An Open Letter to Lowe's

Dear Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse,

A long while ago, you built one of your stores in my town, and you built it literally right next-door to the existing Home Depot. When my wife and I bought our first house, we remodeled the entire place, floor to ceiling, from that Home Depot. We were able to do that because we didn’t have kids yet, so we had all the time and money in the world.

We were rich and carefree. We could go out to eat anywhere, at any time. We could go to the movies any day of the week – not just on Tuesdays - and buy all the popcorn we wanted, even at those movie theater prices. We played golf, both mini and regular. We could do all that while still saving for retirement and pouring tons of money into the home renovations.

We had no idea how much would change when we had kids. No one at the Home Depot warned us. You’d think they would have, since they knew damned well that once we had kids we’d have no more time or money to spend at their store. Go figure.

Anyway, when you built your Lowe’s right next to our Home Depot, I remained very loyal to them. Their employees had always been top-notch (except for the not warning us about the kids thing), and I wasn’t going to share my business with you.

However, over the period of a few months to a year I began to notice a decline in the Home Depot customer service levels. The employees seemed to be getting younger and less knowledgeable, not only about general home improvement how-to, but also about where things were actually located in their own store. Then one evening, a funny thing happened.

I was walking down an aisle and overheard a customer ask one of the employees where something was located. The employee didn’t know what it was. She explained what it was, but the employee still had no idea where to find it. I stopped and told the woman exactly which aisle to find it on, how far down the aisle, and how high off the floor it was located. She thanked me and asked if I was an off-duty employee. I said no, just someone who’s shopped here a lot, as I shook my head in disgust at the pathetic excuse for a customer service representative, hanging his head in shame above his orange apron.

That night was when I decided to give you a try, Lowe’s. And our relationship was good for a long time. Your employees would drop whatever they were doing and walk me to where I could find something, even when I insisted that it was OK if they just told me. Sometimes that was uncomfortable and weird, but it was appreciated, nonetheless.

Somewhere along the way, Home Depot got the memo and stepped their customer service back up, and over these many years, you have both performed fairly well. But I wanted to give you the courtesy of a warning. You’re slipping, big time, in the stocking and returns department.

My wife and I have denied our teenage boys food and shoes just long enough to be able to afford some new lighting and mirrors for our master bath. We bought two light fixtures from you the other day, and I was more than a little upset when I unpackaged the first one back at home. It was immediately obvious that something was wrong, from the complete lack of internal packaging involved.

The only damn thing in the box was the light fixture. No protective bag. No Styrofoam end caps holding it in place, no installation instruction sheet. Also missing were the bracket that holds it to the wall, the electrical connectors, and the screws. And to cap it all off, it was visibly and obviously scratched up. Digging down to the bottom of the box I did actually find one other item – the receipt from the last time it was purchased!

I have one simple question for you: How in the actual hell did this thing end up on the shelf?

Based on my recent past experiences, combined with this incident, both purchasing and then returning this fixture (for at least the second time in its life), here’s my estimation of the current inner workings of your returns department:

1) Customer brings in a return.

2) You ask zero questions about the product’s performance, current state, reason for return, or even origin.

3) You assess whether the product is in the original packaging.

4) If it’s not, you shrug and say, “whatever.”

5) If it is in the original packaging, you will, under no circumstances whatsoever, open that packaging to inspect the item, or even verify that it’s in there at all.

6) You give the customer back whatever amount of money they ask for.

7) You turn around and throw the return into a Lowe’s shopping cart.

8) Someone rolls that shopping cart out into the store and puts whatever it is back on the shelf in the approximate location it came from.

9) Everyone in the breakroom complains about how many returns we’re getting today.

10) Repeat.

Like I said, this is not an isolated incident. It’s just the latest one, and I’m done. I can’t do this anymore. The price of gas is too high for me to make two round trips to get one item. The boys will eventually need to eat again, and the school is complaining about them being barefoot.

So, from now on I’ll be the guy bringing my own box cutter in and completely unpackaging everything right there in your store before I buy it.

And fair warning: If it’s not all there, I’m just going to leave it lying there on the floor.

Do better,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2022 Marc Schmatjen

 

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This is Taking a Toll on Me

I went over a toll bridge in the San Francisco Bay Area at the end of last month. They have completely done away with toll booth operators, in favor of taking a picture of your license plate and mailing you a bill. With no one there manning the booth, I guess they just expect you to be rude to yourself on the way through now.

I always figured they were still collecting tolls just to pay the toll workers in some insane government catch-22. I just assumed, based on Bay Area traffic volume, that each toll worker must make about $3000 an hour. I guess that wasn’t the case.

