My brother alerted me to a special deal on the Canon PowerShot SD450 at Dell Online, and since my wife had become enamored with the earlier SD300 model that my Dad has, I’ve wanted to give a PowerShot camera to her as a present this coming Christmas. Of course, having seen Maria Sharapova’s “MARIA WAS HERE” commercial a few times, which ends with her saying, “Make every shot a PowerShot,” has kept me mindful of the camera as well. J

   So, when Dell offered the camera for less than $300, I jumped at the opportunity, and I’m so glad I did! The camera is amazingly compact and has a large screen and excellent picture quality plus plenty of other features, but most important of all, it compensates very well in low light conditions, recovers quickly after each shot, and has a rechargeable battery – the three shortcomings with my current camera that have annoyed her to no end. Most of the pictures in my blog posts during the past week were taken with the SD450.

   I don't have much free time these days, so I really appreciate great customer service when I experience it. My kudos to Costco for keeping their promise of fixing any flats for tires that were purchased from them. Better yet - they can now scan my Membership Card# and pull up my previous receipts, so I don't even have to keep track of the little pieces of paper anymore! I recently had a flat tire, and all I had to do was drive my car to a Costco, registered it with the Tire Center, and went shopping for a couple of hours. Upon my return, my flat tire was repaired, no questions asked and no cost out of my pocket! That's what I call great customer service.

   In contrast, as a customer of Blockbuster Online's monthly DVD subscription service for several months, I've found that upon receiving a returned DVD, they routinely wait a day and sometimes two days before shipping the next DVD out! That's just not very efficient service. Moreover, I was slightly offended when I received a "late notice" from one of their stores where I had used the monthly coupons (admittedly, a nice value add over Netflix's offering) to rent a couple of DVDs. Apparently, I didn't read the fine print in their "End of Late Fees" propaganda. Now I know, and I think it sucks because this means that it's not really the end of late fees, just a delay of late fees.