Live and Let Live

After I posted my Hulusi I realized I have sold much of my Hulusis and left with only 1-2 pieces. New stocks will be arriving middle of January.

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My website seems to have frequent downtimes. I've feedback to my webhosting company a couple of times already and they have not been able to completely rectify the problem. The last suggestion they gave was to 'program the system to monitor my Tomcat and restart it automatically if it goes down'. Whatever that means. As long as it works.

But if anyone sees that my website is down, please drop me an email to inform me immediately. Thanks!

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We had an interesting encounter the other day with a customer. He came to our shop to look for an Erhu because he is starting his beginner class with a teacher. So after looking through a dozen Erhu models, he picked a starter model and paid for it.

A few days later he called again and says he want to return the Erhu and get a refund. Why? Is the Erhu defective? Is it not up to his expectations? Because if it is, he can come back and we can do an exchange or he can choose other models which suits him.

But the reason he wanted to return the Erhu is because his teacher had 'picked' an Erhu for him and wanted him to buy the Erhu.

The customer went further to say that he will complain to the Consumer Association of Singapore(CASE) if we do not let him return the Erhu. I am quite well versed in Singapore's Fair Trading Act and I don't see how this transaction contravenes any of the Fair Trading Acts.

But being nice and peace loving business people, and we cannot bear to see him making a fool out of himself at CASE, we told him to come back to our shop and we refunded his money.

Well, we have no problems with teachers selling instruments to their students to earn some side income. But if the teacher goes as far as condemning my instruments in order to sell his, even after the deal is done, then I would have issues with that.

There is a conception that teachers pick better instruments because they know how to play the instrument. True to a certain extent, but I've seen some teacher's picks that left me totally confounded. I don't know about other instrument shops, but my collegues and I are well versed in different kinds of Chinese instruments. On top of that, hundreds of instruments pass through our hands so I would presume we have enough exposure to different models of instruments.

When we see lemons brought in by customers for repairs, we would rather not comment, than comment negatively.

We prefer to co-exist peacefully.

Live and let live.