Contact:
Larry Williams
(480) 726-0001
larry@unitedfibers.com

Education Center at United Fibers in Chandler, Arizona

CHANDLER, Ariz. — United Fibers, a nationally recognized leader in municipal recycling and manufacturing, will unveil its new recycling education center next week to help celebrate America Recycles Day.

The $200,000 “green” classroom will help students in the Chandler and Kyrene school districts, along with many others, to better understand what happens once the blue recycling bins are picked up outside their homes.

“We want to help create a better understanding, especially with our children, about recycling, how it works and why it is so critically important,’’ said United Fibers Partner Mike Kean. “We don’t just work in this community. We are part of this community. That’s why we are so excited to open this education center.”

Sitting about 30 feet above the ground, the education center offers a birds-eye view of the many conveyor belts, employees, sorting machines and huge piles of recycling materials below.

The center will stimulate visual and interactive learning, as students observe the process below while watching a 15-minute educational video. But the center also will inspire, from a graphic wrap that turns the large room into a wooded forest with bamboo flooring under the students’ feet. Insulation used in the room comes from recycled materials recovered from surrounding communities in Arizona. Even the benches inside tell a story of rebirth – the benches were made from tornado-damaged trees lost earlier this year in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

“Chandler residents can read the newspaper on a Monday and within days the paper can be recycled here and turned into sustainable insulation for someone’s home,” Kean said. “This facility’s closed-loop recycling is a great and unique story that more people need to hear. We believe this education center will assist in expanding this message.”

For more information visit www.unitedfibers.com

WHAT: United Fibers opens its recycling education center that sits in the heart of a recycling facility. The center incorporates green building materials and products.

WHERE: United Fibers, 390 East Ray Road, Chandler, Ariz.

WHEN: Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011, from 3:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Chandler Mayor Jay Tibshraeny will lead a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 4 p.m.
NOTE: The news media is welcome anytime Tuesday between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

VISUALS: City and community leaders including the Chandler mayor will walk a green carpet. Area children will be on hand to learn about the new green classroom. The plant will be operating all day, creating photo and B-roll opportunities for America Recycles Day.
The center will be filled with massive piles of recycling materials waiting to be sorted.
Green dessert (lime sherbet) will be served.

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I guess expecting them to function right out of the box was our mistake.

This one would probably fall between bad and ugly.

My wife and I bought a new set of appliances for our kitchen. The usual. Refrigerator, dishwasher, microwave and gas range.

We bought them from a local store wanting to help the smaller business owner instead of the big box stores. We did a lot of research and a lot of shopping.

Our decision came down to purchasing General Electric products.

So we anxiously awaited their arrival a couple weeks ago after the new granite countertops had been installed.

Delivery guy shows up on time and installs everything. Looks good. Happy wife. Happy life.

That night my wife is trying out the gas range and learns that the 8,9and the 0 on the keypad are not working.  Wouldn’t you know it, she wanted to heat the oven up to 400 degrees but 411 or or 377 would have to do.

Then we load the dishwasher up and fill the ‘rinse agent’ holder up with Jet Dry. Five minutes later we have Jet Dry on our hard wood floors. Seems like the Jet dry holder didn’t hold.

So on Monday morning I call GE and speak with a woman who is there to help me according to her introduction. This I would learn would only be the first person I spoke to because she didn’t know about dishwashers. So after talking to woman #1 for 5 minutes, I got to repeat the entire story to another woman. I told her about the oven and then spent ten minutes trying to explain to her where the leak in the dishwasher was coming from and what we had done…(more on that later).

Good news, we can have someone out on Wednesday morning. I actually thought that two days was not too bad in the grand scheme of things. Of course he will be there between 8am & noon so I got to schedule me day around that.

About 10:00am customer service calls and gives me a recorded message telling me that the repairman is en route to my home for the appointment. Ten minutes later the doorbell rings.

Scot is here to fix my problems…That is what he tells me. Nice guy. Identifies the dishwasher problem and tells me he has the part in the truck to fix that. Replaces the entire plastic container that hold the soap and the rinse agent. The original part, which he shows me, it is missing an entire corner of this plastic housing. Broken off somewhere. In any case, replaced and problem solved.

