The Monticello Cub has a special employee at the service counter. After a bad experience the previous week at a nearby DQ drive-thru, I hesitated to ask for any unusual help from any other local businesses. Impatience and sarcasm has been seeming widespread during any customer service calls, especially in relation to my new medical coverage, and so I was tempted to just skip asking for help at Cub's service counter. I've been speculating that working from home during the "Covid era" has negatively affected phone etiquette especially.
The short while I was shopping this Cub store, unfamiliar to me, had gone well . . it was a Wednesday around 6 p.m. and I appreciated that the store was tidy and not crowded. But a new insulated bag that I bought there during a check-out 15 minutes earlier seemed to have a faulty zipper. I wanted to just return it rather than break another zipper on that type of bag. I sized up the mature woman who didn't have any customers at the service counter . . would she reply, "That's not the sort of help we give here (giving refunds on something that might break, and was loaded with some of my groceries)"? The matter was trite, like when I asked at the DQ drive-thru if the speaker volume could be reduced . . the fiasco that ensued was offensive. Maybe the big difference at the Cub service counter is that the employee is decades older than the curt child employed at DQ.
Eileen was so helpful, she even demonstrated several times how I should hold the bag by the zipper so I could pull its tab around the second corner. She laughed WITH ME as I fumbled. Long ago I used to repair zippers at a tailor shop! How could I have trouble pulling the tab around a corner?
Eileen's patience with me helped me to regain some optimism about getting around, mostly on my own, in a city that still feels difficult for me to learn since I moved into it only ten days before early March 2020, when we all had to begin wearing masks and avoiding crowds for approximately two years. Although Cub's prices have soared along with the price per gallon of gas, I now value that store because it has kind customer service that is lacking at so many other places. read more