Your Customers (and your Mother) Always Know

Over the years, I have been amazed at the number of businesses that think they can "get away" with something with their customers. Either by lowering product standards, charging for useless features, making it more difficult to get customer service, or just flat out lying to them.

So, I will explain why this is so detrimental with a short little story about a mother and her son and the son's female roommate. It involves the eternal knowledge and wisdom of mothers, and if you try to “pull something over their eyes” they have a way of using your own words to pry the truth out...just like your customers.

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A Mother comes to visit her son for dinner. He lives with a female roommate.

During the course of the meal, his mother couldn't help but notice how pretty her son's roommate is.

Over the course of the evening, while watching the two interact, she started to wonder if there was more between her son and his roommate than met the eye.

Reading his mom's thoughts, her son volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you, we are just roommates.''

About a week later, the young lady came to the son saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find the silver sugar bowl. You don't suppose she took it, do you?"

"Well, I doubt it, but I'll email her, just to be sure." So he sat down and wrote an email:

Dear Mom,

I hope all is well and thanks for your visit! I have a question…we are missing our sugar bowl…and I'm not saying that you "did" take the sugar bowl from my house; I'm not saying that you "did not" take it; but the fact remains that it has been missing ever since you were here for dinner.

Love, Your son

The next day, he received a response email from his Mother which read:

Dear Son,

Thank you for your email…and I have an answer to your inquiry…I'm not saying that you "do" sleep with her, and I'm not saying that you "do not" sleep with her; but the fact remains that if she was sleeping in her OWN bed, she would have found the sugar bowl by now.

Love, your Mother

Moral of the Story: You mother always knows, so do not even try to lie to her…

If more companies would remember that they could not fool their mother's either, I think they would think twice before going down that slippery slope to mediocrity.

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