The last time that I stopped in at Freihofer’s bakery outlet, I did not have the best experience. However, every other time that I am there I have had an average experience, and they have great prices on english muffins and bagels that I eat on a daily basis. Today, I had an experience there that more than makes up for the last time I went in.

Today when I went to the store, they had both english muffins and bagels on sale. When you can get both at or just over a dollar for a half dozen, it pays to stock up. When I got to the counter, I was chatting with the manager about the good price. I said something along the lines of how the last time I was in they were both on sale as well, which hadn’t happened before. Then I mentioned how I should have gotten my last batch for free, but I didn’t because the lady ringing me out had not been paying attention.

The store has a promotion where if a red dot appears on your receipt, whatever you are buying is free. She did not notice until after she had punched in my cash, so when I pointed it out her response was something along the lines of, “Well, I already punched in your cash, so the next person in line gets their food for free.”

When I spoke with the manager today, I was certainly complaining, but I did it in a joking way and not in any way trying to get free food out of him. He just said, “Tell you what, you can have the rest of this for free.” He had only rung up a couple of packs of bagels, so I thanked him and said that he didn’t have to do that and handed him my credit card. Of course, the amount was below what they accept credit for. I took a 5 dollar bill out, but he just decided to cancel the order and gave me all four bags of bagels and 3 packages of english muffins for free. His reasoning was that I was a good customer and he knew that I’d be back, so he did not lose much by giving them to me. Of course, I’d have been back even had I paid for all of them, and I offered to do so.

This rambling story just goes to show that some stores are willing to make good on their mistakes, even when you don’t require them to. I like that.

This weekend, I am finally getting a chance to insulate my attic. More on that next week. Today, I’d like to talk about the customer service that I received at Home Depot. The service that I received ran from great to awful, but not necessarily in that order.
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We went out to Office Depot this evening to see if they will make good on trying to keep us from buying a computer from them. The gentleman I spoke with at the local store was very nice and actually let us use the computer. It was still broken, however, and we did not want to spend $800 (after discount for a display model) on a broken computer.

With my wife going back to school, we are in the market for a new notebook computer. We do not want to spend much money, but are willing to above the budget if we could find a tablet PC so that she will have less danger of carpal tunnel. Office Depot had one that we were willing to buy, but they do not want to sell it to us. After trying on numerous occasions to give them our money, I have given up and will never purchase anything from Office Depot again unless their corporate office makes good on their inept store managers.
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