Promote Your Town with Service, not Slogans

The open road brought Mr. and Mrs. Madville Times to Canton yesterday, where we encountered polar opposites in terms of customer service that illustrated how community marketing is everyone's responsibility.

As we headed toward Canton, our brakes started to make an awful grinding sound. Knowing only enough mechanicry to recognize the sound as a bad sign, we pulled into a service station east of downtown, next to the Pop'n'Go video store. A mechanic with a shaved head toiled away at a wheelless car up on the big jack. I explained the problem and asked if the gentleman could take a look.

"I'm kind of busy," he said unenthusiastically.

"I can see that," I tried to say with sympathy for the working man. "Got anyone else who might take a look, tell us whether we can make it home?"

The mechanic turned from his work and disappeared to another service bay, where I assume a co-worker or two might have been working. A minute or two passed, and I watched Mrs. Madville Times across the parking lot wrangle the baby free of a diaper that had served its purpose.

The mechanic came back. "Nope. Can't do it."

Now call me a liberal with an entitlement mindset, but I thought that, faced with a family from out of town with brake problems, a typical mechanic might be a little more helpful. I didn't expect him to drop everything at put us at the head of the line, but even if he was booked solid for the day, a neighborly citizen might have taken a glance at the brakes and suggest whether the problem was minor or catastrophic. In a small town, one mechanic probably knows most or all of the others and could recommend the shop down the street (without any economic loss, since he's already got all the business he can handle). Even a greedy capitalist would have recognized the out-of-town plates and taken advantage of the situation to double his price, and given a choice between a free-market fleecing and complete brake failure at the next busy intersection, I'd take the fleecing.

But maybe this wasn't blatant unhelpfulness, just Midwestern taciturnity. I ventured the next logical question: "Know anyone else in town who might be able to take a look at the brakes today?"

"Yeah, there's some around." No, this wasn't just taciturnity.

"Is there a Ford dealership in town?" I asked.

"You can try Sioux Falls."

Now right there we have a failure of a local business to be a team player in marketing the town. If a stranger rolls into town and is looking to do business, even if you yourself can't do that business, you make every suggestion you can to try keeping that business in town. You don't mention Sioux Falls unless there is absolutely no way your local businesses can meet that need, as would be the case if I had been looking for a bookstore in Canton (we found the antique shops, but no apparent bookstore -- I hope we didn't miss it!).

Our treatment at this service station didn't particularly incline us to come back for the Canton Good Samaritan 45th Anniversary Celebration coming up on August 26th. The guys there evidently haven't been privy to the development of th "Plan Canton" report, which calls for all the usual Chamber-of-Commerce-type actions, like "Promote & Market Community." Better send a memo to this service station....

Fortunately, we found another station that could get the job done. We went in the video store and asked the lady behind the counter for some suggestions. She recommended Jerry's Pit Stop, but no one answered the phone (Jerry must have been making his own pit stop). Then the ladt at the counter recommended Track-Side Service. We called. A woman answered. I explained the problem and asked if we could get in today for an inspection.

"We can do that." Ding ding ding! Good answer!

We drove over -- slowly! -- and ground to one more halt in front of a shady shop (no, really, shady, as in having lots of trees providing pleasant shade on a sunny August day). A woman came from across the street, asked for our keys, and drove our car straight into the shop. We sat in inside for a few minutes. The woman and her husband (well, they could have been mere live-in lovers, but the Focus on the Family magazine on the table suggested we would not find such adventurous arrangements among these good folks) went back and forth from the shop to the office computer, checking parts, while their curly-haired son downloaded MP3s on the other office computer and treated us to some of his guitar-playing (one year of self-taught practice, and he's not bad).

In ten minutes, the woman had a diagnosis (rotors and pads were shot), a price ($223), and a time: done by noon. She said this at 11:20.

Pleased to find such a can-do spirit, we left the car in the woman's capable hands and left to tour the city on foot. We could have come back for the car at noon -- the woman called at 12:00 on the dot to say the brakes were fixed -- but we decided to have a leisurely lunch at the Garden of Eat'n (another Canton business worth visiting!). We returned after 1:00 to find shiny new rotors and brake pads with actual pad.

Now I don't know what Track-Side Service's slogan is. They may not even have one. But when you do service right, you don't need a slogan for people to remember and recommend you. The same applies for for any business, school or town. Thank you, Track-Side Service, for getting the job done and for holding up your end of making Canton look good.