large player in Israeli commercial VoIP (ie supplies equipment and services to many integrators):
Telephony and telephony related systems based on Voice over IP (Voip) technology had reached the stage in which it could be used in any business in order to reach maximum efficiency. . Voip based soft-switches as well as small office PBX’s are becoming to be the natural choice for businesses all over the world, supplying its owners with a vast variety of telephony functions without the burdening expenses and costs of the old ‘traditional’ analog phone systems.
Besides being boring, that text has several grammatical errors. It’s on their website, as part of their “window to the world.” And there are plenty of sites with much worse texts which are obviously translations of their Hebrew sites (some of them look like they ran the Hebrew through Google Translate and forgot to clean it up). If they’re not careful with the way they present themselves to the world, are they going to be careful with you, the customer?
If you’ve been looking for a hi-tech job in Israel, there’s good news: New statistics indicate that the long drought in hi-tech jobs is over. A poll released last week by Israeli placement company Jobinfo says that demand for hi-tech workers is up 40% this year – while the numbers of those seeking jobs in the field has fallen dramatically, as companies retain their current workers and hire new ones.
Jobs in hardware development rose significantly – by over 30% – in the first quarter of 2010, compared to a year before. There was also a 12% increase in jobs for internet programmers – especially for developers with skills in PHP, Java, and C.
Along with the new demand, salaries have risen, the poll says. Engineers with 2 to 5 years experience are making 8% more this year than last, while salaries for web engineers have gone up as much as 20%. Jobinfo says that “The positive statistics are a positive sign that indicates that the time is ripe for hi-tech workers who lost jobs in the past to look for new ones now, and it is also an excellent time, in our opinion, for those who already have jobs to examine the opportunities in the marketplace.”
Well, of course they would say that – they’re a placement company! But still, the numbers don’t lie – and neither do the anecdotes, as a number of people I know who have been looking for quite awhile have begun new jobs in the past month or so. Yeah! Party like it’s 1999!
A study by Israel’s Oketz Systems released Thursday said that workers in hi-tech companies have a better chance of finding a “life partner” than workers in other professions. According to the study, one out of every nineteen workers on average finds a mate among their co-workers – but for hi-tech workers, that figure is one out of fourteen. In addition, the study showed that significantly more hi-tech co-worker romances ended up in marriage, than did hookups for workers in other areas. And of course, since hi-tech workers get paid better, it’s a good deal all around!
We hear a lot about business “giving back to the community,” but everyone knows it’s BS. There are no free lunches, and everything has strings attached. It’s always all about the money. Everyone knows it.
But maybe what everyone knows isn’t always right. It certainly wasn’t at the “startup roundtable” meeting I went to, hosted by Israeliinvestment adviser and social media expert Sharon Weshler. Sharon and his buddy Aviad of the Termiks startup investment center ran a “roundtable” for fledgling Israeli startups, where entrepreneurs with great ideas could get some help in getting their idea ready for presentation to investors.
The ideas were really creative, ranging from a system to improve management of nursing homes to a home entertainment gadget, and a better way to grow food! Presenters gave the group their core idea and “elevator pitch,” and attendees could comment, question, or give constructive criticism on ideas and presentations.
The startup roundtable idea isn’t a new one, and I’ve been to a number myself. But most of them are sponsored by advisors for their clients, prepping them for presentations to investors. In other words, the sponsors of the roundtable have a financial interest in ensuring that their candidates present well, so they can bring in the bucks
Not so at Sharon and Aviad’s roundtable – from what I could tell, there was no financial or contractual relationship between the presenters and the sponsors. That said, I’m sure Sharon and Aviad would be happy to find a company to work with, but you have to figure there are better ways to track down companies interesting enough to invest in without spending upwards of four hours listening to ideas that they had no idea in advance would be worth listening to! That is what I call really giving back to the community!
If you thought you weren’t getting the internet connection speed you’re paying for, you may be right. According to Knesset member Meir Sheetrit, the two companies in Israel that provide infrastructure and backbone services for internet connection – Bezeq (the phone company) and Hot (the cable company) – are not going to be able to provide the super-fast speeds they are promising to customers, except in maybe a few places.
Sheetrit suggests that the companies be required by law to tell customers the maximum speed they can expect in their areas, considering the potential for misleading customers. “Often, because of their naiveté, customers sign up for service at high speed and prices, only to find out that the company is unable to provide the service,” he wrote in a letter to the Knesset Technology Committee.
Sheetrit forgot to add what comes next – the near-impossibility of getting your money back after you’ve been ripped off by these vultures. It’s bad enough that they (by “they” I mean almost every large service company, not just ISPs) will try to sell you stuff you don’t need at almost every turn, but when the service or product they dump off on you doesn’t even work, trying to get your money back is out of the question – the best you can hope for, usually, is a credit towards a future purchase. In other words, once they’ve got your money, you’re not getting it back!
As I wrote in the Jerusalem Post, it’s a worldwide trend – service and quality you once expected as a matter of course is now “premium,” as companies, strapped for cash, nickel and dime us for everything they can squeeze out of us.
