Deal or No Deal

When I was a child, my uncle raised Nubian goats for their milk.  My parents, who believed an idle child was a sure sign of impending doom, gleefully arranged for me to be an apprentice slave.  I came to love the gentle and intelligent goats, though I would have denied it at the time.

A Nubian doe will give milk for an average of two years before drying up, and will produce no milk until she produces kids.  After a five month pregnancy, the goat will have an average of two kids, and shortly after, you can begin milking the goat again.  My uncle didn’t keep a buck (male goat) on the property, so every now and then, he would load a doe into the back of his pickup and drive over to a friend’s farm who kept a male goat for breeding purposes.  If I remember correctly, at that time the breeding fee was a case of Lone Star Beer, minus a small rebate consumed by my uncle as they watched while the doe was “serviced”.

This is the origin of the phrase “customer service”.

This principle was wonderfully demonstrated this week by the wonderful people at the local Mercedes Benz dealership.  My wife, The Doc, loves her Mercedes, a mid-priced SUV that handles well and has given us few problems (even at age 14).  Our only real complaint is that we live in a town that does not have a dealership.  To be more accurate, there is no Mercedes dealership in the entire southern half of New Mexico:  Our nearest dealership is 41 miles away, in El Paso, Texas.

This made the recent recall notice for The Doc’s car somewhat problematic.  More than a million vehicles were recalled due to a potentially defective brake booster.  It seems that—on one vehicle—the booster had rusted to the point that the pressure of hard braking could have burst the booster, totally disabling the entire braking system.  The danger of losing all of the brakes at once was so severe that the people at Mercedes demanded that the vehicles not be driven under any circumstances until the boosters were inspected.

Personally, I was not convinced.  This is the Chihuahuan Desert, and it is drier than Lubbock on Easter Sunday.  It is hard to imagine anything rusting in this desert.  But Mercedes insisted, pointing out that the inspection was free and that they would tow the car both to the dealership and back home.  The people at the national office were friendly, helpful, and most reliable. 

This friendly help turned out to be the exact opposite of trying to do business with the dealership, who told us we had to wait weeks for an appointment and would have to call a third division of Mercedes to arrange for towing.  In the meantime, the dealership told us not to drive the car and to put it into storage. 

Evidently, the dealership believes we only drive the car for a lark and we don’t actually need it.

Of course, we continued to drive the car.  Out of over a million vehicles, only a handful had experienced any problem, and all of those vehicles were probably used in places where rainfall was not considered an urban legend.  In any case, it is years too late for The Doc and me to die young.

After a few weeks, and many, many phone calls, Mercedes sent a tow truck and picked up the vehicle, promising to return it shortly and all at no charge.  Two days later, the dealership told us that they had inspected the car and the booster was rust-free and we could come and pick up the car.

I pointed out that they had promised—several times--to tow the car back to us free of charge.  Actually, all three branches of Mercedes involved—the dealership, the national office, and the Roadside Assistance People who had towed it—had all promised to bring the car back to us.  The dealership, while acknowledging that Mercedes had indeed promised to bring the car back to us, said it was their policy to not tow the car back unless the car’s brake booster was actually defective, then they would tow the car back to us while waiting for a part to repair it.

Why Mercedes thought I might need the car if it proved to be too dangerous to drive was never explained. 

Calls to Mercedes Roadside Assistance referred me to the National Office, who referred me to the dealership, who referred me to Roadside Assistance.  Essentially, everyone told me that it was not their job and that I should call someone else.  Everyone I talked to apologized and apologized and then did nothing but suggest I call someone else.  Mercedes does indeed make a great car, though in all honesty, I would suggest you deal with a company whose dealership actually wants your business and that certainly does not include the Mercedes dealership in El Paso.

Naturally, we drove over to Texas and picked up the car.  Halfway back home, the Mercedes National office called and said we had been correct all along, and that they would tow the car back to New Mexico. 

I hung up on them.

I can’t prove it, but I suspect that the dealership had always known that they were supposed to tow the car back to me.  Since Mercedes pays the dealership for warranty repairs and recall work, I suspect that the dealership just decided to screw me over and keep the fee they would have to pay the tow truck company.

I remember a politician in Houston telling me long ago that when a political party had gotten so used to a group’s support that the party stopped asking for their votes, that group no longer actually had a vote.  Evidently, the same thing works in business, too.

When a company has grown so large that it no longer believes it has to work to keep its customers happy and believes that the customers will just keep handing over their money no matter how they are mistreated….

Well, it’s not the first time some Germans have been dead wrong.