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Freebies and junk Cause Poor Retention Rates


ralph Alderton
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ralph Alderton wrote:

Perhaps the problem is that very few Lindens actually use Secondlife so they don't know or care what it looks like. They don't think it matters, but it does !

How things LOOK is of primary importance.

I guess we could all lease our own Homesteads from one of the Chung sisters, buy and live in a Painter Meriman house, and enjoy the many benefits of SL... yup, all 10 of us.:matte-motes-evil-invert:

Sorry but I totally disagree with you. But I do believe it is not so much the junk that people like you dislike, but it really is the high quality freebies that really erk ya.

 

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ralph Alderton wrote:

Chelsea, what you should ask yourself is :

If we have 16000 sign ups a day, where are they all ?

How come concurrency figures have been the same for the last 2 years and slipping ?

How come the grid is shrinking ? we lose sims every month

If we forget Tier costs as the biggest factor in regards to lack of growth and stagnancy,

Number 2 on the list of reason why 16000 people a day log off and never come back, is the fact that SL doesn't look engaging enough and it doesn't look engaging enough because of one thing - JUNK, junk, junk

16000 people a day are interested enough in this virtual world to register, why do they not stay ?

It's either because 16000 are too stupid to handle the interface - which they're not - or they see stuff that they don't like

Human beings are visual creatures, it's our strongest perception of the world around us. Secondlife just does not look good enough and it is the junk that is driving them away

 

'Denial ain't just a river in Egypt'

Mark Twain

 

Look when I came here in 2007, SL was growing by leaps and bounds, and this trend continued on for another year. Also, when I first came to SL, there were freebies galore, much more than there is now, and most of it was junk. Your thesis is greatly flawed.

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ralph Alderton wrote:

Clearly the Lab don't think junk is a problem and don't think the way Secondlife looks is a problem. And that IS the problem. LL don't perceive, they don't GET why people are not staying and why the churnover is so incredibly high.

Imagine saying to a 3D game company - hey it doesn't matter what the game looks like.

Top 3D game companies entice new users with exciting screenshots of their games prior to release. They spend millions getting the art style and graphics right.

The SUPERABUNDANCE of junk IS a problem and IS damaging the growth and popularity of Secondlife

Not a popular opinion, not even considered a problem, but it's true none the less. The SUPERABUNDANCE of junk is hurting Secondlife

 

Again, where is your evidence?  I'd argue that the real world economy and the rise of mobile computing have had a big impact on the growth of Second Life, I don't know of anyone who has told me they are leaving Second Life because of freebies, they can't afford it anymore, it's not fun anymore, there's nothing to do, it runs slowly on their computer, I've heard all those reasons but never had anyone cite freebies as a reason.

 

 

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Hello Ciaran, it's not freebies alone, freebies are merely the tip of the iceburg of junk that SL has crashed into.

1. When people say it's no fun, that could easily mean it's no fun to look at, or it doesn't inspire me to have fun in a place that doesn't look good

2. When they say they can't afford it - it may mean for this much money it doesn't look good enough for me to continue paying and doesn't inspire me to keep paying 

3. Runs slowly on my computer - because of all the poorly optimized poorly made junk overwhelming their computer

Personally I often hear people who try SL say it looks old fashioned and rubbishy.

I agree I have not questioned the 16k people a day who try SL and don't like it

But what's amazing is that 16k people a day are intrested in trying Secondlife - that is AWESOME.

I truly believe if Secondlife looked more enticing, more attractive, it would compell people's attention and increase their desire to explore and learn more.

The effort it takes to learn Secondlife is not supported by a thrilling and beautiful virtual environment - if it was more beautiful and there was less junk people would be more ready to make the effort

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meant to reply to Ralph:

 

I do hear ppl say SL looks "old fashioned and rubbishy", but those are mostly ppl who don't play SL. There are also gamers who also "play" SL and think SL looks bad by comparision, but I am not a gamer and I suspect most of my customers are not either, and we think SL looks beautiful*. Our imaginations are perfectly capable of filling in the blanks.

