Customer Service

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

A few nights ago I had a late meeting that required me to head back into the office. After it was over, I gave the wife a call to let her know I was heading home. She then requested that I stop by on the way home and buy some red wine. While we were in Texas, almost any grocery store had a great selection of wine. This is not the case in Kokomo so to get a better selection I am forced to head to an actual liquor store. In the year that we have lived back here in Indiana, we have visited this store a few times. Mostly the patrons are looking to purchase (large quantities of) beer so we have the wine section to ourselves. Since I do not have a tongue savvy enough to tell the difference between bad, good and great wine, the cheap stuff is usually good enough for us. Keeping this in mind, I just look for the wines that are on sale. We had recently tried some raspberry wine that was not too bad so when I saw that there was some cranberry wine on sale ($6 marked down from $9) I jumped on it. I headed to the checkout but it rang up at the regular price. Since I was not interested in a $9 bottle of wine, I pointed out that this should be sold at the sale price. The cashier seemed OK with this but the manager (or someone who appeared to be the manager) was nearby and he headed over to the wine section to confirm. The sale sign could not have been clearer in that it had (word for word) the make and model of the wine that I was buying (Leelanau Cellars Cranberry, 750 ml). Despite this, the manager dismissed the whole episode with a "the sign is wrong" and told the cashier to give me 10% off. I had a brief moment to decide if I wanted to fight for what amounted to a little over $2. Given the size of the manager (he was a few inches taller than I) and the fact that I had no real leverage here (my annual purchases with this store could not amount to $100 give or take) I decided to move on and eat the $2. The wine tasted about like you would imagine a cranberry based alcoholic beverage might taste, namely tart, tart and more tart but now we know. The wife and I have already decided that we are going to pick up a year's supply of wine while in Texas next weekend.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon