The story below was submitted anonymously to ProSales after our call for your spookiest stories. This is the most frightening tale of all.
There are lessons to be learned here for business owners and managers who care enough to read this. And weep.
A recent visit to one of the stores of a multi-location company, which prides itself on customer training and bible-thumping service, was very, very scary.
As we entered the store with the sole and soulless intention to buy a door, all of the employees vanished into thin air. Scurrying away like they had the devil to pay, they took off in every direction, even though we saw no other customers in the store. We were left on our own to find the door and wrestled with a cart to put it on. Finding hardware was a dreadful trick. There were no aisle or product signs, leaving us to comb several aisles to find the basics we needed. When we finally hauled the door and hardware up to the one and only cashier, it seemed to take an eternity to get checked out. A zombie customer was ahead of us, or rather one who appeared to have his brains eaten by a zombie: He was stymied by his own credit card.
We again were left on our own to haul the door out to the truck. Loading it up we noticed it looked a smaller than it should. We measured it and found that, indeed, we had bought the wrong size. So we hauled it back in to the store, went on another grueling and godforsaken search for the correct size, and hauled it back up to the same cashier who then had grave problems trying to figure out how to do the exchange.
After several painstaking minutes, she apologized profusely and called a manager for help. Three times. Beetlejuice finally appeared and was not happy. The grumpy store manager offered no greeting, just silent, grisly glares to the employee who she obviously had not trained properly. She gruesomely tapped the computer keys, obviously annoyed that we were disturbing her bloodsucking break. All the while, other store employees could be seen lurking in the aisles or hiding away in the office like vampires escaping the light. Only the office had windows so we could see them clearly. Like ghosts, they did not vanish completely from sight.
We went to this store because it is small, family owned, and they pride themselves on training their employees. But, their customer service was icy cold and hideous. Now we know never to return to that ghastly and torturous location.”
