I have been receiving voicemail messages letting me know the warranty on my Audi has expired.  In the messages they further explained that if I wanted to renew the warranty I needed to call a specific phone number. When I called I was asked if I wanted to renew my warranty agreement. I asked, "What are the terms of my current agreement?"

I was informed that due to security measures they could not reveal that information to me. My response was, "Let me see if I understand this call. You called me to let me know the warranty on my car has expired and would I like to renew it? When I ask what the terms are of my current agreement you tell me you can not reveal this information to your apparent customer." The salesperson responded, "Yes, that is correct. Would you like to renew?" I asked the salesperson to tell me more.  With that the salesperson, who by the way was in no way associated with Audi, described a ton of benefits that included a hotel room, a rental car, food allowance and telephone calls. After listening to ten minutes of the benefits list I went comatose from information overload. I think they may even have offered a babysitter as long as my child was in the car at the time of the breakdown of my transmission, I was not using a cell phone, my child had eaten a hearty breakfast, the breakdown had not occurred on a weekday before 9:00am on a major highway or after 9:00am on a local road and my child was on the way to school.

The fee for this service was a deposit of $495.00 in addition to $285.00 per month for a period of five years. I asked the salesperson to send a contract to my e-mail address so I could review the details of the agreement. I was told that because my car was a 2006 they could not send me an e-mail.  The agreement had to be conducted by phone and they would be happy to take my credit card to start the renewal of my warranty. I politely thanked them for the fantastic offer but then declined.

What were they thinking? Yes, some of these scam artists are so enamored by their ability to come up with these scams they miss the obvious.

Yesterday I was in the supermarket buying some groceries.  There was a woman in front of me at the cash register who had a coupon for free iceberg lettuce.  When it came time for the clerk to ring up the discounts and coupons much to the surprise of the customer the free coupon was for a bag of cut iceberg lettuce and not for a whole head of iceberg lettuce which is what the customer had. The customer immediately said, "I don't want it.  I will get take it out of my bag." The customer also said, "I don't like iceberg lettuce anyway."

So here we have a customer who was willing to take something for free but didn't really like what she was getting.  What was the intention of the chain store when they wanted to give something away free?  To show appreciation, to give the lettuce away in hopes someone would now buy salad dressing, buy a bowl to put it in, or something else?

I couldn't help commenting to the cashier about the conversation I had overheard.  She smiled and said, "Nothing is free.  She probably paid for it in another way with another purchase."  Now we have a customer that walked away not from something free but what she had paid for in another way and didn't want to go through the effort of getting what she was really entitled to. Webster's Dictionary defines free as, "free of charge, without charge, at no cost, complimentary, on the house."

A dear friend, Moshe Rosenberg once told me, "If it is free I don't want it."  He tells a story of when he went to the store to buy batteries for his flashlight.  The clerk said to him, "If you buy this package you get the flashlight free."  He said, "No, I do not want it."  He told me that she looked at him like he had just fallen from the moon.

I was at lunch with two friends and told Moshe's story.  As we ordered lunch the waitress said, "We have free soup today."  I said, "No thank you.  I don't want it."  She said, "But it is free."  I said, "I know but no thank you."  She brought the soup anyway which was actually lightly colored water with two string beans at the bottom of the bowl.  Each string bean could not have been more than an inch long.  I could not contain my self and broke out laughing.  Now if someone really wanted the free soup they would have been sadly disappointed and the free soup would have done more damage than good.

When I first moved to Long Valley we received an envelope of free coupons.  One of the coupons was for a free haircut.  I called and made an appointment.  On the day of the haircut I was seated in a chair, my hair was cut in less than ten minutes and I was out the door without one word from the hair stylist.  My guess was that since they were doing it for free they needed to get me out of the chair so they could get a paying customer in the chair.  I gave a tip and left never to return.

Here are my closing comments.  As a business owner if you are giving something away free, think it through.  If you are a consumer and someone wants to give you something free, it probably doesn't have much value anyway.

This past week I went to Canastota, New York for my cousin Craig's funeral.  Canastota is a small village off the New York Thruway.  For many years its claim to fame was Rocky Gracciano's Restaurant and the Boxing Hall of Fame.  Over the past couple of years they gained a Best Western Hotel, a McDonalds and a large gas station.  As you travel past these monuments of today you enter Main Street where the speed limit is twenty-five miles per hour.  There are no apartment buildings and no large office buildings.  Everything is for the most part as it was for many years.  On the surface there appeared not much change had taken place in this sleepy village and yet there was a major transformational shift that took fifty-one years to take place.

After graduation from college Craig went back to Canastota and went into business with his long time friend Arny.  Craig's Kegs was a place to buy your beer and soda.  Craig also started a catering business that supported the local college in addition to private parties.  He also opened a delicatessen in another town and was quite the entrepreneur.

At Craig's funeral there was not one mention of his business accomplishments.  Not that they were not important, they were.  The focus was on something different.  The focus was on a transformation that had been taking place for fifty-one years which is how old Craig was when he passed away.

At the church the priest who conducted the service and Craig's best friend, Jim Stokes spoke about Craig's generosity, his caring, and his ability to share of himself in every way.  Craig was there for people when they where in most need.  They told how Craig brought boys into his business while they were still in school and then saw them off to start their own businesses and careers.  They spoke about his love for animals and all the charitable work he did to protect animals.  They also talked about how he would find boys in trouble with the law and help them back to the correct way to live their lives.

Stories will not be told about how many kegs of beer he sold or how his sandwiches were made.  Not about how many parties he catered but how he changed and influenced so many lives.  Here is a man that made a difference in people's lives that will live on from generation to generation. People will remember Craig Turrisi and how he changed people's lives.

Craig was a wealthy man.  I cannot speak of his financial wealth but of a different type of wealth.  The line at his funeral went on forever.  The line was made up of young children to older senior citizens.  Friends had come to say thank you for being in my life, thank you for demonstrating your values, principles and ethics, and for one last time, good-bye.

Craig's wealth is in the friends he has and the memories he left them with which will never be affected by the economy, Wall Street or any other world condition.

Now what is this is really about?  I believe we are in the financial mess we are in because of a breakdown in the values and principles of some companies and their leaders.  We need to run our businesses based on respect for the people we have working with us, our customers and our vendors.  We must be driven by principles of honesty and fair play. We need to go back to the highest of values and principles that must never be violated. We know how we got here, now the process must be reversed.  Greed must be replaced with generosity, dishonesty with honesty, and falsehood with truthfulness.