By Kathy Fawcett
How I came to be driving around on the night before Christmas Eve with a car full of large, uncooked roasts is still a little murky.
On Homestar Runner, Strong Bad said, "They let you return anything during the holidays. I once returned an omelet to a hardware store."
But who returns meat? Who returns perfectly good meat on the busiest grocery shopping day of the year? Good daughters do.
By Chris Kaufman
I had been wanting a Dyson vacuum for some time, although as appealing as the “doesn’t lose suction” claim is, I couldn’t bring myself to dish out the $500 to $600 it takes to bring one of these domestic powerhouses home.
Recently, however, one of my local warehouse stores closed up shop
and moved one of their locations across town and had a big sale on
display merchandise in order to clear their shelves. I was fortunate to
come across an out-of-box Dyson vacuum and got quite a deal on it too
at about 25 percent of the normal price.
Since the vacuum was a display model, it was missing one of the
on-board attachments that are normally included with the DC15 model.
After locating the part online, I discovered it would’ve cost me about
$30, including taxes and shipping, to replace the missing accessory – a
small cost considering the deal I got on the vacuum.
Continue reading “Great Customer Service for a Great Product” »
I came across a great blog entry from Heidi Miller about customer service. It really struck a cord with me and I thought it was worth a mention here on THE DIFF. Heidi talks about great experiences with the Great Harvest Bread Company and her local dry cleaner.
Heidi mentions some basic concepts that we hold dear and true at Quicken Loans. First, she appreciates Great Harvest Bread’s OFFICIAL company policy to offer customers waiting in line a free piece of bread. It’s nice when a company cares about its customers!
Second, her dry cleaner knew her by name and order and she’s only been there a few times. It’s nice when a company makes a customer feel important and special.
Heidi is right on the money here and it’s a shame more companies don’t operate by these principles. Just another example of how the little things can make a big difference!
By Jen Romanowski
This year I decided I wasn’t going to set a New Year’s resolution. Instead, I was going to set an Old Year’s resolution.
“Why?” you ask?
Because I believe that you do not have to wait until the New Year starts to make a change in your life. My resolution: to become more aware of the things I fueled my body with, or, in plain English, watching what I ate.
Here’s another great example from Seth Godin of the "Anti-DIFF."
It seems some CVS employees don’t practice what they preach. Supposedly, the picture on Seth’s blog shows an employee on a personal phone call — right behind a hand-written sign telling customers that CVS cannot provide service if customers are on cell phone calls…
By Edson McLean
My best friend and I just celebrated a major milestone–we just surpassed 250,000 miles a few weeks ago. We have been in car accidents together in which the tire shot off like a cannon. We’ve been pulled over by police officers together. We have gone off-roading together. We have driven together with no brakes. We have watched 4th of July fireworks from the backseat of the car. Yes, my 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee and I have been through it all and it’s still truckin’… Well, sort of.
The DIFF Team wishes you a very happy Holiday Season. Whether it's Christmas, Hanukkah, Eid al Adha, Kwanzaa, or another special tradition you recognize during this time of the year, please have a safe and happy holiday.
There are several people in this world I really feel who embody THE DIFF, but there’s one who I admire in particular, and that’s Linus Torvalds, a.k.a. the “Godfather of Open Source”. For those of you who don’t have any idea who he is, he created an open-source computer operating system (OS) called LINUX (a combination of his first name and UNIX, since it’s a UNIX-like OS). Now, without getting into any real detail—since I’m not a computer nerd like my husband who could tell you all about it—it’s basically an operating system that’s free to use and lets anyone contribute to its programming. Open-source contribution (much like Wikipedia) ensures the system is not only very useful, but is freer of bugs and insecurities. And it’s not just little ol’ me who thinks Torvalds is a genius…Time Magazine included him in their list of “60 Years of Heroes.” Even though I’m not a computer programmer, I think LINUX is a brilliant concept created by a man who thinks DIFFerently.
By Adam Lewinski and Ryan Sills
By now, almost everyone I know has heard of the heroic story involving two dolphins, the Chinese government, and the world’s tallest man. Quite an impressive story if you ask me; a truly impressive tale about how surgery couldn’t save the dolphins and everybody’s arms were just too short to reach into the dolphins stomach to retrieve some plastic.
Continue reading “True Genius is not Always on the Surface” »
According to our illustrious chairman, Dan Gilbert, gray is out and black is in – always and forever – when it comes to text on the Web. For longer than I’ve been around, Dan has fought the good fight about never assuming people can easily read text on our Web sites that is in any shade of gray. I even got caught up in an e-mail debate with Dan and others earlier disputing the merits of gray text as a different, arguably attractive design option versus how easily people can read it.
But in the end, it doesn’t matter what we think. In fact, we want to hear from you! Let yours eyes peruse THE DIFF as it is now – gray text and all – and compare it to a new design that favors black text. Which do you like better?
What’s your vote? Enter any and all comments by clicking on the "comments" link below or just click here.
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