HomeTech.fm - Episode 293 - The Great TP Panic

Episode Date: March 6, 2020

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm support. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, March 6th from Sarasota, Florida with no COVID-19. I'm Seth Johnson. I'm from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. So you're hanging in there, Seth, are you hunkered down? You got your toilet paper and hand sanitizer and foodstuffs? Yeah, I had to go to the doctor yesterday, and people are losing their minds. But we're kind of like ground zero here. I guess we had somebody just kind of like end up in the hospital with pneumonia, but it turns out they had the COVID-19.

And like there's an entire hospital in our town that's just on quarantine, like the whole hospital. Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's kind of wild um so nasty little and i guess it's like for me and you from my according to my doctor for me and you it's just like a cold with sniffles but for like older people of course florida here it's a it's a bigger problem so uh hopefully nothing this kind of just blows over uh it, it's super scary. I, the chat room's really hopping tonight. Thanks everyone for being here.

We've got, uh, Greg saying Costco is out of toilet paper. Greg's up in Canada. Forgive me. I forget which part exactly. It's only one part of Canada. Yeah, right. It's Canada. Who cares?

Uh, uh, Matthew's joining us from Australia. Uh, crazy run in Australia. He says, I know here in Denver, I went to the store just yesterday because we were hearing that all the stores were out of toilet paper. And we're looking at our toilet paper stash and we're going like, forget the emergency. We're almost out of toilet paper. And I had to go to the store and literally I took a picture. The shelves were almost completely empty at our local grocery store. Why are people buying toilet paper?

Because apparently the CDC came out and said, like, you need to be prepped for, like, at least a two-week lockdown. And immediately everyone's first concern was... Toilet paper. Toilet paper. Oh, that explains why my Costco was out of, like, their Costco brand of toilet paper the other day. Oh, yeah. Everyone. It's crazy. It's everywhere. I guess i'm not paying attention to it enough so you know it's an interesting um

dynamic right because it then forces you to like go out and buy toilet paper even if i wasn't worried about it now i'm like now i am because everyone's running out of toilet paper so i had to you know i did they had some left and i bought a couple of packs just to have some around. But it's, yeah, it's just, you know, that whole dynamic of runs on food and groceries and stuff is probably the scariest part to me, honestly. I'm looking behind me. I'm sitting on 30 rolls of gold over there. Yeah, you are. It's going to be the new currency soon.

Yeah. Pay in there. Yeah, you are. It's going to be the new currency soon. Yeah. Pay in squares. Yeah. Bruno is in the chat room from, I know Bruno's based in Hong Kong. So Bruno, if you have a minute, let us know how things are going where you're at. We'd love to hear from you. Hopefully everyone is not, yeah, he says we've been out of toilet paper here in Hong Kong for several weeks. Well, I mean, the whole cold and flu thing sounded bad enough, but now that we're talking about running out of toilet paper, I'm getting kind of worried.

That's right. Be scared. I mean, this doesn't make any sense at all. It's a frightening time for sure, but you know, you got to try to keep these things in perspective. And again, I think, thankfully for those of us who are young and healthy, it doesn't sound like it's a major threat, but it's still really, it's frightening, not dismissing the gravity of it. It's a pretty scary deal when something like this comes out. And we literally as human beings have really we're powerless at this point effectively uh yeah it's a nice little virus it's and there's nothing that we have no drugs that we have that interact with this particular virus that just doesn't everything just passes right by it so um it's interesting it'd be interesting to see what happens i know that they're canceling a lot of tech conferences, um, to kind of like mitigate people from traveling all over the world. Like, uh, Google IO has been canceled. Uh, I know all of the Facebook events have been canceled,

like big developer conferences, uh, which would bring in people from all around the world into one spot. Uh, we got, we've got a big event in Tokyo coming up the Olympics. And I think that one's a big kind of hanging question mark and I told my wife that the other day and she was like oh god I mean that's horrible I mean it's horrible to happen but like think about if you're training like you can't just train and like come back in the next

couple of maybe they delay it like till next year or something like you can't just stop training like you've got to train now somehow for the next I don't know how they're going to do that like if they have to train now somehow for the next it's i don't know how they're going to do that like if they have to cancel the olympics that would be that'd be just devastating crazy devastating well anyways last comment here bruno says we've been through this all for a few weeks now here nothing really bad has happened all is back to normal in the shops

now so it's good to hear hopefully uh you've got enough tp to get you through this little uh panic run on toilet paper and it should all calm down soon. Well, now that I know that I'm going to need to save that toilet paper, yeah, I'm not going to use as much as I normally would. Be sparing. Yeah. All right. Well, enough about that. I'm sure everyone's getting their fill of coronavirus news from all over the place.

