Inverting the Paradox of Excellence

296 Inverting the Paradox of Excellence

You call Toshiba’s 1-800 number. Either you take it to The UPS Store or your UPS driver shows up

at your door to whisk away the laptop, padded box in hand. The box ies to the Louisville hub and

from there, not to Japan, but 2 miles down the road to another UPS building where UPS employ-

ees specially trained and certied by Toshiba—not Toshiba employees—x it. Within 3 days,

your Toshiba is back at your house in tip-top shape. When it turned to UPS SCSs, Toshiba saw its

customer complaints instantly drop.

To keep the household-to-household business, UPS toyed with a network of UPS pack and ship

stores across the country, but instead, it nally joined forces with Mail Boxes Etc. in 2001, buying

the pa