No Dress Rehearsal. This Is Our Life.
Today, just before noon, an attractive young woman walked into my office carrying lunch for six people from Jack Astor’s. They sent out free lunches to selected local businesses to promote their new lunch menu, and speedy lunchtime service. She explained the promotion, encouraged us to come over to the restaurant for lunch, and was on her way.
We enjoyed our free lunch, and will definitely be making a stop at our local Jack Astor’s for lunch soon.
It’s a rare day that I get what I believe to be adequate customer service. It’s an ever rarer occasion that someone exceeds my expectations, but this is exactly what happened this past week with Crate & Barrel at Yorkdale Mall.
We’ve been in the market for new curtains for our living room. Having completed an exhaustive search in stores and online we settled on the Woodberry Curtains from C&B. Before making the trek up to Yorkdale – and rather than dealing with their always packed parking lot for nothing – I called the store to make sure they had the item in stock. A friendly staffer named Barbara answered the phone and indicated that it wasn’t in stock, but that the folks in the linen department could better serve me. I was promptly transferred over to another Barb (who had been briefed on what I wanted!!!!).
Barb verified that that the item was not in stock but more were on order for delivery in late March. Before I could tell her I wanted to buy them now, she offered to order them and have them shipped directly to me. Using this method I could get the curtains in about a week.
I accepted her offer, gave her my address and credit card details, and was on my way.
Two days later I received an envelope from C&B containing my receipt, a hand written note from Barb thanking me for my purchase, and letting me know that she didn’t have a swatch of the material on hand. Instead she sent along a product catalog, and the tech/care specs for the curtains.
After two more days, to my surprise, Purolator delivered the curtains to me.
I felt like I fell into some time warp and landed in a time where retail sellers are interested in taking care of buyers. Why aren’t there more people in retail like Barb?
If you are running late, don’t stop and get coffee. Especially if the event you are already late for requires your attendance in order to proceed. And there are a number of other people already there waiting for your arrival.
I can’t understand how many of the women (yes, it’s only the women who do this) in my cycling class don’t understand this. The class starts early on Saturday mornings, and I understand that people think they need their coffee to get the day going, but come on! The class starts at 8. Get your ass out of bed 10 minutes earlier, get your coffee and show up on time, ready to go.
“There are four ways, and only four ways, in which we have contactwith the world. We are evaluated and classified by these four contacts:
what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.”
- Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) American Educator
In an ongoing effort to grow our business we stepped up our cold-calling and cold-emailing and found this quote to be of particular interest. It acts as a guiding light in our efforts, and more attention should be paid to it by more people, more often.
Potential suppliers contact me all the time but rarely am I moved to actually follow-up on their request. What about you? Have you received a pitch-piece that absolutely rocked and caught your attention? If so, please share it with me.
We finally got around to registering for our wedding (HBC Home Outfitters & Williams Sonoma if you care…) and discovered that real bargain hunters out there should really capitalize on this program. All you need to do is go to a place the offers a registry, create a fictitious wedding and registry, add all of the items you might ever possibly buy to the list, and then come back after your “wedding” and you can buy the items at a minimum of 10% (in our experience) less than the sticker price. HBC and Williams Sonoma offer this plan for 6 months after your event. Since we are planning on replacing a lot of our kitchen equipment, we added all sorts of things to our registry that we know no one will buy us as actual wedding gifts, but we know we want to buy them – and I’m a sucker for saving money.
This post might be a little nerdy, even by my standards, but I need to get this idea out into the open.
Here’s what I think the next round of personal home computers should be:
A personal computer styled like the iMac with the following features, geared towards the aging boomer crowd. The computer would have a large capacity flash drive and a removeable traditional hard drive. The removeable hard drive would sit shuttle tray, much like the new MacPro towers. The operating system would reside on the flash drive, and any of the users files would live on the removeable drive. The OS would be a scaled back version of OSX with Mail, Safari and iLife (iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, iTunes, iChat, etc) built in, along with a reborn version of AppleWorks with the ability to save Word format files (.doc and the new OpenXML format). These basics would satisfy the needs of most of the targeted users. The system would include a DVD burner/player and an array of connection options – USB, FireWire, RCA, headphones, microphone, etc.
I’ll leave it at that for now, but if you’ve got a critique or suggestion about this idea, post it in the comments.