About Me 0074: Im Making Money

Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Roy Williams has settled a dispute with ex-girlfriend and former Miss Texas USA Brooke Daniels over a $76,000 engagement ring.

According to court documents, Williams mailed Daniels an overnight package that included the ring and a taped marriage proposal. Daniels refused the marriage request, and Williams filed a civil suit against Daniels on June 30 in order to regain possession of the ring.

Since Williams’ relationship with Daniels was not far enough along for her to feel comfortable accepting his marriage proposal, the price of the engagement ring ended up far exceeding its actual value. In order to protect readers from making the same type of financial mistakes as Williams, I present a list of ten things nobody should ever pay for.

10. DVDs: Most DVDs cost $20. A RedBox rental is $1 per night. You’d have to watch a movie 20 times to justify buying it instead of renting it. With Netflix’s instantly streaming movie service, it’s even harder to justify buying a DVD, especially because so many movies that come out aren’t even very good.

9. CDs: I’m not even going to get into the whole “Are you stealing from the artists by pirating music, or helping them by weakening the record companies?” debate; I’m just going to point out that rarely is every single song on a CD likable, so it makes more sense to use a downloading service to only pay for the songs you actually like.

8. Dressing at restaurants: Seriously? If I order wings and the restaurant charges me for blue cheese dressing to dip my wings in, that is the last time I eat at the restaurant. Dressing is supposed to go with the food. Charging for dressing at a wings place is like charging extra money to put cheese on a pizza.

7. Dogs: They’re expensive enough to provide food and vaccinations for, so why add to their cost by actually paying to obtain them too? This is the 21st century. Go to Craigslist, and respond to one of the 42 bazillion postings from people giving away newborn puppies for free.

6. Cell phones: Between free upgrades every two years and warranties that cover your phone if it breaks before then, you can find a phone that has all the capabilities you want for free. There are plenty of free phones with email and Internet, the money shelled out for iPhones is simply spent to indulge the inner child and play with all the apps.

5. Books: As if libraries already didn’t render buying books an inefficient use of money, Amazon now refunds you fully if you return a Kindle book within a week of buying it. If you know you’ll have time to finish the book in a week, you can treat your Kindle like a library.

4. Anything at a gas station other than gas: Whatever it is you’re considering buying inside a gas station, chances are it’s stale and overpriced. And those hot dogs are probably older than the person ringing up your purchase.

3. Movie theater candy: Those boxes of candy you pay $4 or more for at the movie theater are usually a dollar apiece at a local store. And they fit perfectly in the pocket of your jeans. It’s a no-brainer, really.

2. Sex: If your skills are so weak you have pay to get some action, you deserve whatever oddly-colored sores or warts you wake up with the next morning. By the way, what do Elliot Spitzer and Auburn have in common? They both “pay for play.”

And the number one thing that no one should ever pay for…

Roy Williams: He’s missed 15 starts the past three years, turns 30 this year and has amassed 1,000 receiving yards only one season in his career, but he’s due $9.5 million next season and is likely to be released whenever the lockout ends. With plenty of younger receivers available, teams should avoid the underachieving Williams like a sumo wrestler avoids carrots.

You’ve doubtless heard about the Airbnb fiasco – being dubbed #ransackgate by some – that’s been exploding the last couple of days. If you’re not familiar with the story, we first covered it here, and there’s some terrific source material from the woman who’s home was ransacked and robbed here and here.

Today Y Combinator founder (and Airbnb investor) Paul Graham wrote this:

I’ve just learned more about this situation, and it turns out Airbnb has been offering to fix it, from the very beginning. From the beginning they offered to pay to get her a new place and new stuff, and do whatever else she wanted.

The story Arrington wrote yesterday about Airbnb not offering to help was bullshit. He asked a company spokesman what Airbnb was doing to help her. The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool.

I’ve talked to the Airbnb guys and they are already doing everything they could be doing to help this woman.

Even if you don’t believe they are nice guys (which they are, among the nicest of all the people we’ve funded), do you really think they are so dumb that they don’t realize it’s not worth the bad PR to save money and effort in this situation?

A few thoughts:

1. What the hell?

2. Airbnb’s Christopher Lukezic told me on Wednesday that the company was not responsible for EJ’s losses, that they would be paying anything for her losses, that they are just a service to match people and that they were helping the police find the people who did this. This was on the record, and it was a call we emailed about first. I didn’t take him by surprise. And I read this back to him before I posted.

3. Paul Graham says instead “The spokesman, who’d been told by their lawyers that he couldn’t go into detail about that because of the precedent said “I can’t comment on that.” So Arrington, in typical Arrington fashion said “Well, unless you tell me I’m going to write that you’re not willing to do anything for her.” And he did. Really not cool.

That’s a lie. What he said is what I wrote in no. 2 above, and what was in the original post.

4. Following publication of that Post, Airbnb Brian Chesky called me and I updated that post with his comments, mentioning that there was some miscommunication. I retweeted that there was an important update, and added a bold header at the top of the post mentioning the update.

5. I then added another update, an email from Lukezic. And another update pointing to a guest post by Chesky on the issue. It is absurd to think that I made up the statements that Lukezic made to me in our first interview. It wasn’t even really relevant to the story.

6. Chesky repeatedly thanked me for the updates by email and on the phone. If Lukezic wants to publicly call me a liar, he should do so directly.

7. I’ve seen this exact behavior before with the Scamville stuff a couple of years ago.

The real problem here isn’t some mixup in communication with me. The real problem is that the victim wrote that follow up post yesterday calling Airbnb out and making new allegations of an attempted cover up.

It kind of feels to me that what Airbnb really wants to do is call the victim, EJ, a liar. But they’re certainly not going to do that (although if they have evidence that she’s lying, they should be talking about that). Instead, they focus on us, call me dishonest and suggesting that the whole story is “bullshit.”

One thing I love about our readers is that they’re independent thinkers. Often they don’t agree with my opinions, and say so loudly. But this goes too far. I’m not the person who grossly mishandled a PR crisis. I’m not the person who made factually inaccurate statements on the record. I’m not the person who tried to convince a woman who’s life has been shattered to remove a blog post.

At least have the decency to stand up and say you’re wrong, Airbnb, and apologize for the lies. Because hiding behind investors, and attacking the press, is both dishonorable and stupid. That’s no way to gain customer trust.

PS – If you review our historical coverage of Airbnb, it’s hard to say there’s anything but a pattern of cheerleading the company on since it launched in 2008. And we’ve been massive, unquestioning supporters of Y Combinator over the years as well. I don’t know what Paul Graham means by “typical Arrington fashion,” but I do know this. It’s not my job to fix it when companies do stupid things.

About Me 0074

Monday, August 1, 2011

Im Making Money

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