Bewley's Cafe and Tea Rooms in Grafton St. as well as a number of other locations is closing down. It's a shame. It's another tradition gone on a main street that is now full of foreign chain stores.
Bewleys has been at the edge before. Around 1985, the then Taoiseach (prime minister) Garret Fitzgerald stepped in to save this Irish tradition. For a time, it was the only state-run teahouse west of the Iron Curtain. After a few years, it went back into private hands, as part of a local catering company.
The Grafton St. cafe was opened by Ernest Bewley in 1920. There were many changes in formats over the years. It was originally a table service operation, but self-service became the mainstay over the years.
It is a fantastic space. There is a high ceiling and a balcony. The room is dominated by enormous stained glass windows designed and painted by Harry Clarke in an Art Deco style.
In the late nineties, the company tried to turn the main cafe into a table-service restaurant. They bought nice art, changed the uniform and generally tried to clear the riff-raff out. They spent millions on it. To fund it, they sold the premises and leased it back. This freed up some cash for the refurbishment, but left the cafe vulnerable to future rent increases.
The Bewleys refurb was beset with disasters. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. It took longer than expected. It looked over-designed. It alienated the traditional customers. The company couldn't get the staff they needed because of the boom, and had to try and get people from abroad.
Everything seemed to be unlucky. I remember one morning I was there for breakfast. Behind me I heard a loud scream. I turned around and saw a customer standing beside his table soaked. There was water gushing from the bar that had been placed in the corner of the room. The poor guy was taking his shirt off to wring out some of the water. The food had a reputation of being hit-and-miss too.
Eventually, the cafe was returned to its original self-service format. This worked a bit better, but still didn't really cut the mustard. The operation was famously inefficient. A worker had to go up two floors to get extra cups when the restaurant got busy. There were always enormous queues. There wasn't any innovation going on - Bewley's were back selling essentially the same thing as they had been selling 15 years previously, when I was at college and visited regularly. (They used to open late then too.)
At the same time as this, Dublin and the world were undergoing a cafe boom. Coffee shops were becoming a glamour business. The product was moving upmarket, and customers were getting used to paying a couple of euros for a drink and a few more euros for a small snack or sandwich. But for some reason, Bewley's just couldn't get its act together.
The company is blaming the demise on the smoking ban and on the preferences of customers. But that's just rubbish. The cafe is always pretty busy. People love Bewleys, even if the food and drink served aren't anything special. The company should just take responsibility for making a mess of it.
It will be interesting to see what happens next. The owners might like to lease the property to a chain as a shop, but the planning permission on the building may not allow this to happen. The restaurant use will probably have to be maintained in some way.
One possibility I see is that Starbucks might take over the premises and make it the flagship store in Ireland. They could then sublet the upper floors and one of the entrances to a bookstore. It would certainly be a comfy convenient place to buy a book and have a coffee of an afternoon.
Buytel, who have recently set up in Ireland have OK rates. 2.48c/minute to landlines in Ireland, 4c/minute to many foreign countries. This isn't too bad.
You pay up-front, but it's on the credit card, so who cares? Also, they give you some discount if you buy a larger amount of credit. That brings the cost of my calls down by 6 or 7 percent further, so I can call a UK mobile for around 24c/minute (as against the 31c eircom is hitting me for).
They also have a neat deal for regular mobile phone roamers. It brings the cost of a call down to around 49c/minute, which is pretty decent.
The only niggling doubt I have is that buytel have had a tough time in some other countries. Still they've got to have as much to offer as Smart Telecom.
I've started using a Wiki to keep track of all those little bits of information and addresses you pick up on the web. A wiki is basically a very simple, very open content system that makes it very very easy to make changes, add new pages and link to them.
The wiki system I'm using is called Kwiki. It's very basic in its simplest form, but lots of add-ons are possible to make it more sophisticated and useful.
Socialtext provide a commercial implementation of Kwiki, with a nicely-finished user interface and a good hosting and user management system. I've used it before for helping organize n-star activities.
