When I was a kid, Sears was a respected retailer. You could get anything at Sears: shoes, clothes, underwear, tires, toys, guns, radio parts, major and minor appliances, furnaces, musical instruments, lawnmowers, tools, anything. They didn’t make this stuff themselves; most of it was made for them and private-branded. But you could count on them to stand behind what they sold. If you bought Craftsman hand tools, for example, they were made in USA and guaranteed for life. Break one and they’d replace it, no questions asked. “Satisfaction Guaranteed” was written over the door when you walked in; you can still see it in older stores. The merchandise may not have been the absolute best, the fashions not the coolest, but the stuff was a solid value and you could rely on the store.
Now Sears is owned by KMart, Craftsman tools are mostly made in China like everything else, and the stores are struggling. Customer service is a thing of the past. Sears and KMart have both been run into the ground by penny-pinching upper management who won’t invest in the stores and won’t do what it takes to win customer loyalty in a tough retail market. They can’t compete at the low end of the market; Wal-Mart owns that. One step up from Wal-Mart is Target, and they can’t compete with that either. Sears has Target prices (or higher) and Wal-Mart service, and the stores look worse than either of them. KMart is struggling with this too, but it’s really hurting Sears more, because they have less of an identity now.
What makes me think of this is my recent experience with Sears product support.
I have three garage doors. The local Sears Hardware (another random Sears stab at a vague market) was closing down when I moved into this house, and I bought three Sears Craftsman garage door openers at clearance price. Not discontinued models, just on sale because the store was closing. The Sears door openers have been made by Chamberlain since the dawn of time, and they have a pretty good reputation for reliability. They worked just fine for three years and then, one day, they all lost their range simultaneously. I had been accustomed to opening the door from half a block away, but suddenly to get any door to open, I had to be right in front of it, and even then it was flaky. Every door and every transmitter was affected. I knew it must be a radio interference problem, but I didn’t know what to do to track it down. So I contacted Sears customer support for advice on how to do that. This was their reply:
We regret you are experiencing difficulties with your garage door openers. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide the information you have requested.
Our product support specialists are not certified technicians and do not have the expertise to answer technical repair question. We recommend that you review the troubleshooting guide of your owner’s manual.
Completely useless advice. “Go away, read the manual, don’t bother us.” Of course, I had already read the manual, and it says nothing about this problem. So I replied back, asking how I might contact a “certified technician” who actually would know the answers to perfectly reasonable technical questions. Their response:
We apologize for the difficulties you have encountered, searching for information for your garage door opener.
Sears offers a great website where you can ask expert technical questions, search for answers from other homeowners, find product manuals and trouble shooting guides. All of this and other great advice and ideas can be found at www.managemyhome.com!
Again, it’s “go find the answer for yourself, don’t ask us.” This one also suggests that I should ask other customers for help. I didn’t know that was their responsibility. You learn something new every day, I guess.
So Sears was useless for this. They sell the product, but they don’t feel any particular obligation to know anything about it. I took a flyer and called Chamberlain directly – and in ten minutes, I had the troubleshooting procedure I needed to solve the problem, from a helpful, well-informed Chamberlain tech who was glad to assist me even though my products were out of warranty and not Chamberlain-branded.
This raises the question, why bother involving Sears in this transaction next time? I could have bought Chamberlain-branded versions from Lowes or Home Depot, and I wouldn’t have wasted any time trying to get the kind of customer assistance that Sears is now too lazy to offer; I’d have called Chamberlain directly and been on the right track a lot quicker.
I wish this were an isolated incident, but it clearly isn’t. Chamberlain gets these calls so routinely that they have the Sears model numbers in their system for their support team. And in the larger picture, Sears has a widely known reputation now for carelessness in customer support and order fulfillment. People routinely have orders canceled randomly, things they’ve already paid for turning up out of stock, and basic customer service requirements unfulfilled. It’s an ordeal to shop with them. They still want to sell stuff, they just don’t want to do the things that make customers want to come back. So why go there?
I’ll bet that’s another question their support staff can’t answer.
