"Make" Your Own Time Machine

Serveral years ago, I signed up for the "Premier" subscription to Make Magazine.  This is supposed to provide automatic renewal at a preferred rate.  The first couple of years were rough, but I thought everything was working OK finally.

Until I used my powers of smart-assery to stir up the hornet's nest.

Here are the emails, starting with one from them, then my reply, then alternating...

2/16
Dear Larry Macgregor,

We hope you have been enjoying your subscription to MAKE. We will be sending your next issue to the printer shortly. Per your request, your subscription was automatically renewed for another full year on 3/9/2012.   [....]

2/16
So my subscription "WAS" renewed on a date that falls over three weeks into the future?  Care to explain how that works?

2/21
Hello Larry,

Thank you for your email.

No, your subscription has not been renewed yet.

Would you like me to remove this feature?

2/21
No, I don't want the feature removed, I want emails that make sense.

Such as "Because you are a valuable subscriber using our Premier feature, we'd like to remind you that your subscription WILL BE renewed on March 9.  To manage your subscription options, please go to .  Thank you for being a Premier Maker".

See how that works?  It communicates the information clearly without resorting to telling the customer that something has happened in the future.

This isn't rocket surgery.

[oops, there's that smart-assery again!]

2/12
Hello Larry,

Thank you for your email.

I understand what you are saying.

Will let the appropriate department know.

Is everything else okay with subscription?

Should I add the account back onto automatic renewal?

2/21
Wow, you took it off auto renewal?  The first reply you sent me ASKED if you should do that, and I replied NO.

How was that unclear?

DO NOT CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT MY SUBSCRIPTION

2/21  (actually received as I was writing this post)
Hello Larry,

Nothing has been changed on your account and everything is in its original standing.

Have a marvelous evening!
-------------------------

I can't wait until I notice that I've strangely stopped receiving the magazine, even though I'll probably still get charged.  Yeah, I shouldn't have replied to the first email, but dammit, it was a stupid message.  If and when I get my time machine, I'm sure as hell not going to waste it on trips into the near future to renew magazine subscriptions.

Eat me

Last night I went to the nearby Kroger to pick up a few groceries, and since I was tired from working in the yard all day, I thought I'd check out their "hot bar" for potential dinner items. It still looks like a bad day in your junior high cafeteria, but I went ahead and grabbed a couple egg rolls, some lo mein and some fried rice. When I got to the end of the counter and placed my stuff on the scale, I got ... nothing. The scale was either turned off or unplugged or otherwise dead. No sign saying "please use the other scale next to the salad bar" or anything. Of course not. Nonetheless I walked over to that other scale, put my plate with the ill-fitting lid on top, entered the secret PLU and hit Print. Chunka chunka chunk. OUT OF LABELS. CALL ATTENDANT.

Um, OK, what attendant? Surely not the two Japanese sushi dudes. I stood there for a bit. Waved my arms around a few times. Watched a few store employees venture nearby but not actually make eye contact.

Left the food sitting there. I hope Kroger enjoyed eating the $6 they would have gotten from me. I found my dinner elsewhere.

All Your Coupons Are Belong To Us

I have a love/hate relationship with coupons. I save the coupon sections from the Sunday newspaper, and clip and use various coupons from there. On the other hand, I think that individual stores that have customer loyalty cards ought to just give me the damn sale price. Yes Walgreens, I'm talking to you. Is it really worth the time it takes for a cashier to reconcile a register with all those slips of paper, and for the store to process them at the end of the day or week?

Now, as a member of Costco, I get coupon books in the mail every month or so, and it does kind of suck to have to tear out the coupons. They made it slightly less annoying though, by programming their cash registers in an interesting way. This morning, I had five coupon items, along with the rest of my order. When the cashier took my coupons, he hit some magic button and the register immediately gave me credit for every coupon-eligible item in my order. OK, it's not perfect, and I still had to tear out a few pieces of paper. And the cashier probably still had to reconcile the register to allow for the coupons. But as a customer, it got me out of the store a bit faster, so good for that.

Guilty until proven innocent? Nah, just guilty all around

SC Johnson is showing a TV ad for their "Off Clip-on" mosquito repellent, in which they tell viewers to go to a website to get a buy one get one free coupon. I was peeved to have to install some mystery coupon printing program to get my coupon, but uninstall and rollback took care of most of that. Still don't know what personal information they encoded into the barcodes though.

Today, I was going to use my coupon at the local K-Mart. But lo and behold, there's a big sign on the door saying they won't honor any "free up to a certain price" coupons, nor any internet or home-printed coupons of any kind.

I stepped up to the "courtesy" desk to ask, just on the off-chance (ha ha, "off" chance) that they'd take my coupon. My greeting was "Didjoo need sumfin?" I asked, got denied, said "guess I won't ever shop here again" and left.

I really resent the concept that all customers are fraudsters, trying to cheat the pathetic Sears Holding Company.

When I got home, I went to the K-Mart website to try to find a contact email or phone number. Not as easy as it should be. But you know what's funny? At the K-Mart website, they offer . . . . coupons. To print at home. From the internet.

Yeah.

So anyway, I spoke to somebody who said that since there was a sign posted, there really was nothing she could do. She refused to say whether this was corporate policy, but the manager will call me within two days, and it's up to him whether they'd honor my coupon. Ooooh, a sign. Anybody can print up a sign. Especially a sign that says that all customers are lying liars and cheating cheaters.

