When I teed off on the customer service experience at Whole Foods store in Kailua in yesterday’s post, it drew quite a few comments.
Today, Whole Foods responded. I appreciate the effort taken to reply.
And since there was a lot of back-and-forth about Whole Foods, I’m including the full message here.
Aloha Ian,
I’m sorry to read that you were disappointed with a recent customer service experience at our store. It is our intention to satisfy and delight all of our customers, and in this situation it sounds like we didn’t do that. I will share your request for PB2 with our Grocery team and be back in touch with you directly about availability. I will also remind all of our Team Members to offer to research and/or special order items that we may not currently offer or have in stock.
In response to the comment about pricing, while local grass-fed fillet mignon from Maui Cattle Company is indeed currently $29.99/lb, our 7% lean local grass-fed ground beef also from MCC is currently $6.99/lb. We do offer a sprouted superfood cereal from Living Intentions in bulk for $15.99, but we also offer delicious, local Anahola granola from Kauai at the current price of $7.99/lb, and many more options for less.
Other great ways to find value throughout the store are by choosing our 365 private label brand, and attending a store tour which we offer every other Saturday at 10 a.m. More information about tours and other events at the store are on our web site at http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/kailua.
Again, I apologize that we didn’t do more to help you find what you were looking for on this recent visit to our store, and hope you’ll shop with us again in the future. Next time you’re in the store please feel free to ask for me or either of my fellow Store Team Leaders, Tim or Nathan, and we’ll happily respond to your concerns in person.
Mahalo,
Robin Burton
Associate Store Team Leader
Whole Foods Market Kailua
808-263-6800
By the way, last night we tried a modestly priced bottle of old vine zin that we picked up while in the Kailua store. I don’t recall the brand, but it was bottled by a company in Manteca, California, not a name I associate with wine country, and it was on sale for, if I’m not mistaken, $7.99. It was a pleasant bottle of wine. I would recommend it.
Discover more from i L i n d
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Had the exact opposite experience at Whole Foods. Noticed they carried my fave chocolate brand, but not my fave chocolate bar. Told Customer Service. They checked and found the bar isn’t on the Whole Foods order from the company. They wrote down all the info and promised to suggest it to Whole Foods order dept. Also asked if I wanted to place an order.
That’s a nice recovery by WF. Certainly a better customer service than our friends at Safeway have exhibited to our community.
P.S. Like some other readers, I’m intrigued by this PB2 product. Please let us know what you think if you ever get your hands on it.
So maybe if you had asked the CS person directly about stocking or special ordering PB2, or had asked for a manger, this scene could have been avoided? Or do you prefer use of the public cudgel as a first resort?
BTW, I tried the Apothic Red you pictured a while back. A perfect bottle for a BYOB restaurant function last weekend.
It’s true. I should be more pushy and demanding on the spot. But I have that local reticence….it’s on the way home that I realize the interaction didn’t go as well as it should have. Chalk it up to being raised in island culture.
Sorry, Ian, that’s a lame explanation. What you did wasn’t “local” style, it was passive-aggressive behavior. Even if local reticence led you to avoid a “confrontation” with customer service, to go to the safety of your computer to say to the whole world what you would not say to one or two live people is unfortunate, if not pathological. FWIW, local style spells it “aloha,” not” gotcha.”
How dare he write about his life experiences on his own blog! The nerve of this guy!
It’s good to see management publicly grovel for forgiveness from time to time. Cudgel ’em, I say.
Caucasian get huffy about wine and cheese in Kailua. Yuck, be kind eat a grape don’t squeeze it to death and pass the rotted dairy. Fish and poi is good enough for me.
@ohiaforest3400 – Nothing like coming to someone’s personal blog & showing them some ‘aloha,’ yeah?
Fair enuf. Of all people, I certainly can benefit from self-examination. And that’s all I’m suggesting here.
