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Your plumber won’t stink—guaranteed

By Greg Fogg

April 10, 2006

San Diego--San Diego residents have had an easier time sniffing out a good plumber ever since Steve Fox Plumbing (www.foxplumbing.com) initiated its “no stink” guarantee five years ago.

The policy is part of the company’s customer “Bill of Rights” that pledges their plumbers will arrive on time, won’t be rude, or leave customers with a messy house. But as the company discovered, not all wrench monkeys are created equal when it comes to a stink factor.

Becki Fox, owner of the company named after her husband, explains customers don’t want to see “butt crack” or smell bad odors.

Before you start thinking of white glove tests and regular spritzings with the atomizer, think again. Cologne is not mandatory, but Fox isn’t above giving them grooming tips.

“If you come [to work] smelling crappy, I’ll send you home,” Fox says. In the past, she has sent her employees home to shower, shave and brush their hair, even giving them breath spray when they needed it.

Catching wind of a pungent problem is not difficult, as Fox explains. She says it’s fairly obvious if one of her plumbers has an odor issue. After all, “jobs get messy,” she says.

For chronic offenders she’ll council them. If pit smells persist, Fox says she would have to let him go, although, things have never been that bad before.

On rare occasions, customers have complained that her plumbers have come into their home stinking of cigarette smoke, for example. Fox says she remedied the problem by curtailing smoking between jobs.

Even in the best of circumstances in the plumbing business, well, shit happens, and Fox says her sweet-smelling handy men can’t run home after every messy job. She says they do their best to schedule dirty jobs all on the same day.

Fox says she thinks customers “keep coming back because of the work we do … not necessarily the no stink policy.”

But she admits, “Most customers know about it. It’s in our marketing.”

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Greg Fogg is a freelance writer in San Diego.