The Richwood Report

One of the real factors affecting the retail business now is the encroachment of online businesses on local merchants. People can buy practically anything from internet-based businesses. It is easier and faster than ever. You can buy groceries, electronics, clothes--and they may be delivered faster than you could find them locally. The delivery truck will say USPS, Fedex or UPS on it and the product can be on the porch when you get home. There is a good chance the price will be the same as the local one or better. You would think local retail businesses would see a clue in this situation and make the customer's experience as good as possible with knowledgeable sales people and fast, courteous service. A bad experience with a salesperson or a goofy company policy means the customer may go somewhere else with his business. He can. He has options. Some businesses appear to have a death wish they show in incidents like this one. Start reading where it says "The DVD player...". Online communication like blogs can let this kind of news travel fast. The businesses that survive will be the ones where the fast-traveling news is the good kind.

Sales of bearing mount cleaners continue to increase. They should!-- The new burnout frames are better-looking and faster to produce and install. Remember to include the following information with your order to ensure a trouble-free installation:

1. Pulley diameter and width
2. Belt width
3. Complete bearing dimensions or part number
4. Bearing centers
5. Bolt size
6. Bearing plate thickness

The Richwood Report just passed the 1000 visit mark and will soon record 2000 page views. Thanks for coming by!

If you are looking for a quick survey of a subject, you might want to look at this site. It is a collection of Navy and Marine Corps manuals and most of it is available online and searchable. All the things you might expect, like weapons and motor vehicles are there, but a lot more. When you think about it, the military needs people to do anything people do in civilian life: cooks, welders, engineers, mathematicians, administrators, electronics technicians, plumbers--you get the idea. There are manuals for all these things and more. I checked out the cooking department and found 1000 recipe cards and some of them look pretty interesting. They seem mostly to be scaled for 100 servings but quantities can be adjusted for family-sized cooking. You may be expecting that many sometime! Take a look at this one. On a more businesslike note, the section on administration has has a lot of business sense in the Navy Customer Service Manual. Try this chapter on attitude and courtesy.

Even in the age of the web, the blog and mass communication of different kinds, the letter is still a great opportunity to deal with customers and prospects. Letters are personal, focused and able to speak your message to the reader. Letters, however can be good or not so good. Lots of them get thrown away unopened or with only a few words being read. How many do you throw away every day? This blog post deals with how to write letters that get read. It's a worthwhile reading because it's not by some expert who only thinks they know how to do it. The blogger asks a question and gets comments from a lot of readers on what makes a good business letter. You will certainly learn a thing or two to help you write better letters. There's a lot of other worthwhile material on the site as well.

In our efforts in the Engineering Department to ensure that Richwood employees and friends are complying with all applicable legal requirements, we are advising that it is probably safe now to eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. This decision has denied the claim of J. M. Smucker that they own the crustless sealed PB&J. Ordinarily, items of personal diet are not a matter of company policy but in this case, the improper manufacture of a PB&J could involve the company if the sandwich were to be made or consumed on the job. Specific items of design covered by the disputed patent are
.

A sealed crustless sandwich, comprising:
a first bread layer having a first perimeter surface coplanar to a contact surface;

at least one filling of an edible food juxtaposed to said contact surface;

a second bread layer juxtaposed to said at least one filling opposite of said first bread layer, wherein said second bread layer includes a second perimeter surface similar to said first perimeter surface;

a crimped edge directly between said first perimeter surface and said second perimeter surface for sealing said at least one filling between said first bread layer and said second bread layer;

wherein a crust portion of said first bread layer and said second bread layer has been removed.

Seriously, the Patently O Blog is a good source for current developments in the field of patent and intellectual property issues. If you have the stomach for it, so to speak, the full text of the patent is here. For the record, nothing on this blog should be construed as legal advice by anyone. Consult your own lawyer before making any major decision--or a sandwich.

Here is a good unit conversion site with emphasis on British units. If you run into a reference to some little-known measurement from the UK, it will probably be explained on this site. For example, here are units of capacity and here are old units for specific commodities. Use of these units in trade is actually illegal, I understand, in the UK because only metric system units are legal for trade. You can choose conversion factors for ordinary units from the category index or use drop-down menus here.

You can go too. Believe it or not, the Massachussetts Institute of Technology has over 900 of its courses available online FREE! It is called Open Courseware and the online content includes reading lists, syllabi, sample quizzes and sample projects. It's part of an experimental program to help people learning at home around the world. Give MIT credit for leading the pack. The main page lists all the departments with classes available and there are a lot of them. Just for a sample, try this one, a class called Experiencing Architecture Studio, which includes a full set of class notes and pictures of the actual class projects of several students. Here's another for managers on Project Management. No degrees are awarded and there is no access to faculty, but free is free and there's a lot here to help you learn something if you want to.