news from the knitting world/gender wars

[quietann]

So there's this knitting store that decided to offer an online Sock Club -- basically supplies and patterns to knit a pair of socks every other month for a year, plus some swag. Sock knitting is one of the new fads, so this was a good business decision.

Except this store's bank, when they started processing the huge numbers of credit card orders for Sock Club, decided that hundreds of (mostly) women paying $210 for something called "Sock Club" had to be some sort of scam, and refunded the money to all the people who placed orders, without letting the yarn store know first, or really investigating what was going on. This threw the yarn store into financial chaos (not to mention customer service hell); having 5 figures of income suddenly yanked *hurts* when one's running a small business.

They've worked it out and moved to a different bank (one hopes the new bank has an avid knitter on the board of directors). But.... gah! The knitting blogosphere is currently full of not very nice comments about the "men" on the board of directors of Bank #1, who clearly don't "get" knitting, and what should be done to them.

YarnHarlot calls Bank #1 Freaking Muggles, and that's pretty apt. See her comments section for more opinions.

Comments

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

We live in a world of cable television, satellite radio, and Teh Interweb; anyone in any facet of the business world who doesn't understand niche markets should be shunned and allowed to die in isolation.

Marginalizing knitters? Do they have no shame? Do they have no grandmothers? Do they have no sweaters?

[quietann.livejournal.com]

snicker. Well, apparently this particular bank has no shame, no grandmothers, and all their sweaters are knit by machine. I think the bank is in Portland, OR, so it's surprising because the knitting community there is well-established and quite large.

AS many of YarnHarlot's commenters pointed out, if anyone at the bank had plugged "Sock Yarn" or "Sock Knitter" into Google, they never would have acted as they did!

[sraun]

I am wondering if there's some legal penalty that the knitting shop could invoke - I can't believe that the bank was within the letter of its contract to arbitrarily and without consultation (with either the seller or buyer!) cancel all those transactions.

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

ahh, but grandmothers live thousands of miles away, and noone does handcrafts anymore. Because bankers sure don't. And if bankers don't do it, noone else would want to.

Oh, the joys of ignorant bankers. If they tried to get me to open a bank account with them, I'd tell them to Put A Sock In It.

Koshmom
(who spins her yarn out of her dog's fur..)

[sraun]

Someone doesn't understand the long tail - just because there are only small integer number of people interested in this in their town doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of interested people - rather the reverse. Silly bankers.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

That's just crazy. Deciding that something is a scam just because you think the name, or even the concept of what is being sold is odd seems quite extreme to me. Banks shouldn't have that kind of power. If I were the owner of the store, I'd be talking to my lawyer. Banks are strange creatures though. I closed my accounts with a bank once because they didn't like the signatures on a check from a local school district. They could have just called the school district office if they thought something was wrong, but no, they just held on to the check and didn't credit me with the money for weeks. What they did was against federal banking laws, but pursuing it would have cost too much money and time, so I just found a new and better bank.

[fabricdragon.livejournal.com]

i want to know what bank it was. partly as a knitter, and partly as a small business owner. i sure dont want to do business with them.

what, they can savvy people signing up for quilt blacks of the month, and colectable cat breakable dustmagnets of the month (known mundanely as "Franklin Mint") but not yarn?