You’ve been there. You know you have. You are out in public and well, when you have to go… you have to go. Heading into the nearest possible bathroom, you wait slightly impatiently for the restroom to clear out before you bolt yourself into the last stall. You do your business, reach for the toilet paper and it’s the thinnest paper you have ever felt in your life. I mean, you can’t even pull it without tearing it into nine tiny peices. The best you can do is reach up into the plastic covered dispenser and manually make the spool of paper turn as to let some escape from the plastic cage encasingg it.
It takes longer to wipe than it does to actually expell the waste from your bowels. I am not trying to be profane here, and that’s even with a somewhat normal bowel movement.
Let me explain why this even matters.
If you walk into a Walmart bathroom. You expect it to be less than ideal. Cheap paper. Dirty stalls. Floor needing to be swept/mopped/sterilized.
If you walk into your favorite coffeeshop, you expect better quality. None of that cheap non-absorbant paper that feels like sandpaper, ‘rips-when-you-sneeze-in-it’s-general-direction’ type of stuff.
I know it’s more expensive. Maybe it doesn’t clog the toilet so often. Maybe it’s even more hypoallergenic (I doubt it) that normal paper that you would find in your own home. But this simple act of kindness can tell a lot about your business ideology.
Do you care? What kind of products do you use? Cheap? Economical and (to put it bluntly), butt-friendly? If you care enough to use the best ingriedients for your coffee, maybe you will use at least something comparable for other things your customers will experience of your establishment or even your church! The alternative is that if you are offering sub-standard products in even the smallest way, you are probably offering sub-standard products in larger facets of your establisment.
Call it a pet peeve, or something. I really don’t know why it gets to me. Maybe it’s the absolutely poor design of most drive through’s.
You see, when I pull into a drive through to get food I usually end up circling the restaurant at least once to get in line, once to get my food, and then usually one more time to leave the parking lot. Three freaking times!
Maybe it’s a sacrifice of my now precious $3-a-gallon gasoline to the gods of fast food restaurants to bless them with prosperity? I wish I had a real answer to the poor design of a fast food drive through.
um, I better go read a book or something…
Apple recently decided that they aren’t going to accept cash this Holiday Season, well… if you want an iPhone or two (limit two).
Here’s some excerpts of the story that c|net ran:
Would-be iPhone buyers must now present a credit or debit card if they want to take home an iPhone, and they’re also now limited to just two units, as they were on iPhone Day, according to The Associated Press. The AP quoted an Apple representative explaining the move as a way of making sure there are enough iPhones for the holidays and to prevent unauthorized resellers from flooding the market.
and
Before Thursday, when the policy was implemented, you could walk into any Apple store and plunk down cash for up to five iPhones. While the concerns about supply are harder to gauge from a distance, the credit card policy seems designed to make sure buyers leave a paper trail.
Granted, debit cards are accepted instead, but at the price iPhones are running anyway, I’d rather unlock it and sell it on ebay and pay off my student loan than buy one to use.
But, as my mind turns… I’d have to wonder about the exchange that Dave Ramsey and Steve Jobs would have over this one.
Technorati Tags: iphone , steve jobs , dave ramsey , debt , credit card , credit , apple , financial peace
Now, I have a faster connection, but when Windows Live Writer crashed earlier today I got this screen.
Whew! I am sure glad that I have a cable connection now.
Awhile back, meaning around 2001 I walked into this Petland in Lancaster, OH and came out with a kitten. A little puffball of a kitten that looked half-skunk. Unfortunately, half of why I bought the cat was because I wanted to rescue it from the pet store. This cat was absolutely covered in fleas. I honestly didn’t know what else to do at the time about it other than buy the kitten and take it home and give it a flea bath. But let’s fast-forward about six years.
My wife and I have been thinking recently about getting a puppy sometime here in the near future. Probably within a year or two. I am partial to Cocker Spaniels and she is partial to Basset Hounds. Lately, she’s been feeling more of a draw to Cockers though. We decided we would hit up some pet stores and get a feel for their puppy personas before we made a decision about what kind of pup we want to get. We were in Lancaster, OH last week and decided to drop by Petland and hope that the Petland in Lancaster had changed ownership in the last six years.
They had two little cocker spaniel pups and one basset. We figured we’d hit the jackpot. Hey, if the management has changed and things were looking up, maybe we’d eventually buy a pup from this place soon.
We asked to take one of the cockers into the play room. No problem there. But after about 10 minutes of play time, we thought “lets play with the other one a little and see what she was like too”. The guy who took the puppy back in asked us if we were serious about buying or if we were just playing with the puppies. We told him “both” where he then told us that we couldn’t play with any more puppies. Only serious buyers could have a pup brought out. What?!
