It doesn’t take a lot of effort to find examples of poor customer service. It’s all around us and one has to wonder why management and ownership can’t see it.
We were on vacation and late on a Saturday afternoon stopped at a small-town supermarket, one as big and nice as 90% of those in big cities. Plus, it’s part of a regional chain. We got our stuff and headed to check out only to see we were about number eight in line, with only one check stand open. Within a couple minutes there were at least four more people behind us.
My wife unsuccessfully tried to find someone to open another line. I then found a guy stocking shelves, who obviously didn’t like the fact that at his age he was stocking shelves on a Saturday evening, who told me, “That’s not my job.” I asked if he could find a manager to get another line going and was told, “No.” He also told me to find a manager I needed to go to the customer service desk, which I did but it was not staffed.
This town has two very nice stores. Guess which one we’ll be going to exclusively from now on?
It’s not that hard to educate people on how the customers come first. Maybe it was just a bad apple employee I met but I know from our local stores it’s not that hard to get employees to help you get you what you want (other than in the big box home improvement stores where the most common answer is, “It’s on aisle X on the right”).
They did open another line about 10 minutes later.