Last night I needed to do some shopping and at the last minute, before leaving the house, I remembered something that I would normally forget.
I needed to return two items to the store for credit.
They were bottles of the same wine that he had bought on sale. One was corked and about 90% full, and the other was unopened.
When I bought them, they were priced at $9.88, heavily discounted to $24.99. So, I thought they had to be good, right?
Wrong. The content was lower than that of Charles Shaw’s wine, also known as “Two Buck Chuck,” a very popular Cabernet Sauvignon sold by Trader Joes for $1.99 a bottle.
I walked into the grocery store, dropped the offending bottles along with my receipt, and said, “I’m going to need a credit for these, and I’ll be back after I shop.”
The clerk snapped back, “Well, I don’t know if we CAN offer a refund for the wine!”
“If you can!” I replied jovially, not missing a step on my way to the ice cream bars.
Of course, her concern that the store might offend me by not refunding my money bothered me as I slithered through the aisles in search of a handful of items I needed to make dinner.
“Wouldn’t that be wacky customer service policy?” I am used. And then it hits me:
THIS STORE BELONGS TO THE SAFEWAY FAMILY: THEY ARE COMMITTED TO A SATISFACTION GUARANTEE ON EVERY ITEM!
How did I know this?
I worked for Safeway! It was one of my jobs during my freshman year of college and to qualify as an employee, I had to attend Safeway School, which lasted a week or two.
At the end there was an exam and the SATISFACTION GUARANTEE was in it.
Suddenly buoyed by this memory and feeling a surge of credibility for being a Safeway alumnus, I completed my purchases in a particularly energetic and self-righteous frame of mind, ready to verbally spar with the clerk who had alarmed me.
It is not necessary, as it turned out. His manager gave me credit, simply insisting that I exchange the value for two different bottles of wine.
No problem.
But there is a moral to this story for anyone who deals with clients.
Well, maybe two morals:
(1) You never know what your client’s background is. They may have worked for your company and may know more about their policies than you do; and (2) Do not unnecessarily alarm a client before knowing all the facts. The clerk should not have expressed to me her doubts about the possibility of obtaining a credit for sour wine. Instead, she should have called her supervisor while I was shopping and asked if it could be done.
Oh, and the moral number (3) is this: Never, ever mess with a Safeway School graduate!