Until today, I had been a regular customer here for about two years. Today was the turning point.
The Country Feed Store has two locations. Both locations are owned by the same people and thus follow the exact same protocol. Both locations have now lost us as their customers.
For many months, we have stopped in at their Carlsbad location and bought (amongst numerous other items) weekly 50 lb. sacks of poultry feed. Today, we stopped by and bought a 25lb. sack of that very same feed.
I used to work for Orkin Pest Control and so I was trained to inspect businesses for pests and sold pest control to commercial accounts. I also have an applicator's license.
When I opened the 25 lb. sack of poultry feed this afternoon, I noticed a plump (well fed) grain weevil, crawling it's way out of the sack. Weevils are not families of "only children". Were you find that one weevil has hatched in a package of any product, more likely than not, it has numbous kinfolk hatching and eating their way through as well. But worse than this is the fact thatmweevils are notoriously quick to infest an entire pantry. Once brought into your home, they will cheerfully make their way into the foodstuffs of your entire pantry. This was my biggest concern and was the primary reason that I immediately reclosed the sack and returned it to The Country Feed Store.
Casey, who was manning their store and who had just sold me the sack of infested feed, at first refused to refund my money from this sack of infested feed or to take it back. I remained resolute that the store needed to stand behind their product and permit us to return the sack of infested feed.
She then started to dig through the sack of infested feed herself as though I was somehow inventing the discovery of the weevil or that I perhaps would not know how to identify one if I had found one.
She finally called Stacey, who is the owner of both stores. Upon hanging up, Casey told me that "just this once, Stacey decided to permit the return" of this sack of infested feed. Really? "Just this once"??
I will no longer buy feed of ANY kind from either of Stacey's two feed store locations. Why on earth would any thinking person buy food from a feed store whose management refuses to stand behind their product?
The store lost nothing (except a good customer) buy finally deciding to "just this once" stand behind their product. Undoubtedly, they will simply divy the contents of the infested sack i had just returned into 2 lb. ziplocked sacks of feed for tourists to feed the local ducks.
Just about every item in their store is priced a little higher than Target, PetSmart or Petco would sell it for. Mary's Tack & Feed (just 10 minutes down the 5 South) sells EVERYTHING this place sells and a lot more. Even better, Mary's stands behind their sacks of feed, accidentally infested with vermin or not. read more