Customer service just not what it used to be... and we're to blame!

I headed home last Friday, looking forward to a quiet evening and a weekend on the links. Before I got all the way there, I decided to veer off path and pick up some provisions at the local Price Chopper. A half-dozen or so items found their way into my basket as I wandered through the store. Satisfied I had everything I wanted, I headed over to the front end checkout stands.

When I made it to the end of the aisle, I saw almost thirty people waiting in line - at two cashes!

That's right - there were two cashiers dealing with the hoards of people stopping by to pick up dinner on their way home from work. Based on my experience working in a grocery store in the early 1990's, this is "prime time" for weekdays. If there is a time on a quiet Monday or Tuesday where there should be a few more staff on hand, it typically is some time between 4pm and 7pm. It's even more critical on a Friday, especially if it's a Friday that comes before a long weekend.

I waited about fifteen minutes to make it to the front of the line and was slowly becoming irritated about how slow the so-called express line was moving. Just before my turn came, the lady in front of me decided to say something and told the cashier how ridiculous it was that they only had two people checking people out at that time of the day. Obviously oblivious to what was going on, the cashier stated that they always have three cashiers working at any time and they add additional help only when lines get to a certain length. I couldn't help but point out that there were only two cashiers and the "certain length" had at least doubled in the time I had stood there waiting.

Undaunted, the cashier told the woman there was nothing she could do about it and started scanning my items. No thanks for the outgoing customer and no hello for me... no apologies were to be had for the inconvenience of being held up due to some unforeseen circumstance.

Now I know, someone might be tempted to point out to me that I was shopping at Price Chopper, the lower price or "discount" brand of Sobeys store. That someone might try to tell me that I decided to sacrifice service for better prices. They might be right to a point - my Dempsters 100% whole wheat bread sells there for $1.89 instead of $2.39 at the 100,000+ square foot store down the road - but even if I were to expect a somewhat lower quality of service at the "discount" store, in this case, Price Chopper's wasn't living up to its lower standards! And nobody seemed to care!

This wasn't the first time I came across sub-standard service at this particular store. On three separate occasions early this year I checked out the expiration dates on a squeezable Heilmann's mayonnaise bottle. The first time I actually wanted to buy some and had to dig through the bottles on the shelf to find one that hadn't yet expired. Knowing that using expired mayonnaise is akin to playing Russian roulette, I wandered around for five or ten minutes to find an employee. Once I found what appeared to be a grocery clerk, I pointed out the problem and was promptly told that this was a known problem (!) that they had been trying to address for some time. I was assured that a manager would be notified and that they would most likely get this cleared up sooner than later.

The next two times I visited the store I checked the same aisle out. Both times I had found expired jars of mayonnaise! On the third visit I ended up speaking to the same person I had talked to the second time around, and this time she shared tales of exasperation. She was painfully aware of the problem but didn't want to say too much about it on too many occasions to management for fear of being labelled as a complainer. I offered to tear a strip of the guy for her, but of course, he wasn't around. No management ever seems to be around at that store.

My point? Waiting in line at a cash is one thing. Knowingly selling merchandise beyond its expiration date is a public health issue. I suppose I could have called the City of Ottawa to see if they have a mayonnaise police squad, but I gave up, hoping that anybody looking to pick up perishable food would have enough common sense to check out the dates on the packaging.

I've done my part.

In an era where profit seems to trump client satisfaction and the bottom line outweighs any perceived need to "go the extra mile" for someone, I can't help but look at some people I know who worked in retail forty or fifty years ago. This was a time where working for Ogilvy's or Simpsons-Sears was seen as a having a reputable job. People back then took pride in their work and retailers guaranteed satisfaction, often going that extra mile to make sure that customer would come back again and again.

That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

Companies like BCE or Rogers contract customer service call centre work to some foreign country like India, sacrificing quality of service in order to make a few more dollars at the end of the year. That we sometimes cannot understand what these people on the other end of the line are saying seems to be irrelevant... as long as the shareholders are happy with the quarterly results, right?

Companies like Imperial Oil or Petro Canada all love to claim they're not gouging people at the pumps while recording record profits. Who cares if customers are happy if the shareholders see yet another record earnings report?!

Companies like TD Canada Trust and BMO (didn't we once call them Bank of Montreal?) hike fees indiscriminately and expect people to believe that with skyrocketing costs service will improve... sure, banks are getting "prettier" recently, but who cares if a charitable organization has seen its fees go up ten-fold... provided that profits are at record levels, securing the board members' positions because again, happy shareholders keep the heat of the senior administrators. Besides, where else can the public put its money?!

