Cybrpnk's Rantings

As those of you who have been reading my rants know, I'm not much of a fan of big corporations, and tend to be pretty negative about lots of things in business. I'm not that way about everything. I don't want this blog to be nothing but complaining. Here are a couple of stories about companies that I have really good things to say about.

First hero is Garmin, the GPS people. We have a handheld GPS which we use for all sorts of navigation. We were getting ready to take it with us on a sailing trip to the British Virgin Islands. Then we ran into a problem. The version of nautical chart CD we had was old, and it wasn't possible to buy the code we needed to get additional sets of maps off of the CD unless we updated our local region maps. But we didn't really need a local update, and didn't really want to have to pay for one. So I sent an email to Garmin customer explaining my predicament. Within a day they had written back to give me a free local upgrade, which enabled me to buy the Caribbean charts without having to buy an extra product I didn't really need. Hurray! I was already sold on Garmin because they make really good products and have excellent cartography, but now I am happy to recommend them because they are also a really cool company.

Next up, KitchenAid. I do a lot of cooking, baking, all that kitchen stuff. A lot of our kitchen is KitchenAid: oven, mixer, food processor. One day, completely out of the blue KitchenAid sent me a grain mill for my mixer. Apparently they had mixed up someone else's warranty exchange, and had sent it to me by mistake. I called them to try to sort it out, but they didn't seem that interested in helping me solve the problem, so I just left the thing in my garage. Figured someday I would use it. Then I had an incident with our food processor. I put in some fairly cold chocolate, and tried to grate it, but had the grater disk upside down so it was in slicing mode instead. Spectacular. Lots of exciting noise. Managed to destroy the disk, but not before it had sliced through both the lid of the bowl, and the bottom of the push tube. Did some research, rather a pricey little incident, but clearly entirely my fault. I called up KitchenAid to order replacement parts. I started out by saying that I doubted that this would be covered by warranty, but then told them what had happened, including an acknowledgement that this was entirely my fault. Much to my surprise they said as long as it was under a year old (which it was) they would replace everything for free, no questions asked. Wow! They then asked me about that unresolved return of the grain mill. I told them that they had never sent me a return slip for it. This person seemed interested in getting things worked out. They sent me my parts and a return slip, I sent them back their grain mill. I still can't believe how thoroughly they stand behind their products. What a great company.