One of our readers advises that he recently had problems with a printer he bought from the Officeworks store at Northmead in New South Wales – they eventually admitted it was “no good” and needed to be replaced, which it was.
This store has an ordinary email address – northmead@0fficeworks.com.au – which, of course, was used in negotiations over this matter.
AND, and we find this absolutely fascinating!
Officeworks is a subsidiary of Wesfarmers, a conglomerate based in Perth, with, according to the Wikipedia article on it, more than 220,000 employees, and we had previously noted that it has an ordinary email address – info@wesfarmers.com.au – readily available on it’s website, and our reader advises that his emails to the Officeworks store were copied to Wesfarmers, AND, that the Wesfarmers people came back to him promptly and were extremely helpful in the matter.
So, our extremely strong advice to our readers is that, in dealing with any of the Wesfarmers subsidiaries, of which there are many – see their website – that they do the same. Obviously Wesfarmers have people standing by whose job it is to provide such help as may be necessary in such circumstances.
But there’s a problem for you and us – and that’s that for every organisation like Wesfarmers, there are 50 not like it. Telstra, for instance, according to the Wikipedia article on it, has 150 subsidiaries – can you imagine Telstra ever having people on standby whose job it is to provide assistance to anyone having problems with any of them? Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha! Ha ha ha!
And we’ve recently come to realise that Apple is the same. As we’ve reported elsewhere, one of our readers has had enormous problems in dealing with one of their stores – yet does Apple have people standing by to provide help? Not that we’ve been able to find.
We could go on and on and on!
The problem is that people standing by costs money, and people who are intelligent, experienced, knowledgable and helpful cost a lot of money. To us it’s a tussle – on the one hand people and organisations wanting to be successful while saving every cent they can, and on the other hand, people like you and us wanting, wherever possible, to only deal with people and organisations that have such people standing by.
Fortunately, separating “the sheep from the goats” is kindergarten stuff. The people and organisations who don’t have ordinary email addresses readily available are seldom worth bothering with, and with those who do, it’s a matter of sending emails to those most likely to be helpful, and going with the ones who provide the best responses.
As we’re always saying – The Bible says, “By their deeds ye shall know them;” these days it’s “By their emails ye shall know them.”
A comment or a question? Email us at info@questionsmisc.info.