Here’s a simple thought… if you have a business, spend your time making those customers happier, and making their lives easier, and your company will prosper. Now this is an ovesimplification, but in general this is pretty much true. And yet, so often this basic maxim is ignored. Let me be specific.

NBC has a move they’ve developed since the advent of DVRs where their official schedule goes anywhere from 1-5 minutes past the start of the hour. For example: if I wanted to tape 30 Rock last night on NBC which ended at 10:01pm and then tape Shark which started at 10:00pm on CBS I couldn’t do it. I had to choose between the two or sit there and manually record shark starting at 10:01. I think there may be a way on my Windows Media Center to start the show a minute late but even if it exists it was too much of a pain to configure. And as it happens I forgot to tape Shark (I think James Woods is cool).

Now when this practice started NBC was actually adding a couple of minutes to their standard 22 minute sitcoms and calling them “Super Size”. I felt it was annoying that their shows no longer conformed to the unofficial “on the hour” and “on the half hour” conventions of television, but at least there was a tiny bit of extra value. Now the shows are the same length but NBC is just messing with the guide information to lock you in to the programming on their network if you’re recording. I suppose it’s possible that there’s an error and that NBC has nobody at the network who actually uses new viewing technology to consume their own product. I suspect much more likely this is a cynical move to keep us locked in to whatever show they have in the 10:00pm 10:01pm slot. ER I think (which I find unwatchable). If was at NBC I’m not sure whether I’d rather cop to being shitty to customers or incompetent.

What message is NBC trying to give me? “Hey… we’re so appreciative that you watched 90 minutes of our sitcoms that we’re going to reward you by screwing you over if you want to watch something else when you’re done. I think it’s sad when companies lose their humanity. That’s what this is. Folks making decisions who’ve forgotten to treat customers (fellow human beings) with basic respect. Nothing less.

I recently gave into my three-year-old daughter’s overwhelming desire for Strawberry Shortcake DVDs and related toys and accessories. Our house has turned into Strawberry Central. Aside from our deep analysis of the entire Strawberry World (where are these kids’ parents?) I noticed one little tidbit as I popped in Adventures on Ice Cream Island for the 326th time. Each one of these videos comes with a really aggressive and menacing warning about piracy that you must watch before you actually get to the movie. I know there are countless discussions on treating customers of commercial meda as criminals. But this is Strawberry Shortcake. I don’t know why I would be more tolerant of this condescending lecture if it were on a Matrix DVD, but on Strawberry Shortcake I found it somehow more offensive. The fact that it’s unskippable just adds insult to injury. On my list of impossible charts I’d like to see is the one that shows the amount of Strawberry Shortcake piracy averted in dollar figures vs. the number of minutes wasted while Strawberry Shortcake viewers wait through this notice (also in dollar figures). Do these people not know that life is too short already?

Treating your own customers poorly is not limited to the world of intellectual property. Here’s a quote from one of my favorite articles of the past year:

“Bear in mind that being suspected of theft is actually a reason to leave the store, not a reason to stay, in much the same way that no one remains at a party after they have been insulted by the host.”

It may qualify as a misdemeanor compared to ridiculous delays inspecting your receipt on the way out of a store, but the practice of asking for my phone number when I’m buying something at Radio Shack or Toysrus makes me insane.

One final example is maybe my favorite. We buy Arrowhead brand water for our kids. They used to come in these little mini-sport bottles. The bottles were great as you could take the tops off, refill them with water or anything else and reuse them. Then one day the tops no longer came off. Sorry. Single use only. Even worse, this new “feature” of the bottles was advertised as a new child safety feature. I have no doubt that lawyers at Arrowhead had something to do with the change to the container. But I also am certain that nobody in the marketing department is crying over the fact that you need to throw the bottle away after one use. I’m sure there’s a way to design a bottle so that the top is removable, the bottle is reusable, and the cap is not swallowable. Not to be.

I can only hope one day that when confronted with the same sort of decision we’ll make the right one.