I was watching a commercial this morning for a local tire company that we will never do business with again because of an unfortunate experience that we had with them. The commercial convinces that the big, nation-wide tire companies won’t care for you in the same way that the local tire company will. When I saw the commercial, I thought to myself “I bet the nation-wide tire company won’t forget to tighten the lug nuts on one of my tires”.

It was at this point that I realized that the commercials that try to convince you that one company is better than another are ridiculous on their face because companies are comprised of individuals, and those individuals are the ones that you will interact with when you deal with a company. The mechanic who forgot to tighten the lug nuts on my tire may have been having a bad day, or he or she may have been a bad mechanic who doesn’t work for the local tire company anymore. Nevertheless, we won’t do business because of that single, powerful experience that we had.

But, this illustrates the danger of the case study in shaping your experience. The commercials that I see that try to convince me that I should do business with one company, as opposed to another, want me to believe that one company is better than another. But, the greatest company is currently employing humans who have the capability of being widely unpredictable. And, the same goes for the worst company. Similarly, I shouldn’t be denying my business to any company with whom I’ve had a single bad experience, because a single experience of whatever kind is not a definition of a business.

But this extrapolates out, to all of our experiences with other people. That guy on the highway who screams at you as you accidentally cut him off; he’s fighting his way through a difficult divorce and is normally a very pleasant person. The waitress at the restaurant who seems upset at your smallest request; she’s being sexually harassed by her boss and she can’t be happy at work. The guy in line in front of you at the grocery store who takes nine items into the six-items-or-less lane; his mother is dying of cancer and he can’t bring himself to focus on anything else.

These people are not bad people, but they are inconsistent. We are all inconsistent. As we deal with each other, as fellow humans interacting in society or as consumers interacting with companies that we chose to do business with, we need to keep in mind that single interactions with others are most likely not defining moments for those people. They shouldn’t be defining moments for us, either.