Relax!!

I love cookies. I make them at least two to three times a week. So, lucky for me, on Saturday my dear friend Amber and I attended a Christmas cookie baking class. We sat in a perfectly modern stainless steel teaching kitchen to watch chef Bob prepare four delicious cookie recipes. He shared his cooking knowledge, baking secrets, and samples of his perfect treats with us before he let us loose to try making them on our own. At our first station, the ingredients were laid out, the high tech mixers ready to use, the oven was preheated, and we were set. Following chef Bob's recipe; we mixed the ingredients, shaped the dough, put them in the oven and produced a hard pile of sugar and oatmeal. Our cookies were nothing like the ones from the demonstration. Sadly, we threw away the rest of the dough and started over.


What had gone wrong? I followed the recipe, the one chef Bob said would work! He lied to me! I paid for his services to teach me to bake wonderful cookies, but he did not deliver, right? I wondered if I should yell at him. I could tell him he had a horrible business, he had no right to advertise his skills and that I would report him to the commission of cooking schools. Then maybe I could storm off and pout.

Obviously this reaction from someone in a cooking class is completely out of line. After careful examination of my dough I learned I had accidentally doubled the butter in the recipe. Making the disastrous turn out of our cookies my fault.

Unfortunately, customer reactions like this are a little more common in the used car industry.

Let me share a story with you.

On Tuesday, a gentleman came into the dealership to purchase a 1996 Beretta. It was a trade-in we'd had for a week or so and was a good little car for the price. After knocking $600.00 off the sticker, the gentleman signed all of his paperwork, handed over a check and drove off under the afternoon sun.



That night, a phone call came from that same man. He was angry. His newly purchased 13 year old used car was having problems. It kept dying on him and he was sure it was a problem Hardman Car Company already knew about.

"You need to get a tow truck out here now! I can't believe you would sell me such a piece of junk!" He yelled.

Eric, our trusty co-worker responded by asking him, "Does it have enough gas?"

With the needle close to empty, but not yet in the "red" the customer assured him it did and the problem was something major.

Eric politely asked him to please put some gas in it and if there was still a problem, to call him back and he would be happy to get a tow truck for him.

He waited until today to make his call. Now a somber, embarrassed customer, the gentleman apologized for his behavior, realizing he was in the wrong when the car worked perfectly with a full tank of gas.

A whole incident of someone getting angry (and then embarrassed), a salesmen feeling worried, and an owner anxious about his business reputation could have been avoided. If the gentleman would have just stepped back, and taken a look at was really happening, there would have been no need to get so worked up causing a big, ugly confrontation.

I share these stories with you as a business owner, a friend, a sister, a daughter,a consumer, a mother and a neighbor. All of these relationships are hot spots for angry confrontation. Although it is sometimes difficult, it's up to us to follow the golden rule and just take a second to look at the big picture. I hope that especially during this holiday season we can all step back, maybe grab a couple of scrumptious cookies, and just RELAX.