When Customer Loyalty Lay in Ruin
Readers looking for Loose Cannon’s usual breezy gloss on direct marketing may wish to skip this column. A month ago, right around the Passover/Easter holiday season, I found a true story of how one merchant who valued his customers acted when his business was threatened. This story does not have a happy ending.
The story is about Willem Blom, a Dutch merchant who in the early part of the 20th century built a high-quality butcher’s shop into a cannery and ultimately a meat wholesaler that supplied customers throughout Holland.
When the Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, they issued a series of edicts that allowed them to take over Jewish businesses. In October 1941, they confiscated Geldersche Vleeshal, the meat supplier Blom had created.
The Nazis demanded that Blom continue to work in the business, in order to maintain the fiction that the confiscation was a normal business deal. He refused. The Nazis then insisted that Blom surrender his business mailing list and ledgers. He refused.
Instead, Blom secretly sent his customers the following letter, which in five paragraphs speaks to his pride in his business, his agony at its loss, and the value he placed on his relationships with his customers.
The Nazis deemed sending out this letter an act of economic sabotage. In December 1941, Blom was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, where in 1942 he was murdered.
Blom’s letter follows.
Winterswyk December 1941
[Dear Customer:]
According to the just-issued ordinance, now in effect locally, Jews are forbidden to sell meat to non-Jews.
Because our firm is looked upon as Jewish, as of today we cannot supply meat to you. These few simple words have a devastating meaning for us. It took some 25 years to build our firm, which became part of our very being. We always strove to be of service to our clients. We sought our customers’ loyalty by means of friendly business relations. Customers were never looked upon as mere objects, for monetary profits. The fact that our clients regularly placed their orders with us, year after year, some since the firm’s founding, confirms our belief that we earned our customers’ loyalty and trust. And now all of that lies in ruin and is destroyed.
Why? Because of our misdeeds? No, only because we are the children of our beloved parents and grandparents! Even so, we proudly keep our head up high, and our thirst for work and life remains undiminished. Even Napoleon reached his Moscow!
But we’ve kept your attention too long with our problem, and it is understandable that during all this you thought, What now, how do I get my supplies? We can put your mind at ease. Although our business connection is broken, we thought of your difficulties nonetheless, and we found a solution.
A local non-Jewish butcher is prepared from now on to serve you in precisely the same manner and on the same conditions we did in the past. Therefore, as far as you are concerned, nothing has changed. If you wish to continue purchasing your meat in Winterswyk, then instead of sending your orders to Geldersche Vleeshal, send them to Butcher Mol, Post Office Box…, Winterswyk. This colleague will then take care that your orders receive the same careful attention.
[signed] Willem Blom
RICHARD H. LEVEY ([email protected]) is a senior writer for Direct. His Loose Cannon column appears every Monday on Direct Newsline (www.directmag.com).