The digital display on my gas range however was not so lucky. Technician Scot identified the problem by pressing the buttons and telling me that I needed a new digital display component. No problem. I’ll order it and it will be sent Fed Ex. I’ll be back here next Wednesday. You do not have to do a thing.

Man this is sounding good. Don’t have to call and make an appointment, I am on his radar screen.

Later that day, I come home and I see a delivery an my doorstep. It says GE on it. Holy crap Batman. The guy is here at 11:00am and the parts show up by 5:00pm. That is sure some efficient system that GE has. American know how…company pride…customer service look out they are kicking butt and taking names…

Oh did I mention that the parts that were shipped were for the dishwasher…Oh and they were the wrong parts…Oh they came after the repairman was here. Oh well I guess no butts were kicked and no names were taken.

Flash forward to Friday. Another delivery shows up at the door. This was my electronic display.

Flash forward to Wednesday. So here I am working in the office. 8am-12pm is my time frame for Scot to show up and get the stove working. 8am not Scot, 9am no Scot, 10am no Scot, 11am no Scot.

Finally, I thinking that Scot telling me last week that I wouldn’t have to do a think was too good to be true…I know you won’t believe it, but it was too good to be true.

12:00pm I call GE’s 1-800 number. After making my way through the phone landmine called customer service I get Connie on the phone. Explain to her the issue. She looks at her screen and tells me that I have an appointment on Saturday to get it fixed. I very calmly explain to Connie that I have plans for Saturday. Made arrangements to be home today because that is what Scot told me. She then says that she will try to get to dispatch and see about getting someone out today. Can you please hold. It may take a few minutes. Sure Connie, thanks for your help.

10 minutes pass so I know that Connie is working hard for me. OK here she comes to give me the good news…dialtone. We have been disconnected. Surely Connie will call back since the automated phone tree asked me for my phone number and Connie confirmed my number….2 minutes…5 minutes…10 minutes…damn it Connie isn’t calling is she?

So I get to go back into the start of the system again….Press 1….Press 3….Press2…..let me connect you to an agent…..Music….all agents are helping other customers your wait will be approximately 3 minutes.

Hello this is Nina can I get your phone number…Are you freakin’ kidding me. So I explain to Nina that I was disconnected. She tells me that I will have someone there today between 1:00pm-5:00pm. I ask Nina why Connie didn’t call back and she explains that this is only an inbound call center,they cannot make outbound calls. To say my head exploded is an understatement. General Electric… Jet engines, multi-billion dollar company…technology leader, their call center cannot dial out. Classic.

So doorbell rings at about 1:30pm. Roy is here to fix my problems. So I let Roy in, explain to him the issue. Give him the parts that were sent and head to my office to empty my inbox.

At least it looks nice...

15 minutes later, Roy tells me that after replacing the component pieces we are back to the say place. It has to be the ribbon cable that connects the pieces together. That is the only common thing. So Roy I’m sure that you have the ribbon in your truck right…Nope that will have to be overnighted, but it is after 12:00pm so it won’t get here until Friday, but I can’t guarantee what time…Monday is a holiday…So Roy and I have a date a week from today to replace the ribbon cable connector.

Roy started leaving and I said here are the parts that you just replaced. They still should work according to your diagnosis. You can just throw those away. We can’t use them

This to me is just a classic example of a big company tripping over themselves time and time again. Two brand new appliances out of four that don’t work right from the get go. Three phone calls(so far) to customer service…Three repairman visits(so far) calls…Three pieces of shipping…Wasted parts. Hello landfill here we come.

Come on General Electric. You need not look very far to understand why your profits are below expectations or why customers grow frustrated with you. I am writing this blog. I have no idea how many people will read it, but it is a punch in the nose and someone who reads this may decide that LG appliances are the way to go.

I guess the good part is that they are keeping customer service operators, shippers and repairman employed.

BTW, when I went and took this picture of my gas range, Roy didn’t even set the clock to the right time. Nice attention to details.

Over the past three months, I have had exceptional customer service and horrible customer service.

The trend has been excellent in the retail/brick and mortar setting…Horrible in the service industry and web/phone world.

What are your impressions?

