Business Blunders

If businesses want to know why they are losing money, maybe they should ask their customers. We can certainly give them some pointers.

For one thing, stop being so stupid! We live 5 blocks from my husband's dentist. My husband had been going to this office regularly for cleaning and dental care and always scheduled his appointments in advance.

Now, you need to know that all of the office workers in this particular dentist's office work in the same room, the ones that schedule the appointments and the ones that handle billing and payments. They talk to each other as they are working, so this is why what happened seemed very odd to me.

My husband had been in to have his teeth cleaned. A couple of days later we received a bill in the mail. Nothing unusual, except that the bill was only for 86 cents. Now, if the person who sent the bill out had just asked the one who schedules appointments, they would have known he was coming in again the following week and they could have asked for the money then, or they could have made a free phone call to us and told us to bring the 86 cents in the next week.

Instead, they chose to cause additional wear and tear on the computer and printer, use paper, ink, an envelope, electricity, and an expensive stamp, plus pay the employee for the time it took to do the work to send out a bill for 86 cents. Now, all of this could have been saved just by making a free phone call, or asking if the person had another appointment booked.

Major corporations are just as dumb. Approximately 7 years ago, we took out a loan, paid off some bills including a credit card, then cancelled the card. The credit card company miscalculated our balance and we overpaid them by $1.59. Every single month for the past 7 years they have sent us a monthly statement telling us that we have a credit of $1.59. Well yeehaw! What are we supposed to do about it? We can't access the credit because the account is closed. They could have just sent us a check for the $1.59 or even just wrote it off and not said a thing to us. We never would have known. Instead, they waste all this time and money to keep telling us they have $1.59 of our money and we can't have it. Then they keep raising interest rates to improve their profit margins to cover their stupidity.