Good Business Practices - Sprint!

I think it's either the Daily Show or the Colbert Report that has a segment called "Tip of the Hat/Wag of the Finger" to honor or shame someone because of extraordinarily good or poor service or effort. I'd like to give a great big Tip of the Hat for Sprint mobile phone services, specifically the store in the Country Club Mall next to See's Candies.

Somewhere in my travels this past week (and I think I know exactly where) I managed to lose the battery charger for my cell phone. I figure I probably had 30 minutes of conversation or 5 days of standby, but that meant that I was going to be without a cell phone by the end of this week unless I found or replaced the missing charger.

We got my phone about 2.5 years ago from this dealership and it's convenient so I dropped in there first. It was 10 minutes before closing time so I really expected to be told to come by tomorrow or have them try to tell me my phone was so old they couldn't help me. The salesman asked if he could borrow my phone for a couple of minutes then disappeared with it into his back room work area. About five minutes later he reappeared with my phone in one hand and a charger that looked identical to my old one in the other hand. Handing them both to me he said, "Here, this is on us."

Thinking I may have heard wrong, I asked, "You mean it's free? No charge?" He said, "Your phone is out of date so you're going to have a rough time finding a charger. But we have a couple dozen in the back that we won't need soon."

I left with a hearty, "Thanks, again!" and thinking that there is one store that knows how to increase brand and store loyalty.

Tip of the Hat to you, Sprint!