My friend, Tawnya, asks a question on her blog based on a recent incident, "Is Superior Service Gone?" That’s a great question considering what happened to ‘the pride’ while out over the weekend.

We stopped off at McDonald’s to buy a quick dinner. Jennifer noticed that they had a ‘adult’ Happy Meal containing a new salad they had just released, a bottle of water and a DVD with some exercise routines. Jennifer ordered that, but when we sat down, she noticed that she had not received the DVD (per the signs…plural!) around the restaurant. She went to the front counter to inquire about the missing DVD, and the register person (who wasn’t getting Jennifer’s part of the order right to begin with) said, "Oh, we don’t have them yet." Jennifer sat down, dumbfounded, and asked me if, during the 6 plus years I worked for ‘the Golden Arches’, I ever placed a sign up promoting something that wasn’t available yet. I mentioned the number of times that we placed signs up early, but always placed a smaller sign on it mentioning when the promotion started, plus I made sure all of my cashiers knew to tell the customer before ordering that the promotion started at a later date. (It eliminated confusion with the customer.) By this time, Jennifer is angry, and wants to speak to a manager. It takes no less than 6 employees screaming for a good 3-4 minutes to get the manager (Barb) to ‘come out from her hiding place’ (the employee’s words, not mine) to talk to Jennifer. What Barb gave Jennifer is bunch of excuses on how she (Barb) doesn’t know why ‘they’ put up the sign. (Who’s ‘they’? Oh, that’s right… YOU, BARB… THE MANAGEMENT OF THE RESTAURANT!!!) Barb also stated that the DVDs would not be in until Tuesday. That’s all Barb said. Jennifer knew that she wasn’t going to get an apology or her money back for doing a fast food ‘bait-n-switch’, so she grabbed the receipt and would contact the regional office (right down the street from me right now) to get this settled. (I’ll keep you posted.)

I admit that I was taught about customer service very early in life (maybe too early), but it just seems like no one cares anymore about the customer. All Jennifer wanted was an apology and an explanation that wasn’t passing blame on someone else. So I will ask the same thing Tawnya did… Is Superior Service Gone?