"Screw everybody" seems to be the motto that has replaced "Satisfaction guaranteed or your money back". Why? Shareholders drive companies now, not customers... Why? Because we've let them. What to do about that, I have no idea. I'll keep talking to store managers about poisonous mayonnaise and griping to supervisors when it takes me 62 minutes to get my new PVR activated by some guy in India.

Will it make any difference? Probably not. We've become such a complacent society... but that's a post for another day.

Ontario health "tax" or "premium" - where has it brought us?

I'm beside myself after listening to a caller on CFRA's Lowell Green show just now. Samantha, a 35 year old woman just called in to lament the fact that she has been waiting for months and months for a "positron emission tomography" or PET scan test here in Ontario.

She has breast cancer that has spread to her liver, and I gathered from her interaction with Lowell that things are grim and there won't be any happy ending to this story.

A PET scan was had in Montreal in exchange for cash early on. The problem is that things have progressed and she needs another scan so that a future meeting with her oncologist will be based on "recent" test results. The cancer is particularly aggressive and having up-to-date information on which to formulate a battle plan is critical.

The most shocking part of the call was the numbers she quoted... and she sounded credible, so I have no doubt the numbers are valid. The province of Quebec "funds" 16,000 PET scans annually. Here in Ontario? 750! She stated that there is one such device at the General campus of the Ottawa Hospital, but that it is only used for research purposes. She did not fit some "criteria" that would qualify her for whatever it is she needs to satisfy in order to get a scan done there. She further stated that there are two at the Civic campus of the Ottawa Hospital but qualified it by saying they're located in the University of Ottawa Heart Institute - and that getting a scan done there for cancer is next to impossible.

Here we are in the midst of a provincial election and much of the talk has been funding private faith school systems for Jewish people and Muslims who make up approximately 1% and 2-3% of our general population, respectively.

What about a much larger segment of our population who suffer from medical conditions that could be more easily treated if facilities were made available?! What has Dalton McGuinty's precious health tax or premium done for people like Samantha?

Some have said that it's easier to get an MRI in Ottawa for a dog or cat than it is for elective joint replacement surgery planning. While I love Jersey (cat) and Digger (dog) dearly, neither one of them are as high up on the priority list as Samantha should be... or anyone else in her shoes.

She said that none of the major party platforms have anything within them to address any of the above points. What's it going to take?!

Bank of America raises ATM fees by 50% - everyone else will soon follow, I'm sure...

Using the same lame excuse (I mean explanation) I've heard other thieves (I mean, bank executives) use here in Canada, Bank of America (BoA) spokeswoman Betty Riess says that BoA wants to make sure that its ATM system is convenient and really awesome for its customers.

Or something to that effect - I'm taking liberties here. But so are they.

The fee is going up from $2 per transaction to $3 - a 50% increase... just like that. The worst of it? There's not one thing the poor American saps can do about it and every other major bank will follow suit within weeks, I am sure. Once the "BoA Constrictor" takes the lead, why wouldn't everyone else? Doesn't everyone want to increase an income stream or six by 50% OVERNIGHT?!

Wait - that's not the worst of it... Canadian banks will recognize this as an opportunity to seize the day and raise their fees from the paltry sum they currently charge - an average of $1.50. Hey, TD Canada Trust, Bank of Montreal (or BMO as they call it these days), Royal Bank of Canada (or RBC as they call it these days) and ScotiaBank, and..., and..., and...

Bunch of crooks.

So when will the insanity end? Never, I'm afraid. Even if we do manage to get this cashless society we all dream of, some Ferengi-like nation or mega-corporation will dream up some new way of screwing people senseless.

After all, that's what today's bank shareholders want, right? What happened to the customers? Wasn't there a time when they were number one?

Ahhh... the good old days.

Global warming alarmists really grasping at straws now!

Come on... we're supposed to take these people serious? A news story about the latest way for us to "slow down global warming" is breaking right now. What's this latest scam?

"Cutting down consumption of meat and dairy products could slow down the pace of climate change."

You have got to be kidding. A medical journal called The Lancet has printed a story claiming that the world's growing appetite for meat is increasing greenhouse gas emissions as rain forests get bulldozed so cattle can be raised.

These "scientists" are calling for people living in "wealthy countries" to cut their meat consumption in half over the next forty years. And doing that will save the planet?! Geez.

I've got a brilliant idea for the birds over at The Lancet - let's cut the earth's population by 80% and we can then solve the global warming problem. Or will we? Nobody knows because nobody can prove it either way. What would these "scientists" have been writing as the world plunged into its last ice age? Or when it came out of it?