I have also tried using weblogs to store notes. It just doesn't work well for me. The wiki works better, at least for now.
One big problem with wikis is that they can quickly become unstructured if there are a lot of people using them or if they aren't pruned now and again.
Smart Telecom won't send me a list of their tariffs. They say the list is too big to send by email. I have now made a complaint under Comreg 04/86, a regulation which requires telephone companies to publish accurate, comprehensive tariff information. - UPDATED with pricelists for Smart Telecom and Tele2
I've initially made the complaint to Smart Telecom, and I expect to hear from them over the next day or so.
They want me to request the specific countries I want rates for. Am I being unreasonable here? Is it unfair of me to expect Smart Telecom to send me a list of tariffs for all the countries they operate services to? Eircom publishes this information on its website, why can't Smart?
UPDATE
After the matter was escalated, Smart have finally sent me an Excel spreadsheet with information about all their tariffs. It only took three days, and it wasn't so big after all.
Here is the Smart Telecom pricelist. Download file
Here is the Tele 2 pricelist. Download file
Mass media, especially television, used to bring people together and give them a common experience. Not anymore, according to a report on Tuesday on RTE. A Dutch Muslim explained how a large proportion of Muslim homes now had access to channels like Al Jazeera, which give them a completely different perspective on Middle East conflicts from their neighbours.
It is no secret that I'm tired of incumbent Eircom and am looking for a new telco. I saw Smart's fancy new ad campaign on the telly, and I thought they were the answer to my prayers.
Smart is quite a small company. It's market cap is in the tens of millions of euro range. It has really only started trading in the last year or so. The word is that they plan to unbundle a number of exchanges.
So I went to find out what the full story is with Smart. First I went to the website. I knew not to expect much when I saw the 'splash' screen. Sometimes these splash screens purport to tell you about the company's products or even values. Not this one. I waited two minutes, but all it did was play dodgy music.
Then I got to the website. Not one to beat around the bush I went looking for what I wanted to know. The home page was full of useless, irrelevant information. I didn't care that Smart was the first to implement single-billing, or that they employed 270 people. If number of people employed were my criteria for choosing a telco, I'd have stuck with eircom. So what? Who cares about these things?
The website design wasn't exactly to my taste. It uses cascading menus, and in my experience, cascading menus spell T-R-O-U-B-L-E. They are awkward to use for beginners. They often render incorrectly on non-Microsoft browsers and leave the website unusable. They are nigh on impossible to make compliant with disability guidelines. And in this case they are unnecessary, because the website only has 20 or 30 pages of content, at the most.
But you have to leave these things aside. It might be just taste. Geese and ganders and all that. Maybe Smart Telecom know something about web development that I don't.
So I went looking at the tariffs. No tariffs listed. Well, there were tariffs for obvious places where Smart could offer attractive rates, but there was no complete list. I wanted to know what they would charge me to call a UK mobile, as that is an expensive call that I make quite frequently. But no details available. (Eircom, to their credit, give details of all their rates on their call calculator, although they confuse the issue by offering mangy rebates to high-spending customers like myself.)
So I rang the contact centre. I was on hold for five minutes. According to the announcement, there were supposedly 5 people in the cue in front of me. I soon found out why there were such long queues despite having a lot of staff employed. At the Smart Telecom contact centre, they have no concept of content management or content organization. The staff don't have immediate access to the information they need to do their jobs.
The representative (who was helpful and courteous throughout) had to put me on hold and go rummaging to find this obvious piece of information. It took her a few minutes to find it.
Now, the question in my mind is what exactly was she expecting me to ask her about? You go to the butchers and you expect the person at the counter to know the price of beef. What is a person in a telephone company contact centre if they do not have the price of a call to a UK mobile immediately to hand? It beats me.
