Let’s have a Worst Customer Service contest!
I’m going to nominate Fabricland on Merivale Road for their absence of customer service.
I bought thread there yesterday. In fact, I’m a card-carrying member of Fabricland, and I go there fairly regularly. So they weren’t just having an off-day.
I got to the cash with my three spools of thread. There were two cashiers at two cash registers. One was serving a customer. The other was doing something at her cash…I’m not sure what, but I stood there for about two minutes, waiting for her to finish. She did not acknowledge me in any way.
When she was done, she turned her attention to my thread. She rang it through, took my club card, applied my discount, and processed my credit card, all without saying a word to me. Then she handed me my receipt and turned away. She was perfectly competent, but it was like I didn’t even exist. I was merely a transaction.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
It’s not like I have outrageously high expectations of customer service. But shouldn’t a human being provide at least slightly more personal attention than an automated checkout machine? Is it asking too much to expect a hello and a thank you when you shop at a store?
Some of the staff at Fabricland are friendlier, but my overall experience of their customer service has not been great. For example, I don’t ask for help because I sense they don’t really want me to.
I think it goes beyond the individuals who work there. Fabricland needs to take a good hard look at itself in terms of its corporate messaging. Â I was considering taking a sewing course there, but after reviewing the print-out and visiting the sewing class page on their website, I decided not to. It just didn’t sound like it was going to be any fun.
That’s my nomination for the Worst Customer Service contest. I know there’s worse out there, and I’m looking forward to reading about them. The contest is open until August 31st, and then we’ll vote. I’ll send certificates of nomination to all the nominees, so they’ll know they’re being considered for this most prestigious award.
I agree with you about Fabricland. I went there to get the fabric for the quilt I made for David (years ago). I had the design in mind when I went, just plain squares of blue and brown in different shades. The lady who cut the fabric for me gave me a hard time about my choices being “boring” and acted like I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily I knew enough to ignore her and the quilt turned out to be lovely.
Wow, that’s pretty nervy of her to get all judgmental about your fabric choices if you weren’t asking her for her opinion. Maybe I should consider myself lucky that they treat me like I’m completely invisible.
SEARS. Hands down it’s Sears. It doesn’t matter if you’re there in person, or trying to use their website, or calling customer service the entire experience is antagonistic.
I absolutely refuse to shop there anymore, and that says a lot about a rural Nova Scotia disgruntled customer – Sears is the only department store within an hour and a half of my house.
They never have enough staff on hand so you have to search the store for a cashier, wait forever to ring things through, can never get help and their staff in three provinces so far are without exception huffy about having to do anything but ring through your purchase. The website sucks, and they won’t let you order any way but with their crappy department store credit card. We cut our card up and did a ritualistic dance around it hoping for their slow painful demise because they never ever admit they’ve made a mistake. We moved and gave them our new address, which they did not record properly. So we didn’t get several months worth of correspondence, and resulted in late fees on our bill. We spent time with customer service in three provinces trying to sort out the issue, and they never would admit a speck of wrongdoing. They lost us completely as customers at that point. I hate Sears more than Walmart…and I think Sam Walton eats the children of the working poor for breakfast every morning.
Mudmama, you make such a compelling case for Sears, I’m tempted to boycott them myself!
I vote for Sears as well. I bought my daughter a waterproof sports watch there and it leaked after six months. I’m terrible for keeping receipts and warranties and so I knew I was probably out of luck, but I went in to Sears anyway. They looked at me blankly at the watch counter, then sent me to the watch repair centre where I got more blank looks and shrugs with no suggestions about how to follow up with the manufacturer.
After, I went to a new watch store in the Bayshore mall, and even though I had never bought anything there, they gave me a padded envelope to ship the watch back, along with the forms that I would need. Also, smiles and a friendly demeanour.
It turned out that since I had gotten the watch on sale, all the shipping and handling fees for the repairs weren’t worth it, so I got her a new watch instead. Not at Sears.
Finola, it speaks volumes that a store that *didn’t* sell you the watch picked up Sears’ slack on the customer service end. Maybe we’ll have a Best Customer Service contest after this one, and you can nominate them.
I agree with your Fabricland assessment. I’ve never had anyone there offer to help me. In fact, the one time I tried to track someone down, it took forever. Then, when she did help, I was pretty sure she was heavily medicated because she was completely out of it. I told her I changed my mind about wanting her help and left the store completely frustrated.
