Thanks for the comments, Dan. I won't post the contents of private emails. But I can assure you I'm not rude to customers. I am quick and to the point. I work 13 and 14 hour days and value my free time so I spend as little time as possible getting things done. If that's interpreted as rude then it's a personal interpretation. I have no intent to be rude. Just efficient. My goal is to get our customers what they want as quickly and inexpensively as I can and I do that pretty well. There are tradeoffs. I could devote more time to writing epistles and jawing with customers but I'd have to serve fewer customers or else increase overhead and prices. Higher prices and fewer customers would certainly ease my work day. I'll consider it. I'm probably getting too old to work at this pace anyway.
I didn't make any rude or personal comments to Jason at all. I didn't count them but I don't think I wrote more than 20 words at all to him until he called me a jerk. I might have written 20 words responding to that email but none of that response was rude either.
If my response to this thread appears rude it was because it really angered me. It wasn't intended to be rude even though you may interpret it that way. It was certainly defensive because I felt I needed to defend myself against an attack. I'll rant a little and then end my involvement with this thread. If you read it you'll thank me for ending it.
The knife cuts both ways. Incidentally, I'm not referring to Jason in any of this rant.
We all know the internet tends to bring out the worst in some people. It provides anonymity and some people say things anonymously that they wouldn't say face to face. You wouldn't believe some of the emails I get. I'll share one with you.
Yesterday, just before I logged on to this forum a customer whose credit card charge had been rejected told us abusively by email that it wasn't OK with him that we didn't ship his order and that he had been inconvenienced by all of this and expected us to ship overnight for free. It was he who had inconvenienced us, actually. His credit card wasn't rejected by us. It was rejected by his bank. We wanted to ship his order as much as he did but the charge was declined for whatever reason. He was rude and unreasonable. I was more than happy to write him a quick response refusing his request and cancelling his order. I made a note in his customer file to refuse any orders from him in the future. Maybe one day he'll run out of people to buy from and change his ways. Not likely. Most customers aren't this way but this one was and it's an example of what I'm talking about. We see a few of these each week.
Also a few people try to steal from us every day. That isn't an overstatement. We average around 3 fraudulent orders per day. Not may slip through but we get ripped off occasionally. We have customers try to return abused products or products they bought elsewhere. Yesterday, as another example, a customer sent us a boot knife he had bought 4 months ago. It had been sharpened (poorly) and showed plenty of wear and the metal portion of the sheath was dented. He wanted his money back. He didn't get his money back but I didn't hit his card for the return shipping costs either so we took a small hit from him. At least I know it won't happen again. Another note in the customer file. I had two NSF checks returned from the bank yesterday as well. Two more that we don't want as customers. So we lost some customers yesterday that we're glad to be rid of. Luckily we had many more new ones that we value.
The point of all this is that the customer has some responsibilities as well. Vendors are people and they react much like customers do to the very same stimuli. The posts that have appeared in this forum about me have not been issues of honesty or integrity. They have been from customers to whom I have reponded in kind and moved on to the next communication at my normally furious pace. These have been people whose communication has been interpreted as aggressive or rude by me in the same manner that you have interpreted my posts here to be rude. If people are reasonable with me, I'm reasonable in return. If people are aggressive with me I'm usually agressive in return. We can consider it a character flaw. I realize there are stronger people on the planet than I am.
The final point, then, is that people should treat their vendors as they want to be treated. Stronger people than me put up with aggressive behavior better than I do but that doesn't mean the aggressive behavior is called for or beneficial regardless of whom someone chooses as a vendor. Businesses need customers and have no incentive to anger them for no reason. My business is no different. We have around 30,000 valued customers and a few hundred former customers who we don't really miss (examples above.) Sure there are some we do miss because we lost them as a result of our mistakes. There is some value in being valued. That's true for a business and that's true for a customer, as well. I told you you would thank me for ending this. Take care.
