Wills and Won’ts

Mike and I often think about what we want Pickle of the Month to be. We often say, “we will never . . .” or “we have to . . .” when painting the picture of our future. Because I like lists, I’ve decided to create a list of things we will do, and things we won’t do.

Things We Will Do

1. Make our site as fast as possible
2. Make our site as simple as possible. Fast and simple wins the race. We will look to sites like Google, BustedTees, and Amazon for inspiration.
3. Strive every day to be remarkable to our Pips. Not our peeps, our Pips. Hopefully you’re a Pip.
4. Offer you a bug-free experience. No one likes a site that crashes.
5. Not take ourselves too seriously. We’re selling pickles here people, this has to be funny.
6. Be professional. While we always want to remain goofy, we will look and act like an established company you can trust.
7. Respond to you questions quickly and thoughtfully. Sending an email to a Info@BigCompanyWhoDoesNotRespond.com and getting no reply stinks. We will respond. Quickly. Thoughtfully.
8. Give you as much relevant information as possible. Order tracking. Pickle reviews. Account history. Messages from friends you have given pickles too.
9. Provide funny, irreverent information. A pickle map, showing the most popular places for Pickle of the Month. A pickles-shipped counter.
10. Ship you a product we are proud of. Why be in business if you’re not proud of the service you offer?

Things We Won’t Do

1. Have pop-up ads. Even more so, we won’t have any sort of annoying advertising. I hate Hotmail. I love Gmail. Both sell advertising, but Hotmail’s annoys me to no end, while Gmail’s makes me laugh (try emailing about Tony Robbins sometime and see what kinds of ads pop up).
2. Sell your information. Never. Never ever. Never ever ever. You have permission to come punch me in the groin if we do this.
3. Bombard you with emails. In fact, we only ever want to email you when ask us to, never otherwise. Nothing turns me off faster to a company than annoying emails.
   Have a confusing site. Our goal is to be as utterly simple and user-friendly as possible.
4. Want to check our order status? You should be able to do it in one or two clicks. Want to order some pickles? Ditto.
5. Be annoying. No music on our site. No ads that cover up content and make you click through them.
6. Be everything to everyone. To be remarkable to our Pips, we have to ignore customer groups that would detract from that, like my Grandma. While she’s a sweet lady, she’s really not in the market for a Pickle of the Month club and crazy t-shirts. Trying to please her would take away from offering our Pips a service they rave about (sorry Grandma).
7. Lie to you, or try to deceive you in any way.
8. Be raunchy or tasteless. While Pickle of the Month lends itself well to selling tasteless stuff (I’ll leave examples to your imagination), we won’t do it. After all, our moms read this site and no doubt will tell their friends about it.

This is not a complete list by any means, but it’s a start.