I live in Barcelona and for the first time in my life, that means I’m drinking bottled water at home.
The Barcelona tap water looks and tastes like it was used to wipe down a chalkboard before being pumped to your house.
I drank the tap water for the first few months after moving here. I kept asking myself, “Why am I always thirsty?”
Then some friends came to stay with me for a few weeks. They took a sip of the tap water. They refused to have a second sip. They bought bottled water instead.
I drank the bottled water while they were here. And when they left, I found I couldn’t go back to the tap.
My thirst was finally cured. But now I have a new problem. I regularly have to go and buy the water, and schlep it back home.
That’s what I did last night after my evening walk. I walked to the nearest supermarket, about 200 yards away, bought a large 6-pack of bottled water, and schlepped it home.
As I was carrying it, I was thinking about how — bear with me here, I’m getting to a point — there’s a convenience store right in my building. A guy named Malik runs it. The total distance from Malik’s convenience store to my front door is 4 yards, not 200.
And yet, I haven’t shopped at Malik’s for almost a year now. I refuse.
The question is why. I’ve actually written about this before:
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Malik doesn’t ever ring up what you’re buying. He never gives you a receipt.
Instead, he eyeballs the stuff you’re holding in your hands — a bottle of water, two cans of beer — and tells you the total. 7 euro 65 cents. Tomorrow, the same basket of stuff might cost 6 euro 30. Or 9 euro 15.
Sometimes, Malik senses he has overcharged you. And without looking at you directly, he senses whether you feel so too. If he ever thinks he’s gone too far, he doesn’t lower the price. Instead, he throws in something extra — a single-serve cookie, a lollypop, a piece of bubble gum. Lately it’s been happening a lot.
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At first, this behavior was curious. Then cute. Then annoying. I stopped going.
I could afford the extra euro or two. I would even gladly pay for the convenience not to have to schlep my bottled water home from a block away. But the random price increases and drops, depending on Malik’s whims and how rich I was looking that day, drove me away. They made me feel gullible and stupid.
The point here is twofold:
First, I’d like to suggest you don’t make your customers feel gullible and stupid. That might seem perfectly clear — much clearer than Barcelona’s tap water. And yet, how many businesses engage in practices that make it seem their customers must be gullible and stupid? Stuff like:
– Transparently fake reasons why (“Our warehouse manager just phoned me in a panic and…”)
– One-time-only offers that really aren’t
– Price increases and drops based on a whim or on momentary greed, rather than strategy
Malik’s store still survives without my patronage. I see him sitting there all day long, looking exhausted and unhealthy. I would gladly pay him the top price he ever charged me for the bottled water, if I only didn’t feel stupid and gullible doing so.
And that brings me to the second point of the story above. But I will talk about that tomorrow, because one point a day is my new limit.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to write daily emails that allow you to 1) build trust rather than resentment and 2) charge high prices that people happily pay, then you might like my Simple Money Emails course. For more information: