Looney Labs Rabbits Mailing list Archive

Re: [Rabbits] Donate Games to Ziggurat Con in Iraq

  • FromAlison <alison@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateThu, 19 Apr 2007 18:13:49 -0400
Hi Timothy,

I'd like to apologize for a general lack of communication here. Let me give you some background as to what happened "behind the scenes" here at the Labs.

We had our weekly staff meeting yesterday, and Carol brought up this whole Ziggurat Con thing, and that people had been talking about it on the Rabbit list, and wouldn't it be great if we could do something to facilitate that.

We decided it would be great if people wanted to place orders to send to the troops, we could consolidate them and pick up the shipping ourselves. We debated whether there was some way we could do one big order that people could contribute to, so the balance would be right, but SuperFRED is not capable of taking donations, per se, and we just weren't sure it would really be possible.

In the end, we decided that it would actually be really cool if people could place their orders individually, and include their own personal note, and it would be the games that they picked out themselves. Since this idea had been originated by the Rabbits, we thought it would be nice to let them put a personal touch on their involvement.

We debated trying to put up a web page so that people could see what had already been ordered for the Con, but in the end we decided that that would be too much work, and we would be adding some ourselves, so we could just even out the mix then.

That is in fact our current plan. To: 1) consolidate the orders, including everyone's order slip with any messages 2) pick up the shipping ourselves, and 3) fill in any "gaps" with stuff donated directly from us, and certainly throwing in a bunch of happy flowers at the very least.

That's all great. The Looney News was slated to go up the very next morning, and there's not a lot of space in that announcement. We had VERY little time, and very little space to throw together an announcement to this effect, and it was deemed rather complex and lengthy to describe the machinations and limitations of our shopping cart, to wit:

SuperFRED doesn't know how to automatically give free shipping, so he'll charge you shipping, but it won't actually charge your card. At the time of the order, the card is _reserved_ but we will go in and take off shipping, and the card will be _charged_ for the reduced amount.

We didn't anticipate that we'd upset anyone by not making the whole plan clear in the Looney News. In hindsight, of course, we realize we could easily put this in email to the Rabbit list here, but our immediate concern was with the web update, where, unfortunately, our space is limited, and we didn't have a lot of time to think it out.

We have be updated the Looney News to try to make all this a bit clearer. Our intention was certainly not to take advantage of the situation. Our Rabbits wanted to give to a good cause, so we wanted to facilitate that, and also join in the giving ourselves.

Hoping this will bring us all to a happier place about this opportunity to bring some amusement to our troops serving in Iraq.

-Alison


--On April 19, 2007 3:05:13 PM -0500 Timothy Hunt <games@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hey Carol,

I have to say... I think this is mean.  This is for a good cause, right?
But it seems you are encouraging your most loyal customers to pay full
retail price, pay full shipping in the order, each rabbit for
themselves instead providing of a decent way to combine our funds, and
then Looney Labs gets to save money by combining on the shipping!  And
with each rabbit for themselves, there's no co-ordination on what gets
shipped. What if lots of people bought treehouse and no-one bought
fluxx?

The soldiers get their games, we pay full price, and Looney labs makes
a profit from retail and also gets to pocket the extra shipping they
don't pay.

Sorry, but that seems mean.

If the company can't afford to give a discount on games for the cause,
then that's understandable.  But to make a special program that makes
it look like a good thing, but actually looking closer, it appears to
be simply a way to encourage sales while making people feel all warm
and fuzzy about it.

What I would have liked to have seen is something like:
"Hey, if you donate money to Looney Labs, we'll use that money to pay
for a discount order, and once we know how much money we have, we can
nicely split the funds to make sure we get a nice cross section of our
games out to the soldiers there, and we can use your dollars to best
effect"

I'm not expecting you necessarily to not make any money at all from
the program, but without a discount, I have no incentive to go to
Looney Labs over my FLGS.  Indeed, without any financial incentive,
I'm more tempted to go to my FLGS as I have a wider selection of games
to choose from.   Yes, as was pointed out, there are bulk discounts
available from LL, but I can't afford an order that size.  If Rabbits
were able to donate to LL somehow, and have you guys figure out how
much product that money would buy at cost (or just above cost, but
certainly below full retail), I would be HAPPY to support the program.


Timothy

On 4/19/07, Carol Townsend <rabbit-support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi folks!
>
> If you look on the Looney News today:
> http://www.looneylabs.com/index.html
>
> ... then you'll see some cool new stuff - including some information
> about Ziggurat Con - the first Gaming Convention happening in a war
> zone.  The largest problem with running a Con in Iraq, of course, is
> that there are no local stores or game publishers. So we decided to
> help our fans send some games to the Troops!
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