 

*Now if you fly around on mainland, yes, it looks like crap, but the answer is not to fly around on mainland. There are enough lovely places in SL you can pretty much entirely avoid the junk.

 

That said, yes, freebies should not dilute the search.

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<snark>

 

Then instead of complaining and wanting someone else to fix the problem, do it yourself!

 

You say the problem is all the junky freebies?  Then put out some high-quality freebies, and circulate them!  I'm sure a bunch of high-quality, top-notch freebies would be heavily used, once they were found and shared......Oh, wait.  That would mean GIVING something away to better SL.

 

You don't have a problem with that, do you?

 

I mean, if it's going to benefit SL, and get a lot more retention (and thus future customers), then you and all us other merchants should make a few top quality freebies and put them into circulation.  Sure, it's a hit to our profits, but it'll make SL better in the long run!

 

</snark>

 

The reason some may leave SL shortly after signup is all the immature behavior and actions being perpetrated in many of the starting areas.  Some may leave when they can't get the hang of the controls, and don't feel like spending the time  trying.  Some may leave when they come for HAWTSEKS and find out they can't even get to certain areas without age-verifying.

 

The number who leave based solely on the appearance of the world and the avatars in it?  Probably a small fraction.  I don't have any numbers, nor am I claiming to know.....just making educated guesses.  So I don't say these ARE the reasons.....I say they MAY be.  You are stating 'as fact' something you have no evidence for.  Might want to try stating your claims a little differently......and maybe suggesting some solutions too?

 

 

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ralph Alderton wrote:

1. When people say it's no fun, that could easily mean it's no fun to look at, or it doesn't inspire me to have fun in a place that doesn't look good


They could mean that but I doubt it's a big issue, at the heart of Second Life lies social spaces, it's what people can do and how easy it is to find things to do that will hold people.


ralph Alderton wrote:

 

2. When they say they can't afford it - it may mean for this much money it doesn't look good enough for me to continue paying and doesn't inspire me to keep paying 


Again I doubt this is a big issue, paying people have been hooked by something, however you're right in so much as it's an experience to dollar decision.


ralph Alderton wrote:

3. Runs slowly on my computer - because of all the poorly optimized poorly made junk overwhelming their computer

Personally I often hear people who try SL say it looks old fashioned and rubbishy.

I agree I have not questioned the 16k people a day who try SL and don't like it

But what's amazing is that 16k people a day are intrested in trying Secondlife - that is AWESOME.

I truly believe if Secondlife looked more enticing, more attractive, it would compell people's attention and increase their desire to explore and learn more.

The effort it takes to learn Secondlife is not supported by a thrilling and beautiful virtual environment - if it was more beautiful and there was less junk people would be more ready to make the effort

Optimisation you have a point, people using larger than needed textures or running too many scripts, a decent discussion with Linden Lab on these issues would have potential.

If Second Life "looked" more enticing is an issue beyond the visual experience, but you're correct to suggest that if it looked visually stunning it would hold people's attention more at the start but no matter how good it looks, it has to offer something for people to do.

When I was a lad a game called Dragon's Lair arrived in the arcade, it was at the time visually stunning, unfortunately it was a bloody awful game, Pacman and Galaxians were far more fun and they didn't look as good, not even close.

If people landed and right away had something fun and easy to follow to do, they'd probably stay longer. I'm not saying the visual aspect isn't important, I just don't think it's as important as you think it is and let's not forget that one huge appeal for Second Life is user generated content, don't underestimate how much fun people get out of playing with the creation tools and even if what they create is widely considered junk, it's their junk, they can build from that base, it's a big draw.

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That's your griefing tool?

So out of all your problems, which could have been summed up with a big fat RTFM from the beginning, the need to share this wonderous griefing tool with everyone else instead of actually giving it time to get fixed (not measured in hamster time).

Reminds me of the time you said your things were borked when you just didn't wait for the synch, or the time you said support was a failure and didn't even wait 24 hours.

Amazing.

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1) I'm less concerned that it's a griefing tool than that it's intentional on someone's part and eventually going to be used for some other more serious purpose.