But good night to have a lot of people in the chat room and a very international crowd. So kind of interesting to see all over the world this is going on. But anyways, let's, what do you say, jump into some home tech headlines here? Let's do it. Last year, AT&T announced plans to launch yet another TV streaming service called AT&T TV, original title there, to its already crowded lineup. Now we know exactly what that service will look like. The new service will offer largely the same channels as the existing DirecTV service, but it'll come over the internet via an Android streaming TV box rather than a satellite dish. So pretty interesting move here. The box is free to subscribers,

although it says additional devices cost $120. So I guess you get one with the service. I was a little bit confused by that. It says it can record up to 500 hours of TV and comes with Netflix and other streaming apps, much like Comcast's X1 cable box. And finally, channel-wise, you can expect everything you'd find on DirecTV, although the new service does not have the NFL Sunday ticket. Hmm. Interesting. They're still calling it AT&T TV. AT&T, that's probably the hardest one to pronounce. AT&T TV.

It doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? No. I thought HBO Max was odd, but this one, I think, takes the cake. This one is the hardest one to say. They got them trumped. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting, like, the way it's structured.

I mean, it's very much, it's technically a streaming service, right? It comes over IP, but the very phrase streaming service today has come to connote something different than this, in a sense, right? Like, this is very much more like a linear TV package that basically is just replacing the satellite infrastructure and all of the costs and acquisition costs and things like that associated with it. So, you know, that, that's the business case, like get rid of all the dishes and the legacy hardware that goes with them and see if you can get all those customers over onto a, you know, a cheaper infrastructure to support, I suppose. It's just weird. You need this box, right? Like, isn't that strange? Like, why, why do you need, why do you need this? Why isn't this just an app? Why do you need this AT&T TV box? If you have more than one TV, it's going to be $300, $400, I guess. Yeah, that is interesting. It's really weird. Just make this an app and hook it up to your Apple TV and call it a day? Yeah, that's a very good question. I wonder, I don't know. I'm certainly not a technical expert with hardware programming or anything like that, but I just wonder if

there's something special about the hardware that's required to, I don't know, parse out the signal. You're right though. It is an interesting question. To the point I made a couple minutes ago, if AT&T is doing this because they want to lower acquisition costs and support costs associated with hardware, why have hardware in the first place. Right. Yeah, that's, that's my, I mean, even doing, going this route definitely will save them lots of money on reducing hardware, right? Because they're not going to have to worry about DirecTV boxes and satellite dishes and then all the, like the LNB things and all the little like splitter things you have to have to hook up your DirecTV system. I mean, those, those have gotten like easier and then somewhat harder to figure out over the the last couple of years like used to you had a dish and

and you ran the wires down in from the dish down into the the box or into this weird splitter thing and you ran it out from there to all the boxes in the house and you were good to go and it's it's not quite like that anymore like i think there think there's, there's only like, I don't know, it's stranger now. And, uh, and, and, and it's harder for me to wrap my head around and I'm glad that there's other people that have to worry about that. Not me. Yeah. Yeah. Some good dialogue in the chat room, maybe hardware encryption. Eric says, Greg says not everyone has a media streaming device, which is of course true, but they're so cheap and commoditized now. So who knows? It is a cable box, but with IP, says Matthew.

So, you know, hard to say, but interesting offering. It'll be interesting to see how this one does. Again, it kind of falls into a middle ground a little bit between traditional linear TV and streaming, but from a typical, just average consumer's perspective, the pricing and the model are much more similar to traditional TV offerings than what most people think of

when you say streaming service. See what happens with it. It seems like an interesting offering. According to a massive report from Coldwell Banker, the inclusion of wellness products in homes is one of the most desired features among luxury buyers. And the Coldwell Banker report titled The Report, colon, 2020 Global Luxury Market Insights.

