Super Moon and You

I work for a grocery chain in the US. I deal with problems with our in-house products, customer comments, and general food questions. These are some of the calls/emails I’ve had in the last couple of weeks. I will try and give any follow up to the ones I know about.

• Customer asked if our cat litter (which uses grass seed) was GMO free. No idea. So I shook my head and escalated for research.

• The oil that the customer was using to cook with won’t “make grease”. Customer could not elaborate.

• Customer called in because her daughter had a reaction to something she ate. Her daughter has Celiac’s and the customer wanted to know if something she ate had gotten in it. Not an unusual request, but there was a slight problem. Customer didn’t know what the daughter are because a friend was taking care of her and the customer wanted me to look at the friends grocery purchases for the last two weeks and tell her what had gluten in it. I suggested that the customer contact the friend and find out what her daughter ate.

• Customer called in wanting to know why the serving suggestion of a supplement was different on a bottle than it was in his MyFitnessPal App. 20 minutes later, the customer kind of understood the app was wrong.

• Customer wanted us to “do something” about the price of something we don’t sell.

• Customer wanted to know if spring water was safe to drink. Like drinking water.

• The paper we use for our coupon flyers was to thick.

• We do your fresh green beans stay green after cooking? Do you dye them?

• Customer wanted to know about the enzymes used in our cheeses. Enzymes, or rennet, come from two sources; animal and microbial. Most people ask due to religious or dietary reasons. Customer emailed about more than 30 different products, many without previous research.

• Due to a new Netflix documentary, customers are asking if our olive oil is real olive oil.

• My company offers curbside pickup of your groceries. You make the order online, pick a time and date to pick up, and pick up your order. The time for pick up is in hour chunks. If you schedule a pick up between 13 and 14 hundred hours (1-2 PM) that means you can show up in that time and pick up. Being cold and flu season, many stores are running short staffed, especially for a job that requires lots of outdoor activity in winter temps. Customer emailed us that it was unfair that his wife had to wait for half an hour to get her groceries (wife arrived at 13:15, the email arrived at 13:45-ish) and that the store said that they were short-handed and that’s not their problem.

• Customer complained that the “quality control of this generation is going downhill” (direct quote) and that she hopes “Mr. Trump” will do something about it. All because roughly a handful of came of mixed nuts that so had purchased in the last 5 years had a slight chemical smell. Customer also wanted to send us her nuts so we could know exactly what she was talking about. She could not understand that we keep samples of every production run we make of a product.

• The directions on this bag of rice call for quarts of water and not cups. I’m never buying it again.

• Quality issue with a product and Trump is going to fix it.

• Women are hysterical and will throw food out even if it isn’t bad. Can I eat this thing that is 4 years past the use by date? It’s been in my fridge the whole time. (All said by a man.)

WINNER OF THE WEEK

• A national recall was issued for a product that we make. The same product was also discontinued. The customer was convinced that it was a conspiracy to get him to stop buying our products. The customer refused to return the product to the store in spite of warnings about bacteria in the product. Wanted to know if we were going to replace the product with something else. This went on for 30 minutes. He too also cleaned that Trump was going to do something about our “swamp water company”. He finally asked to speak to someone else. I got him over to our escalation specialist, who was on the phone with him for another 30 minutes. He was not refunded and refused to go back to the store.

Side Note — The 3 Trump calls and the misogynist came in the same day.