Quote:
Originally Posted by pusangani
I feel bad for Drache losing the $30, but do I want to see shootsoft go out of business...hell fucking no, we need all the retailers we can get. He was right for posting this publicly, its really his prerogative so he can do whatever he wants to do, especially if the admins advised him to.
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I don't see 1 customer service issue putting shootsoft out of business. I want them to keep on their good work. They've filled a big void when it comes to airsoft in Canada, and hope that they can continue servicing us well into the future.
That being said, I don't want them to turn into A&A either. From September of last year, I saw the 'transformation' of A&A from being a reasonably priced retailer with impeccable business practices to becoming a money hog with poor customer service. Why? Well, there are a lot of reasons, I'm sure, but I could bet the farm that a large part of it was because they got complacent knowing they were the ONLY option, and because they had a large community of past customers and local airsofters to back them up. I personally had no real issues with A&A. But I was seeing more and more people reporting these problems and being essentially shit on by the bandwagon supporters. It's the same reason Bell Canada became such a shitty company to deal with. They had no competition and could get away with screwing people left right and centre and no one had any recourse to do anything about it.
By December or so, they still had a reasonably good public reputation in the community, although by that point I don't think they deserved it anymore. There were alot of A&A issues being raised that would be met with really harsh responses from A&A supporters. It's in the last couple of months of operation that all the prices were getting raised significantly on an almost weekly basis, and floods of customer service horror stories of undelivered (paid for) goods. The story from A&A was that these items hadn't yet arrived, yet their store showed these items as having numbers of them in stock. There were also a lot of stories from irate customers of money owed to them, A&A ignoring communication, etc. Still, A&A supporters regularly flogged the "they would't do that", "it must be a communication problem", and "Mark's a really nice guy, he's just really busy.." defences - just like we're hearing here.
I don't think anyone wants Shootsoft to close down. However, I don't think anyone wants them to end up the same as A&A was either. And silently allowing any business to get away with anything without the community being aware of it will eventually breed that sort of behavious, regardless of their current or past intentions or how good their past service may be. And whether it's their first time screwing over a customer or not (not saying that shootsoft screwed over anyone - again making a generalization), making such business practices public will show that the community won't put up with questionable business ethics.
Silently accepting such is akin to someone committing a deliberate crime after a life of no criminal activity, and letting them go scot free because they've never done it before. Do you let the person who's just robbed a convenience store go without conviction because he's never broken the law before? Of course not! Not that this is as serious, but it's still the same principle.
And in case anyone didn't catch this, I'm all about fairness and despise greed of any kind...