My Big Small Town

Best service in the city. Go if you need a new eye doctor. 

I woke up in screaming pain one day this past week. I opened my eyes and felt like someone was stabbing a knife directly into my right eye. I could not open it, I could not move my left eye without my right feeling like it was being scraped by sandpaper.

My youngest, God bless her, brought me a cold washcloth and a cup of coffee with cream, just the way I like it. I laid in bed, unable to move my eyes, or move in general without being in pain, for an hour. I patiently waited for 8 a.m. to roll around so I could call my eye doctor for an emergency appointment.

I called and got the office voice mail informing me that on Thursday, of all days, their hours are from noon to 8 p.m. But...there was a phone number to call for urgent care. I called; it was my eye doctor's cell phone.

I left a message and she called me back within 2 minutes. She made arrangements to see me that morning even though the clinic wasn't open.

By the time I arrived the pain had subsided substantially, probably due to the ibuprofen I'd been popping and the lack of eye movement. She confirmed what I suspect, which is that I had somehow scratched my cornea (I don't recommend doing this). It probably began healing overnight, but upon awakening in the morning ripped the healed cells back off my cornea, thus the stabbing pain at that time.

She called in a prescription to the pharmacy for antibiotic drops and gave me directions on how to care for it while it healed. We chatted about our kids; her oldest is in 1st grade, my youngest in 7th, at the same school.

I drove straight to the pharmacy, where I was greeted by Meg, who knew that a prescription had just been called in for me, but there was another waiting for me as well. Psst...I didn't even give her my name, first or last. They just know me there. I'm not sure if it's a good thing that the pharmacy staff knows me that well, but in this situation, it was incredibly reassuring.

I walked out of the store, smiling to myself, thinking about what an amazing small-town service experience I had while living in a major metropolitan city. As I stepped out, I saw my neighbor, an 89-year-old woman who has lived on our street her entire life, waiting at the stop light for the light to turn green. She and I waved to each other, the light turned green, and off she drove, eyes just inches above the dashboard of her large sedan.

Yep, I definitely live in a small town. In a big city.

When Dramatization Goes Too Far

I've been accused of being a storyteller. I wear that label proudly, thank you.

I like to consider this blog to be my version of storytelling while journaling my children's childhood. Neither of my kids know this site exists;  I suspect that some of my posts will be met with protests from my eldest and most logical of my two children. She would do what many of my friends and family members do when they read my posts, which is correct my facts, informing me that a particular trip I wrote about didn't happen in fall, it was winter, or that I was in 5th grade, not 6th, or what have you.

Others will just laugh at the story and take it for what it was meant to be -- entertaining, but not entirely factual.

That's what I think the best storytellers do -- they build stories around events without boring readers with unnecessary details that would take away from the entertainment. There is a fine line between storytelling and marketing, and in the world of nonprofits, there IS no line between storytelling and marketing. Telling compelling stories is how nonprofits get their audience to feel empathy for their mission and to give.

Recently, I've seen a few examples of storytelling through marketing that have made me raise an eyebrow.

For example, my mom and stepdad have vacationed in a retirement community called The Villages. It is more than just a community, it's a city with its own hospital and zip code. Golf carts are the preferred method of transportation and golf cart traffic jams after town square events are a part of the norm. One of their community centers is filled with black and white old-time photographs of farmers and families, with plaques telling stories about the families who used to live on the land where The Villages is now located. It made my folks feel good, knowing a little bit more about the history of the area before it became developed.

On their second-to-last day of their stay, they picked up a local newspaper that talked about The Villages' plans to expand and the amenities that would be built. One element talked about the planned decor and mentioned that fake families and stories would be created to give the place a history, like had been done the rest of the development.

You mean...you mean that Farmer Johnny, his wife and seven kids didn't really own this land in the 19th century? That warm, fuzzy feeling they had gotten from those stories was gone.

