In the 1980s, a colleague I shared an office with got a call from his daughter. He had bought her a cheap compact disc player from audio retailer Richer Sounds in London to take to university and she had found that it didn’t work.
He suggested she take it into a Richer Sounds shop in Manchester, where she was studying. The staff there tested it and it worked. But she seemed uncertain, so they gave her a more expensive CD player instead.
“This is not complicated,” Julian Richer, the UK company’s founder, told the Financial Times last week, as he outlined his business philosophy. Treat your customers and employees well and the business will thrive.