2) It's not a question of me waiting for synch. If people order stuff while I'm waiting for synch, I have no control over that.

3) I DID wait substantially longer than 24 hours for my support case, and it's a support case that I was only directed to submit as a diversion from more open discussion. Police suspects are questioned separately in order to keep them from cooperating, and we are directed from this forum to submit support tickets for the same reason.

4) The synch was not directly relevant to the borking issue. Even with the synching, those regions were absolutely borked, and I'm no longer using them because the large number of boxes makes them repeat targets for simultaneous borking.

5) (since I know what you're going to say next anyway). Effective embezzlers don't steal pounds; they steal pennies. Thus the bookkeeping aphorism "Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves".

6) You can be almost completely sure that they're not working to get it fixed, but looking for ways to explain it away or to give people instructions that are supposed to make it less obvious how to abuse the system on top of the continuing unintended information failures. These are people who have spelled it out to me in spades that, no matter what they may say to you, me, or to each other, they DO NOT want solutions; they DO want excuses. And maintaining their ostritch-like perspective will inevitably take priority over anything so trivial as whether the company might be practicing active forms of negligence in the face of imminent threats to long-term viability. If I had walked into their office with Osama Bin Laden's head on a silver platter, the most well-considered thing I'd expect them to do is to separate the two items into different recycling bins.

 

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If this problem is utterly known-about, why was I directed to instructions that continue to invite the error to be repeated?

Even if they don't want to rewrite code (or maybe at least until they rewrite code) they could at least change the instructions so that people delist items before doing any other part of the process. That would some extra work, maybe, but they've already got even me farming boxes so that they don't have to do anything about intentionally borked regions, pressing the synch button repeatedly without any detectable effect, and otherwise acting like an unpaid test volunteer... except that when something doesn't work, the plan is not to figure out how to fix it, but to figure out how it must be my fault that it didn't do what they told me it would do when I did what they told me to do.

Designing a system to fail is one thing.

Specifically directing people to use it so that it fails is another thing.

If they spent as much time insulting you as they did me before admitting anything in the flagging issue, you might not have the same kind of patience left for them as you're asking me to exercise here.

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Not sure what you were directed to do, or how they've been working with you behind the scenes as you're eluding, unless you're talking about what I'm estimating is about $500 US or so blown on your specific case in time and labor and entertaining your antics about conspiracies, which only serves to make the rest of us look like fools.

But since you think I'm insulting you (I'm not, my New York tell-it-like-it is slipped through there for a moment) you, about those fanboi comments you've been making, let me dispel that myth again for you.

The company should know enough to handle reporting on a sane level without any sort of input, it's kind of commerce 101.

Barring that, reporting isn't going to be completely fixed until after Direct Delivery, at least so says my gut ... reporting will have to be re-done to match the mechanics of DD. As will other Marketplace features.

So, they're either missing what everyone else has been saying about reporting in favor of someone with whacky conspiracy theories cluttering up somewhat better feedback (there's a conspiracy theory for you, maybe they WANT to make us look like unprofessional idiots by groomnig this kind of feedback), or they're paying attention to trivial issues when they should be paying attention to larger issues.

In either case, mentioned that there is a failing, here it is:

Are we going on two years now for the Marketplace? I believe so, one re-write later, nixing features that all merchants liked, development that's dog slow across the board with SL. More examples:

Been waiting 5 years for mesh, another year or two to go until everyone can actually see it. In a 3D world, no less. Low poly is well understood as low poly in the rest of the world, it's simple. Not here, not yet.

6 years(?) for a language (something on top of Mono) rather than the 2 million lines of code that makes up LSL. Not understanding this one, built a game engine years ago, took us overnight to drop in (going a bit fuzzy) Rhino for embedded Javascript. That took overnight to plug in, a week for the glue. Regardless, that many years to get the job done speaks for itself. Other companies have done this in a year.

Actually made a suggestion in an office hour as a baby step that we need a dialog window for user input rather than something like chatting 69 my command. Finally got that one, although I'm not sure that was due to my input. About two years later it looks like that's finally working after sitting there unbroken and not working for a year and a half. Then it was only working in V2. Major win right? No, what we really need is a full set of GUI controls so that people can develop the kind of slick looking things that draw people into SL, but hey, if you know it's there you don't have to use those odd chat statements any longer.

