Monday, November 1, 2010

No Fare for You!

I spent the weekend in Seattle with Ms. Kayla from Essential Wholesale. We spent the weekend eating (too much), watching movies (Conviction and Life as We Know It - Conviction, in my opinion, is a must-see) and hitting the spa for some (eh hem) research. Oh and of course, cupcake tasting. We ate 4 cupcakes in the span of 3 days. Even we were impressed with that amazing intake.

We were in the 'big' city of Bellevue, WA and delighted to walk everywhere. That is, until it started to rain. Then, we were considerably less happy to walk everywhere. We tried to find a taxi.

The first guy we came to asked where we were going and then refused to take us because it was too small of a fare.

We called two taxi cab companies. They refused to come pick us up because the fare was too small.

We finally found a cab company willing to take us for our $6.50 fare. He explained to us that many cab drivers wait in the fare line for up to 2 hours and want their 2 hours of waiting time investment to pay off big and so they won't take a small fare when it comes up.

What if the cab drivers instead took every fare, irregardless of the size of the fare rather than sitting in the cab line and waiting to hit the lottery of the large fare?

What if you did away with your order minimum and filled every order as if it were 'the Big One.'? What if you treated every customer as though they were the only thing that mattered? What if you kept the 'Nordstrom Customer Service' principles throughout your entire customer line, every day, all the time? What are the ramifications for turning away a small sale; what small customers are you discouraging that could be a large customer tomorrow?