Now the store wasn’t busy. There were about three employees in the store and we already told the guy that we were serious, but come on, what else do you do with a puppy? Puppies are meant for play. It’s not like they can be guard dogs at six months old.
Well, we liked the puppy that we played with, but we won’t be buying a puppy yet. Not from this Petland in Lancaster, Ohio but someone should at least rescue those animals from this place.
“Thank you for a wonderful vacation away from everything! We needed it.”
This last week, Becca and I went on vacation. After looking online in several locations, we settled down on Summit Haven Retreat. Since we had never vacationed in the Hocking Hills area before, we honestly didn’t know what to expect price-wise.
Along the way, our landlord decided to start painting a day early while we were visiting friends and family in Dayton and Cincinnati. We were upset that even though we told him we were taking that cats, leaving on Tuesday and hadn’t even packed the suitcase yet (it was laying on the bed open), he had started painting anyway. The cats were hiding under the bed. He moved everything, got paint on my laptop screen and keyboard because he didn’t even shut the lid, and even took down our calendar which had 12-17 of June marked as vacation in bright blue marker when he started painting on Monday, the 11th.
My first (actually all of our) experience with Summit Haven was positive. We called and asked if we could come a day early. There was no way we’d be able to stay at home that night. They were flexible and said we could come on down a day early, no problem.
When we arrived we were greeted only with a sign by the door that simply said “Welcome To The Big Oak Lehman’s. Enjoy Your Stay.”
The cabin was clean, the location was quiet with a ton of shade, except for that clearing over the skylight where the bed was, where you could see the stars as you went to sleep.
The next morning, Scott, who runs Summit Haven along with his parents, Don and Cindy, stopped by to make sure we were okay and if we needed anything. I asked about the trails around the cabin and he gratefully informed us that they were overgrown with poison ivy in the summer and that we might not want to try those trails right then.
The cats particularly liked the wood beams that ran across the cabin. This was their regular spot throughout the week. I honestly think that they enjoyed the week as much as we did.
One night after Kayaking, we lost electric when a storm came through. We built the fire high and opened up a few windows and listened to the storm pass, and the rain pelt against the tin roof. The next morning, Scott came by to check on us and brought us some water to flush the toilet and told us if we needed to, to dip a little out of the hot-tub. He also offered us some ice for keeping groceries we had bought cold. Don later came by to make sure we were okay. Becca had talked with Cindy over the phone, and I had spoke with both Scott and Don. Everyone we talked to was nice and did their best to make sure we had a great week, that we had good directions, and that we had everything we needed.
Thank you to everyone at Summit Haven, (Don, Cindy and Scott) for the great week and wonderful time we had there. We look forward to coming back.
Here’s some more of my favorite pictures over at Artist Hideout from the trip
I had recently revisited some of my experiences with Dell computers in a post entitled “So…Why Blog?”
JohnP@Dell responded. Now I have had a great experience with the Direct2Dell blog. In fact it was the only way I was able to resolve some of my issues when I went through that mess awhile back.
John and I began a discussion about customer service in the comments on that post and then pointed me to a post that is an
interview with Richard “Dick†Hunter, Vice President of Consumer Customer Experience and Support at Dell. Basically, he runs the company’s customer service efforts.
There is a section right at the end of that interview segment:
We’re thinking about offering a premium service to a select group of people. We’d maybe have the option of buying into a service. For example, if you fly American Airlines coach all the time, you can still buy your way into the Admiral’s Club. If you fly First Class, you always get it. The point is we’re thinking about letting you buy your way into exclusively North American support.
That irked me to say the least.
I guess I have a problem with “buying North American support” as an exclusive service from a company that should be giving this anyway. I did the whole cross-cultural experience trying to get my issues resolved. I don’t have a problem talking to someone in India… but if it’s not going to do any good talking to them, why put the customer through the ringer?
Just give good support up front and be done with it. That’s what I thought I was buying when I bought my laptop. As it stands right now, I get better support from posting about it and then I get premium support. Why? Better to have a happy blogger than an unhappy customer who doesn’t have a voice.
I have no doubt that my issue would have been cast aside and lost in the process if I had never written to the Direct2Dell Blog in a comment thread there. If people are willing to pay more for better customer service, then so be it, but I don’t think you’ll be able to justify it as an exclusive service that has an added price. It’s two-faced and spells out that Dell doesn’t care about the customer as much as “saving face” from a mad blogger.
