Mega-vendors treat you — and your customers — as expendable commodities
Do customers crave respect?
Many years ago, I worked with a publisher that always confused anecdote with antidote. “Let me give you an amusing antidote,” he would say. I never said it out loud, but I always agreed. Any anecdote that ends up being an antidote is amusing in its bones. If you are interested, the rule in publishing these days is that publishers are from the sales side and may have very little formal education, while editors tend to be fairly well educated but lack judgement. It’s a marriage made in hell, and is largely responsible for the current condition of media. That said, if you view every anecdote as a potential antidote, you will find your life enriched. By way of anecdote, my wife this month threw
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September/October 2020
away a nearly new Cuisinart food processor. Last February, well in advance of the pandemic, we were sitting in the living room, talking one night, and a groaning, chewing, mechanical noise came from the kitchen, followed by the stench of burning electrical contacts and rubber. We went into the kitchen, and the food processor had turned itself on and lit on fire. Smoke, anyway. No visible flames, but smoke and stink. Nobody had been near it, and we had not used it for at least a day or two. It was just sitting there, alone. Naturally, we pulled the plug. This was clearly not a “normal” case of appliance failure. It was nearly bedtime, we could easily have been upstairs and there was no apparent trigger or