So, since they got rid of the workers, I guess all the money just goes to the bridge now. What a fun way to pay for a bridge that has already been fully paid for by the tolls about six zillion times.

Anyway, I got the $6.00 automated bridge toll invoice from Bay Area Fastrak in the mail the other day, and I picked it up yesterday morning to pay it. You just have to go to bayareafastrak.org and enter your credit card info. Neat-o.

As I was about to go to the website, the license plate number listed on the bill caught my eye. I was driving our Honda Accord that day, but the license plate number listed was the one on our Ford Expedition. Hmm… Did they just look up our name with the Honda plate and then the computer defaulted to another one of our cars when creating the bill? That would be weird, but plausible.

Then I noticed in the upper right corner of the bill there was a downward-facing picture of the front of our car going through the toll booth. There was the hood and bumper of our Accord with our Ford’s license plate clearly visible below the Honda emblem.

What the hell??? Did some prankster in our neighborhood sneak onto our driveway one night and swap our plates around? No. Who would do that and why?

Wait a minute, here. That’s not the date I was in the Bay Area. And this says I went over the Antioch bridge. That is not the bridge I was on.

I don’t think that’s my Honda. Did someone steal our license plate and attach it to their Honda?

Nope, all plates accounted for.

Hang on a second. Let me put on another pair of readers and double my magnification on this picture… Son of a biscuit, that’s not a C. It’s a G! Some Honda owner has a plate that is only one very similar-looking letter different than mine.

Dammit! This invoice is going to be $6 plus $25 more if I just ignore it, and I think that’s just for the first month.

I guess I am going to bayareafastrack.org after all… Oh, look. What a shock. There is no place on this fabulous website to handle this. Yay, I get to call them!

Thank you calling the Bay Area Fastrak customer service center. We are currently experiencing longer than average wait times to speak with a customer service representative. We recommend calling back later in the week when we anticipate a shorter wait time, or you can visit us at our website, www.bayareafastrak.org.

How the hell can you anticipate shorter wait times later in the week? Do you mostly send people someone else’s invoice over the weekends? And I already went to the website. There’s no section for, “Hey, you butt munches, this isn’t my car!”

Press one for English.

If you have a question about your notice of toll evasion, or would like to pay your notice of toll evasion fines over the phone, press one. If you have a question about…

Sixty-seven phone menu tree branches and a full five minutes later, Your wait time in approximately fifteen minutes.

What followed was possibly the worst hold music to ever exist. It was the same fifteen-second tune (I had time to count), played over and over on a loop, and it sounded like it was being piped through one of those giant WWII-era military loudspeakers, except the loudspeaker had been hit by a mortar shell. It was so tinny, my dog ran out of the room.

Every sixty seconds, or four “musical” loops, the recorded voice would come back on and tell me all about how great the website was and how I could definitely handle my transaction there. Then it would update my wait time by subtracting one minute from the previous estimate.

But the twenty seconds it took the voice to tell me about the website every minute was never factored into the declining minute timer. So, the sixteen times I heard about how great the website was (they told me twice that I had one minute remaining on my wait) really added more than five minutes to my wait. (I had time to do the math, while I prayed that my ears would fall off.)

Amazingly, when my friendly toll customer service professional finally came on the line, it was very easy to clear up the problem. I told her it wasn’t my car and that I thought the license plate was one letter off from mine. She had immediate access to multiple pictures of the car on her computer and was able to zoom in on the rear plate and read it clearly. It was, in fact, a G and not a C.

She also laughed at one point when looking at her pictures and said, “Oh, yeah, ha! That’s a guy wearing a white shirt,” as if that was further evidence that this was a mistake.

Umm… you’re on the phone with me. I’m clearly a guy. Do I not sound like I own any white shirts? Why would that… never mind. Whatever. She removed the charge from my account. That’s all I care about.

So, Bay Area Fastrak, I just want to thank you for the twenty-eight minutes of my life that it took to fix a problem that you created and had absolutely nothing to do with me in the first place.

And just a thought here, but how about we invest some of those (literally) millions of dollars y’all are collecting every month in a camera system that can tell a C from a G? That would be great.

But in the meantime, feel free to send my actual toll bill from the end of last month to someone with a similar license plate as my Honda. I appreciate it!

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2021 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Birthday Meal Comp

“We’re going to comp your lunch.”

Unless you’re at Denny’s on your birthday, nothing good has ever happened prior to that statement from the restaurant manager. It usually means you’ve just spent twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to clean the chocolate shake and cheeseburger off your shirt and pants after the new trainee waiter lost control of his tray on the way past your table.

