There are, but not many!

As one of Australia’s most trusted repairers, we attract great customers and have very few issues. As every business owner knows, however, you cannot please everyone, no matter how hard you try or how well you run a business.

Liquid Audio, in collaboration with several other Western Australian technicians and retailers, manages a (thankfully) short list of people who will not receive assistance from any of us. This protects the businesses in the group and minimises pain for us, the business owners.

The Blacklist

My customer database comprises well over 1000 individuals and I’ve only added around 10 people to the blacklist over a decade, so we enjoy excellent relationships with an overwhelming 99.99% majority.

It is a pleasure assisting normal, polite, respectful customers, but I choose to avoid aggressive, demanding, disrespectful, entitled, rude or otherwise unreasonable people. Unfortunately, there exists a small subset of people so unreasonable and problematic that attempts to work with them must be avoided entirely.

When these individuals cause problems for us, my colleagues and I apply a zero-tolerance policy:

Assistance is terminated, details are recorded and shared, and that person is blacklisted and perma-banned.

Rest assured, no reasonable human has been blacklisted nor will they be, but what does this mean for the few dozen individuals who have? Well, blacklisted individuals lose access to the most highly regarded technicians in Western Australia, forever and irrespective of which one they upset.

That’s a bad outcome for people who love hi-fi and care about its upkeep.

Admission

If you’re wondering how one makes it onto this list, in my case, do something like:

• Pound on my door like a loon for 30 minutes at 8 am on a Sunday in a pointless attempt to collect equipment when we are closed.
• Don’t pay your due-in-7-days account for a year, then forget to thank me for not selling your equipment and argue about the storage charges you’ve accrued.
• Accuse me (someone who’s been dedicated to helping the hi-fi community for more than a decade) of running a ‘scam’ after I’ve spent hours helping you, or of “stealing” 40-year-old, dead capacitors.
• Etc…

For anyone worried about being blacklisted, I can assure you that reasonable, respectful, folks have ZERO chance of this happening. Just be aware that the pathology leading to the examples above exists and we will protect ourselves from it wherever possible!