Please understand up front that I'm involved in a joint venture with FlightSim.com. So in the story below you must consider whether I'm biased, though really I assure you that I'm not. When it comes to the Pilot Shop I'm just another customer, like you.

Anyway, I placed an order with the Pilot Shop on 11 July. It finally arrived yesterday, on 2 August ... And yet I'm going to say "Yay, Pilot Shop"?

Absolutely. Because during the time when the package was hung up in the US Postal Service, long overdue, the Pilot Shop people assured me that if the package truly did not arrive, they would replace the shipment at no cost to me. They asked only that I allow the advertised full two weeks for the delivery.

At the end of the two-week period the package still had not arrived. Even though USPS had never listed any detail about the shipment, which had been originated by the Pilot Shop as a tracked shipment, they did not give up hope. When I called again after two weeks and a weekend they checked the USPS tracking website one more time ...

... And this time the shipment was listed, with its status as being in Jacksonville, Florida. My wife, who has family in Florida, immediately said "The Post Office must have tried to deliver it to Lakewood, Florida instead of Lakewood, Colorado". It took almost another week for the package to get here (suburban Denver), but I was now able to wait patiently because now I had confidence that it had not been lost in transit.

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The problem was not of the Pilot Shop's making. They had put the package in the hands of USPS, just as my order had said that they should. In a legal sense they would have been within their rights to say "Under the USA's Uniform Commercial Code, title to the product passed to you the moment USPS picked it up. You are on your own, good luck."

But they didn't say that. They said instead "Let's give it a little more time. If it still doesn't arrive, let us know and we'll replace it."

So the issue is only partly whether the vendor has a problem -- all vendors do. The issue is what the vendor does about your problem, and in this case I was entirely satisfied with the Pilot Shop because of their statement of policy. You see, the FlightSim.com Pilot Shop clearly understands what business they are in ... They are selling customer satisfaction, and they delivered customer satisfaction.

They have joined the ranks of vendors of whom I am now a customer for life, vendors who have no-questions-asked return/refund policies. While there are many such vendors in the USA, the two I'm talking about in particular are Best Buy and Jewelry Television.

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I like to tell vendors when they're doing a good job, not just when they're doing a bad job. So here's another positive story ...

A few weeks ago I was having an order rung up in our local chain supermarket, a Safeway store. There had been a customer load spike so I was being served by the manager himself, a gentleman I had seen around the store but had never spoken with.

As he was checking me through I said "You run a great store, thank you." He looked up, startled. "Why do you think it's great?" he asked. Having had some long ago experience in retail sales I was able to tell him exactly why.

"Your store is brightly lit, the aisles are wide, and it is always clean, not dark and dingy and cramped like the local King Soopers. In addition, you are almost never stocked out of any item that I want. Finally, your staff is hard working and unfailingly helpful."

"Yes", he said. "I have a terrific staff. Look, we almost never get favorable comments. Do you mind sending in a courtesy card so you can tell my boss what you just told me?"

I was happy to do it. About a week after I sent in the comments card I got a phone call from their regional office in Phoenix, hundreds of miles away. "We just wanted to make sure that these comments actually came from a customer."

Two weeks after that I was being checked through, this time by one of the assistant managers, a gentleman I have come to be friendly with over the years. He mentioned to me that the regional manager had just finished a tour of all their stores in the Denver area, and that the store I shop at was the only one about which he had zero complaints.

In our various subsequent encounters the store manager began saying things like "How's it going today, Boss?" and "Can I help you find anything today, Boss?" Always with a warm smile.

Finally one day, when he was again the one checking me through, I said "It's 'Mike', not 'Boss', okay? So please call me 'Mike' and I'll call you 'Greg'. And so it has been.

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The Safeway in question is a large store, large enough that its manager would be within his job description if he stayed in his office. But instead Greg goes out on the floor and pitches in, helping his staff out in any way he can when they're overloaded.

I had told the regional HQ people that they should do whatever they had to do to retain Greg, and that they should promote him to District Manager someplace. I like to think that I have helped him out though really, his work speaks for itself, as does the loyalty and efforts of his staff.

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So tell your vendors how they're doing. Good vendors will want to hear even the negative comments because it's the only way for them to know what aspects of their operations they need to fix.

But when positive comments are justified, please make them. We all work for pay. However, in the end we work for psychic gratification, and hearing good things from customers is an important aspect of job satisfaction for the management and employees of any retail operation.