Why am I not surprised? This is just another manifestation of an attitude that you find in so many places, from the corner store to the bank to, of course, the government. They sweet talk you and act like you’re their best friend when they try to get you to sign up – but once they have your money, try getting the time of day out of them!
Here are a few good tests I’ve found which indicates how badly you are going to get ripped off:
Before ordering a service, call the company’s service line, and see how long they keep you waiting. While all companies are guilty of giving lousy service, some are less bad than others. As I do lots of research for my writing, I call companies like Orange, Bezeq, etc. to ask questions, even if I’m not a subscriber to the service. A good indication of what to expect is the “sales to service call” ratio – ie, the time difference between how fast the sales people answer the phone, and how slowly the service people talk to you. The bigger the gap, the worse the service, I’ve found.
Ditto for the sales pitches they give you, both recorded and live. Some companies will respond to nearly every question with a sales pitch, basically ignoring what you asked (but implying that your problem can be solved if you just ‘upgrade’). Often long times on hold are coordinated with repeated recorded sales pitches – it’s as if they keep you waiting just so they can get you to listen to their stupid ads! Avoid companies that do this, if possible.
Any service or sales person that does not implicitly understand that they work for you – and not the opposite – is a bad reflection on the company they work for. When I speak to sales or service reps, I’m very attuned to signs of cynicism or superciliousness. If the person on the other end of the phone sounds like s/he has his/her nose up in the air when they talk to you – like they’re somehow better than you (even though you’re paying their salary!) – it’s time to move on.
How do you resolve these issues? In Israel, a loud voice always helps. You have to be prepared “lahafoch shulchanot” (go crazy),as they say. Threaten to switch, cancel the service, or threatening to tell all your friends how bad the service/product is can help too, sometimes; most of the people you speak to on the phone don’t care one way or the other, but if you really do cancel or switch, you can be sure their manager will be listening to the recording of the conversation and probably call them on it, so if you can make them understand that it is they who are causing you to want to leave the company, they may think twice before acting nasty. Unfortunately, there’s no sure-fire single method that works every time; it’s a matter of experimentation, seeing which company reacts to what tactic.
But it’s worth the effort; when you confront the service providers and make them understand what they are doing wrong, you are contributing to an improvement of the consumer culture in this country – and maybe even helping the next person not to get ripped off!
Everybody’s got a “Bezeq story.” Here’s mine. It’s about unrequited revenge. But one day I will be avenged, mark my words.
In my Jpost article today, I talked about the alternatives to Israeli phone ex-monopoly Bezeq. While only Bezeq can still offer traditional PSTN phone service, a host of challengers have arisen to provide consumers with broadband-based home phone services, usually on a POP (pay one price, like at Great Adventure) basis. Until customers can connect to the internet at more than the current 8mb/s (most people here have 5mb/s or less), I wrote that transferring for your home phone service to the internet – which for various reasons is dicey enough in Israel (the infrastructure sometimes hems and haws) – might not be such a good idea, at least until Bezeq’s NGN fast data transfer infrastructure (reputed to provide up to 50mb/s capabilities) reaches your neighborhood. And the truth is, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t all that terrible.
Now. Now they’re not so terrible. As one reader commented on the Jpost site, Bezeq’s prices and service aren’t so terrible now because the company has five competitors breathing down its neck, who are actually having an impact on its customer base. For me, with a network of five or six home computers that are always on and active, downloading, processing, or presenting and playing this or that, adding internet-based home phone service would be just another strain on the system (I’ve been down that road anyway, with both Skype – which usually behaves, but sometimes doesn’t – and a dedicated softphone, complete with VoIP box). But for any folks who aren’t heavy web surfers, saving 50 or 100 shekels a month on their phone bills by switching away from Bezeq. Many are doing so. It makes lots of sense – and can be a very satisfying experience.
That’s because everybody has their “Bezeq story.” You can’t really blame them for the crappy service in the “old days,” before 1984, when the culprit was the government-controlled Ministry of Communications. But you can blame them for the crappy service after 1984, when the Ministry spun-off Bezeq into a separate – but still government-controlled – enterprise.
Even just a few years ago, on the eve of its becoming a private company, Bezeq was still mired in its old ways. Example: You have been able to pay your Bezeq bill by credit card anytime, day or night, over an automated system for nearly a decade. You call their service number (199), press some buttons, and input your credit card number using your keypad. The process is pretty efficient – now. Until about a year and a half or so ago, however, it was much easier to call during business hours and get a real person; that virtual cashier would go on and on for eons, making you repeat input, checking and rechecking things.
Perhaps they planned the system like that for uptight Israelis who expect to be given a hard time by the people they pay for services, but what should have been an easy input-based bill paying exercise turned out to require your full attention for as long as ten minutes! Note that this situation prevailed even during a substantial period when Bezeq was a private company. They’ve cleaned up the input manager now, and it now takes about three minutes to go through the process of changing things.
