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December 05, 2006

Last week a woman came into the store, grabbed one of the "stay in touch" cards and walked off. Half an hour later she came in, handed me the card then literally ran out of the store. Her behaviour was really odd and when I looked at the card, I understood why.

The address and name portion had not been filled out but there was a note on the back that was pretty sarcarstic and said something along the lines about how nice it was for us to send out our catalog after the Tsnuami to show that we care. It also said that they had just seen Al Gores "An Inconvienient Truth" and they were so glad to see that our store kept all its lights on all night long wasting electricity.

There was no contact information and she didn't stick around to hear an answer to her concerns; she'd already made up her mind that the store was the problem. However, had she chosen to create a dialogue with anyone who worked there over what she thought was wrong (a store that didn't care about Tsnuami Victims or electricity) she would have learned that the store had donated hundreds of thousands to the Tsnumami victims as well as clothes and supplies. And she would have further learned that the halogen lights the store kept on all night were run by solar power and that, for the most part, the store was off the grid.

I understand her concerns and agree with her on trying to do something about them, but I didn't understand her tactics. I find so many people point fingers at the wrong places or wrong people and continue to do so because they never ask questions or listen to an answer that might not be what they want to hear. Had she really been concerned she would have asked the question and stuck around for the answer - but she wasn't open to actually changing something. She was open to attacking and feeling "right."

And that's almost as futile as not doing anything at all.