Cantankerous Consumer:

Of dumb parking,
donuts and digicams

By David Cobain

Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Consumerism is rampant, it's said, but less commonly remarked is that consumers - mere fodder, too often, for the mills of manufacturers, distributors and retailers - are getting the short and defective end of many a hi-tech stick.

Retailers seem not to care. Why should they, they doubtless ask themselves, if consumers aren't bright or energetic enough to do anything about it, to demand better, to go elsewhere if morality and money don't secure better treatment.

Take, for instance, the great shopping malls that either disfigure our suburbs or devastate our traditional old city centres. Ever noticed that all their best parking spaces have gone when you arrive, regardless of the time of day?

At 10 in the morning, the mall is likely bereft of shoppers - yet there is hardly a vacant parking space within a hundred yards of the entrances. Who owns all these cars? Store staff, that's who - people there theoretically to serve you.

Wouldn't you think that common sense or courtesy, not to mention business acumen, would suggest that staff be instructed to park their cars away from the entrances to allow the people who pay their salaries to park conveniently?

Think again.

When you've finished, give a thought to why the lines of consumers at Tim Hortons outlets - those in and around Toronto, anyway - comprise individuals growingly irritated as they wait for their coffee and timbits.

Their dissatisfaction - exasperation, in many cases - results from and is amplified by the sloppiness and carelessness now so widely evident at a chain of retailers that, sadly but accurately, exemplifies the Canadian approach.

One long-time patron of Tim Hortons - now taking her custom to rival Coffee Time - says she cannot remember the last time she got what she ordered, quickly and correctly, when she finally got to the end of a line-up there.

'They apparently pay not the slightest attention to what one asks for,' she complains, 'and when, rarely, they do, the frequent inability of their staff to understand the English language - as willing as they might be - sabotages their efforts.

'I finally got so sick of it - and of the slovenliness and screeching of metal chair legs on dirty tile flooring - that I took my business elsewhere. Coffee Time is a considerable improvement and their coffee is as good as Tim Hortons ever was.'

All is not yet lost, though, for consumers. There are retailers, still, who regard customers as more than a mere nuisance; and there are manufacturers who trade in customer support as reliable as their cost-management and technological ingenuity.

Two of the latter are Fujifilm, a venerable manufacturer of all things photographic, and Hyundai Motor Company, a comparative newcomer in the ranks of global vehicle makers, both examples of what care for the customer can achieve.

I'll let you in on my experience with a Hyundai dealer and one of his used models - not perfect, although better than expected - in my next column...but first one of the most impressive of Fujifilm's great digital camera line-up.

All this company's digital cameras are ingeniously designed, carefully manufactured, easy to use and produce superb results, in my experience, but perhaps the most outstanding, and a great value, is the S9000, the latest in a long developmental line.

Consumer superzooms - cameras with lenses that magnify the image you see by 10 or 12 times - are popular and plentiful, marketed aggressively by many traditional still camera makers, as well as by electronics giants Panasonic and Sony.

But Fujifilm's superzooms represent what I regard as a sensible turning away from the crowd in at least one vital aspect - the striving to guarantee clearer exposures by use of image stabilization, a mechanical adjustment of elements within the camera to compensate for movement.

This is an approach made popular by Panasonic, followed recently by Canon and Sony - but Fujifilm is a leader, not a follower. Its way, exemplified by the S and F series cameras, is to use a very advanced processing system that provides better photography naturally.

Particularly impressive is the S9000, an attempt to introduce in a fixed-lens model many advantages of entry-level SLR models. The result is a superbly ergonomic camera with a 9MP sensor, 28-300mm lens, manual focusing and zoom rings, a hotshoe and an ISO range of 80-1600.

It also has a tilting 1.8-inch LCD screen, a 30-fps movie mode and - the essence of the system - the proprietary Super CCD, a remarkable innovation that all but guarantees great pictures, even for novices, with enhanced clarity and colour, high shutter speeds and exceptionally low noise.

As a former newspaper reporter-photographer, I can attest that this is an excellent camera, well built, impressively featured, irreproachable in its handling and competitively priced. Try it at a Henry's camera store. If you don't buy one, maybe you need more digital photography lessons.

(In my next Cantankerous Consumer column, read how Hyundai has changed and how this fast-rising rival for Toyota's popularity - and its dealers - can do better still.)