That's very corporate, Coldwell Banker. Found that while 81% of survey respondents said home automation technology is still the most wanted feature in the home, many luxury buyers are looking for more. According to the Global Wellness Institute, this is really a thing, GWI, the wellness real estate industry grew 6.4% annually from 2015 to 2017 and is expected to reach $ 198 billion dollars in 2022 with a lot of this growth being driven by an increased consumer desire to lead a quote wellness lifestyle um i i'm not sure you

can hear the like sarcasm and uh just i don't know like dripping yeah dripping from my voice like i i this is clearly a fad one of those like fad things that they're using to sell stuff with these days i don't know and i think yeah i mean just it's fine call bell bankers like angle i mean why why do they care if don't they write real estate like they write uh like uh don't they sell homes so i think like's probably their, their goal is to figure out a different way to sell homes to people who think they want a yoga studio or something in there. That's, uh, that's certainly a possibility. Um, yeah, I, I think the jury is still out on the home wellness thing. It is certainly getting a lot of attention right now. And I think there are some interesting possibilities, but I don't know. I have a hard time wrapping my head around exactly what

the model looks like. I feel like it's one of those things that's really attractive when you just look at it on the surface and you're like, oh, that's got to be a huge market. Of course, people want to be healthy technology can enable that we're a techno home technology company so there's got to be an angle there and so i think conceptually like that makes sense but i don't know there's still a lot of of experimentation and figuring out to be done to figure out if like if this can actually be a viable model i feel like this is uh one of those um it's like following this will be aging in place conversations and all of the other things that just kind of like try to attack technology onto

something that probably doesn't need it i don't know i'm i'm very bearish on this particular topic i just don't see it amounting to very much. Yeah. Yeah. It says, as it turns out, luxury home buyers believe a place where they live plays a critical role in promoting their overall sense of wellness, whether it's through air filtration systems, circadian lighting, or other wellness or biophilia focused products. I just, I can't get past that word biophilia, but anyways. Um, yeah, i don't know it says for integrators the message is clear it's time to get with the program and embrace the category and learn how to take advantage of it while the trend remains hot or while the trend of the trend while it remains hot um yeah i don't know i would modify that slightly if i was still an integrator this is something i'd be paying attention to but I wouldn't,

I wouldn't necessarily be investing a ton of my time and energy into it just yet. I mean, if you find a niche, right? Like if you find a niche, like I think I've talked, I've heard of the, uh, the Reva guys, uh, talking about how they're going to do like wellness rooms. Like, you know, they're already designing high-end theaters and they can, they've already got the clientele. And if you can sell a high-end wellness room that can do fancy lighting and make you feel like you're on a beach when you're not like you know why not sell into that if you can't but like i don't know if that has to be your niche i wouldn't go out of my way to try and sell this into you know a market that doesn't find value in something like this like you you definitely have to be um yeah you know because i do think in some markets there's probably pull for this

but like uber high end i'm thinking back to like my days as an integrator in beverly hills and stuff right like i can totally see the hollywood crowd latching onto this and being like i need this in my home. And so if that's happening in your market, absolutely take a look at it and figure out how you can make, you know, make it work. But yeah, don't try to force, force it. I think is, is the way I'd be thinking about it. All right, moving on here to our next story. Best Buy is on a roll and much of it has to do with its successful in-home installation and service strategy. The giant CE retailer and custom installation company just compiled its 12th straight quarter with sales growth. I'm going to read a few highlights

here from CE Pro where they summarized the story and specifically focusing on a couple of the angles that I find particularly interesting, because of course, this came from their quarterly earnings report, and there's a whole bunch you can dissect there in terms of overall sales numbers and things like that. But I think the two things that are really noteworthy in this story are, number one, the in-home experience that Best Buy is really focused on. If you research Best Buy at all, I did a blog post on this a while back. I'll have to dig it up. But something I think a lot of people don't necessarily realize is how successfully Best

Buy has turned things around. And they were in a lot of trouble not that long ago. I forget my timelines, and so I don't want to misstate anything. But there was a big turnaround. And what they've done overall as a company is pretty darn impressive in the day and age of online shopping and Amazon and all of that, given the retail footprint that they've got. And a major component of that strategy, it's had several different iterations, but has always been about putting the experience over the technology. And so first they focused on the in-store experience and they really changed. I mean, think back to what Best Buy looked like in the grand scheme of things, not that long ago, you'd go in there and the entire middle

of the store was full of like CDs and DVDs. Remember that? Remember those days? Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, there was some space on the edge for other, other stuff, but all of that square footage had to be, you know, rethought. And so now you go in, it's a totally different experience. Anyways, fast forward, of the in-home experience, of extending that experience out of the store and into the home. So a couple of components here. Number one, the in-home consultation program. And number two, the total tech support program.

