I counted them last night while the news was on. Twenty-nine emails since Wednesday from companies I have never bought anything from, every one of them writing to tell me they are monitoring the situation.
The World Health Organization used the word pandemic yesterday. The NBA suspended its season a few hours later. By this morning my inbox looked like a photocopier had jammed.
A hotel chain in a city I have not visited. A software vendor I evaluated in 2018 and declined. A dentist I saw twice in 2016. An abundance of caution, an unprecedented time, a health and safety that has apparently always been their highest priority.
Everyone is arguing about whether the tone is right. The tone is not the problem.
Nobody is grading your statement on empathy. They are scanning it for one line, which is what changes for me, and twenty-nine companies in a row declined to answer.
Useful is a short list and you already know it. Are you open, and what are the hours today, not the hours in general. Is my order shipping, yes or no. Can I cancel or move a booking without a fee, and until when. What happens to the people who work for you.
That last one keeps getting left out, and it is the one people will remember in June. If your hourly staff are being paid, say so plainly. If you have not decided, do not send an email about caution. Decide first.
The two messages I actually read this week came from a food cart pod that posted its hours and a phone number, and from a small studio that wrote, we do not know yet, we will tell you Friday. Both took under a minute to write. Both were worth more than a legally reviewed paragraph about our community.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms and I know exactly how it happens. Someone says we need to say something. Nobody wants to be the brand that said nothing. So a paragraph gets written to protect the company from a criticism no one was going to make, and it goes out to a list of people whose week it does not touch.
Silence is available. If nothing about your business changes for me, you are allowed to not send it.
They are scanning it for one line, which is what changes for me, and twenty-nine companies in a row declined to answer.
Truffles slept on the radiator all evening and Barnaby knocked a pen off the desk at eleven, same as every other night. Their situation is unchanged and neither of them emailed me about it. There is a version of that restraint available to the rest of us.