An interesting experience about customer service.

Joachim De Posada

By Joachim De Posada

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I received an email that Macy's was holding a great sale last week so needing a couple of suits, I headed there. I found a great sale and actually bought 4 suits instead of 2.
While I was trying them on, the salesman approaches me and says that Macy's is going to hold another sale in a week and that they were going to slash 25% off the prices I was buying. I would save a lot more money. He then said that he would give me the 25% discount right there and then.
That is great customer service and has made me loyal to that particular salesman and to Macy's in general.

I go to Books and Books yesterday since I had an hour to kill before meeting my sister and brother in law in Houston's in Coral Gables.
I just love Books and Books. It is my favorite book store and I buy lots of books and I do my own book signings there. Many of my friends visit it and often we meet at the restaurant at the back to eat and have some quality time to chat. Mitch the owner is a great guy and a very close friend to my very close friend Bruce Turquel.

I write about what happened now  so as to help them change their ways and also to help readers of my blog.

I saw a book that had great information that I could use in a meeting I had a few hours later so I decided to buy it. I had received an email a couple of days ago that said that Books and Books was holding a sale on July 4th discounting 30% of all books.  I always get a 10% author's discount there but I couldn't add my 10% to the 30% and I am ok with that an understand it.

I go to the register to pay and I tell the very nice lady there that I had received the email announcing the sale and I wanted to buy the book right there and then with the 30% discount.

She said that she didn't know if she could do that but she was willing to go to the manager and ask.

She did go to the manager and came back and said that she was so sorry, that the manager said it couldn't be done.

I needed the book right then and there but just to see what she would do, I  asked her if she could then hold the book for me, in other words, reserve it so that I could get it the 4th of July. She told me that she couldn't do that either.

I would like all of you to analyze this. Here I am at the store, I have the book in my hands, I want to buy it right there and they say no because I am a couple of days early.

While she was checking with the manager, I opened my Ipad, went to Amazon and looked for the book. They had it for 20.00 plus the 3.99 roughly equal to the 30% discount I could get in Books and Books.

I then saw thye had it on Kindle which would allow me to have it right away for 14.99.

So, right there, in my favorite store, I was forced to buy from a competitor with one click because I needed the information in the book for my afternoon meeting and with the kindle I could get it right away.

Companies, stores, businessess need to keep up with client's demands and they need to solve a client's problem when it is so easy to do so.

I felt bad having to buy from a competitor when I really wanted to buy from Books and Books, an independent bookstore, because I am a loyal client, they are a very important part of our community and we all need to support them in their effort to compete with national stores.

I hope they will learn this lesson because I plan to remain a loyal client.

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Answer to the reader who wrote me about passion

Joachim De Posada

By Joachim De Posada

Dear reader:

Thank you for writing me. You make very good points about following your passion. You provide the example of a young want to be actor that has to wait tables in Los Angeles until the right opportunity comes up. If he is single and 25, he can do so and in fact many artists have done so and have become Hollywood stars, most people that have done haven't become stars and have had to find other careers.
If a person is married and has the responsibility of raising a family, and what he or she has passion for doesn't provide an acceptable income in order for him to raise his family, then he has to bite the bullet and do what he needs to do.
In that case he would have to work at whatever and at night go to theather classes or write scripts or do something that would keep him at least in some way connected to his passion.
I will never forget a waiter who used to work for my ex wife in an events company who was so good that clients would request him as a waiter. One day after a wedding in Casa Espana in San Juan, PR, I approached him and congratulated him for doing such a good job. I then said, "you must love being a waiter, you were born to do this". And he said "I hate being a waiter. I am a dentist. My family had to leave Colombia because of the FARC (the communist guerrillas), they were going to kidnap us and since we didn't speak English, we came to Puerto Rico. I am studying weekdays to revalidate my career here in PR and start practicing as a dentist"
This man is doing what he needs to be doing in order to attain his dream of practicing dentistry.
In life, you will have to sacrifice things you love to do in order to pay the price and be able to get them down the road.
I don't define success by passion as you write in your email. Passion is an ingredient of success but I often talk about "well being" that is much more than success. Well being is a state that can be achieved by balancing financial stability, health, career, social and community.
Balancing these five I think you can get as close as possible as happiness.
So, in the case of our husband, he must continue doing his work and taking care of his family but at the same time he must find areas of his work that he can find passion for. Sometimes we only focus on the negative but if we look for positives, we find many that are right before our eyes and we don't see them.
If he absolutely hates his job or career, then he must start looking for something else that more resembles his passion but keeping in mind that job one is taking care of himself and his family.
He might not be yet ready to switch so he must adopt the "not yet" mentality, in other words, he is on his way but not quite ready.
You know, his problem is one that a lot of  unemployed people would kill for. He has a job and makes relatively good money. I suspect that he has an attitude problem and he should work on that.



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Email received about following your passion.

Joachim De Posada

By Joachim De Posada

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This is an email I received in regards to my previous post of following your passion.

 

I think you should explore the concept of having passion for your job. Although there are some people

 

who may love what they do, that is not the majority. The purpose of working is to provide income for

 

yourself and your family. Example: you love nothing more than to act. Well it's okay to be a Starving actor

 

living in a studio in Los Angeles and waiting tables on the side if you are 25 and alone. But it is not

 

appropriate if you are married and have a small child to feed. So your responsibility should trump your

 

passion in this scenario... Right???? So   If you happen to be someone who is passionate about

 

something that doesn't bring enough income for your situation.., ie playing a sport or acting or painting...

 

Then what do you do? What if you love guitar but simply aren't good enough to become famous, or you

 

are an excellent guitarist  but have never had the X factor of being discovered at a bar by a good

 

producer, or know a friend of a friend who connected you to just the right person. So you have all this

 

talent but it makes you no money. What do you do?  I ask you this because of my husband. He's

 

miserable. But he has three kids to feed. So if you define success by passion for what you do and your

 

passion doesn't equal financial stability then is it impossible to be successful? And if what is important is

 

to have passion for your work and most people don't feel this passion isn't that setting them up for simply

 

feeling sorry for themselves instead of being productive? Similar to marriage. When your standard for

 

marriage is "feeling" in love and that feeling wears off then the only alternative is divorce which results in

  

a life of other related failures: loss of income, struggles with your children, instability ... So people spend

 

their time chasing these "feelings" passion, being in love, happiness ... I'm not sure this is the right

 

formula. Do you have any insight on this because my family is in this kind of crisis. Should my husband

 

quit his job and become a teacher making $40000 putting us in more financial strain and forcing me to

 

leave my children to become the bread winner? And what if he realizes (as most do) that what he thought

 

would be his passion is not as great as he thought it was going to be- he hates waking up in the morning

 

or he finds being around kids all day quite annoying instead of stimulating. What happens to passion for

 

your work when there are other players involved that count on you? 

 

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