Letter Never Sent

To all within earshot, have a Happy Thanksgiving! I’ll be doing a lot of driving and I imagine you will be too. Watch out for all those liberated office thralls motoring around in their family cruisers, don’t overdo anything, and enjoy the company of family and friends.

My company, Duet Design, is looking for partners web monkeys. Basically, we need a few extra hands since we have more business then we can get out the door. Right now, for every job we do, I’m the one doing nearly 100% of it. Obviously, this prevents future growth since I can only do so much per hour.

This is not an hourly or salaried position. You will only get paid for the hours you work like any contract or freelance job. The only difference is we juggle many different projects on a regular basis. Let me know if you are interested. I’d like to get to the point where I have several people I work with on a regular basis that I farm stuff out to.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s behind Walmart’s push for cheap generics. They’re clearly feeling some sort of pressure from the neighborhood drugstores, which have been expanding rapidly and not just due to an aging population as the article suggests. In my neighborhood in downtown Dallas, there are 5 or more drugstores within a mile radius. On Lemmon Ave, there are two CVS stores less than a mile away from one another. I think as more people move back into city centers, or remote burb-claves and cocooning trends continue due to things like: cable TV, Netflix, and the Internet that keep us cooped up inside, the big-box stores will have to compete with a raft of smaller, neighborhood-type stores. This is fine except it requires massive, centralized companies like Walmart to get nimble. The other problem is that they’re getting more competition in the affluent suburbs from companies like Target and Kohl’s.

Beemer thinks Wal-Mart’s threat is indeed significant, despite the fact that its program so far only covers about 300 generic drugs out of thousands on the market. Because the company is largely using its pharmaceutical business to leverage up its store traffic in the hope that customers will buy other goods in its stores, expanding the $4 price to cover more drugs is likely. At a certain price, people will forego the convenience of the local Walgreen or CVS to make a longer drive to Wal-Mart.

Four dollars “is an incredible price point for Wal-Mart. I think there is no question they will expand it,” he says.

Key to its strategy is luring 55-plus, low-to-middle income shoppers that Wal-Mart isn’t getting right now and that could well be important to the company’s future. Indeed, the goal of all pharmacies is to become the one-stop shop for customers who buy multiple drugs each month. By luring buyers with promises of a few low-price, even below-cost generics, they can either retain or expand their base of customers who may buy other brand-name drugs at considerably higher prices and higher profits.

“Wal-Mart is basically saying, ‘I’m stabbing the head off my drugstore competitors,'” Beemer says.

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This is interesting. A Sitepoint survey reveals four web developer “types”:

• The “Guru” is strongly motivated toward technical excellence, actively tracks new technological trends, and is interested in learning how to use them to improve the quality and functionality of web sites.
• The “Entrepreneur” is strongly motivated toward building and retaining an audience, and is less interested in using technologies just because they’re new.
• The “Designer” is strongly motivated toward the timely delivery of visually appealing web sites that meet the business requirements of clients.
• The “Corporate” is strongly motivated toward reliable, stable performance; the “Corporate works in a larger organization, and faces the unique mixture of constraints and opportunities that the corporate environment offers.

This sounds about right to me. I’m definitely more of the Entrepreneur type by nature, but also because I currently work for a small company that is focused on marketing to its prospective customers. You just can’t specialize and expect to be as effective when you have a team of one to two people tasked with achieving all projects that need to be online. However, it helps to be able to slip into the other modes when necessary. It’s all about maintaining the flexibility needed to meet the overall strategic goals. In other words, creating a visually stunning design or implementing an amazing CMS should not supercede the need to make the phone ring and get the information out to your customers if that’s what needs to happen. In larger corporate settings where you’re one of many in amongst an array of departments, you can worry about version control, documentation, or overall content management. Likewise, if you’re running a design house, you can spend time obsessing over every visual detail to support one of your client’s online ad campaigns. But, if you design / build in-house for a small company, you just have to get stuff done.

Creepy, but riveting. What did we do before the Internet?

As you may have noticed, I’m working on a new theme/skin for this web log. If you notice any weirdness in your browser please leave me a comment so I can fix it and make everything look nice.