Because they're stingy with everything (one problem with Marketplace reporting at one point seemed to be due to the limitation of characters they were using for some fields), and script limits are a solution for too many resources on too few machines, I won't even bring up certain issues like needing static properties on objects that don't even need to take up memory until they're actually used, saving enormous amounts of script memory. Doesn't even need to be stored in a database. Only uses memory when called. Won't ask for that because I want 256 of them, and I'd probably get 6 which is pretty much useless.

Need global objects with reliable access. HTTP is fine, so long as it's reliable and I don't have to deal with limits there and making sure there's actually an always-on connection is fun. HTTP limited to 2k worth of data ... that's really useful for developing killer apps ... not.

Could go on and on here, but won't. Combine that with volumes of sincere and thoughtful Jira's, pages and pages of info from the forums.

But if that conspiracy style will help my case, and get me and others heard, then you may have proven your point after all. Not sure if I have another 2 years of patience in me to see a fraction of this get done though.

Loving those Marketplace charts that not only let me track sales history at a glance on any one item, but also up to an overlay of 5 items and switch between different types of graphs. I can sell much more with info like that. And it's so fun I could spend all day looking at that kind of thing. So could someone just being a merchant for fun.

But right, most of your issues were basically due to you not being able to read the wiki, and follow simple advice from other merchants at the outset. So $500 bucks of redundancy later and more conspiracy, here we are.

What a cool way to operate a company.

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"If I had walked into their office with Osama Bin Laden's head on a silver platter, the most well-considered thing I'd expect them to do is to separate the two items into different recycling bins."

LOL you'd most likely be told to list it in the appropriate sub category and not the top level/root Men's Heads as outlined on the Second Life Marketplace Listing Guidelines

 

^L^

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@ Dart

I used to very much prefer to let them go about their business, as you seem to be saying I should.

And then they crossed the line by creating a problem for me and trying very hard to pretend that they hadn't.

Now I consider myself free to assume that every problem for which there's no clear explanation is probably a problem someone at LL is creating for me, and which someone at LL will also try to pretend is my problem until I have done everything necessary to enforce accountability.

If you don't like the conspiracy theory genie, you can take it up with them; they let it out of the bottle, and I consider them very welcome to put it back in the bottle at any time.

As for them also having what you consider  to be real problems, I still think it's mostly all one big problem, and I'm just showing them some facet of it that they might need to better examine in order to really see the one big problem.

The big problem is simply that someone among them is way past due for getting $hit-canned.

And if they have any sense of integrity as an organization, getting $hit-canned should be the least of that person's worries from a legal standpoint.

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Josh, I get it, I really do. For the record I'm not carrying angst around about it, and I'm not without a sense of humor either, some of your points are actually amusing. I don't think you completely believe the amount of conspiracy you're flinging about yourself. I know this is out of context of this thread, and have to agree with Mad's advice that it probably belongs elsewhere.

It's that convincing a company that's generating great numbers for itself, especially in the context of the SLM that it's failing to satisfy customer demand, and not properly supporting its merchants in terms of dedication.

Used that graphs example, and pitting that against one of the teams replys in response to the fact we don't have useful features that SLX had. The attitude is that "this is not SLX". Well yes, no kidding ... but how do you convince a too-autonomous, too small team that's performing very well for the company in terms of numbers that customer fulfillment is as important as the earnings? With conspiracy? Not likely, but not ruling that out, even.

Why supply good tools very quickly to merchant customers to help sell better, when as someone else pointed out, there's a ceiling on the amount of goods that can be sold, while the amount of product steadily increases? Why would they want a merchant to sell better? It doesn't affect overall sales in the slighest whether merchants A, B and C have better tools, the top numbers remain the same.

Someone else made the point that the company is still plagued by culture, and I think this also is true. If it were based on fast innovation and performance it would be an entirely different company. As in clearly defined management dictating the work to be done, not the other way around.