Last week, while munching on a box of fine fast-food cuisine, I began to read the story on the box that the food was in. It's a story about a little boy who used to visit a particular fast food restaurant on a daily basis, and how he became their unofficial mascot. Suddenly he stopped visiting. He finally showed up one day and told the workers that it wasn't as easy for him to get there anymore because someone had stolen his bike. On the other side of the box you read about how all the employees of the restaurant felt so badly that they pooled their money together and bought this little boy a bike, which made the store owner proud. His heart swelled three times its size that day.

The last line is "I just love telling this story." Followed by an asterisk.Which brought me to look for the disclaimer, on the bottom of the box.

The photos are of models, not the actual people in the story. I have no idea if the "dramatization" is a re-writing of an actual story that was related to the marketing staff at headquarters, or if it was generated at a brainstorming session. The fact that I have to question the story at all has my guard up and makes me believe that the story in its entirety was fabricated.

Warm fuzzy feeling? Gone.

Now I'm not accusing either of these companies of doing anything wrong. Neither of them misrepresented their product or services, nor did they have a have a lapse in quality. I give the fast food place kudos for printing an asterisk and a disclaimer, as opposed to The Villages, which allows residents and visitors to think that those stories are true.

I am questioning the storytelling.

If I were a fast food restaurant and was looking for warm, personal stories involving my brand, I would have a contest on my Facebook page eliciting the best story of a visit to a local restaurant from my followers. The stories their own audience members would deliver would probably be better than the one the marketing department created. And guess what: no little asterisk needed. Even better, how about if the asterisk said, "This is a summary of a story told to us by one of our Facebook followers and long-time customers. Like us on Facebook to read the original story and share your own."

I don't know what to tell The Villages except that when the fabrications are discovered by their audience, the emotions they were trying to create with those stories is immediately gone, replaced with a feeling of having been deceived. It's not a good feeling, let me tell you. I wouldn't recommend it.

When consumer trust is hard to earn and corporate missteps are immediately spread wide and far through social media, my advice to companies and nonprofits alike is to be on the up-and-up. Be a storyteller, yes, a fabricator, no.

*I remind readers that posts are a reflection of my personal opinions and do not reflect that of my employer or anyone else for that matter.

Metropolitan Consumers

Wayne and I recently bought a Sleep Number bed. Our old mattress was aging and we wanted to get a king if possible. Of course, with our old house with its 90-degree turn at both the bottom and the top of the staircase, we knew that getting a "normal" king-sized mattress into our bedroom was an impossibility. So we looked at the Sleep Number bed, as the bed arrives in pieces and is assembled in the bedroom.

We kid you not, that was a deciding factor in looking at a Sleep Number bed.

While the girls were away at birthday parties one Saturday afternoon, we had a couple of hours to ourselves so we drove to the nearest Sleep Number store, about 2 miles from our house. We shopped, tried different beds, talked about whether or not we wanted to make this investment, and ultimately signed on the dotted line. A week and a half later a crew of two guys showed up at our house, hauled away our old mattress and assembled the bed for us. By that evening we had a brand new bed for us, and a new "toy" for the girls, who thought that having a remote for a bed was DA BOMB.

The girls putting our new bed to use.

I was talking to my dad about our latest purchase, and he was slightly envious. "We used to have a Sleep Number store in Jonesboro," he said wistfully. That's the closest big city to them, about 25 miles away. There would be no way they would get a bed delivered and set up at their home by Select Comfort employees anytime soon with no store location near them now.

My mom said their customer service stunk, which is why they didn't buy one. She and my step dad drove to Green Bay, WI to shop for a bed, and found out that they do not live in the delivery area. The store would have shipped them the bed in pieces for them to assemble themselves. If they weren't happy with it they could break it back down, put it back into the original boxes (yeah right) and ship it back within 30 days for a full refund. She figured they would lose a week on both ends of that equation just to put the damn bed up, so they never bought one.

I wouldn't say that Select Comfort has poor customer service, I would say that my mom lives too far away from the store to get customer service.

My niece who lives in California was in her hometown of Tracy, Minnesota, visiting over the holidays. She wanted to make a salad and went to the grocery store with her mom to get the ingredients.

