Tim Tse's Blog

As you can tell, most students are either pretty lazy (maybe just me) or really keen and involved in school. I once was pretty skeptical about finding part-time jobs and even volunteer work because I thought it wouldn’t really “build” my career path (like I mean, volunteering wouldn’t really have anything to do in my future), but apparently I proved myself wrong after spending so much time on extracurricular activities in high school.

I laid my hands down on my first part-time job during grade 12 two years ago. Initially my reason for working somewhere was just to earn money with my spare time and also to have something to fill up the gaps on the Sauder application form. It was pretty scary at first, I mean working with people that I didn’t know and I didn’t have any experience at all. But after a while I started liking working as a team and attempted to satisfy each customer that we had. We had good times, when customers phoned back and giving us constructive feedback, and bad times when customers called back and ranted on us for mistakenly taken their orders.

While having fun and enjoying my first part-time job, I learned so much about working as a team and how to manage relationships with other employees. My manager is who I believe made the job fun and not-that-intimidating anymore because she cared about teaching us these things. Personally speaking, even though I wouldn’t really recommend working in a fast food chain, the experience that I had there was totally different from working with a student team in school. I didn’t even notice that these are certain aspects of OBHR until I took the course last term. Other than the OBHR stuff that she taught me, I also learned from her about managing the logistics of the items that we had in our store (which was also another great experience that I didn’t expect to learn at a fastfood chain).

If you have to ask who I learned the greatest lesson in my whole life from, my parents would totally qualify for it since they’ve taught me a lot since I was born. But in terms of working in a real job environment, I would have to say it’d be the manager of my first job.

Have you ever played video games? Other than the gaming content, have you noticed that you’ve also been exposed to the effects that video game music causes?

Parker Mason from blogcampaigning wrote a blog entry (Games and Music: The Soundtrack of the Game) about video game music. Based on my understanding after reading his blog post, video game music is defined as pieces that loop endlessly without lyrics. If you’re no ordinary gamer, you wouldn’t really pay attention to the music played while you smash on the buttons on your controller.

Mason suggests that video game music from 20-30 years ago were actually purposefully simply written just to ensure that it stuck to people’s brains easily. The first extraordinary example was the music in Space Invaders, where the background music changes accordingly to the level and the status of your spaceship. However, video game music probably didn’t attract gamers due to technological difficulties in creating pleasant tunes.

Have you ever noticed the change in the background music of your favourite Pokemon games?

Nowadays, video game music has evolved from simple MIDI files into better quality documents that support the use of different musical layers and several musical instruments. Video game music has been considered as the “soul” of the game itself. Knowing that that gamers actually notice the background music in games, gaming companies took a huge risk and began selling OSTs (original soundtracks) of their games. This became pretty successful, thus popular games right now oftern launch their own OSTs. Some gaming companies, for instance Square Enix, periodically organizes concerts to showcase their famous pieces. Even though the sales of game music dropped significantly, it has still remained the third bestselling genre.

From Rihanna’s newest single to Starbuck’s new logo, Microsoft Windows to Zara, Facebook has been used by every type of business to advertise their newest products. Facebook users are constantly bombarded with product information with the use of Facebook Pages, Groups, and Likes. One may question, is this marketing method effective?

With almost a 4 million growth in the number of Facebook users last month in the United States, Facebook secures the spot of “King of All Social Media”. A study conducted by MerchantCircle has suggested that, many of the small businesses are also in favor of using Facebook, the ultimate social media, to market their products. After beating Twitter and MySpace in terms of the number of users, Facebook this time kicks Google out of its throne and becomes the dominant social media that small businesses use to advertise their products; more than 70% of the survey participants responded that they are currently (or in the past) using Facebook to promote their products. The study also discovers that, most small business owners are optimistic about the future.

Most of these businesses, however, rely on the use of “side advertisements” (the ones that are known to choose advertisements that are specifically based on what each user is interested in). While this marketing strategy may be effective, it may turn down a number of potential customers as well as causing harm to the reputation of the business due to ethical issues (data gathering without permission). Most businesses are fragile to damages to their reputation; in the case of small businesses, the effect would be more devastating since most small business rely on frequent customers and word of mouth marketing.

Effectiveness or reputation damages, which one would small businesses side with?

If you haven’t noticed, McDonald’s is giving out free coffee AGAIN (last time was last November). What intrigues me about this matter is that, how and why is McDonald’s trying to put itself into the furious battle between coffee shops.

Free McDonald's coffee this week! Would you want one?

Coffee consumption has been rising for every country in the world. In Canada, the coffee consumption per capita has risen from 4.5 kg per person in 1997 to 6.5 kg per person in 2007 (Source: World Resource Institute). One reason for this may possibly trace back to the “boom” of coffee shops in Canada a decade ago.

While the major coffee competition in Canada is between Starbucks and Tim Hortons, McDonald’s on the other hand, tries to enter the battlefield. Famous for its French fries and burgers, McDonald’s squeezes itself into the market by introducing the first McCafe to Canadians in 2001 (Source: Espressotec). While the majority of the income comes from fastfood, McDonald’s tries hard to snatch customers from other coffee chains by offering specialty coffee drinks.

Now McDonald’s, as one of the newcomers in the coffee industry, attempts to promote its coffee by handing out free coffee. Does this really attract people though? According to Coffee Review, the quality of McDonald’s coffee is still not comparable to major coffee chains such as Starbucks.

In my opinion, McDonald’s is lacking the enthusiasm in creating new, special coffee products to attract potential new customers. For instance, it does not offer special recipes to customers. While McDonald’s is one (or maybe the most) successful fastfood chain, it does not have the knowledge, nor enough creativity to compete with coffee chains that specializes only in coffee. Maybe McDonald’s would be better off focusing on their fastfood products.