Survival Arts

On not compromising on quality... when you have a say in the matter

This is reprinted with the permission of Monica White from a thread today in the "Antichrists" community on Orkut:

Or not compromising in general....

ie: couple of days ago in Dublin we did the cheesy city tour and visited the Guinness factory.

Paid something of the order of 20 euros each to go on the official Guinness factory tour. Cost didn't matter, though, as I am a bit of a factory addict (love process & systematization etc). So here I was, grinning and ready to see machines go 'whoosh' and produce beer.

Nope, we stepped into what I can only call a first-year marketing student's wet dream. Not in the factory - in some sort of fitted out multimedia shell. It was supposed to be 'self-guided'....pah!....different sizes and styles of arrows haphazardly pasted to the floor, almost no lighting, displays of barley, hops etc in clear glass tubes (that you couldn't see due to lack of lighting) with attached.....speakers. Yep, so that you could LISTEN to someone pouring said grain onto microphone. Yawn.

I could go on - and I did - to the manager. Needless to say that I demanded my money back and their general no refund policy wasn't going to cut it with someone who had received NO value at all for the admission fee.

I wrote two solid pages of complaint - I gave them a full analysis of the problems with the tour as well as ways to improve it and metrics that could be implemented to ensure quality. In essence, I did something that I usually charge for.

Funnily enough, the manager realised that I was serious after a while and confessed that they were redoing the tour.

I've long ago learnt to argue my case as a consumer, probably because I'm usually the demon on the other side of the fence haranguing people into giving excellent value.

If I were asked to teach anyone one easy to implement lifeskill that would make them happy in the long term it would be to ask for a refund when they're not happy rather than compromise on what they want.