I needed a couple of things from the store and the Food Lion on Battle Bridge is about halfway between where I was in Clayton and where I was heading.
Of the Food Lion stores near me, this one has always been the one I’ve preferred going to because the one literally just up Rogers Lane was so atrocious in terms of just general cleanliness and the customer service was even worse. It was so bad that I must have gone about ten years between visits until I just couldn’t avoid it anymore.
The Food Lion on Battle Bridge was originally planned to be a Bloom which was Food Lion’s idea of an upscale store where they could try charging Harris Teeter prices. Yeah…that experiment didn’t last too long. But the stores that were intended to be Bloom locations were generally the nicest ones in the area…clean, well lit, and very polite employees.
And then there was this evening’s lovely encounter. 🙁
The trend over the past couple of years has been fairly obvious and dramatic starting before you even enter the store. There’s rarely less than a full barricade of cars parked up in the emergency lane where an enterprising Raleigh copper could write a fortune in parking tickets but they’ve clearly given up on policing the lazy drivers. One can only imagine the carnage and chaos should an actual emergency occur requiring the services of the fire brigade.
A few months ago, they had the remodeling crew come in to refresh the inside and this has to be the first time where it seems like it’s actually made what was already pretty decent far worse…cheap and ordinary comes to mind.
Honestly, I’m not stopping by for the decor. They’re usually pretty cheap on the prices though they seem to think they’re now in the league of Publix who often makes Harris Teeter look like a relative bargain!
As long as there aren’t rats or other vermin ruling the aisles, I’m perfectly fine with getting in, getting on with it, getting it over with, and getting out!
Normally you’ll find me using the self-checkout tills which they’ve now enclosed in a somewhat claustrophia-inducing bullpen arrangement but as all of the tills were taken and there was a noticeable queue waiting to get into the bullpen, I figured I’d give the soon-to-be-empty “express lane” with an actual human a shot.
That was a breathtakingly stupid mistake on my part!
For some reason, the person ahead of me who was in the process of paying decided to abort their transaction so the gent behind the till takes off with his infrared bar coding scanner leaving me wondering if unloading my lightly laden cart was a bit of an own goal.
He apparently needed the manager’s bar code to pause the transaction. I can only guess at this because he never said a word when he took French leave of his till nor did he make any explanation when he returned. The amount owed went to zero and he started scanning the items.
So far, so good.
When he’s done, I’ve got my phone out and I’m hovering it over the customary spot where it picks up the Apple Pay and lets me authenticate with the appropriate finger. The Apple wallet came up, I tried doing the authentication but that payment terminal just wasn’t having it.
I know some of them can be somewhat dodgy and thinking this was one of the ones that was known to be touchy, I ask the gent if he has a suggestion as I’m holding my phone in my right hand.
In fairness to what happens next, he did actually ask “may I?”.
But the *ONE SECOND* pause he allowed before summarily grabbing my unlocked phone and starting to swipe through the apps to search for the wallet wasn’t anywhere near enough time for me to try to ask him what he was proposing to do!
He finds the wallet, opens the app, and then hands me the phone as I’m standing there pretty much in a state of shock wondering what in the hell just happened.
I wave the phone at the terminal and this time it decides it wants to actually complete the transaction.
I guess I must have butter-fingered the wallet app into the background and the terminal gave up trying to talk to the app on the phone that was no longer the active app.
Whilst it’s processing, I finally am able to ask what I think is a reasonable question…”is there any particular reason you grabbed my phone without first telling me what you wanted done much less ask if I would give permission for you to do it without so much as a by your leave?”
That question is met with a somewhat blank stare.
I try a different tack: “am I somehow bang out of order for expecting that you *ASK FIRST* before taking my phone and messing about with it?”
The response was rather mumbled and unintelligible and he finally whispers something along the lines of “what do you want me to say?”
I tell him that the truth would be awful nice but it’s clear I’m not going to get any further answers out of him.
Fortunately, his supervisor was in the bullpen and when I related my tale of shockingly poor customer service to her, I’ll give her full marks for seeming to be suitably horrified at what had just transpired. I’m not quite as convinced that her initial plan of “having a word with him” is truly going to do the trick.
I’ve shopped at Food Lion for over 50 years and knew it before it was actually called Food Lion. Originally, they were known as Food Town but they expanded into Tennessee and Virginia where there was already a different Food Town chain and they had to change their name in 1983 where they used the lion logo from their parent Delhaize which had acquired them in 1974.
In all that time, I can honestly say I’ve never had anyone pull a stunt like this.
Perhaps my expectations when it comes to customer interactions are a bit too high for the day and age we find ourselves but I can’t imagine how he could ever come to the conclusion that his job entailed just assuming he could grab what effectively is my checkbook and do as he pleases with it.
And that’s even allowing for the possibility that he may have genuinely thought he was trying to be helpful but did so in the most dreadfully wrong way!
I’m not very hopeful about the trajectory of this particular Food Lion. If this were an isolated incident, that’d be one thing…but come to think of it, this person actually was the same one when I last had a problem at that store and that wasn’t terribly long ago in the grand scheme of things.
It’s bad enough that the prices are sky-high and the quality not so much. But compounding what already sucks with miserable customer service just seems to be adding insult to injury.