Once, I had bought a CD that could not play. I took it back to the shop and Kim gave me a new one right away. She did not ask any questions, she did not demand proof of my purchase, she did not test the CD to find out if, indeed, it was faulty.

When I took the replacement CD home, it still could not play. I discovered then that the fault was with my CD player, nothing wrong with the disc itself.

Another time, I wanted to buy a pair of loudspeaker cables. One of the staff asked about my hifi equipment and said that the cable would probably not match my equipment. He advised me NOT to buy. I was pleasantly shocked.

In spite of the shop providing such good service, however, I never went there often. More than once, I had gone there to listen to some CDs, and then bought the same titles elsewhere for maybe $1 less.

After a while, it became evident that Hi Fi Corner was not doing too well. The crowds had thinned. Joe’s lengthy and chatty classified ads began to shrink, from about 40 cm to 30, 20, 12....

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Bargains

Did I go down to lend my support to this wonderful store? No. I waited. I waited for its “closing down sale” so that I could pick up some bargains.

Hi Fi Corner did close. But it did not hold any closing down sales. Somebody else did. Shortly after, another store advertised CDs for sale at special prices. It had bought Joe’s stocks at an auction, a forced sale brought on by his creditors.

This time, there was no coffee, no testing of CDs, no chairs to sit on. Instead, I had to squat on the floor to rummage through boxes and boxes of CDs. The task gave me a headache and I ended up buying only 1 or 2 pieces.

I was disappointed. As I reflected on his store’s closure, however, I realised that I had been a most ungrateful, unsupportive customer. I had waited like a vulture for my prey to die, so that I could swoop down and eat my fill.

I am quite sure that many others were like me, caring only about getting the best deals for ourselves, not sparing any thought for the livelihood of a businessman who sought to give his best. Our self-centred attitudes contributed to Joe’s financial collapse.

It is now about seven years later and I find myself somewhat in Joe’s shoes. I now own a hifi store with some CDs, but my store is tiny compared with Joe’s.

Like Joe, I strive to offer good service. For example, I not only allow but I actually encourage my customers to do home trials on hifi equipment before they decide to buy.

I try to greet every customer with a smile (although there have been days when I feel lousy and I don’t.) I give customers the best advice that I can offer, even if that means telling them to buy something cheaper or not to buy.

If you read through some of the hifi chat groups on the internet, you will find comments about me being friendly, helpful and so on.

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Ungrateful

But what do I get? Like Joe, a bunch of mostly ungrateful customers who care only about getting the best deals for themselves. For example:

I get customers who spend more than an hour testing out over a dozen CDs and not buying a single piece.

Once, a customer asked me to help him find about 15 CDs. I was too trusting not to have taken a deposit from him. He never came back.

I have a customer who showed great interest in my loudspeakers. Once, he brought a whole stack of CDs and auditioned my speakers for nearly four hours. In the end, he bought a different brand of loudspeakers from another shop because the other brand was on special offer. He even came back to tell me, “But I still like your speakers better.”

Another customer also showed great interest in the same pair of loudspeakers. After a few rounds of auditioning, he e-mailed the manufacturer in Germany to ask if he could buy direct at wholesale price.

Once, a customer loaned a set of very expensive hifi cables for a home trial. A week later, the telephone number he gave me went dead. I wrote off the cables as a loss until about three months later, when he finally contacted me to say, “Sorry I was busy moving house.” Thankfully, he did return the cables. Unthankfully, he did not buy.

More than once, I have regular customers borrow hifi cables and other items for home trial. When I call them a week or two later to find out what they thought of the items, they say, “Oh, I haven’t tried them yet.”

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Bargain

And so on and so on.

There are countless customers who bargain to ridiculous levels, insisting that I sell to them at close to cost price, or even below cost.

“No need to earn so much,” they would tell me. Now, with the recession, they have found another excuse: “Times are hard”.

Three of these bargainers I find hard to forget.

One insisted on a discount of close to 40 percent because “Nang nang Teo Chew nang” meaning “we are both of the same Teochew dialect group”. I wanted to hurl Teochew obscenities at him.

Another accused me several times of quoting him a low price on one day and a much higher price the next day, until I lost my temper and shouted at him, saying I did not want his business if he felt that I was trying to cheat him.

Finally, he said that in his job as a marketing executive, he sometimes used “certain tactics of negotiation”. Is this what they teach at business school?

Then there was a customer who, after bargaining like mad and squeezing the last possible discount out of me, tried to preach to me about “The Lord”.

Geez!