If you live in Austin TX., please read

[swordfish]

(If this seems slightly out of context it is because I just posted it on another central Texas/Austin area aquarist club's web site. I have copied that text and pasted it here.

 

I somehow heard a few days ago (last Thursday) that Aquatek on Burnet rd. in Austin Texas had some southdown sand. Apparently this stuff is the hot item in reef sand these days since it's cheap and fine in the literal sense. Problem is you can hardly ever get it west of the Missisippi. I called Aquatek to comfirm this and they said yeah, they had some 50 lb. bags selling for $10 each. Great. I asked them to hold one for me. They said "You don't need to do that, I always have plenty of it here and we're expecting a new shipment this coming week as well.". Even better.

 

Well when I got there on Monday, after driving well over 45 miles in the simmering 103 deg. heat from San Marcos in my truck which does not have AC, apparently the story had changed drastically. About the only southdown the manager said he had ever seen there lately was "a few bags someone bought in on consignment" which had sold about as soon as they were set on the shelf. There had not ever been a regular stock of the stuff there, nor was there going to be, according to him. I told him someone who I talked to on the phone assured me they had it virtually stacked up to the ceiling and had more being airlifted in by the C-37 load soon. The manager said he had no idea what I was talking about, his employee "didn't know what he was talking about" and none of that was true. Before you ask, yes I was sure I had called Aquatek in the first place.

 

I said to him "Do you stand behind what your employees do on the job here or do you not? If they work for you then I think you should maybe start doing that. How about giving me a bag of aragonite at a discount after all this hassle I had to go through?". (I had informed him by then that this sucked since I had had to drive this far based on what smelled like an almost deliberate lie.) He said he wouldn't give me any discount to appease me. At the time all this was being said, he had been standing there talking to a woman who was seething to get a reef aquarium going and who had been marvelling with him at their show tank. I mean she was INTO this and was already talking about buying the tank and everything. She had taken all of this conversation in since she was standing right there, which I then topped off with "Well, your customer service is pretty disappointing then.". If she had half a brain she would have walked on that place right then, just as I did.

 

True, he did have aragonite at a very decent price, but I may as well have tattooed "stupid bait and switch victim" on my forehead had I bought it there. I guess they don't think this kind of thing ever catches up to them or......anyone would ever do anything about it......like, say, get on the net and complain.

 

This happens to exemplify something about the American retail service sector that sucks, and that is this all-pervasive attitude that for someone in charge at a store to say "I'm sorry" is okay, like that's a resolution to their screwup or the customer's unresolved need or both. Well, I don't give a carp about how they feel about that or anything else, even if they are sorry. What do I look like, a therapist? I'm not there for some clerk's emotions, I'm there for service. "I'm sorry" just doesn't cut it. Doing something to make me a happy customer DOES cut it. I myself run my own small service-based business, and as all people in the world tend to do, I screw up at my job once in a while. Wanna know what I do about it? I explain what happened to the customer and then I make it right, then I throw in a small discount or something. Why? Because they won't be happy with anything less and that's just called taking care of my own occasional mistake, that's why. Yet almost every time I go into a store lately, I walk out wishing it were legal to just backhand these slacking, worthless, flunky retail drones across the face.

 

Jeff

 

Jeff

[Crakeur]

bait and switch is against the law. better business bureau the bastard