Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm sure we haven't had a customer service moaning thread on this particular board yet, and I like reading people's experiences, so I'll crack off with a good and bad example I've had recently.

Bad: Myself and my lady ordered some coffees this morning at 'Caffé Ritazza'. I wanted a latte, and she wanted a mocha. However the chap rung it up on the till as a mocha and an Americano, so she politely asked him to confirm that we were actually going to get a latté. He screwed up his face and said to her, really roughly 'What drinks do you want then? Tell me!', so she repeated herself. He then said 'A latte is the same price anyway!', so I said, not nearly loud enough 'But it's not the same drink, is it?'.

Completely bereft of charisma, the guy then went on to say 'That's £5 anyway' in the most unfriendly tone. I turned to the gf and said 'That's £5 anyway? What school of customer service do they teach that in?'. Then the guy comes over with the drinks in non-takeaway cups, at which point my gf reminds him that we asked for takeaway. This guy slams the cups down and turns away without a word. Cue waiting for another 10 minutes before actually getting the drinks we asked for, all the time getting a really shitty attitude from this guy. Then, after we left, it transpired that he HAD given me a fucking Americano after all.

It's only a coffee, but it's really really simple to be nice and polite to customers that really aren't being awkward, and just want what they asked for.

Good: We were in Giraffe (see bargains thread for 50% off voucher!) and I ordered a burger and asked for it well done. When it arrived and I bit into it, it was uncomfortably pink on the inside. Since I'm pretty paranoid about food poisoning, I point this out to a waiter who offers to replace it. I tell him it's ok as long as he assures me it's safe to eat, which he does. So I finish up the burger, which was nice enough, and we go to pay. Then the manager comes over, unprompted, and starts apologising for the fact my burger wasn't cooked as we'd asked and insisted on taking it off our bill. I found this amazing because I hadn't really complained, I was just checking it wasn't blatantly undercooked. Top marks to the manager because the burger was a good £8 or so and I would have happily paid for it.

Not technically customer service, but strange all the same..

I was in the queue at a supermarket and a women who had previously been served came back to the till saying she had free range eggs on her receipt but hadn't actually bought any. She then began taking all the items out of her bag to prove the fact that there were no eggs in there.

The girl behind the till pointed to some brocolli and said "thats them. We just ran out of brocolli barcodes so had to use the egg barcodes. They're the same price so it's only the receipt that's going to be different"

The woman looked at the till girl and said "That's not very good is it. Can I have a refund please?"

The till girl gave her a refund and took the brocolli back off her purely because it had the wrong bar code on it. Strange.

8 quid for a burger!

It was a FAT burger, and came with chips. Pretty average for a main at a restaurant?

Hmm, a less charitable viewpoint is that he was trying to absolve himself of responsibility if you subsequently developed food poisoning after all. I mean, it's not like it's going to magically be OK just on the basis that the waiter said so..

Still, you didn't, so fair enough

I'm pretty sure TGI Friday's Ultimate Burger is way more than £8—perhaps £14—and bloody lovely. I can't fit one in my stomach any more.

Also, their Barnamint Bailey's drink is fantastic, and also hideously expensive. I think that was close to £8.

Peh, that's nothing. At a uni reunion a few weeks back, my friend Pete had the mother of all burgers for £11.

Yes, that was actually it's name. And he had to have it after his burger eating exploits at uni. "Man City have been relegated? Right that's it" *eats 10 burgers*

Why would you have a Burger at a restaurant?

Because I'm a commoner, and actually, it was dead nice.

Giraffe @ the Trafford Centre btw pod.

Nice burgers are nice. I had one at Giraffe in Richmond and it was lovely. It still isn't as good as the ones at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen though. They're ridiculously lovely.

Though why anyone would want one well done is beyond me.

Oh man, I could use up and entire thread complaining about customer service.
HMV are the worst, both in store and online..I failed to get so much as an apology when they fucked me around for 4 weeks and then let me down about a game I pre-ordered (one that was sold out everywhere by that time).
People in shops just don't smile any more, let alone learn what customer services means.