"I can't find the cucumbers," she called to her mom as she was looking over the produce department.

"Cucumbers are out of season," her mom calls back, "They don't carry them this time of year." My niece looked at her mom like she was from Mars.

Recently I had an exchange with a high school classmate of mine who sent me a recipe for an Irish soda bread. He recommended using Red Mill flour in this particular recipe, so I went to the store to buy some. I snapped this picture, sent it back to him and wrote, "Which kind?"

Wheat flour? Whole wheat flour? Semolina flour? Soy flour? Oat flour?

These are ALL Red Mill brands of flour. Crazy.

 He assumed I was at a specialty store; I was at my local grocery store. And apparently the answer was "Red Mill Organic Unbleached White Flour," which wasn't even in the section I was looking in, because it is so "plain."

We take this level of access to choices for granted.

Want to buy an expensive bottle of wine for a special occasion? We've got 3 wine stores near us to choose from, which one did you want to try first?

Did you want to go to a restaurant that only serves vegetarian food from Ethiopia? It's called "Blue Nile," and I drive by it on the way home from work. Or you could have your pick from any one of over a thousand  restaurants in the area, serving cuisine from every corner of the globe.

From clothing to household goods to food, we are lucky. Not only can we afford these purchases (which I am grateful for every day), but we have easy access to these goods and services living where we live.

How Disney Saved Christmas

Lindsey wanted a wristwatch for Christmas this year, and not just any old wristwatch. She wanted one that had Rapunzel on it from Disney's movie Tangled that we had seen Thanksgiving Day. She wanted it to be digital, but her teacher told her she would be "very disappointed" if Santa brought her a digital one, because she needed practice reading the time the old-fashioned way.

I dutifully go to the Disney store website and use their tools to design the watch. I pick the watch face, the color of the band, even personalize it with her name. Each watch is custom-made for each order, depending on color and design selected.

I finish personalizing the watch, including putting Lindsey's name on it, and order it on December 13th. That should be in plenty of time, I've got two weeks until Christmas and I live in the internet age when things get delivered in 24 hours from the click of a mouse. I receive an email confirmation of the order.

By December 21st I haven't seen a shipping notification, so I check on my order. The only message is  "not shipped." So I call the customer service number to find out when they expect to ship it.

Okay, so perhaps I was a bit cynical. It's one thing to call all the staff members working in a Disney park a "cast member," but a service rep on the phone? It seems a bit much.

I finally got a live person and found out that because I had personalized it with her name, I should've ordered it by Dec 9th to guarantee Christmas delivery. Apparently there was a little disclaimer that said that once I landed on that page, but of course I didn't see it. The "cast member" was apologetic but said that it probably wouldn't make it in time, especially since I hadn't paid for express delivery...because I didn't think I needed to.

My fault for being the bad customer, I figure I'll be printing a picture of the watch off their site and putting it in a card for her. The problem is, she truly, deeply believes in Santa Claus, and this was supposed to be her gift from Santa. How do I explain this?

Do I tell her the elves didn't finish it in time? That it fell from Santa's sleigh? Or do I let the cat out of the bag that the gift was from her parents, who ordered it late from an actual company, not from the North Pole?

Then I get an email on December 23rd informing me that my order shipped, and a call from the husband who saw the credit card get charged. It shipped? Is it going to make it? No, I said sadly, I didn't pay for express shipping, it won't make it.

Then, suddenly, the unexpected on Christmas Eve.

And then the incredible:

Yes, Disney express delivered my package to me without telling me they were doing so, to ensure that the gift arrived in time. Talk about underpromise and overdeliver.

I could've hugged the FedEx guy. He looked tired and cold and probably could've used it, but instead I gave him a huge smile and said "Thank you, you have no idea what this will mean to a little girl." I think that helped brighten his day.

When a company already has an exceptional reputation and incredible customer service, how do you improve upon it? By going to infinity and beyond. Disney has redeemed itself in my eyes.

By the way, Lindsey loves her watch.