If you are doing business these days, you have to recognize that the world has changed. As consumers, we expect good customer service. If we don’t get it, we don’t just forgive and forget. We never buy from you again. We tell our friends not to buy from you. We tell the world not to buy from you.

That’s right. In the days of blogs and search engines, customers have the final word. That’s why you need to bend over backward to keep them happy. Because the happy customers stay quiet. It’s the angry customers who speak up, and deter others from doing business with you.

Take me for example. I just posted this message at a website:

HP is the worst. Only an idiot would buy from them.

They just burned me badly. It's too long of a story to tell but I will never buy from them again.

If you buy an HP Compaq Presario 2100, you are buying a complete lemon. If there were computer lemon laws, HP would be in big trouble.

If you are looking for reviews on HP laptops or, specifically, an HP Compaq Presario 2100 laptop notebook review, here it is. They suck. They break. Their service is terrible. They rip you off and don't apologize. They break all their promises.

Want to buy the best laptop? DO NOT BUY FROM HP.

You can find my post here: one of my HP sucks posts. In the months to come, I intend to post it everywhere, again and again and again. Call it a new hobby. (Feel free to post it yourself if you like, and link to this page using the instructions at the bottom of this page. The people united will never be defeated!)

As you can tell, I’m angry. I’m not irrationally angry. Anybody who hears my story agrees that HP mistreated me and that mine was a case study in poor customer service. The reality is that my HP laptop was a lemon and I not only had to pay for a lemon, I paid a lot of extra fees to fix the lemon, and what I got back from HP was, you guessed it, still a lemon. At a certain point, you just give up and say “I will never do business with HP again” and you move on to Dell and others that are better. I’ve only done that once before – with Citibank. I was screwed by Citibank, swore I’d never do business with them, and I never have. It’s been twenty years now.

Small businesses can learn from my having been screwed by Hewlett Packard. Treat your customers right. Don’t abuse them. Don’t break your promises. Recognize that a single dissatisfied customer might equate to tons of lost future business. By my calculations, I can shift over $500,000 in sales away from HP simply by not buying their computers myself for my organizations and by deterring others from buying.

Someday, maybe in March 2007, some idiot at HP corporate will be wondering why they aren’t hitting their numbers. Well, it’s because they screwed me back in August 2005. Me and probably hundreds (maybe thousands) of other dissatisfied HP customers. Cause and effect. It’s that simple.

So don’t make the HP mistakes. Do whatever it takes, within reason, to keep your customers happy. If you do, you’ll be hitting your numbers in March 2007 and for years to come.

p.s. you can link to this article from your website and support this cause by copying the following code and adding it to a page on your website:

<!-- HP Sucks Link --><b><a href="http://www.gaebler.com/hp-sucks.htm" title="HP Sucks">HP Sucks</a></b><br>HP laptops suck, according to this guy. He says don't buy HP laptops. It's an interesting read. <br><!-- HP Sucks Link -->

p.s.s. I didn’t start this. HP started this.