Ruining a good thing by trying too hard

I remember back in elementary school we had an assignment to draw a map of a fictional city. I worked hard on mine, and it was great! However, I couldn’t leave well enough alone so I kept adding more and more stuff to it until it was a huge mess. Trying too hard created a worse outcome.

I just saw a similar thing happen with a local car dealership. While some dealers were a disaster to try to work with, some were great and we simply couldn’t come to an agreement. One of those was Cobb County Toyota.

I emailed with a few folks there to try to make a deal, and it didn’t work out. They were prompt, friendly, and helpful, and while I didn’t buy a car from them this time, they left a favorable impression on me. Then they spammed me.

The email just I got was from a mailing list of theirs; it was impersonal, unhelpful, and unrequested. It was spam. In the footer of the email they explained why:

As you likely can see, there are two glaring problems here:

• I’m on their email list because I “requested information from them“. That’s not a good enough reason.
• “…we do not monitor replies to it“. In other words “we’re going to spam you with email that you didn’t request, but we don’t have time to listen to your questions about it“. Gross. Car dealers (and banks, often?) tend to be the worst about doing this.

This raises a major problem. This dealership, which I held in relatively high favor, now has me questioning everything. If they’re willing to be a little shady here, what else are they shady about? Misleading pricing? Bogus upsells? I have no idea, but they absolutely no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.

In the Bible, Jesus said it perfectly in Luke 16:10:

“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much.”

They were dishonest with very little, so will they also be dishonest with much? As I shared a few days ago, you either have integrity or you don’t, and now we know where they stand. They had a good thing, and then they tried to hard to make even more out of it and it all fell apart.

The little things that you do matter. Always do them right so that these kinds of questions never surface.