A slim little pile scarcely demanding a president's attention—or a sales manager's. A few complaints. A retailer out in Butte. That San Antonio jobber Winchester had such a hard time landing. What's this? Didn't get the buttons he ordered? Stuff and nonsense—well, Henry will write nice, consoling letters and those will be those.
Now Henry is a good kid. Just out of school. Learning the business. Writes a bang-up letter.
But the San Antonio jobber doesn't want nice, consoling letters. He wants to know how come his pants came without the special buttons he ordered. And those special buttons are so important in his life that he has written to the head of the firm—whom he'd met at the Atlantic City convention—and he expects the head of the firm to tell him what he wants to know.
"Come, come," the president would have said to him, had he walked into the inner sanctum, "you know I can't give my time to such petty details—I've got department heads who attend to such matters. When you want an extra thirty days—or want to talk over handling our goods exclusively in the Southwest—why, those are the things for you and me to spend our time on."
But the San Antonio jobber, had he been there, and had he been asked, would have rejoined:
"I, too, have my department heads. I, too, leave many of the trivial details to them. But if a customer came to me with a complaint, I wouldn't care a rap what it was about. It wouldn't be that particular complaint which would interest me. It would be the mere fact that he had a complaint at all. A dissatisfied customer is a dissatisfied customer, and there isn't anything in my business that would get quicker and more personal attention from me."
Well, well, businesses come and businesses go. Our imaginary conversation will never take place between the president and the San Antonio jobber. The San Antonio jobber took his business elsewhere some five years ago. The president still comes in at nine and opens the mail. He never drops a check in the wastebasket. There are still three piles in front of him. Three slim piles. Even the pile of complaints is slim. There isn't enough business left to produce many complaints.
Henry? Oh, he got to writing letters to an heiress who was wintering on the Riviera. And when her daddy died, he wrote such a nice, consoling letter——
But we wander far afield. We're out in the rough somewhere, and it's going to take a real recovery to get us back on the fairway if we don't watch out.
For one thing and for instance: Is the customer always right?