Currently I am fighting to get a refund on postage when I ordered something to be delivered on a certain day and it wasn't.
Grrr.

Relatedly, I recently bought something from ebuyer and opted for Super Super Saver cheapo delivery, and it actually arrived two days later. Had I specified I wanted it delivered on that day, I'd have had to pay an extra fiver. Rare treat, that

I get that every so often, too. Fantastic, isn't it.

I haven't really had any negative experiences with customer services, etc. I must be quite lucky.

My new tyres arrived 9 days after I ordered them: 5 days after the guy said they'd be delivered (Amtrak, for the record). I was out the country though, so it didn't affect me. Awesome.

I often have this happen to me via ebuyer. They seem to be a generally very good company, hence why I tend to always buy from them. City Link, though.....

Oh man, they were fantastic. We had them on Easter Sunday after your birthday night out.

TJs Burgers in Leicester do (or did, this was years ago) a huge mother of a burger. It was ace.

Had we been able to move, or indeed digest food, we might have joined you.

Alas, we were able to do neither.

£8 for a burger? Until the 7th (3 days!) I can afford 3 of them. One a day sounds like a plan then? (I can get there for free with my mega-bus-pass)

Ahhh, it's happened again. I ordered a book from Amazon yesterday, just after 4pm. I didn't want to pay £9 for next-day delivery, so opted for el-cheapo instead.

It arrived this morning.

Music shops are the worst. Thanks, I'm here to buy music, so obviously I must want your shitty music blared out constantly while I do it. I don't, for example, want to buy something else entirely and go home and listen to it.

If you opened a restaurant, when people came in and looked at the menu, would you hurl pasta and garlic all over them, or cram a carrot down their mouths? No? Then turn the fucking music off, you tasteless shits.

See also: clothes and/or shoe shops. I'd enjoy clothes shopping if it weren't for the music and high proportion of drooling morons working in the shops. With women, anyway - men's clothes are just too bloody vile to be pleasant to be around for long. Just try getting a plain blue shirt that isn't in fucking pastels. TRY IT.

Or trousers that actually fit. Grumble. Although at least men's clothes are sensibly labelled - the sizing for women's stuff is totally fucking stupid and useless.

My main gripe is finding plain black t-shirt. In town there's a Burton and a Next (about the only men's clothing shops that aren't 'designer' i.e. extortionate) and they make it difficult to buy something that doesn't have some stupid graphic on it.

Still, at least Primark have simple stuff for simple people like me. Cheap too.

I can't seem to find a nice, cheap black jumper with a crew neck. V-necks aplenty, mind.

Spent ages yesterday with this. Wandered around trying to find the right combination of waist vs. leg and couldn't. All of the fairly average sizes had evidently been snapped up and the shops never bother to restock them, leaving you with either giant waists for massively tall people, or giant waists for massively short, massively fat people, of which I am neither.

I feel your pain on this one. Clothes designers seem to be obsessed with putting designs on clothes that, at best, look like they've been thought up and applied generically using an 'art'-gun (similar to Homer's makeup gun) or, at worst, look like the result of an ejaculation.

Primark is excellent, and cheap. Customers don't 'alf leave the place in a mess though when they've trawled through the clothes.

Decathlon is the place. I have about 20 plain black t-shirts from there, £2 apiece.

I also have major trouser issues. I have a waist that can fit into a 34", and an arse that demands a 40".

I had a bizzare conversation with a guy from Orange this morning when I changed my tariff. He told me I had a lovely voice, and gave me 100 free texts. Erm... thanks!

I'm pretty much everybody in this thread. Except for the nice voice and free texts.

I looked around all of Merseyside trying to find jeans that fit (and don't look like they've been cut to bits Thank You Very Please), black plain t-shirts and a black rollneck jumper.

Had to order the jumper off the damned internet in the end. It took eight weeks for the online shop to get them in stock.

THE FYUTURE.

Primark circa 1997 is the best. The stuff from that age lasted. Or still is lasting, rather. Modern primark is crap, really.

You are Steve Jobs and I claim my £5.

Oh yeah, not being able to find shoes that actually fit in shoe shops is really bogus also.