A monkey can put together lists of features that merchants and other segments of SL are asking for. So why are these things not as prioritized as internals? My take is because they don't at all affect the bottom line of the company and because real speed in development and innovation costs more money.

So, yell and scream, conspiracy or calm negotiations, the end result is the same. LL isn't Pixar, and I think they need to get over that. Even Google is starting to see the light that culture/creativity over performance is a losing proposition. The losers in our particular case in terms of revenue are the merchants.

But I see we're back to comments now on blog posts. Drama sells. Commments on the quarterly report are unanimously pointing out the same problems and frustrations that have been with us for years. The last straw for me, was a post by Torley playing both sides of the fence a short while ago saying something like "hey we know parts of LL suck and here I am convicing my co-workers to walk in Residents shoes". Not dumping the problem on Torley, Torley is awesome.

How cool is that? Not very when it points to the fact that there's a serious lack of accountability in customer satisfaction, a weakness in fast-paced development, not enough money being spent to get the job done, and overspending in frivolous areas.

Great for the company, except that you can't deliver on modern tools that would drive people to innovate enough to draw more people.

I wouldn't be so quick to suggest that people get fired if the root cause is lack of spending and lack of manpower. It would seem to indicate that not having a very slick and sophisticated Marketplace after 2 years is a failing of talent, but that may not be the case.

My only real point against your methods is that you may be falling right into their hands with this culture issue. Aren't we just so cool for picking up a trivial issue by one of our vocal critics? No, not very. Not when you're still not delivering the type of product that people are asking for. Congratulations on the revenue though, looking great. In the meantime our revenue is somewhat ... less.

Liked that our CEO realizes that part of their commitment hopefully later this year will be working on delivering more customers to Merchants. Got to take the show on the road though rather than spend money to do that. It still fails to show a dedication to Merchants as business folk. It also shows a lack of being able to control a market with a ceiling, and in that sense is only a fix as long as membership grows.

Barely on topic in this thread as it shows some points why freebies aren't the largest part of the issue when it comes to profitability and Merchants.

Sorry, awfully long and boring, but hopefully a bit more clear than sniping at your snipes ;)

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I think this is your best message yet; not because you somewhat agree with me, but because you put things in a way that better enables me to essentailly agree with you.

The reason I have to post conspiracy talk on threads about other subjects is simply that, if I don't, it gets deleted.

The whole point of the conspiracy talk is that it doesn't really matter to merchants whether what we see is the result of conspiracy or of a few bad decisions higher up.

I wouldn't say that I don't care who gets fired, but not knowing the precise reason for whch it should happen doesn't change the fact that the size and persistence of the problem absolutely warrant it. My career counselors were bad, but they at least didn't tell me to prepare to work at some kind of company where repeated failure has no consequence (and I think you know why even they would not tell me that). When problems don't get solved because of someone making the same bad decision again and again somewhere, that person eventually needs to be removed from the opportunity to keep making that bad decision, regardless of the motive behind that decision. Protecting investments and job security are both more important than the question of what, really, is going through the mind of someone making a repeated mistake.

In the string of present examples, it ultimately does not matter to merchants whether the stinky end of the stick is incompetent administration of the SLM or an epidemic of compromised and/or corrupt technical people, because the problem at the handle end is the same: resources are available to sufficiently prevent or alleviate the affects on merchants, but someone won't decide to allocate those resources for that because it might cut into the budget for baseless denials of criticism and cryptic quasi-apologies that provide no useful information we don't already have.

What's in it for LL to fix these problems now, rather than later (if at all) is that, even if they don't think they affect the bottom line, they do, and shall. Any market can potentially saturate, of course, so there is some kind of ceiling, eventually, on what can be sold. But to create some other kind of ceiling below that and say "they must be about the same" is very presumptuous. If there are twice as many couches, only about the same number of couches may continue to sell, more or less, but the average price per couch will tend to be driven upward, rather than downward as couch production expands.

Yes, you read that right.

How?