If we’re talking “Feline Fridays” or the latest dinner menu, that’s personal. Using your 4th ranked blog to fault someone for not doing what you didn’t ask them to do and which they have no obligation to is something else altogether.
As I said in response to the original post, if Ian had taken this up directly with the CS person by asking WF to carry the product or special order it or had taken the matter up with a manager and been blown off, well, then, fire away. If government, for example, doesn’t perform pursuant to law, then fire away: the law is the law and they don’t need to be asked to abide by it before you comment on their failure to do so.
But this was not fair game. As I see it.
Hey, if criticism of the businesses we deal with and rely on “was not fair game” unless it involves a service they are obligated to provide, consumers would pretty much have no right to say much of anything. Isn’t there something wrong with that picture?
Even with government, the only applicable standard isn’t whether our public employees are acting lawfully.
I think we’re certainly entitled to criticize public employees when they are rude, or unhelpful, and to criticize their managers and administrators for failing to provide efficient service, not simply adhering to some legally required minimum.
Isn’t that part of what’s at stake in an election? Holding officials accountable not only for acting legally, but doing things to improve public life?
Anyway, just my two cents worth.
Ian, was the CS person you spoke to at WF “rude” or “unhelpful” or “inefficient”?
It sounds from your original description that they were not the first. Perhaps they were not helpful, but then it does not appear that you asked them to carry the product or to special order it for you. I don’t know about the third; perhaps to them efficient is not carrying products for which there is no demand; perhaps it would have been more efficient for you to ask to speak to a manager or to make a follow-up phone call, rather than proceeding directly to the blogosphere.
My reference to government and its legal obligations was intended — apparently unsuccessfully — to draw a distinction in your favor. That is, if government doesn’t do, thru it’s employees, what it is supposed to or legally obligated to do, I don’t think you should have to say “pretty please” before you take to the airwaves to make your case.
I’d like to think alot of problems can be solved, even in the government context, with some more nuanced interpersonal interaction but, hey, we pay taxes, we have expectations. Not so much with private enterprise with whom — unlike government — we do not HAVE to deal. I think if we want something from them, we need to ask. If we don’t want to do that, then it’s their loss because we can just take our business elsewhere. We don’t have that option with government.
In any event, the fact is that whether we are dealing with the private sector or government, we are dealing with individual people, in the WF case probably a new, younger, marginally paid person at that. We owe it to them to put ourselves in their shoes and give them the same benefit of the doubt we would like to get.
Criticizing is not unfair, especially if, as I said before, one makes an effort to provide a solution and gets blown off. But as I also said before, publicly criticizing someone as a first resort for not doing something they were not asked to do, and may not have been trained to suggest, IS unfair and I think reflects a tendency at least among journalists like yourself and perhaps — unfortunately — the population as a whole (including, all too often, myself) to criticize and find fault not necessarily as a means to an end but as an end in itself. It’s caustic, corrosive, and just not helpful.
We have too many more things in common that unite us, rather than divide us, to dwell on the things that divide before making a genuine attempt to find the common ground that unites us. A friend of mine said at dinner the other weekend (when we had that bottle of Apothic Red), “I knew I liked you when we first met because we complained about the same things.” Wow. What does that say about us? Nothing good, I’ll tell you that. I don’t want to be that person.
Hey, Mr. Burton, it’s “filet mignon,” not “fillet.” “Fillet” is for fish.
However, I do occasionally shop at Whole Foods, and I love it. So nice to have an alternative. I can’t afford the meat, but that’s OK.
Ohia, I can see you’re getting hammered for being the nail that sticks up. You’ve made some good points, and I appreciate your views on this.
Mahalo, Nancy,
I have so much respect for Ian and his efforts to keep important issues in the public eye that his blog is one of the first things I read every day. So, it distresses me when I see him go off track, in my opinion, and delve into what seem to me to be petty, ad hominem diatribes.
I’m no better, I just don’t have a blog to spew it.