[ephemerisle] Ripple Theater video

Here's a video of the Ripple Theater I did at Ephemerisle. Sorry for the poor video quality -- youtube's built-in compression engine does nasty things to dark parts of the image, and there's little I can do to stop it.

Funny enough, my old youtube movies are higher quality than I remember. Perhaps they kept the full-quality version of the uploaded movie on their database and later reconverted it at a higher quality level.

Time warp... we're going back to January 2006, before I really used LJ. There were kittens.

Trial sizes

I'm surprised that more products don't have trial sizes.

I was in the Milk Pail Market today and saw that they had a separate bin with small pieces of their various fine cheeses for $.50-$1.25. Given that cheeses usually fairly expensive ($4-$8 a piece), this is a great way to sample a lot of cheeses.

This decision was made by the store, but let's think about the manufacturers.

Why isn't this done for more types of products? There are lots of shampoos, unusual types of alcohol, special oils, and other things that are essentially "stuff" that can be sold in arbitrary quantities but are usually only sold in blocks of >$10.

So why not offer a trial size? If you produce bottles of "stuff" that normally sell for some large amount of money per bottle, some portion of your potential customers will be turned off by the price if they don't know how much they'll like it. People tend to value consistency, so they will keep buying the same product if they're already satisfied with it. They're unlikely to want to risk being without their known product and unlikely to want to pay twice as much to get both.

I don't know what the extra production cost would be for a small trial version but I think it would boost overall sales (but not necessarily profit) so long as the underlying product is good.

So if you do see a trial size for a product, the manufacturer is placing a bet that you'll prefer their product to what you're buying now. It's likely worth taking them up on their bet.