I think those are really the big things that, as anyone with any interest in home technology, especially the professionals, paying attention to that. So it says the company is continuing to focus on the in-home experience for customers. This is a big contributor to its success, which has seen its stock price rise over 66% in the past year. During fiscal 2020, we expanded our in-home consultation program from 530 to 725 advisors. This is CEO Corey Berry. Those advisors conducted more than 250,000 free in-home consultations, high satisfaction rates on these, net promoter score of 87, she told investors, that's a really high score. And from that service, Best Buy is seeing growth and repeat

purchases by those customers. Bringing mortars back, baby. Yeah. So that in-home consultation program, I think there's some great takeaways there for home technology professionals to really focus in on that segment of our audience for now. This idea of providing these regular check-ins with your clients at One Vision, part of our platform with our partners, we call them tech reviews. Same idea, like touch base with your clients once or twice a year, it doesn't have to be anything crazy. Go in there and refresh them on the training. You know, if there's some simple issues, fix them. But to be clear, this is not like a preventative maintenance visit. It's a relationship building visit, right? You know, get them more retrained, re comfortable with their technology, address any little nagging

things or questions they have, uh, talk about potential upgrades, things like that. And, you know, obviously Best Buy is a very different model than a traditional integrator, but, but I think there are parallels here clearly and things we can take away. Yeah, no, I, I, I'd agree. Um, that was one of the, the big things I think a lot of integrators miss out on is going back. Like, you work so hard to get a client, right? And then you get the job, and you finish the install, and then you're on to the next one. And it's like, you never go back. And yeah, they'll call in for service or whatever, but you never go back and actually talk to those people and say, hey, do you want to?

Like, it was always one of the sales things you would hit when you talk to any sales class in Cedia or anything around there, like go back and talk to the people who have already bought from you before. Like they already have money invested in you. They already have, they have already, there's already like a psychological barrier for them to bring their money somewhere else. Like just go back to them and see if they need anything else. And if they do, they're going to buy it from you because they've already bought from you. Um it's it's like one of those basic things that i think a lot of guys still miss uh these days i know that we definitely did uh when when we were running well just about every shop i was in it was just like i'll get to the next one because uh you know yeah well it's hard especially when like i mean the economy for has been generally good in this country for a very long time.

And when you're busy and you're cranking out new projects, the idea of going back to the old ones and the smaller upgrades that can come from that, just kind of from a revenue standpoint, sort of pale in comparison sometimes. And there's also, I think, the fear, sometimes founded, sometimes not, of stirring the pot. Now there's, okay, well, I go and then uncover all these things, and those things can be hard to bill for sometimes. And all of that is real. So I think conceptually, though, those are the things that you have to face head on because you're a hundred percent correct. Like the barrier is gone. The upsell opportunities are there. You have to be efficient and smart about how you structure things and you have to manage expectations. But if you're just completely ignoring your legacy clients, you know, unless they call that with something that's broken, then, you know, you're doing yourself and doing yourself and your clients a disservice.

I strongly agree with that. I would too. There are some real challenges there that shouldn't be ignored. If it was simple, everyone would be doing it. But I think the smart companies are the ones that go and figure out those challenges, face them head on, build a business that can deal with those, and reap the benefits. So the other thing here in the Best Buy story is the Total Tech Support Program. I alluded to that. It says, meanwhile, the company's Total Tech Support Program launched last year for $199 a

year, about $17 a month. This is a recurring annual program, continues to shine. Quote, our total tech support program grew steadily during fiscal 2020 to end the year with almost 2.3 million members. It continues to get strong customer reviews and members spend more and are twice as likely to opt into other services that we provide than non-members. So I think that's another key point to remember is like, it's not just about going back and trying to get another one-time sale. It's as home technology professionals hopefully increasingly think about ways to offer what they do as a service tied to some sort of recurring fee, understand that making that relationship sticky and getting the client from zero to one, like getting them used to paying some sort of recurring fee is the biggest hurdle. And once you get them there, then you've eliminated that barrier, Seth, that you talked about. And now the door is open to more of these sort of ongoing premium services,

