Customer Service & Brands

I've recently had horrendous experiences with customer service from brands that I used to have respect for.

A few examples:

- IBM took 2.5 weeks to replace a logic board on my Thinkpad, requiring it to be sent back to them 3 times, getting sent back to the wrong address twice and resulting in over 20 telephone calls to get the problem resolved.

- Sears taking 4 visits to fix my ice maker, and 4 out of 5 brand new appliances purchased from them (all top consumer reports rated) breaking within the first 2 years. Sears response: "you should purchase the extended warranties - these things break all the time".

- A 1.5 year old premium-priced Hoover vacuum shooting out smoke. Getting a response from them took several weeks (after four phone calls and emails). Their answer: take it to burlingame (25 miles away) and get it fixed for almost as much as we paid for it in the first place.

I'm certain the decline in customer service is the result of cost-cutting and belt-tightening happening from the downturn. But what long-term effect will this have on the brands of these companies.

If you can't trust brands like IBM, Sears and Hoover, who can you trust?

Welcome to California...

Years ago (prior to the boom) there used to be a very popular bumpersticker here in Silicon Valley that you would see on lots of cars. It read "Welcome to California...Now Go Home". It reflected a sense of resentment by those who had lived here for a while that the large number of people moving here were ruining the quality of life for the rest of us. During the boom the immigration into the area became even worse - I can remember a time whan almost one out of five license plates were from out of state.

Then the downturn happened, and for a long time I didn't see any out of state plates. In fact, traffic even declined and became somewhat reasonable again.

Lately I've been seeing lots of out of state plates - Oregon, Washington, Maryland, Massachusetts, Arizona, Montana and the list goes on. I wrote about this in a previous post - I think this is an economic indicator that hiring is ramping up, and that people are being lured here by job offers (which probably sound quite attractive compared to the salaries where they came from - at least until they find out what housing costs are here). The other possibility is that people who left the area because they couldn't find work are now returning. (though almost everyone who I know that left is not likely to come back).

It should be interesting to see if the out-of-state plates trend continues...