Corporate Responsibility and Consumer Relations: What the Big Boys Might Learn from Small Business (with a Catholic Application)

I blogged back in February about the dismissive response I received from a major chain of stores, Target, when I sought to provide them with some feedback early this year about purchasing patterns in their local store.  As my February posting notes, I think it's important for us as citizens and consumers to try to keep holding the feet of corporations to the fire, no matter how big they are. It's important, it seems to me, that we exercise our rights as consumers by insisting that corporations listen and respond to us, and provide accurate information about their marketing practices when we request it.

I haven't been back to Target after my shoddy treatment by them earlier this year.  I don't intend to return to them after the way they handled my valid request for information in the first part of the year.

Meanwhile, the big boys could learn a lot from some of the smaller players in the marketplace.  What follows is a response I just got from an email I sent to a local food store in the Napa Valley in California, following a negative experience Steve and I had there on our trip to California towards the end of June.

The response came back within hours after I had emailed my feedback to the store.  One of its owners writes,

Thank you for your feedback. We are very grateful that you would take the time to let us know that one of our team members did not meet your expectations. Obviously he fell far below our standards. As far as we are concerned there is never an acceptable excuse for the attitude you described. Please be assured that we will take the appropriate steps to ensure this type of situation is not repeated. Our sincere apologies that our team member did not help contribute to, what otherwise appears to have been, a wonderful vacation. Thank you again for your input, we can not fix what we do not know is broken.

The big corporations, who often seem to think themselves above the hoi polloi whose dollars keep their business running, could learn a great deal from the customer-service savvy of this small business owner, whose store I may never again visit (since I don't know when I'll ever be in that part of California again), but who nonetheless took my feedback seriously, acted on it, and thanked me for it.

In contrast to Target, which shunted my questions hither and yon and then followed them with an insulting phone call to me, in which one of their managerial dunces informed me that they simply can't be bothered with providing information to customers about their rationale for stocking this product and not stocking that one . . . . 

Could one of the problems with the Catholic church right now be that it imagines it is too big too fail, that it does not need to demonstrate accountability to its "customers," since management knows it all and we little folks couldn't possibly have an opinion that counts?  The Catholic church, is after all, a big corporation and a huge business.  And what appalls many of us most of all about its leaders' behavior at this point in history is that this behavior is modeled far more on the ruthless practices of business elites run amok, than on the gospels.