I told her that was unacceptable and as previously mentioned won't be darkening their doors again.

Market Share drop in 5, 4, 3, ....

This post is regional - it's about the Richmond VA area's loss of a grocery store that prided itself on customer service.

If you live (or have lived) in the Richmond VA area, you of course know about Ukrop's Supermarkets. A chain that nearly defined "customer service" for years. Sure, there were things that people didn't like about Ukrop's - closed on Sunday, no beer or wine, that nagging "let's all go to church this weekend" sign in every store. But they knew how to treat customers right.

Most of us were sad when it was announced late last year that the family had decided to sell the chain to Dutch conglomerate Royal Ahold, operators of Giant supermarkets. The sadness was tempered by knowing that at least Ukrop's Kitchen's would continue to produce that tasty chicken salad, those white house rolls, and other yummy items that were worth the price.

The remodelled and restacked stores were to be called Martin's, and I visited one of the first ones to open nearby, nearly a month ago. I had a few problems, and of course went to the website to send a message.

A week went by, then most of another. I'd gotten the dreaded automated email reply, but nothing substantive. I stopped in at another newly opened store the next week and found some of the same issues. I replied to the auto-reply and again, nothing. This past Monday, I went to yet another store and still was not impressed.

I fired off one more email, saying "hey, you know how to lose a customer? Ignore him completely!"

Let's take one single complaint that I had. On each of my three Martin's visits, I took my own re-usable bags. I never got a bag credit like Ukrop's offered, as does Kroger and Target and many other local stores. At least on my third visit earlier this week the cashier tried to give me a credit. Unfortunately, the cash register programming was stupid, I never got a discount and I'll leave it at that.

Today I finally got a response to my three emails to Giant/Martin's/Ahold ... among the other primarily useless information in the reply, I was told that they "never offer a bag credit."

Umm, then what was that poor woman trying to do on Monday? Alternately, I'm led to believe that this big new chain came to town without any plans to offer bag credits, even though it's fairly standard in this market. No matter what, I'm left with an impression of Martin's that is a whole lot less than favorable.

I admit I am holding them to a high standard - they bought that standard when they bought the Ukrop's chain.

Sadly, it looks like they have no interest in even coming close.

When a store makes me look at Food Lion as a viable option, then I think there's a real problem.

Challenged by dates

Dear Lowes,

I want to thank you for the offer of "No Interest if Paid in Full within 12 Months" which I received in today's mail. Today is April 26th, 2010.

Your offer states that it is valid "April 21 through April 26, 2010".

Yes, thank you so very much. Perhaps next time you could arrange for it to arrive the day after it expires just to make it completely useless, rather than almost completely useless.

This is almost as good as the coupon I got that expired on "September 31" last year.

Upgrade?

I've been banking with People's United Bank in CT for years. I even kept them as my primary bank when I moved to VA 15 years ago, and I've never had any major problems. Sure there's been a couple hiccups along the way, but nothing that wasn't quickly and easily resolved.

Even though they don't have any local presence, their phone and online systems (which they've had forever) have made it simple to do almost anything I need to do.

When they recently announce that they'd be updating the online banking system, I was interested, but not at all worried. After all, the existing system was a little long in the tooth and a refresh couldn't hurt.

So what did they deliver? Visually, the new site looks worse than the old one, but if that was the only problem, I wouldn't be writing this post. The whole online banking system has been outsourced, and that's not good. I like my browser to stay at the site that I logged in to, especially when it's my bank!

But even those things are minor. My first hint of something rotten was an email I got on Wednesday. It showed the details of the online payments I'd made via the new site on Monday. I'd never received such an email before, and I certainly didn't request any such email. I logged on to the new system and struggled to find out what setting I had to change. Finally I found it. Or should I say "them". The option to receive email about payments made is set on every payee that I have. The only way to turn off those emails is to go into each and every payee and flip the setting. So without my permission or any prior notification, People's is now sending details of my payment activity out over unencrypted email. No Thanks.

I used their in-system message function to complain about this and got no response until I looked at my email this morning (three days later). Of course it wasn't actually a response, it was just a notification that "A secure message is available for viewing. Please sign on to online banking to view the message." Fair enough. I logged in and went to read the message, only to see "Thank you for contacting People's United Bank. We will reply to your inquiry as quickly as possible. In the interim many of our customers have found the information available in the Frequently Asked Questions section of the people.com Upgrade site very helpful. " [note that it really does say people.com not peoples.] So they have no problem with sending my payment information out over email, but to send me an automated reply, they use their secure messaging system?

Since I was logged in anyway, I looked at my accounts. One of the things lost in the transition to the new system was the display of a running balance column. People's sent an email on February 18 saying "this feature will be available by February 24". Well my calendar tells me that today is the the 27th, and there's no running balance. They also seem to have lost the ability to show me any holds that might exist on my checking account, so even though there's a current balance and an available balance, if they're different I have no way to tell why. (I happen to know why in this case, but that's not the point).

So I used their wonderful secure messaging system again and complained about 1) the fact that an automated response took three days, 2) the missing running balance and 3) the missing hold information. Then I logged off.

This time they managed to get me an automated response in just a couple minutes. I got the same email about a "secure message" being available, so logged back in just to see what it said. Interestingly, they'd used some sort of message parsing magic to determine that I'd asked about the running balance. Their response to this? "Your running balance will be available online as of February 29th."

Great, only two years from now!

People's United Bank online banking upgrade?

FAIL!