Anyway, when she found it, she quoted me a price which definitely wasn't right. She could sense the doubt in my response, and she had a good idea that the price was too low. She looked again for a few minutes. Finally, she quoted me. She apologised for the delay, and said she was looking at a grid, and the prices were very hard to read.
The price was a good bit better than the 'official' eircom rate, and a little cheaper than the eircom rate including rebate. No big deal, but there's a saving, and you have to try to help out for the little guy, right? So, in my mind, I was coming around to the idea of moving, even if the customer service seemed rusty.
But there was some doubt in my mind about that rate I'd been quoted. I wanted to have something in writing, or failing that, in email, before I committed myself to anything. So I found another section on the website, 'Smart Telecom Residential'. According to this page, Smart's rates vary on a daily basis. That put me on my guard a little. I could get a copy of the full international tariffs by emailing a special address.
If rates vary on such a regular basis, why do they not just put them up on the website and save themselves a lot of trouble with people emailing them? That's what the web is for, after all. Access to information. Self-service. 24/7.
But it is not for me, a mere consumer, to reason why. I emailed the address. A lady with a pleasant email manner emailed a reply in a very short time. This would be the information I wanted, at last. But no. The enclosure with the email didn't contain the rates I was interested in. It only contained the rates that I already knew about from the website. In fact, all she had done was attach the HTML page from the website to the email.
Now at this stage, I'm wondering: does Smart Telecom think I'm stupid? Or does Smart Telecom know its website is so badly laid out that I might not be able to find the 'rates' page? Why would they send me something that I already have? Surely if I am smart enough to find their email address, I can find this?
So I emailed Smart Telecom back to ask specifically for what I wanted. I am still waiting for a response an hour later.
There are other problems at Smart Telecom too. My experience with the telco business is that if you want to cut costs, you have to find alternative ways to provide customer service more efficiently. Smart are not even making an effort to do this.
With Smart, you can't get good customer service over the Internet. You can't check your bill on-line. They are completely dependent on sending out paper bills. Sending out paper bills and answering phone calls ain't cheap. It easily costs one euro or more to send or receive a bill and four or five euro to field a telephone call. If Smart could deal with customers over the Internet, it could save a lot of money and improve service at the same time.
The big worry for Smart Telecom isn't going to be getting customers. If Smart keep building public awareness of the brand at a steady pace, the customers will come.
The big problem is going to be dealing with thost customers when they get them. If they can't do the basic stuff, like answer the phone efficiently, have straightforward information on their website and allow business to be transacted on-line, their customers are going to leave them as fast as they join them.
All this should be possible for little more than the cost of a national advertising campaign. It's basic, so why don't they do it?
Simon Davies, the founder of Privacy International is speaking in Dublin on Monday.
I hope to go along and see what they're saying.
Personally, I am very concerned about privacy and information security, but I think it is also important to balance the needs of the public good with personal privacy. For example, greater control of use of the roads network, using electronic numberplates, GPS, mobile networks and so forth is inevitable, because of the problems of congestion and road safety. On the other hand, I recognise that this could result in a dangerous concentration of personal data about people's movements, and this has to be monitored and controlled.
According to the blurb:
Simon Davies "Giving guns to psychopaths. Why e-government will bring an end to privacy"
On Monday, 11 October 2004, at 8 pm, Joly Lecture Theatre, Hamilton Building,
Trinity College Dublin.All are welcome to attend; please pass this invitation on to any colleagues who
may be interested.Simon Davies has worked for almost twenty years as a privacy advocate and
specialist in IT, consumer rights and data protection and is widely regarded as
one of the world's leading privacy advocates. He is founder and director of the
civil rights watchdog organisation Privacy International
(http://www.privacyinternational.org/); he has been a consultant adviser to
numerous governmental, professional and corporate bodies; and he has an
extensive publication record on privacy and technology matters. He will be in
Ireland to work with the Irish Council for Civil Liberties at the launch of its
Privacy Audit - an examination of the current protection of privacy in Ireland
in light of modern international standards.