I'm the kind of person that says thank you to the check out person and it peeves me when I say thank you and they don't.  It should be them thanking me for choosing their store to make my purchase, right?  We recently stumbled across a pet store in Coon Rapids that I had never heard of before, Chuck & Don's.  We were looking specifically for calming treats for our Schnauzer and thought we'd give the store a shot.  We were pleasantly surprised, not once, but twice.

When we arrived we were greeted with a hello, not unusual, you get that in a lot of stores.  As we wandered around the aisles and to the back of the store we were approached by a young man who asked if we were looking for something specific.  I told him about my friend Sandy in FL that had calming treats.

He knew immediately what we were talking about and brought us to the aisle with a few different brand choices.  He also suggested cat nip (what???).  We found the exact brand she had and made our way to the check-out.  There we were asked if we wanted to sign up for their newsletter.  I saw a sign near the bags of treats that you could get 50% of the product if you received their newsletter so I signed up and asked if I could use the discount immediately.  To my surprise, they said yes.  As the clerk was filling out my newsletter information he found out we were from Duluth and we proceed to talk for 20 minutes about the fishing in this area.  He also informed me that when we get the newsletter there would be coupons and discounts and the closest store to Duluth was in Forest Lake.  They were very friendly, took the time to be very informative and as we left, I felt like we had been chatting with old friends.  That was the first surprise.  The second came a few days later.

We received a HAND WRITTEN thank you in the mail.  Not an email, not a text, a hand-written sent-through-the-US-Post-Office card (pictured above).  They even mentioned the product we had purchased in the thank you card.  I was floored, talk about customer service!  I was more than impressed and will go out of my way to stop at one of their stores again if I'm near one and in need of something.  Now I want you to know, I’m not dissing on our local pet stores, I hadn’t visited them before we ran into the Chuck & Don's store, so to be fair, they may sell the treats we were looking for as well.  We had only tried to find the calming treats at local department style stores up to this point.  However, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have gotten a hand written thank you card.

I'm sure you've all had crappy customer service and I try to cut people some slack, I know every day can't be rainbows and glitter, but still if you're dealing with customers you need to try your best to smile, attend to their needs, answer questions and thank them for shopping in your store, especially because there are so many choices now days.

What's your crazy customer service story that left you shaking your head?

 

More From B105