But that’s not my Bezeq story – instead, this is it: About seven years ago (2002) I was getting ready to leave with my wife and kids for a family trip to U.S. relatives. The flight was to leave quite early, I remember, and we were up long before dawn making last minute preparations. Then it hit me – I forgot to pay the phone bill, which was already overdue by a couple of days! But where was the bill? Already edging on towards late and trying to take care of a plethora of last minute details, I search and searched, but couldn’t find the bill.
When you call Bezeq from your home phone, the computer identifies your phone number and account – and that feature was active in the 2002 version of the Bezeq online payment system. So no problem, right? You don’t really need a bill; call the automatic payment system, let it identify your account via your phone number, let it tell you how much you owe, and pay.
That’s the way you would expect it to work – but not at Bezeq circa 2002. While the system could identify who you were, it couldn’t tell you how much you owed! You had to have the bill in front of you in order to input the full – exact, down to the agora – you were supposed to pay. What if you didn’t have the bill, or wanted to pay in advance? Could you, before, say, going out of town and having lost your bill, input a clearly inflated sum like NIS 500 (instead of the NIS 200 the bill usually was), and let them hold it for you on account?
You could try – as I did – and be told that the payment had been recorded in the system. And you would go on your merry way, confident that Mamale Bell was watching out for you. And you wouldn’t even realize you had a problem until you sauntered back home three weeks later and picked up the phone – and heard nothing!
Why nothing? Because Bezeq had cut off your service. And why had they cut off your service? Because you didn’t pay your bill. But Ms. Bezeq lady, you beg, I lost the bill and input much MORE than I owed, so you would get your money! It’s just not fair! To which the Bezeq lady would reply, in more or less words, “tough.” To get your service back, you had to pay your bill PLUS a cutoff fee, EVEN THOUGH your payment was seemingly accepted at the time of payment by the system!
And you, left holding the bag, seethe with rage. And you tell the Bezeq lady, “All right for you. But one day the government is going to allow competition, and on the first day they do, I am dumping you for anyone else that can offer home phone service, even if they charge more money than you!”
So much for dreams of sweet revenge. Nowadays, it would seem that the revolution is over, that Bezeq has joined the family of humanity and positive human relations. But people like us remember – and our day will come yet!
Whether it means something politically or economically, I can’t say – but something fundamental has apparently changed in the Israeli attitude to the dollar. In the old days, dollars were seen as the ultimate hedge against shekel inflation (many apartment renters used to have to pay a year’s rent up front, in dollars!), but now, apparently, respect for the greenback is at an all time low. How else do you explain it when discount supermarkets are using dollars as a sales gimmick?
In Israel, groceries aren’t cheap (although not necessarily overly expensive), but you really don’t want to stock up if you’re paying full price. So, you wait for a sale, and then you buy in quantity. Each chain has its own sale “style” – buy one or two items and get one free, coupons, cash back on a credit card, etc. Smart shoppers can sometimes reduce their food bill by 10% – 20% through savvy use of the discounting system, hopping from store to store looking for bargains.
That means there’s little brand loyalty for supermarket chains in Israel, and the stores know it; they realize that price trumps convenience, prizes, or green stamps for most customers. So, they run a sale when they want to drum up business. And this is the story of one of those sales.
Not far from my house there’s a branch of a chain called Victory. Some chains go for an affluent crowd (they usually open in more affluent neighborhoods), but Victory generally sticks to the “periphery,” catering largely to Russian immigrants and working class Israelis, from what I can tell. No matter – everyone wants a bargain, and since we were in the area, we decided to check out some of their bargains.
The deal this time was unlike any I have ever seen in Israel: On a wide range of goods, you paid full price, but at checkout time, you got a cash refund – in U.S. dollars! Not the dollar equivalent in shekels, but real live actual dollars! With the dollar hovering around NIS 4 these days, that meant a discount of about 4 shekels on the participating products. The photo, for example, says you get a dollar back if you buy three packages of marshmallows. Each package is 6 shekels, so you end up paying 14 shekels for the three – a discount of a little less than 20% on each package, by my reckoning. Not too bad, but there were a lot of really good buys, with some prices halved, taking into account the dollar deal. Altogether, we got $22 U.S. dollars after everything was added up – about 80 shekels – off a total bill of 550 shekels (they didn’t look like phonies, either).
If you ask me, it’s a genius move! Israelis like to travel (especially to Turkey), so you figure some of them are going to use their “earnings” at the duty free on their way out of town this summer, while others who can’t afford to go anywhere get to feel like “big shots,” with a couple of greenbacks in their pocket (they can also take their dollars to one of the numerous currency exchange places and get shekels). It’s certainly a different promotion, at least for supermarkets. Victory probably bought the dollars last week, when the exchange rate was lower, so they aren’t discounting as much in shekels as they would if they were running a straight sale. And those who hold on to their dollars could technically get an even bigger discount long term, if the dollar strengthens to NIS 4.10 or 4.20 again.
But once upon a time, only affluent Israelis – and of course, “rich Americans” – walked around with dollars. A reflection of the power of the word “America,” and all that stands (stood?) behind it. And now dollars have been reduced to a supermarket gimmick, the equivalent of a throwaway coupon. The “American century” may not be over just yet, but is the dollar’s?
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