which I think everyone in the industry needs to be thinking about. Yeah. Yeah. Getting, getting the dealer to dealer to go from, from, uh, charging. Well, I mean, can you imagine dealers charging $200 a year? Like that would be great for them, right? Every client $200 a year flat rate, you know, like that'd be great for dealers, but it's like such a mental barrier, a mental block for most guys to do something like that. Yeah, it is. It's a mind shift to go have that conversation, for sure. I think that at $200 a year, the vast majority of integrators would probably be really under

selling it. There's some really interesting data that we talk about a lot where Parks Associates did this study back in 2018, and they surveyed, I think it was about 5,000 people to say, hey, would you be willing to pay for a premium tech support service? And they found that like what they led with with the slide was like 45% of people will pay $15 a month for a plan. And that's like, okay, that's kind of interesting to know. But what was really interesting when you look at the slide, and I'll try to dig this up and maybe we

can link to it. As the slide expanded out to the right, they had other bars where it was like it went from $14.99 up to like $20 and then up to like $30 a month. And the number of people, the proportion of people who said they were either likely or very likely to pay for that service hardly changed at all. So even though the service doubled in cost, almost the same exact number of people said, yes, I would buy that. Which tells me that there's not a lot of price sensitivity. It's either customers see the value or they don't. Yeah, yeah. Right?

And so don't underprice it is the point. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, Best Buy is pricing this for the millions of people that have signed up for this and dealers cannot do that. So, um, cause you know, for every, every hundred thousand people, uh, or for every one person, there may be a hundred thousand people that don't use the service and that's $200 coming from them. That's a lot of money. So, um, it's, it's interesting. It's interesting that they've been able to kind of turn. Now I know this isn't like, this isn't the only way they've turned around their business because, uh, Best Buy, like you were saying, has been, uh, looked like it was going out of business a couple of times here. Uh,'s definitely interesting to see it still standing in the way that it is these days.

And all these little type programs they've added on to the packaging of Best Buy, I guess, to be out in front of their customers even more so than they already were. I think there was a thing I read like years ago, which I always took to heart. It's like Best Buy is in front of their customers eight times a year. Like whether that be a commercial they see on TV, whether that's a mailer, they get in the mail or something like that. That's how much marketing they do is like, you, you will see their logo like eight times a year, period. Um, so you're all there. You're, they're always on your mind. I always, always thought about that. I was how do how do like i as an integrator get in front of my customer eight times a year like right barely like some of them you'd be driving down the street and you're like i'm not gonna get on this street

i'm gonna go around the street so i'm not in front of my customer right like you don't want them to see your van so but yeah and there's some yeah it's it's complicated for sure. But I think you got to stare that stuff down and go figure it out. So I just posted a link in the live channel to an article I wrote. This is just about a year ago. So May 2019. So it doesn't have any of the most recent data, but it does have a lot of the stuff. We'll include it in the show notes about kind of the turnaround and the strategy.

And I think there are some really interesting lessons there for anyone in the business of home technology. Yeah. One is don't buy a, what, 50,000 square foot warehouse showroom. That would be one. And don't buy many of them and put them in many cities, but that'd be my first step. Well, yeah. Robert said something interesting in the chat room here. Best Buy makes most of their money selling end caps and, quote, store in a store, end quote. They hop right over there and grab it, uh, before I can order it online or through distribution or anything like that. Like it's, it's right there. I can get just about anything I need, um, from right over there. So like good for them for, for keeping the doors open and at least giving me a convenient place to go pick up a USB chargers or something, you know, like.

