Always Open

I recently had a pretty dumb experience at a TCBY down the street from my house. And as much as I'd like this to be a raving personal rant, it actually has a tie back to the reality of branding.

In a nutshell, the minimum-waged employee turned off all the lights to the store so as to give the appearance of closedness a good 20 minutes prior to their scheduled closedness.

fellow-ice-cream-wanter-in-car: "I think they're closed."

me: "uhh, no they're not. I've checked their site. They close at 11pm. It's 10:40."

So we drove up to the darkened menu board with the speaker-phone, squinted our eye-balls out, informed the "employee" of our inability to read their delicious offerings because of darkness. Surprise - she did (and said) nothing.

We got our treats and left. And went home and wrote a long nasty-gram on their internets.

And we got this in response:

Dear Mrs. ME,

Thank you for taking the time to e-mail our Customer Service Department.

I am very sorry for the poor service that you encountered at our Bright Banc location. Please be assured that we take all such matters very seriously. I will immediately forward your concern to the franchise owners so that this matter may be investigated and the necessary corrections (firings) may be made at the store level.

I will also let our Marketing Department know about the problem with the contact-us page on our Web site. (their internet form didn't allow me to submit the complaint until I removed all apostrophes from it) Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

I will be sending you a few gift certificates (bribes) in the mail so that you may return to any of our stores near you at your convenience and enjoy some of our delicious product at no cost. You should receive them within the next two (to 52) weeks.

In the meantime, if I can be of any further assistance to you, please let me know.

Thank you for contacting TCBY on-line No problem.

Robert Schicker
Retail Customer Service
TCBY

As a consumer, I find websites to be hugely helpful in this respect. I mean - how mad would you have to be to sit down and pen a complaint to TCBY HQ and wait several weeks for a response. This, my friends, was awesome. For me.

Probably not for TCBY. But who knows? The ability to have little spies to report this type of thing would be hugely helpful for me as a business owner. It would be great to always have undercover reporters to keep everything in check. It just sucks that they also have to be your customers.

Not the First time

This isn't the first time that such an experience has happened to me at a fine dining institution. Once at a Dairy Queen, albeit 8ish minutes to closing), as I sat looking at my high-tech phone read 11:55pm, I was told very blatantly through the shitty P.A. system a-la drive-thru that "it 12am accordin' to ma clock" If I were the manager of said DQ, I wouldn't care if it were 12:05 "accordin' to yo clock." If a customer has made it to the store, must. serve. something.

Complain and you shall receive

It seems a bit backward, no? This whole idea of complain = reward? When we were kids, complaining got you little more than a hairy eye and swift words of terror.

But here, in the cushy real-world, it delivers sweet reward. Delicious.