Mitch’s Blog

It’s never a good thing when large companies start irritating a bunch of their customers. It’s much worse when they start alienating people who have a large forum to tell others what’s going on that’s bad.
In this case, though I rarely mention names, since it’s not my gripe I’m going to bring light to [...]

This is the title of my latest newsletter, on customer service issues. It was based on a story a friend was telling last week about a phone call she’d received from the credit department of one of the major department stores, saying that she’d missed making a payment and they were going to take [...]

Last week I received an email asking me if I could help with some customer service tips for this gentleman’s business as it concerned common courtesy. He had read an article I’d written on common courtesy on a consultant group’s site that I’m a part of in more ways than one.
I sent him an [...]

My wife and I went out to dinner Thursday night to one of our favorite places up the street. It’s one of our favorite places because, for once, a waiter has actually been in one location for a couple of years, and we’ve gotten to know him fairly well. He always greets us [...]

If you want your business to survive, you don’t go around messing with mothers. That’s the story here, as the National Pork Board tried to intimidate a woman who writes a blog called The Lactivist from selling t-shirts that said “the other white milk” on them to help raise money for a website that [...]

By now, most of us have heard the story of how the airline AirTran removed a family from one of their airplanes because their 3 year old was throwing a tantrum and wouldn’t calm down.
At the risk of taking an unpopular stance, I’m going to say I agree with the airlines, though I don’t take [...]

I was out of town last week at a convention in another city, a large city.  I stayed at a five-star hotel, and the convention was at a different five-star hotel.
I spent more time at the hotel where the convention was than my own hotel.  Talk about luxurious.  This was the first time I ever [...]

I spent an overnight trip at my mother’s house to finally load all the software she needed in her new laptop, which I talked about a couple of weeeks ago. It’s hard to imagine for most, but it takes a lot of time to load software if you’re loading multiple things.
One of the things [...]

You know, the toughest thing about working for yourself is, if you’re not getting a referral, you have to reach out to people and companies to see if they can use your services.
I’ll admit it; I absolutely hate this part of the business. I’m not very good at it because I’m often forgetting what’s [...]

Yesterday I went with my mother to buy her a new laptop and a Palm pilot.
We went to the first store because she had $250 worth of coupons that would go towards her purchase. We looked at the laptops, and early on the choice came down to two that were fairly similar. Then [...]