I heard those six words this past weekend at the poolside bar and restaurant at the swanky Marriott Newport Coast Villas, where my family and I were pretending to have enough class to actually fit in. We were having lunch with my sister at a poolside table while the kids swam in the giant pool. (At least, I think they were swimming in the pool. I had kind of lost track of them after I stopped caring where they were or what they were doing. It’s a big place, but they were basically trapped in the resort since they didn’t have a car, so my parental watchfulness kind of went on vacation, too.)

It was our replacement waitress bringing me the confusing news of my unexpected dining windfall. Connor, our original waiter, had vanished mid-meal, but no one cared at the time, since the second pitcher of margaritas was still over the halfway mark.

I had asked for the check, and our replacement waitress was having a hard time locating it. We got the feeling Connor didn’t give her much of a briefing before he left. After sifting through seven or eight different bills with her, we did the logical thing and claimed the one with the lowest total. Unfortunately it was still over a hundred dollars, and even more unfortunately, it was actually ours. They don’t exactly give the margaritas away at places like that.

I’d told her that I’d given Connor my credit card to start our margarita tab, and when we finally found the right bill, she walked back to the bar mumbling something about not having seen the card. Hmm...

She came back to our table about ten minutes later and broke the happy news to us. “So, um, we’re going to comp your lunch.”

Primary inside-my-brain reaction: Free margaritas!

Secondary reaction: Wait... she didn’t spill anything on us. Did someone spill something on the kids?

Tertiary reaction: I wonder where the kids are?

(I don’t know the word for Fourth-i-ary) reaction: Oh, crap. My credit card.

That was it. She was holding the bill, but not my card. My whole life flashed before my eyes. Not again!

I haven’t had the best credit card luck in the past few years. The information sharing policies at Target’s IT department have caused my credit card company to issue me new cards twice now, and a few months ago my wife had one card number stolen, and completely lost another card, all in the same weekend. Authorities believe margaritas may have been involved.

Every time we get a new credit card number it takes three days off my life. Literally. We have nearly all of our bills on auto pay with our credit cards, so every time I get a new card it takes me three days of logging in and trying to figure out where to update my billing information, or contemplating hanging myself while on hold in a soft rock phone tree maze of despair.

“Um, why exactly, are you buying our lunch?”

“Well, funny story. Connor, your first waiter... His wife went into labor and he accidentally took your credit card with him to the hospital... ha!”

Primary inside-my-brain reaction: Who has a baby on spring break? That’s just bad scheduling.

Secondary reaction: I guess we should tip him pretty good. He’s going to need it.

Tertiary reaction: I better not be paying for the delivery!

(I don’t know the word for Fourth-i-ary) reaction: That’s actually pretty funny.

“Would you like anything else?”

“Two more pitchers of margaritas, obviously. So, when will I be getting the card back?”

“We’re working on that.”

Twenty-four hours later and I still don’t have my card back. Connor has not charged any medical, gift shop, or champagne and cigar purchases on it, so I am rolling the dice and not canceling it, since I would almost rather lose an arm than have to get a new credit card number. Back at the pool bar they assure me that they have a call into him.

“I’m driving home tomorrow, and that card is my gas card. I need it back tonight!”

“We will definitely make that happen, sir.”

Four hours later I get a call from George, the front desk manager. He does not have my card, but he does have some “options,” and wants to meet in the lobby. I can’t figure out why George is in the lobby and not in a car retrieving my card. I am not happy with George. Or Connor. I meet with George and sit down in the comfortable and inviting lobby relaxation area.

“Well, here’s the thing,” says George. “Connor is six hours away from here.”

Primary inside-my-brain reaction: Why does he work six hours away from where his wife is giving birth?

Secondary reaction: Such bad spring break scheduling, bro!

Tertiary reaction: Does the front lobby here have margaritas?

(I don’t know the word for Fourth-i-ary) reaction: This George guy is about to really piss me off, isn’t he?

“Go on, George.”

“He has mailed the card back to me, but it won’t be here until Monday. I was told you were driving back home to Sacramento tomorrow, is that correct?”

“Yes. Go on.”

“When I get the card, I will overnight it to your home address. In the meantime, I will send someone right now to go buy, let’s say, two hundred dollars’ worth of gift cards to cover your gas on the way home. Will that be an acceptable solution to this embarrassing problem we’ve created?”

I try desperately to maintain my angry face, fighting back my smile. I don’t need the card for gas. My wife has the same card in her purse. At least, she did before the margaritas.

“I think that will be acceptable, George. When can I expect those?”

We got back to our villa that night to two hundred dollars in Amex gift cards and a nice bottle of red wine on the counter, courtesy of the Marriott. It’s not a pitcher of margaritas, but I guess it’ll do.

