Blowing & Drifting

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.

Eatin' Good in Your Neighborhood

On Thursday, Shannon and I used an Applebee's gift card (the official gift of new moms in Northfield to one another) to get dinner. My entrée was fine and Julia couldn't be bothered to eat her chicken sandwich, but Shannon's meal was horrible: a dried-out chicken breast, a dry bun, none of the promised sauce, withered mushroom, and a cup of old fruit.

We kvetched about it at dinner, but then at lunchtime on Friday I actually called the comment line listed on the bottom of the receipt. I went directly to a live operator, who listened carefully to my complaint about Shannon's dinner, repeated the whole trivial thing back to me, asked for my contact information, said she was immediately sending a "problem report" to the manager of the southern Minnesota region, and then topped it off by promising to send a $10 gift card "to encourage you to try Applebee's again." I was a little bit surprised: I half expected to get a computer-voiced mailbox when I called, and this was pretty much the opposite. The gift card essentially made Shannon's sub-par meal free. Which is fair, I guess.

The capper was that, not three hours later, the manager of the Northfield restaurant called me on my desk line to say breathlessly that he had just received the problem report and wanted to apologize and please please please use that gift card to come in again and please please please talk to him directly if there's another problem.

That's the service economy, I guess. I wonder how many person-hours were spent addressing my complaint, and how much more valuable those hours were than my paltry $10 gift card!