Fortinos Customer Service

I experienced some good customer service, and because I was expecting some bad customer service, it made the experience all the more gooder.

Suz and I were grocery shopping last week at a store we usually don't frequent. It was one of those mega Fortino's grocery stores with six billion square feet and two levels. The upper level doesn't have food, but it's still a large, accessible part of the store.

Sarcasm alert: The following single paragraph contains sarcasm, defined as mocking, contemptuous, or ironic language intended to convey scorn or insult.

Being a weekend, the store wisely opened a whopping two checkouts for about two thousand customers, which allowed for the creation of pleasurable long lines weaving throughout the store in a very desirable way. The lines blocked off many undesirable areas and isles preventing customers from buying all sorts of things they didn't really need anyway.

As much as we despise them, Suz and I decided to use the self-checkouts instead, mostly due to my foot pain. We scanned all our items, which took about twice as long as it would have taken a cashier, paid, and left.

When we got home we noticed that two of our products, Maple Leaf Prime Chicken and Shneiders Oh Naturel Chick'n burgers, had $1-off stickers on them. We were supposed to peel them off and scan the bar code on the back right at the checkout to obtain our discount.

That's two bucks! What does two dollars buy? Well, at $1 per litre, we could have bought 2 litres of gasoline for the Insight. That would get us about 60 or 70 kilometres. I could drive to work for almost three weeks on that! I couldn't let those coupons go to waste.

I phoned the store and asked for Customer Service. The manager came on the phone. I explained that these coupons were supposed to be scanned at the register at the time of purchase - and we didn't know that, but a regular cashier would have. She understood completely, agreed with me, and told me to bring the coupons in along with our bill so that she could honour them.

Wow! Three cheers for good customer service!