Dear Friends,
Spring is teasing its way into Vermont as friends send me pictures of daffodils making their way through the remaining snow and mud that is not quite as deep on the back roads. It seems like fall down here as some of the trees are shedding their leaves but the temperatures are rising and so is the humidity.
We have made the very difficult decision to close our Rutland, Vermont store. This store in a very small community was unable to sustain the level of sales necessary to support the overhead. We tried hard and while we are leaving Rutland for now, we may come back some time in the future. It was a beautiful store and we enjoyed support from the town, our landlord and other Rutland businesses. We have completed some great renovations in our other three stores including HomeKit demo sections.
Out Key West store has also had some changes and we have had a change in leadership there. Joe Lytton, who was with us from the start has moved up to Georgia to be closer to his family. He led the effort to renovate this store and did a remarkable job. Tommy Allen is our new store manager and Joanne Marius has been promoted to assistant manager.
I was struck at how poorly United Airlines handled their customer service issue last week. From the beginning, Hapy and I have had the philosophy of empowering our employees to make customer service decisions. Often times we would get asked about a situation and rather than making the call we would simply ask the employee, “what would you do?” and let them make the call. We keep our eye on the true life-cycle value of a customer. The profit we make from a single sale pales in comparison to the value of a loyal customer. Some time ago, a woman that came to work for me handed me a book entitled “Customer Satisfaction is Nothing, Customer Loyalty is Everything”. The book sucked but the concept is sage knowledge. Building customers for life is our goal with every interaction.
This week’s Kibbles & Bytes Exclusive is an iPod sale! The iPod is Apple’s almost forgotten hit but many of us love our iPods. I use one on my motorcycle for tunes and I have another in my shop to blast rock and roll as I work on my bikes. This week only for Kibbles & Bytes readers you can take $5 off any iPod Shuffle and $10 off any iPod nano or iPod touch!