I can’t imagine that they just have really bad luck with their hiring. It must be poor management, low service standards.
I’m really glad I’m not alone in my assessment of Fabricland. As I was writing that post, it occurred to me that maybe they treat everybody else like valued customers, and I’m the only one that feels invisible and unwanted there. (Which I doubted, but it still crossed my mind…)
Mine has to be Bell. I had a cell phone with Bell, they got my account mixed up with someone else’s and disconnected my phone because their records showed I hadn’t paid a bill. I found out the phone was disconnected when my car broke down on a lonely stretch of HWY 17 at midnight. I tried calling for help, but all my calls were being redirected to Bell’s Customer Service department. Which was, of course, closed.
I made arrangements to get internet service through Bell Sympatico years ago. Unfortunately I had to move before they even shipped the equipment (modem, etc.) and my new place didn’t support their internet service. I called to cancel the service. They not only billed me for the equipment, they continued to bill me for monthly internet service for an additional 8 months. I called every week to clear up the situation, but it took that long for them to sort it out.
The final straw came when I was moving yet again and wanted my phone number moved to my new address. It was a new home and so we needed a tech to come and hook things up, but they were on strike. So it was going to take three months to get an appointment.
No problem, I simply asked that they put an automated message on my phone indicating the number had been changed and giving my cell phone number in the interim. I checked and double checked to make sure it wasn’t an issue that my cell number was with another company (I’d learned my lesson from the first experience). Somehow, when they did that, anyone who called my cell phone ended up reaching a random Bell operator in rural Quebec.
I could make outgoing calls, but couldn’t receive any. I was on holidays, in a new home with hundreds of people trying to reach me (furniture delivery, cable guy, dishwasher installer, etc. etc.), including my very ill mother. I spent hours on the phone with Bell, using up my precious daytime minutes, and all they would do is tell me that it wasn’t their problem and that if I wanted to speak to someone higher up, I’d have to leave my number for them to call me back. Which, as you can imagine, was infuriating seeing as how the only phone I had was being hijacked by Bell. Even removing the automated message from my land line didn’t help.
My cell service provider stepped up to the plate, giving me a new number at no charge (so that people could actually reach me), refunding me the daytime minutes I’d blown through trying to resolve the issue and offering me a reduced monthly rate for the inconvenience. Which, after they investigated, turned out to be entirely Bell’s issue.
Bell never even acknowledged me. I heard nothing back from them and to this day have refused to ever deal with them again. I won’t even get a land line from another company unless they don’t rent the lines from Bell.
The great cell phone company though? That was FIDO and they’ve always been amazing to me.
I’ve had huge, unbelievable, ugly, drawn-out battles with Bell too, and they left me feeling so incredibly frustrated. The worst of it was that these things went on forever and seemed unresolvable, and they were so complicated and my friends’ eyes would glaze over when I’d try to tell them the latest developments in my epic battle with Bell.
I can’t even remember anymore what it was about. Thank God.
Hands down for me is the Loblaws at Elmvale Acres in southeast Ottawa.
I don’t know how many times I have been stuck in line for more than 15 minutes because the store management has decided that 2 open cashes are enough on a busy weekday late afternoon! And upon expressing my displeasure to a supervisor, getting a “meh†and a shrug of the shoulders.
Or how about the time that I bought a jar of pickles that was a whole YEAR out of date and didn’t realize until I got home. Then upon returning it, being told to “get another jar of picklesâ€, without a sorry or an offer of a gift certificate… something to offset the gas and time expended to bring the jar back to the store.
Or the time I saw the guy at the deli counter berate and older lady for changing her mind about what kind of ham to buy!
Or when I had to pry the car order door open to get my own groceries because I was tired of waiting 10 minutes for someone to answer the bell.
I could go on…
So why do I shop there? We love the PC coffee and would have to drive 5 times the diustnce to get to another Loblaws.
If from Ottawa, don’t shop there!
I laughed out loud. I still shop there because I can walk there and also because they are like the unpopular kid at school that I always trued to make friends with because – yo know, they need a friend.
That would piss me off about the pickles too. Same thing happened to me at the Merivale Loblaws – I took some moldy raspberries back, and they replaced the raspberries but didn’t apologize or in any way acknowledge that it was an inconvenience for me to have to return rotten food.
