Two things were reinforced for me over the Easter holidays.
1. Some people should never run a business!
2. Dale Carnegie was a genius.
While on holiday my partner who is a well respected interior designer (and very shrewd business woman) and I went on the hunt for some retro furniture to restore for our new house. The local "antique" and second hand goods store was a bit of goldmine and the owner sent us down to the warehouse to look through at excess stock in storage with someone else.
We ended up negotiating a great deal on a set of six dining chairs and five various other seats that could either be restored for us or on sold to my partners clients. The deposit was paid list of goods drawn up and delivery arranged on the spot.
Come delivery day no one turned up and no calls were received. We went down to the store and the owner said she wasn't going to sell the goods to us now as they were sold far too cheap and offered our money back. Needless to say her approach was not well received and I took a back seat while my partner and the store owner went hammer and tongs each escalating the threats against each other until apparently we were going to court over the matter as well as being trespassed from the premises.
Not being one to want to waste too much time and energy on this now it had got completely out of hand I tried a different approach from Dale Carnegie's world famous book "How to win friends and influence people". One of the pieces of advice from his book I have found most valuable is in part three "Win people to your way of thinking" the first two chapters relate to winning people over in arguments and the first things to do is acknowledge their point of view.
With a leap of faith from my belief in the philosophies from the book I spoke to the owner and told her how I completely understood how she felt about the matter. Having two demanding, irrational out of towner's coming in and negotiating a price on goods with someone and her not getting the chance to sign off on the deal before it was done must have been infuriating & if it was me I would have most likely fired the person who made the deal. I went on to say she must really hate us coming in and spending our money all around town like we do. Before I even finished that sentence she cut me off saying how much she actually relied on out of town business and we weren't really that bad. She then went on to talk about how she had just had and operation and really wasn't in the best of moods and apologised to me before organising for someone to meet at the storage facility to hand our furniture over.
If the business owner had maybe read the same book and had phoned us as soon as she had heard what her assistant had sold the furniture for apologising in advance and explaining her situation while saying that she would have completely understood if we wanted to hold her to the price we would have quite happily discussed the matter paid about 15% more than the original agreed price.
I am sure there are worse horror stories out there of terrible customer service it just still astounds me that people can stay in business despite their horrific attitudes and business acumen.
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