If You Can't Say Anything Nice...

This is a note to inform you that it is highly unlikely I will shop at Superstore again. On Thursday of last week my wife and I purchased groceries, including a package of pork chops that cost $18.61. We hung onto the receipt, but today was recycling day and it went with everything else. The chops, which were labeled as good until August 16 (today being the 15th), had gone bad. I drove to the store to return them, and while I was aware of the no receipt policy, informed the clerk that I was not interested in replacement meat, nor did I want to wade through the crowds (this was close to supper time) in order to buy the equivalent amount. She was inflexible, so I asked to speak to the manager. Sadly, all the store manager could be bothered to do was to phone down, hear her side of the story, and tell her there was nothing he could do.

Fine. I left the meat with her and told her to let her manager know that he had lost a customer.

Last Thursday we spent close to $350 on groceries, and only two of those items were meat. We have two teenage boys, which as you might imagine contributes to a healthy monthly food bill. Sadly, it seems to me that your managers are not really trained in the art of customer service. As the saying goes, it takes months to lure a customer into the store, and only seconds to lose one. Who knows? I might have changed my mind if he had bothered to come down and treat me like a human being, or perhaps he might have changed his mind on seeing the quality of the meat and the fact that I wasn't someone looking to perpetrate a scam.

My fairly regular $300+ grocery bill likely does not impact your bottom line, I know, but the inability of the store manager to even be bothered to come down to talk to me (plus the apparent disdain the girl at the desk exhibited) indicates that it would be much less grief for me to take my business elsewhere, which I am happy to do.

And while I know that my impact on the world at large is small in the bigger view of things, rest assured that I will blog, tweet, Facebook, and Google+ my view, to say nothing of making sure that I make as many personal comments to friends, acquaintances, and even random strangers as I can. Again, I know that many, perhaps even most, of those people will not change their buying habits. But some may, and certainly many, if not most, will always have a niggling doubt about your store whenever they set out to do their shopping.

(Update: this is the 8th Street store in Saskatoon. Dopey me.)

Labels: customer service, idiots