Simple... The market for the worst possible kinds of couches is already met with freebies and the like. But as Steve Wynn would point out, there will always be people who want the best. Whatever is the best couch available on SLM at the moment, someone will buy it, and they will happily pay a higher price than what is demanded for the second best couch. That means a bigger commission for LL. And if people just see a better couch than what they have at some point, they might just buy that at a higher price than the previous one. That is, the ceiling that LL is setting is a quality ceiling in terms of consumer choice, and that also sets a ceiling in terms of what consumers are willing to pay. If the tools worked better, more merchants could use them more often, and the broader selection would produce greater potential for people to buy something better at a price they consider warrants the price. 

The whole ceiling idea (at least as actually applied to the SLM so far), really, seems to assume that competition by SLM merchants is competition with other merchants, for a market of fixed size and fixed demands.

This simply is not correct. The real competition is other entertainment media and RL.

SL is competing with drugs, gambling and pornography, for example. If SLM merchants could (by offering more and better things, and offering them efficiently) persuade SL users to spend even 1% less on just those 3 things and instead spend that money on something in SL, it would be a freaking firehose of hundred-dollar bills pointing at LL, 24/7/365.

When I started to sell rocks, I figured that, for sure, I would saturate the demand for such things almost immediately by offering everything as full perms. How many kinds of rocks can people possibly need? The answer: "more". I am perpetually amazed at what happens whenever I offer some new rock that actually looks pretty good. People DO buy it. Do they buy it because it's on their to-do list? Apparently not. People have told me that they buy it, often, because they see it and think "I should have that", even if they don't know yet what they're going to do with it. And that is part of the counterintive beauty of SL; you don't need to know what you're going to do with a thing when you buy it, because you can just stick it in a folder and wait for the opportunity to use it, if you have a feeling that that will come. Thus, the more rocks I make, the more people seem to want rocks.

Maybe rocks are not very important, but they are an example of something which, if we can both make it and sell it more effectively, creates an SL more visually worthy of joining and participating. That drives demand for other products by helping to retain new users... and that eventually includes the demand for land; something I should think ought to be of at least some interest to LL.

The conspiracy is not to rip me off. The conspiracy may be partly to rip off my customers, but, ultimately, the chief effect of the conspiracy may be incidental to the motives of the conspirators; the conspiracy is VERY bad for long-term earnings at LL.

But if doing something about it means LL being willing to open their minds to the possibility of a conspiracy, how could something like long term earnings possibly be more important than not doing such a socially inconvenient thing?(yes, much sarcasm implied)

If you hire a knight to track down the holy grail, it matters less that you, yourself, believe in the holy grail than that the knight has at least not already decided it can't possibly exist. Otherwise, when someone drops it in his lap, he'll just chuckle, toss it aside, and keep searching.

LL almost certainly has some internal security people whose job ought to be to investigate any possible whiff of a conspiracy. But if they're treating the job as something more like a job where you keep showing everything is OK, then they'd be doing LL (and us) a huge disservice, and getting paid to do it. If they could not be replaced, it would be better just to eliminate their positions, because knowing you may have a problem that you can't quite understand is still better than believing you have no problem if you have one. Other companies have such problems all the time. For LL never to have them, ever, would be pretty weird. Not telling us abut them is one thing, but telling us automatically that they don't exist or, implicitly, can't exist, especially in the face of numerous otherwise unexplained coincidences, is a more profound insult to our intelligence than LL must yet realize.

They're not just insulting me. They're insulting you and everyone else, too.

But it seems like I'm practially the only one not eagerly lapping it up.

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Hey Ralph -

maybe you're right.

maybe the junk you see that first hour is a problem.

http://twitpic.com/68pvxd   

I'm the one on the right, and even two hours after that...do not have much of an inclination to stay, if you get my drift.

and yeah....there was a SUPERABUNDANCE of new avs that looked just like me.  well....there were 6.  but it was the entire welcome center, and they were all stalled there.  not quite ready to find your store, wherever it may be.

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If such an appearance were always a freebie, that might be a good argument againts freebies.

But consider how many people are paying to look like that, and maybe it becomes clearer that the main reason that that appearance continues to be offered is that people keep paying for it.

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