There's only two types of shoes that fit me: the cheapo £10 formal stretchy ones from Shoe Zone that last about six weeks before dying, the mega expensive extra wide Clarks brown hiking shoes that cost way too much.

I shouldn't have trouble looking for these things. Curse everything.

I've found that Addidas Samba are one of the few things that manage to look ok AND not cause my feet to feel like death.

Hence I have no shame in having bought 4 pairs to date.

Slater's? That's where I got my last jeans from (I'll see your 'not cut to bits' and raise you 'don't look like they've been washed 4000 times and stained with cowshit, or come with a ridiculous belt'), plain dark blue Wranglers for £20. They're down one of the side streets off the high street on the same side as John Lewis.

Ah, I see where you are going wrong. You are assuming that your clothes are there to feel comfortable on you and keep you warm and all that kind of thing.

What they are actually for is to let idiots pay stupid money for the privilege of being a mobile advertising hoarding. I can't think of anything dumber than advertising a company and paying for the privilege.

Oooh... when I rule the world, "camera snobs" are going to, well, not be first against the wall, but certainly in the top ten.

At the other end of the spectrum you have idiots like me, who pay £30 over the odds for a pair of Fred Perry plimsolls with the most discreet logo you can find so that nobody will ever know they're Fred Perry. But I know that they are, and that's all that matters.

Did any one read about Topman stealing a design from someone and putting it on one of their t-shirts without knowing what it was? Printed off a load and put them in the shops, only to find that they had stolen a picture from a study of Russian prison tattoos, and they had inadvertently splurged some facist slogan about purging Russia of the mongrel races on their clothing.

Without wishing to further derail the Customer Service thread, ONE purpose of clothing is to feel comfortable, and another is to keep you warm. However, lots of people wear them to make themsevles feel good, look good, create an image and so on and so forth. Saying that they're just to stop us being naked and cold is much along the same lines as saying that all food does is provide us with energy, so why don't we all buy the cheapest and most nutritional foodstuff and forget about things like flavour.

A few years ago I was Christmas shopping in HMV and as my sister (who somehow decided to have a second childhood in her late 20s) was a big fan of Steps, I thought a calendar featuring their likenesses for each month would go down well. It wasn't until I got to the front of the queue with this that I realised the guy serving was a barman from my local, who cheerfully asked if I wanted a pint of Guinness to go with it. The desperate-sounding "it's a present for my sister" was out of my mouth before I had time to think.

To his credit, he never spoke of this incident again.

That has filled me with absolute joy, I dearly hope that it is true.

yeah burtons are the main culprits, theres been many times Ive had a wander about the shop, think I see something quite nice and then realise theres some paint dribbled fucking print in pink which is the absolute last colour that would go with whatever colour thing you are looking at. Is there not and H and M near you? 3 quid for plain tshirts, 10 quid for shitty prints, I know whos the winner there.

It absolutely is, I remember reading about it at the time. Hang on a sec...

Here you go!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007 ... il.fashion



Also: Threadless are aces for t-shirts.

The problem with Primark, TkMaxx and H&M is that their stuff is shit; I like things to last more than 3 or 4 washes - or in the case of some jogging bottoms (strictly for lazing around the flat in comfort, you understand) one. Just because it's cheap shit doesn't make it okay to buy replacement clothes once a month.

Thankfully, CostCo's plain white tees are fantastically hard wearing (nearly a year out of this pack so far with them being washed at least once a week) and 6 for a tenner. Reassuringly heavy, ringspun cotton.

Made in a Chinese sweatshop, naturally.

What are you washing them in? Bleach?

Ouch.

I demand a shirt that says 'In Soviet Russia, Pussy Licks You!', in Russian.

Top office foreigner 'Little Elina' tells me "В советской России, кот лижет вас" is what you're looking for.

I'll bet Mimi has some fabric pens.

I agree that H&M's clothes are shit - I have a jumper (sweater?) off them a couple of years ago that became incredibly tatty after three washes at 30 degrees.

Because nice burgers are nice? The existence of cheap ones doesn't change that.

You wouldn't never have a steak at a restaurant because Bird's Eye frozen beef slices exist...