A Sucker for Service

I love great customer service!

I'm not a very forward person when it comes to shopping or getting oil changes or even at restaurants. I've never been one to send my plate of food back because I don't like it. And, I've never been one to just get free stuff from places. You know the type of people I'm talking about. The kind of family that servers will approach and just hand your kids ice cream because they think they're cute. Well, I've never drawn that kind of attention.

But, I have had some great experiences that make me go back to a place over and over.

Walmart. I *heart* Walmart. It's not their low prices. It's not their hours. It's their customer service that I experienced once.

We moved into this house a week or two before Christmas when I was pregnant with Maggie. I was tired. All the time. One day, Jamie gave me the 'go ahead' to buy curtains and curtain rods for our living room. I headed to Walmart. Well, we have 3 sets of window's in the living room. And I couldn't find enough rods. So, I called another Walmart. They sounded like they had what I needed.

I headed out to the other Walmart and went to the customer service desk. There on the back counter was 2 different styles of rods, 3 of each kind. The nice woman gathered up all this for me so that I wouldn't have to truck all around the store.

And here's the great part... she didn't even know I was pregnant!

Fast forward to today. I decided to head out to Panera to use up the last of a b-day gift card and order my two favorite things from there. A caramel latte and a bacon cheddar quiche. I had my gift card and my frequent coffee card all set to go. Then I handed the girl my frequent coffee card.

"I'm so sorry, but we're not using these anymore." she said.

"Oh, that's fine.", I said. Because stuff like this happens to me all the time.

"I'll give you a free latte today.", she continued. Even though I wasn't even near to filling out the entire punch card.

"Um.... what? How does that make sense?", I asked in confusion and disbelief.

"All you owe is the amount for the quiche. Some guy is selling our cards on the internet so we had to stop our card program.", she replied.

"Um... ok. Thank you so very very much!", I exclaimed.

I've always had a thing for Panera, but now it's so much deeper :)