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I forgot how to write
No, this isn’t an explanation for the long posting intervals, nor is it an excuse for deficiencies in the posts I do make. I can still string sentences together and express myself in type. And I can still make readable marks on paper with a pen or pencil.
But I seem to have at least partly lost the skill of handwriting in cursive.
When I was in early elementary school, I was a year younger than my classmates, and I wasn’t really physically ready when they switched us from printing to cursive. I was terrible at it; I didn’t have the coordination yet, and I never really learned it well. So all through grade school, I got poor grades in penmanship. My dad bought special pens and pencils designed to force the fingers into the correct grip, and made me copy pages out of books. This resulted in hand cramps, but no improvement.
Then, when I entered junior high school (that’s 7th grade, 11 years old) my very first elective class (and I do mean first; it was the first class of the day as well as the first one I was enrolled in) was drafting, AKA mechanical drawing.
Back in those days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had no computers. Drafting was done at slanted wooden tables, on thick paper with hard pencils sharpened to fine points, using compasses and protractors and triangular-profiled rulers. Not only did we have to draw accurately, we had to print accurately, using precise block capitals. The teacher, Mr. Arafat, was a petty tyrant who brooked no slackers. Misbehaving boys (it was all boys in those days; the girls were off learning how to cook and sew and type) were sentenced to hold a piece of paper against the chalkboard with their noses for the remainder of the class, or kneel on one of the triangular rulers, or similar punishment. The punishment for misshapen letters was also severe; each letter drawn wrong on an assignment earned you the task of drawing that letter correctly one hundred times, and if you drew it wrong any of those one hundred times, it didn’t count and you had to start over.
I came out of that class with the ability to print in neat, regular block capitals.
We all did, but most of the boys swiftly forgot it. I didn’t, though, because finally I had a way to write legibly for the first time since they had taken away our telephone-pole-sized beginner pencils in the third grade and handed out the Palmer cursive workbooks. I abandoned the difficult and seemingly pointless cursive writing, and switched to block capitals, using smaller and larger versions of the same letter to indicate capitalization. Occasionally I would encounter a teacher who would insist on cursive, but after trying to decipher a few assignments written in my illegible scrawling, they would quietly drop that requirement and I would revert to block caps again.
Thirty-seven years have gone by, and I still write that way. People comment to me on my distinctive handwriting. “You must be an architect.” “Are you an engineer?” Most guys get to adulthood with a mishmash of cursive and printing; thanks to Mr. Arafat and his classroom Napoleon complex, my handwriting is regular and even and ultra-legible. Over the years I rationalized it to myself. Some of the rationalizations are good questions, actually; for instance, why do we need to teach children four different ways of making every letter? I’ll return to that question shortly.
This morning in the shower I was doodling on the fogged up glass, and I started writing random words in cursive with my finger – and I realized I have forgotten how. Not completely; I still know how to make the letters (though I wouldn’t bet my life on the capital Q or K being right). But I have forgotten enough that I’m not sure how to join the letters any more. How do you join a lowercase b and a to write banana? I tried it a couple of different ways and it never looked quite right, or felt right. How do you make the double m in summer? It looked like a child’s doodle of an inchworm when I got done with it. I felt foolish, but then I realized, I forgot this skill because I don’t need it, just like I no longer remember how to configure upper memory management in 16-bit operating systems. It’s an obsolete skill.
For years I have been telling myself that cursive was unnecessary. I made that argument to defend my own decision. But nowadays I wonder if that’s become the right choice for everyone, not just for me. Why waste time teaching children how to write letters four different ways when most of them will never hand-write a letter in their lives? I can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter in longhand. It used to be that a handwritten letter was a sign of care and personal attention. Now it marks the sender as amateurish and technologically backward or deprived. Everyone types and emails and texts; increasingly you don’t even need to print to paper any more. I don’t miss it, and I’m not used to it; if I have to hand-write more than a few sentences, my hand cramps. Who needs that? Typing’s faster and clearer and easier to send to its destination. Handwriting now is mainly for filling out the occasional form, writing post-it notes, and labeling objects. Why do we need cursive for that?
Is it time to get rid of cursive? Was I ahead of my time? Or is there still a use for it?