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Friday, February 06, 2009

Customer service rant

I’ve been feeling a little out of sorts this afternoon. I ended up with a little while to myself and, on impulse, swung into a comic book store that I was passing on the way home. It’s not a store I’d ever visited before, but it was close to the house and I was curious just to get a look at it.

The place was open and nice, with a lot of gaming tables, a pleasing layout of books, etc. What’s more, it had a large selection of quarter boxes with a bunch of recent titles. If I’d splurged and spent three dollars or so, I could have come out with a nice handful of books.

I’m the only customer. There are two people working there—one of them hanging some stuff up, the other behind the counter. They greet me just fine, ask me if I’m looking for anything in particular, and leave me alone after I say I’m just browsing.

So far so good.

Then one of them starts to talk to the other one about how his cat puked in his bedroom that morning.

In what world is this an appropriate discussion in front of a customer? Particularly a new customer who has been in your store about 90 seconds?

I’d been enjoying starting to flip through the quarter boxes, so I decided to hunker down and block it out, but the two start to go back and forth about it and quickly get into a nauseating level of detail that I won’t elaborate on.

My god.

I stalked out of there. Despite the close proximity and the allure of the cheap back issues, I doubt I’ll ever go back.

1 comment:

Trike said...

I think you stumbled into one of those things where people start treating the workplace like their home and forget to turn on their filters, because they're bored and have exhausted most other topics of conversation.

I volunteer at animal rescue, so I probably would have joined in the discussion, but I can see how that topic would gross a lot of people out.

You should probably tell the manager what happened so he can have a talk with them. They should at least know why they've lost your business, especially in times like these.

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