Has anyone disproved the possibility that this so-called climate change is just another shift in temperature that has occurred more times than anyone knows over the past zillion years?!

Anyone?

Anyone?

Hmmm...

Strike if you must... state your case and let the public be!

The summer's over - back to the routine... and back to the more regular posts. August was one heck of a month!

Support staff members at Carleton University are on strike. I suppose that it is their right to do so, but why is it that they can take more liberties with the law while striking than ordinary citizens can in their day-to-day lives?

It must be a complete coincidence that the strike began right when the school year started. They've had since late April to get affairs in order and contracts negotiated. Why they waited so long to take job action is beyond me as they're employed to make things run smoothly and effectively for the consumers of the university's product. Why wait four months to reduce access to course registration offices at the most critical time of year? Why wait four months delay them from gaining access to the campus and its classrooms? Why wait four months to end up disrupting or cancelling biology, chemistry and physics labs?

Oh yeah - few people would pay attention to the poor underpaid and overworked support workers.

Who gave CUPE and its members the right to disrupt traffic around campus - possibly causing delays to travellers who use Bronson Avenue to gain access to Ottawa's international airport?

Why unions and native bands appear to have carte blanche when it comes to: a) blockading streets and, b) delaying or denying public access to public roads while just about anybody else would get ticketed or arrested for doing the very same thing, I cannot understand. Why law enforcement officers don't step in and enforce the Highway Traffic Act or municipal bylaws, I also cannot understand. Is that not why they are there in the first place? Who doesn't have the intestinal fortitude to stand up against these "public bullies"? Why don't they have it?

Is a settlement coming soon? Who knows. The petty political games that unions and management play while posturing throughout the process is a mystery to those who have not been behind closed doors for negotiations. Union wants 12.5% over three years, management's offering 9% over the same time frame. Nobody's telling the workers that the extra 1.17% per year works out to mere pennies after tax when the pay cheques get printed... and won't offset the lost wages that they'll never recover while they chase those extra pay cheque pennies...

Oh well, I guess they are having fun delaying vehicular and pedestrian traffic onto campus and snickering each and every time an OC Transpo bus drives by, refusing to cross the picket line. Aren't them union brothers honourable?

Ask a student and see what they think. How was chem lab today, John Q. Student? How much did you pay for access to that lab? Ahhhh.... I see.

So who will win here? The lawyers on the negotiating teams! WOOHOO!!! Go strikers go!

So long, Ottawa Lynx

I attended the first Ottawa Lynx game back in the early 1990's and went to the funeral yesterday, September 3, 2007. This time I was with a couple neighbours, my buddy Luc and wife Melissa. Had this game been played a month ago, we'd have made up 40% of the total crowd.

OK, I'm exaggerating a little, but that is how I felt at those mid-summer games where one could pick any seat, row or section in which to seat oneself. I'd buy a ticket and roam around a bit, hoping to find someone or something interesting in that particular part of the stadium... the stadium with no name and the stadium with the world's smallest parking lot. Even the Best Buy up the road had more parking spaces in it.

There are a number of articles in the papers this morning mourning the loss of the team. Where did the fans go, they ask. While I am guilty - to a point - of having been an avid supporter in the early days and fading off as the years passed, I always made a point of attending a game or two here or there. Every warm summer night spent in the blue seats over in section LL I would remind myself how much I love the experience of having a hot dog at the ball park.

Sure, I owned a pair of partial season tickets in years one through three but then I headed off to university. I tried to make a point to attend games every now and then but clearly didn't do a good enough job. Sorry, boys - I let you down. We let you down.

To Howard Darwin, the man who brought baseball back to Ottawa, a big thank you. Even bigger thanks to Ray Pecor who tried to keep the dream alive. Will I keep track of the Iron Pigs? Probably not... it was tough to be a huge Lynx player fan with the 2007 affiliation with the Philadelphia Phillies - I had been conditioned to hate them over the years. And with no Lenny Dykstra or John Kruk around, this Montreal Expos fan just didn't have any personal attachment to the big league team or its AAA affiliate.

The only upside to the last Lynx game is that team management did a heck of a job. The same couldn't be said for those running the Expos - none of the regulars played in that last game at Olympic Stadium and most of the concession stands were closed or selling wieners with no buns. I still can't believe that the guy told me that I'd have to pay full price for hot dog components!!

The Lynx were a class act on day one... and remained so right through the end. All involved should be commended and deserved a better fate.