One of my favorite bloggers, Joel Spolsky, wrote:
Many companies that have gone bust didn’t die because of the recession. They failed for one reason: They treated customers poorly
I found the Circuit City salesperson to be so aggressively unknowledgeable and remarkably useless that I fled to Best Buy, where I was helped by a cheerful, 20-year-old twerp who knew everything. I later learned that in 2007, Circuit City had fired the chain’s 3,400 most experienced salespeople and replaced them with generic, untrained, near-minimum-wage workers.
The article contains a lot of other really good stuff, stuff we should all learn about, and ends with
Even as competitors like Circuit City go bust, B&H remains packed with loyal customers. And that makes me very happy. For a business owner, there’s nothing more satisfying than watching honest dealers expand their operations while the schmucks, with their going-out-of-business markups, go down the drain. It’s inspiring to know that starting with the premise of treating your customers well really does pay off.
via Why Circuit City Failed, and Why B&H Thrives, Managing Technology Article – Inc. Article.
(beware the obnoxious popunder – it doesn’t grok Firefox and messes with your keystrokes until you close it. Consider it a computer game, a little mid-day pastime. You have to close it quick before the javascript gets control and pops it under again)