Yeah, no doubt. No, they've, they've done some really, uh, they've done some great things again, especially when you consider the, what they've been up against with online and all of that. So, uh, cool stuff there. Go check out the article, keep an eye on Best Buy. They're, they're a really interesting story. I think more so than, than a lot of people realize if you kind of dig into their history and look at what they've done over the last decade or so, uh, pretty interesting stuff. And for, for a dealer out there, for people who are running their own companies, it's, it's, um, there's, there's takeaways that you can get. There's not like, you're not going to be able to do what they're doing at their scale, of course, but you can do a little small part of it

and you can do it better and, and, and differentiate, differentiate yourself from one, your competition and two best buy, uh, that way. So, um, that, that'd be my advice on that. Yeah, totally. Uh, the computer. So we talked a little bit about this before, but the consumer electronics industry has been slowly feeling the effects of ongoing outbreak of the coronavirus this year, uh, with latest news citing potential disruptions to the supply chain and a couple bullet points here lg backed out of isd 2020 uh we talked about a bunch of the things earlier though a bunch of the conferences that'll be shutting down uh and uh exhibitors aren't aren't like can you imagine being a boss

and saying no you have to you know go spend your time with uh you know 70 or 80 000 people and and most of them who are probably sick and shake hands and like, no, nobody's going to do that right now. Everybody's staying home. It's crazy. So it's interesting that the whole supply chain has been kind of halted because of this. Not only the disruptions in the labor force of China, but, you know, just basic sales exhibitions and that kind of thing where people go buy product, like things are just slowing down in general. Right. Yeah. It says Reed exhibitions,

the company that operates ISC West has been forced to close its China pavilion at this year's show due to travel restrictions currently in place, uh, put in place by the U S government. Um, says let's see one leading consumer electronics manufacturer which wished not to be named recently had its factory closed for two weeks for the protection of its local workforce. And others like Nortec Security and Control are being fully transparent regarding the fluid situation, sending out emails, notifying customers of upcoming supply chain delays. We have some text we could read from there if we want to get into that deeper. But, you know, I think it's one thing we didn't talk about.

We're kind of joking about the runs on toilet paper and trying to keep this all a little bit lighter and in perspective. But honestly, like, I mean, look at what's happened to the Dow Jones lately. Yeah, yeah. And that's a huge concern is what this sort of thing does to supply chains and stuff. And it just starts to have a domino effect and people get jittery and start selling stocks. And then that makes people get more jittery who in turn sell more stocks.

And like, you just get this cascading effect. Well, and the stock market is based on the the futures it's not based on it's not based on reality it's based on the futures so yeah it may be hot right now but we know that the they're betting right now that the futures will be slower than they they should be and that's that's what you're seeing with that so like there's there's something coming i don't think it's a recession or anything but there's definitely something like coming that's going to hit us all a couple of months from now, whether it be a slow Christmas season or holiday season or what like that. I'm not sure, but there's there's something definitely coming.

Right. The the Nortec email is long, won't read the whole thing. But, you know, it says as a ripple effect, many companies are experienced supply chain delays and disruptions. Uh, it's expected that the impact on shipping timelines around the world could range from days to weeks. We too are experiencing some delays in manufacturing and shipping from the affected regions, uh, and writing to assure you that we are closely monitoring the situation is a terrible and unexpected event to many companies, um, goes on to say, we are diligently working with our suppliers to prioritize production scheduling,

the return of personnel, and ensuring that our customers are supported to the best of our ability. So there's more to it than that. But the takeaway, clearly, a company like Nortec, they're a giant company. I'm curious if SnapAV has issued anything. If not, I have to imagine they probably will at some point soon. Because these bigger companies like SnapAV and Nortec are going to definitely be the ones that'll be didn't want to be named, like we've heard very similar stories from our vendors who interact directly. Like there's one that's making a cable for us, a cable, like, you know, just like an audio cable. And we send it off. He's like, normally I can get this done and shipped back to us at least some samples of like 500 samples in like a couple of days but uh everything's closed right now so look you're looking at like three weeks before you know we're

really going to get something to you so okay you know whatever it's just an audio cable that we're ordering nothing major but right like still even something like that gets kind of put on the back burner uh when when everything kind of slowed down over there. Totally. Yeah. It's big and small. It doesn't really matter the size of the company. Supply chains are supply chains, right? And as these things come to a halt, it has major ripple effects, as the email said. So we won't belabor it,

but I thought it was interesting to note and definitely something that's front of mind. I'm talking to partners every day at One Vision and it's certainly coming up and everyone's trying to figure out, uh, you know, what, what to do and trying to take reasonable precautions, but also not, uh, not do anything rash or panic. I don't think there's any, any need for that. Just wash your hands. Yeah. Right. Keep toilet paper. Common sense stuff you can do. Go buy toilet paper. Yes. No, it's crazy.