I live in the Phoenix area. Groupon, Living Social, Deal Chicken, Yoodle, Metromix, Dine4az.com, Yelp, plus the countless offers coming in all directions. We all know that these are just the tip of the iceberg because the folks over at Google are not going to stand on the sidelines and watch.

Also a number of other local platforms are joining the fray every day. My clients call me weekly to tell me about someone else who called them about their website offer.

I can only get so many bikini waxes (as a guy), I can only get so many facials, I can only get so many massages.

So when will all of these offers just become white noise to the consumer and when will advertisers pull the plug and realize the only way they can get the cash register to ring is by taking a bath on discounting.

The number of offers coming to my inbox…the quality of offers and the timing are going to kill the great idea that surfaced.

Someone should have some restraint and put a cap on this flood before we all die in a river of cheap products.

Gone was the two paychecks per month.
Gone was the paid health insurance.
Gone was the 401 K (no match).
Gone was the three weeks of vacation per year.

Gone was my identity.

Now looking back after a couple years of reflections…

Gone are the endless, senseless meeting.
Gone are the battles that existed day in and day out.
Gone is the ceiling I kept hitting my head on as I tried to bring more to the table only to be met by the bottom of my boss’s shoe.
Gone is the frustration of seeing others give 50% and suffer no consequences from their lack of effort.
Gone is the mundane physical environment that my ownership refused to improve for the well being of everyone.
Gone is the anger that I would come home with and burden my family with because things never changed.

The old saying goes…”If I only knew then what I know now” if more true than I ever realized.

The loss of a job in February of 2009 was incredibly stressful. The economy was heading downhill and fast. The job market was non-existent. The experience that I had gained in 17+ years with one company all of the sudden didn’t look so important because the guy next to me had 25 year and was willing to do the same job for less that I was.

Perspective, a loving wife, a wonderful son, a supportive extended family and time have given me a new world view.

While I never aspired to own my own business…I’m not sure now I would ever go back to work for someone else…or at least someone who didn’t share in my world view.

Sometimes being a one man band and keeping things moving in the right direction is difficult, but at least it is my direction, on my terms, with who I want and I haven’t hit my head on the bottom of anyone’s shoe yet.

So my wife said to me that we need to replace the toilet in our guest bathroom because the bowl has been scratched from a plumber’s snake that was used to get rid of a recent clog. It is not a big deal to replace a toilet, but it is a few hours and a couple hundred dollars when all is said and done.

It seemed like something that was not unique to our family or situation. So I do like so many people in the world do…I Googled looking for the solution.

So I enter ‘removing scratches from a toilet’ in Google and up pops a link to a site called thriftyfun.com. Many others have had this issue too. User generated comments lead me to a solution that has worked for others.

The solution was a product called Barkeeper’s Friend. I had never heard of this product. So I did what I do…I Googled it. Up pops the companies website. Where can I get it? At a Lowe’s which is is less than 1/2 mile from my house. I hop in the car and head towards the cleaning aisle. There it is…Power and liquid…my choice. $2.48 later I am heading home to put it to the test.

SUCCESS! The scratches are removed. My weekend is now mine again…I saved a minimum of $150 and didn’t swear once like I know I would have in the replacement process.

The point I am making is that products like Barkeeper’s Friend would never have crossed my world unless Google helped it.

Small companies that have the right solution and can be teamed with the right answers can make sales to people that have never heard up them until…they have been Googled.

My wife bought me a Fossil Watch two years ago for Christmas. In December, one of the little hour markers came loose and fell off leaving me with no 4 o’clock.

So a couple days after Christmas this past year, I went to the Fossil Store at San Tan Village in Gilbert, Arizona. The young lady there told me that they could send my watch to their service center and they would repair it and it would cost me $27.50.

That seemed like a reasonable price so I gave them the watch. I was told that it would that 5-8 weeks to get my watch back.

Today, I received a package from the service center with my watch.

First thing, my crystal which was scratched from two years of wear and tear was replaced. The marker identifying the hour was replaced. I also received a brand new band which was fitted to match the old one along with a few extra links.

Also included was an invoice for $8.50….I am only asked to pay for shipping. Everything else was done as part of their GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE.

Fossil Watches exceeded their agreed upon service, did it faster than promised and did it for less money than they quoted.

They have earned at least another purchase from me and probably have made me a Fossil customer for life.