Still More Credit Where Credit’s Due

Last winter, when I junked my old and slow Dell desktop in favor of a MacBook laptop, I had to switch my home banking program to a new software.  I had been running Microsoft Money for years, and was generally happy with it.  I don’t need anything fancy in the home finances department — I don’t invest in the stock market or track my retirement or anything like that — so my requirements are fairly simple: I  want it to look like a checkbook, and I want to be able to print out reports at the end of the year.  When I changed operating systems, then, I was hoping I could just load Money for Mac, move my data with a zip drive, and just keeping going along like nothing had changed.

There was just one problem:  they don’t make Microsoft Money any more.  So whether I wanted to or not, I had to switch.  Again, I don’t need anything fancy, so I opted to pick up the newest version of Quicken — which I had never used, but which seemed to be a fairly easy and intuitive program to work with.  I went to the Intuit website and advance ordered it — this was last winter, and it wasn’t scheduled to ship until early this Spring — paying about 69 bucks for the newest version.

Long story short, then — so I can get to the point — the program worked great, I’m very happy with it, and consider it a good investment of 69 dollars.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I received an e-mail from Intuit last month that included the following:

Thanks to the direct feedback we have received from customers like you, we are making changes to Quicken Essentials for Mac. Here is what we have planned for the next couple of months:
 
Price reduction and $20 refund—we are dropping the price from $69.99 to $49.99 and you will receive a $20 refund! Your credit card will be credited automatically in 4-6 weeks; you don’t have to do anything. 

Sure enough, last week, my bank account was credited for twenty dollars and some change from Intuit.  Imagine that: a company actually giving customers money back when they lower the price of their product.  That was a classy move on Intuit’s part, and they’ve made me a loyal customer who will recommend their products to others.  And I do.