But anyways, we'll include that as well as all the other topics that we've discussed on this week's show in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 293. Staring down the barrel of 300 here, Seth. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes weekly show reminders and other occasional updates about all the great things going on here in the world of Home Tech. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting 7, 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more how to do that

at hometech.fm slash live. And I promise next week, the server, I'll figure out what the password is for it and go reboot the thing. So it works a little bit better. I don't know what's going on. Yeah.

Yeah. I had some issues with our live stream uh this week chrome users seem to be the ones affected interestingly so sorry chrome users we'll get it fixed psa if you're gonna tune in next week maybe have a second browser uh handy but we should get it figured out shouldn't shouldn't be a problem let's move on here seth you got a pick of the week this week. I do. I have never seen this before, and I probably should have come across this stuff years ago. But Jason, have you ever used those stupid Phoenix connectors? Like taking a, sometimes they put them on, I say stupid. I actually love them. But like sometimes they put them on amplifiers and you have to like take stranded cable from

the speaker wire and like shove it in there and then like put the little screw down real quick. And then you like pull it out and you're like, Oh, I didn't even screw it down on the, on the, the cable. Um, so you have to do it all over again. Um, yeah, totally. So there's this little tool that, and, and, and ends wire ends, like usually I'm up on wire ends and i i guess i'm not because i've never seen these in my life uh these ferrule ferrules crimping tools like these little things you you put them on the wire and then crimp it down it makes these little square connectors and they slip right into those uh phoenix connectors uh makes makes for a beautiful connection uh some pictures i i have

i i oh yeah there you go i bought bought some of this on Amazon the other day, and I'm happy to report that it's been delivered to an Amazon locker now that I have to go pick it up or something. I don't know how that works, but I'll have it tomorrow, maybe. Farrells is how that's pronounced. I'm glad that was you and not me. Farrells, like the dog? Yeah, these are cool they're almost like um i never used these either when i was when i was in the field but they're like you know how you can do like i think you might have used this exact

example like speaker terminals and you have and like then there's the the banana clips or whatever that you can put it's like that but for a phoenix connector exactly exactly it like yeah no that's cool it looks like these get down pretty small like they have some little small tiny ones uh that could go into like security like i always ran across these in like security wires where you're like bunching a bunch of security wires together and crimp this would be great to like crimp on top of that and just shove into the security wire security terminal um but even like on the back of like control four gear, they used to have these. Um, and a lot of the time, most of the time I would say it's speaker wire that I have to deal with that has to go into those, uh, those types of connectors. So, uh, grab this, put it, put this,

uh, kit in your, in your, in your toolbox. And, and, uh, I think, I think what for $28, you get $28 and 1800 pieces. Like clearly it's something we all should have on the truck. Yeah. That'll pay it off, pay itself off after like three terminations. Yeah. The rewards come quick. I used to hate doing those little tiny ones, especially. Greg wrote in the chat room, I converted over to them sometime last year. Awesome. I can't wait.

I think it's going to be life-changing for me, even though I don't really like have anything to do with them. I'm going to have them. And that's what's going to matter. Oh, it's the little things. Yeah. You know, good stuff. All right. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or ideas for a show topic or guest, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm. Once again, that's feedback at hometech.fm or visit the form at hometech.fm slash feedback. And we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through our Patreon page.

If you don't know about our Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show but every pledge gets you into a fight to our private slack chat the hub where you know their supporters of the show can gather every day and talk about coronavirus and toilet paper evidently that's that's all we're going to talk about this week yeah no doubt uh if you're looking for other ways to support the show, we would definitely appreciate a review on iTunes or on your podcast app of choice.

Those reviews definitely help more people find the podcast. So take a minute to do that and or tell a friend about the show. We would really appreciate it. Yep. I guess that wraps the show up this week, Jason. I got family coming in for the weekend and have a nice relaxing weekend weekend good weather and the beach it will be involved no no coronaviruses nice maybe maybe coronas but no no corona

yeah i feel a little bad for corona it's bad branding but i don't know it's not good i saw a corona billboard the other day And like instantly my subconscious was like, coronavirus. That can't be good for sales. No, no, it can't be. Anyways. All right. Well, enjoy, uh, stay safe and, uh, look forward to reconnecting again with you next week. Thanks everybody for listening. And Jason, I'll talk to you next week. All right. Take care.