Since everyone else is making up wild conspiracy theories about where the swine flu came from, I’ve got one:

The swine flu was created and released by Cafepress, to divert everyone’s attention from the godawful mess they’ve made.

It’s not exactly a public trainwreck, since you have to have an account to view it, but getting an account is as easy as opening a store – you don’t even need to put anything in your store. Just having the store gives you access to the 2009 Marketplace Announcement Discussion. This forum was started…I’m going to guess less than five days ago…and it’s already got 4,026 posts. I think it’s over five pages of posts – I don’t know for sure right now, because the forum just crashed.

…and it’s back.

Five pages. In under a week. Five pages of people being very upset about the change.

What change? Oh, nothing major. Just a complete reversal of their usual [somewhat trite] ‘unique expression of you’ line.

What they’re going to do is make it so that each individual type of product – no matter the design – has a set, flat price in the marketplace. You’ll still have your own markup in your regular store, but in the marketplace? Not anymore. And you’ll only get…I think the quoted rate was 10%.

I guess their new line [instead of that ‘unique/you’ shit] is ‘the customer is too stupid’.

There’s a lot of shit in that forum. A lot of people saying they’re leaving. And a lot of things that really shouldn’t be there – like the story about one shopkeeper calling in to ask what the hell was going on, and getting told ‘you don’t do shit’ by the person on the phone.

As someone with a shop there, this…bugs me. I’ve spent hours just setting up the sections and getting the images right, not counting the time spent on my drawings. My iguana took months to draw. Telling someone who does this that they ‘don’t do shit’ is just…not right.

I hope CP records their calls, and that this person was fired.

At this point, I don’t really care what their reasoning is anymore. And I’m starting to not care about the other side, either. Because, seriously, whining on a messageboard about how you’re going to tell the media? Not helpful.

Actually telling the media might be helpful, but you might want to do it in a non-petulant sort of way.

One might also consider just blogging about it. Since most of this is contained within a private forum [not too private, but private enough that most people won’t go to the trouble to see it], you might want to be sharing the information with the general public.

Also an idea: if you want to get your attention, you should do what those people in Texas did to Yahoo back when Yahoo ditched the user rooms. They called a Troubleshooter type news person to report ‘pedophile rooms’, and the troubleshooter person got in touch with the various companies that advertise with Yahoo. CP has certain special account-holders that might not be aware of this. I think one of them sells Peanuts products [y’know, Snoopy?]. Those groups might be interested in hearing about this, and they – even though they’re an extreme minority among shopkeepers – might have a little more pull, if you really don’t want this to happen.

I know I don’t want it to happen. I’m rather fond of not having to put any work into my shop, and occasionally getting sales from the marketplace. I won’t much like it if my rather modest markup suddenly becomes even less because of this. But I don’t do shit, right?

Yeah. I don’t.

Especially right now. I’m not really in the mood to continue with this post. Maybe I’ll say something else about it later. Maybe I’ll get around to talking about ways this wouldn’t annoy me. Or maybe it’ll go the way of my common-law marriage post.