Ask a random bystander if he’s into online gambling and he might sniff that he doesn’t waste his money on games of chance. Ask him instead if he ever bought a refurbished piece of electronic equipment from an online retailer and he might say sure, from time to time. Well, newsflash, bystander, that’s online gambling.

Some online retailers will permit you to send back a refurb as easily as you would a new item, issuing you a magical RMA (return merchandise authorization, aka return material authorization). But just as often, you may find that your retailer’s policy is to replace your refurb rather than credit your original form of payment. A “with beans” correspondent recently tried to use a retailer’s online form to return a lousy refurbished phone and the knee-jerk response of the form was to spit back the response that an RMA could not be issued for the item. In so many words, the retailer’s was saying “Either keep your lousy phone or have us send you one that you now have reason to believe may suck just as much.”

Well, there’s a fiendishly simple way to get around that, and it comes down to three magic words: email or call the customer service department and say you understand the policy but that you see this as a customer satisfaction issue. Coolly dropping this phrase works almost every time, because linguistically and otherwise you’ve sidestepped the Draconian return policy and elevated your case to a realm that’s a bit more intangible. In the case of the bum phone, our correspondent sent an email with that phrase and within ten minutes got a response – by phone – from an apologetic rep who never once lectured him about the restrictive, stated return policy and graciously issued an RMA. That’s good news for you, very smart business for them.

Image source: Davide Vizzini via Wikimedia Commons

I heard a rumor today that perhaps Verizon may be rolling out their pay per byte pricing on data plans beginning with their San Francisco customers who would want access to a 4G (LTE) connection.

AT&T spoke about the variable pricing model for data a couple of weeks ago. Now, Verizon is mentioning it. The problem with Verizon doing this is the sheer number of users in Silicon Valley and mid-Texas…the 2 most bandwidth-hungry places in the USA. Verizon indicates that their selection of next-generation of phones may indeed be out in late 2010, not 2011 as they indicated in late 2009.

What does this mean for a San Francisco Verizon user?

With a tiered pricing model for data starting as soon as next year, you will want to make sure your handset is wifi enabled. You definitely won’t want s new Hulu or YouTube video product to cost you an extra $500 per month to watch The Office. This should be good for AT&T & Starbucks…two of the beneficiaries of increased wifi use.

Ok, so I don’t know for sure, but I have a suspicion. Google recently launched their local business enhancements for San Jose, California and Houston, Texas. Perhaps this gives us some hints about Google’s view of their most progressive and highest-margin markets.

First, let’s talk about what is known. Google plans to start-up its own ISP in at least one test market. The market will showcase Gigabit level speeds for a small sample area of users.

Austin, Texas – Why not build it for Austin, Texas (aka the other Silicon Valley)? Google has supposedly soured on Austin because of the situation with the office they closed and quickly shuttered.

Why Houston, Texas? Houston has a large amount of excess inter-city wind-powered (Green-E)electricity capacity (at the zip code level), plenty of dark fiber and shovel-ready sites located in easy tech access areas. In addition, if you assume Houston is one of their highest margin cities, they would want those users to increase their speeds (and searches) first.

I stumbled upon an interested value proposition this week. The idea that people would do 1 to 10 things online for $5. Some would design a logo for $5, some would talk down to you like your father, while some would become your Facebook friend.

The name of the service is fiverr and it contains a listing of people will to do everything under the sun for $5….payable via PayPal. I tried it out for some of our other companies.

I used a user called goinglikesixty to review our companies for $5. I liked him so much that I used him to offer reviews on 5 different sites for 2 different companies. Good deal.

I also used a user called DeuceGroup to Digg and Stumble a few deep link pages inside some of our sites.  Very quick, very good links.

In both cases, the work was completed in less than an hour and was done satisfactorily. The fiverr website runs slowly because of all the new traffic, so I’d recommend getting individual email address to be able to bypass the website. The site accepts PayPal, retains some of the funds and send the rest to the workers.