There are, but not many.

Liquid Audio, in collaboration with a select group of other professional technicians and retailers, manages a list of people who, for very good reasons, will not be assisted by any of us.

We add to this shared list as needed. I’ve added one new name in each of 2022, 2023 and 2024. That said, we enjoy fantastic relationships with 99.9% of our customers so the list is short and new additions are extremely rare.

Respect

Liquid Audio is one of Australia’s most trusted repairers, something I’m very proud of. We attract almost exclusively great customers, but as every business owner knows, you cannot please everyone, no matter how well you run a business. You cannot filter all the bad eggs. Some will inevitably slip through the net.

I prefer not to assist aggressive, entitled, unreasonable, rude, disrespectful, boundary-pushing individuals who don’t respect things like integrity, personal space and operating hours for example.

Furthermore, there exists a small subset of people so unreasonable, problematic and difficult that attempts to work with them must be avoided at all costs, even if losses must be incurred to get rid of them.

The Blacklist

For these individuals, there is a price to pay beyond irritating or alienating most they come in contact with. My colleagues and I have a simple zero-tolerance policy for dealing with people like this, no apologies:

If someone does the wrong thing and upsets any one of us, assistance is terminated, details are recorded and shared, and that person is blacklisted and permanently banned from our network.

Rest assured, no decent, stable, reasonable human has ever been blacklisted, nor will they be.

But what does this mean for the few dozen individuals who have been? Well, blacklisted individuals will not receive assistance from any of Western Australia’s best technicians. Black-listed folks lose access to the best repairers, no matter which one they upset, forever.

This severely impacts anyone owning decent hi-fi equipment and wanting it to receive the best and most professional attention, so I think the message is clear.

Moral

The moral of the story, for those on the list or anyone who even suspects they might be unreasonable, rude, or ill-intentioned is clear: Do better, make changes and learn how to interact respectfully with people. Take courses, get help, behave reasonably, politely, respectfully, display gratitude to those who help you, etc, etc.

Can you be un-blacklisted..? Good question, I don’t know, I need to ask The Speaker Doctor, but it’s never happened!