An early customer · Knoxville and East Tennessee
The year he did not renew
He was a customer like any other. We hung his lights, sent an invoice, took them down in January, and put him on the list for next year.
The next season, he did not renew. That happens constantly and it usually means nothing — people move, budgets tighten, someone decides they would rather do it themselves. We called the way we call everyone.
That is how we found out he had cancer. Every dollar he had was going toward treatment, and Christmas lights were a long way down a list that had been completely rewritten for him.
He did not ask us for anything. He was not looking for a favor and he did not bring it up as a problem for us to solve — it came out the way that kind of thing comes out, in the middle of a sentence about something else.
We did not make an offer, or start a conversation about it, or ask him to fill anything out. We put him on the schedule, showed up on his day, and hung his lights.
And they were his lights. Same crew, same commercial-grade product, same clips, same timers, same clean gutter line, same take-down in January. Not a stripped-down version with whatever was left on the trailer. He got exactly what every paying customer that week got, because a free install that looks free is worse than no install at all — it tells the person on the receiving end precisely where they now sit.
That is the whole idea, and everything else here is just an attempt to do it on purpose and at a larger scale. Somebody is having the worst year of their life, and for a few weeks their house looks like Christmas anyway.