We drove home the next day and got back to an empty fridge. My wife promptly went off to Costco with two hundred dollars in free Marriott bucks.

Thanks, Marriott. You didn’t just comp our lunch. You comped our whole family’s next ten meals. And a nice bottle of Kirkland pre-mixed margaritas.

Cheers. And congratulation, Connor! I hope you still have a job when you get back.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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An Open Letter to Verizon Wireless

Dear Verizon Wireless,

I fell in love with you all over again last week. I’ll admit, my love for you was waning a little, especially after our trip to Europe this summer. I brought you along to help with navigation and translation. Your translator function did great helping me order beers, and your map navigated us successfully across four countries and back, but I have to say, you were expensive.

You lured me in with your economical international voice and data plan, but then once we were actually in Europe, you kept charging me another thirty dollars every two days because my wife’s phone was using too much data. Your text messages were less than helpful. “We are charging you thirty dollars because this phone exceeded the data allowance” isn’t very useful when we have no idea what one phone was doing differently than another. A message more like “Tell your wife to stop playing Candy Crush until you get to Germany” would have been much more informative.

Europe aside, we had a great year with the new phones, but my love for you took a big hit a few weeks ago when my phone stopped being a phone. I guess at this point what I carry around in my pocket is tough to call a ‘phone’ anymore. It’s really an amazingly small television set that also has an amazingly good camera that also lets me read books, and read and send emails and texts, and allows me access to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and lets me order things and track them to my doorstep on Amazon Prime, and keeps track of my entire life with an amazing calendar feature, plays all my music, and lets me search literally the entire world’s collective store of information while I sit on my toilet, and also happens to have a phone feature.

I know some of the kids out there don’t even know or care that these things come with a phone feature anymore, but I’m over forty and still communicate with voice, so the phone part is still important to me. Especially since we got rid of our home phone last year. I know what you’re thinking – “What’s a home phone?” Never mind.

Anyway, my phone stopped being able to make calls without the person on the other end of the line sounding like I called a fax machine. I know what you’re thinking – “What’s a fax machine? And the other end of what line? What’s he talking about?” Never mind.

Frustrated, I arrived at your store at 10:01 A.M., which had opened at 10:00 A.M. I was fifth in line. I waited an entire ten minutes (I know, right?) before I was called to one of your space age-looking white oval desks and helped by your guy Jared. I explained the problem with my phone and tried to hand it to him. He didn’t want it. He just started typing on his handheld tablet.

“Do you have any kind of warranty on the device?”

Device? What happened to phone? “I didn’t purchase a warranty plan for this one. I bought an extended warranty for my wife’s device because she sits on it all the time. Hers works great, except in Europe.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. No, I don’t have an extended warranty.”

“OK, because this device only came with a one year warranty, and you’ve had it longer than that.”

Here we go. This is where you’re going to tell me I need to give you $400. I will end you and your hipster sideburns, Jared.

“No problem, though. We’re in open enrollment right now, so I can add a device protection plan to your account and get you a new device coming.”

“Huh?”

Tap. Tap. Tap. “OK, your new device will arrive at your house tomorrow. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

“Uhhhhhh. No. I think that will do it. Thanks. By any chance, does Verizon have a health insurance branch?”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Have a great day!”

Sure enough, my replacement ‘device’ arrived the next day. I used Samsung Smart Switch just like Jared told me to do and it worked great. An hour later I was up and running with a new device, ready to proclaim my undying love for you from the mountaintops.

Sure, the replacement device shut itself off and rebooted a few times during the switch over, but I chalked that up to all the updating of apps and whatnot and so forth. It’s all very technical.

Then it kept shutting itself off and rebooting, and freezing up.

Hmm... This is actually starting to feel more like health insurance after all. My replacement device now makes great phone calls, but nothing else works right.

Yes, my replacement device is broken.

I read the fine print. The device you received may be a reconditioned Certified Like-New Replacement... I’m falling out of love with you again at this point. My original device worked fine when it was new. This is nothing Like-New.

Back to your store I went yesterday, making sure to arrive at 9:50. I was first in line when the door opened promptly at 10:00 A.M., and I was walking out the door at 10:06 with a second replacement device on its way. Fareed was faster than Jared, and his shoes and sweater were Verizon red. Jared was in all khaki and white. He’d better watch his step. Fast Fingers Fareed is gunning for top dog in Verizonville.

Triple-F has once again fanned the flame of my love for you, as my second replacement device arrived on my doorstep today.

I hope this one behaves Like-New, or you and Jared and Fareed and I are going to have to go to counseling.

Fingers crossed,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2016 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!