But about this car order window. I thought those things disappeared in the 70s. There’s still one left?
There’s a car order service at the grocery store at Billings Bridge mall too. I think the main point of their existence is to fuel people’s fantasies of riding down that shute.
You have that fantasy too?? I remember as a little kid wishing I could do that.
Any combination of Bell, Rogers or Telus but especially Bell. Oligopoly of telecommunication providers just boils me with their billing practises, outsourcing to India, etc. anti-competitive collusion.
It seems Bell almost has a business model of false charges and collecting money from people who don’t check their bills and notice being overcharged (of course Bell now charges $2 for a paper bill – which is another sore point with me about these companies and TOS changes requiring 30 days notice to cancel, etc…)
5 years ago I was gung-ho for a paperless billing push, considering my wife a bit of a Luddite for insisting on paper but now I am with her as long as the paper bill is free, but Bell is not alone in starting to charge for a paper bill.
DW, I just called Bell last week about that $2 paper bill charge. They credited the $2 back to me, and then said I should switch to e-billing. I told them I already had, but they had me down as both – e-bill and paper bill. So later in the day I get an email summary of my transaction with them, which they said included activation of a voice line. I phoned them back and said I didn’t authorize or want activation of a voice line. They said that’s just what it was called, not what it actually was…
What irks me about these companies and their charges for paper bills is that they’ll SAY it’s because of their commitment to environmentally friendly business practices, but I don’t believe them. Same thing with the companies that charge a nickel for a plastic bag. It’s not about the environment, it’s about the nickel.
Oh I got you with Fabricland. They wouldn’t know sewing or customer service if it bit them in the axx.
I’ve had them close the till after the customer in front of me saying they were off for their break and I could wait for so and so who was in the back restocking or something else really important.
And yeah, I’ve also been peed on for my choices. But that’s okay because they look real confused when I quiz them about sewing related matters.
Now, I shop primarily online and just go in there every so often to look and have fun with them by seeing if their knowledge base has expanded at all – even a little.
And SEARS! Hysterical! I’m a shapely woman of fifty-something. The last time I went to buy a bra there, was the last time I went to buy a bra there. They acted like I didn’t know I had boobs or that they needed to be supported. :/
I bought my last bra at Sears too. Fortunately I didn’t need any help, because there was nobody working there. (Same thing with Zellers the other day. GC wanted to buy an iron, and we walked all over this huge Zellers store looking for either an iron or an employee. Eventually we found Zellers Only Employee, who told us the irons were kept in the Storage aisle.)
Try Fabricland in Kanata. . . . it will make the Merivale experience pleasant by comparison
I am from the states but it is my opinion that the bigger the company the worse the service. Another good reason to shop local and support “Mom and Pops” stores. My nomination would be for Verizon…
BTW what is a car order window …?
Toronto Fabriclands were no better than the ones described above – but I believe they have all closed now. Rent downtown was just too high.
I don’t have any experience with Fabricland but I just quit Rogers for Bell internet and I’m already coming to regret the decision. My husband has already spend at least a hour on the phone with them trying to find out why there’s a $20 difference between the rate we were told we’d pay when we signed up and the rate that our bill has. Never mind the fact that they also charged us a set-up fee when they promised they wouldn’t. I hate Canadian telecom companies. All of them.
[…] to my post the other day about Fabricland, here’s a photograph of the sign that hangs over the check-out […]
I find most Loblaws terrible for having far too few cashes open on anything except Saturday morning and early afternoon, at which point they have all of them open, but still have horrendous lineups. Going to the grocery store is a trial in keeping rage at bay most days.
Bell and Rogers are pretty much equal in their slimy business practises. Telus isn’t too far behind them, but I find them mildly preferable. Really for internet alternatives Teksavvy is the only one any tech geek will swear by. They’ve got decent customer service, non-shady practices, and combined with a bunch of other tiny internet companies are the only ones fighting the good fight for open internet, and competetive practises.
For cell phone alternatives there’s Wind and Mobilicity (almost every other cell phone company out there is owned by the big 3, including Fido, Virgin, Koodoo, etc) but they’re not great if you live outside of a major metro area sadly. Hopefully one day they’ll be a viable alternative nationwide.