September 25, 2009

Have a pleasent day

Ever feel like you're getting a new present when you're really just enjoying something you already owned? That's what it feels like when I pick up my shirts from my dry cleaners.

My whole life I was used to getting my clean clothing back on a hanger. A hanger! Can you believe it? How passé.

Now my shirt comes nicely folded, buttoned, wrapped and I even get those cardboard inserts to make everything stay put. But most importantly, I get a personal greeting from the dry cleaning management:

"Have a pleasent day."

Yes, you read it right the first time. Pleasent. Not pleasant.

We've all seen some funny misspelled words. This probably isn't very high on my list of "all time bests". But it's more annoying than most precisely because it's such a small, silly mistake that could have been solved by 10 seconds of investigative research.

The funny signs we see are the result of sheer stupidity and ignorance. But this misspelled word comes from an otherwise smart company. They offer a great service, have good prices, are centrally located, and get me my clothes back quickly and squeaky clean. And that's why it's so frustrating to see this blunder.

They should have known better than to print a million of these things without running spell check first.

Normally something small like this is enough to deter me from going back to a store. Any slight whiff of a lack of professionalism and I'm gone. I'm crazy like that.

But despite being annoyed, I still bring my clothes here. Turns out that bad/stupid/silly marketing material doesn't always affect consumer decision. Sometimes companies have enough good things going for them that we can overlook the mistakes. This is one of those cases.

What do you think?

2 comments:

Yoav, Tali and Karen Kaufman said...

I don't know, sometimes I dislike those generic comments that people tack on to the end of conversations (or in this case to a dry cleaned shirt) like "take care" or "have a good one" or "have a nice day". I guess it's not so much the comments that I dislike, but the fact that because they have become so over used, they seem to have lost any and all genuine connection to their true meaning.

negevwriting said...

I'm with you on that. But I think this is different because you don't really expect it as much. It's not every day that you get greetings attached to your shirt collar! It's cute, a little strange, and slightly out of the ordinary. Perhaps a bit cliche, yes, but cute.

All the best

:-)