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After a lot of examples of crazy customers and bad customer service, here’s some proof there is some good in the retail world. \u00a0I’ve heard the one about Nordstroms and the tire return before, and it has been validated as a true story.<\/p>\n
One of my personal favorites happened at a store in what used to be called Leisure World. \u00a0A customer came in having recently had foot surgery and his foot was heavily bandaged. After shopping it began to rain so he asked for help to his car. \u00a0The store manager came up with a 6-wheel flatbed cart, had the customer climb on it and wheeled him out to his car so his bandages wouldn’t get wet. \u00a0 Now that’s a \u00a0CUSTOMER CARRYOUT.<\/p>\n
1. MORTON\u2019S STEAKHOUSE<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/mentalfloss.com\/sites\/default\/files\/styles\/insert_main_wide_image\/public\/mortons-tweet.png\" "\\"\\"")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\nAuthor and business consultant Peter Shankman was getting ready to board a flight that was the last leg of a long day of traveling. It just happened to occur over dinnertime, and he knew he would be starving when he deplaned and headed home. \u201cHey, @Mortons \u2013 can you meet me at newark airport with a porterhouse when I land in two hours? K, thanks. :)\u201d Imagine his surprise when he got off the plane to find a tuxedoed gentleman holding a bag that contained a 24 oz. Morton\u2019s porterhouse, shrimp, potatoes, bread, napkins and silverware. Shankman noted that the Tweet had to be noticed, someone had to get approval for the idea, a cook had to make his food, the food had to be driven 23.5 miles away from the nearest Morton\u2019s, and someone had to track down his flight information and figure out where he was landing to meet him at the right location. All while his stomach was grumbling on a 2.5-hour flight. Pretty impressive.<\/p>\n
Sainsbury\u2019s, a grocery store in the U.K., must have been pretty amused when they received a letter from a three-year-old girl named Lily<\/a>. \u201cWhy is tiger bread called tiger bread?\u201d she asked, referring to one of their bakery items. \u201cIt should be called giraffe bread.\u201d Lily was just being observant \u2013 the pattern on the bread does<\/em> resemble a giraffe more than a tiger. To everyone\u2019s surprise, Chris King, a customer service manager at the chain, responded. \u201cI think renaming tiger bread giraffe bread is a brilliant idea \u2013 it looks much more like the blotches on a giraffe than the stripes on a tiger, doesn\u2019t it? It is called tiger bread because the first baker who made it a looong time ago thought it looked stripey like a tiger. Maybe they were a bit silly.\u201d He enclosed a gift card, and the bread was renamed.<\/p>\n A customer\u2019s mother had recently had some medical treatment that left her feet numb and sensitive to pressure \u2013 and also rendering most of her shoes totally useless. She ordered her mother six pairs of shoes from Zappos, hoping that at least one of them would work. After receiving the shoes, her mother called Zappos to get instructions on how to return the shoes that didn\u2019t work, explaining why she was returning so many shoes. Two days later, she received a large bouquet of flowers from Zappos, wishing her well and hoping that she recovered from her treatments soon. Two days later, the customer, her mother and her sister were all upgraded to \u201cZappos VIP Members,\u201d which gives them all free expedited shipping on all orders.<\/p>\n Not impressed? Just Google \u201cZappos\u201d and \u201ccustomer service\u201d and you\u2019re bound to find\u00a0something<\/a> that<\/a> astounds<\/a> you<\/a>.<\/p>\n A Redditor\u2019s 89-year-old grandfather got snowed in<\/a> a couple years ago and didn\u2019t have much in the house for meals. His daughter called several markets in the area to see if any of them had grocery delivery services, but the only one that said they did was Trader Joe\u2019s. They don\u2019t, actually, but were willing to help out this WWII vet. As the man\u2019s daughter placed an order, the Trader Joe\u2019s representative on the phone recommended other items that would be good for her dad\u2019s low-sodium diet. An up-sell, you may be asking? Nope. They didn\u2019t charge her a dime for the delivery or<\/em> the groceries.<\/p>\n A man was en route from a business trip in L.A. to his daughter\u2019s home in Denver to see his three-year-old grandson for the last time. The boy, beaten into a coma by his mother\u2019s live-in boyfriend, was being taken off of life support at 9 p.m. that evening so his organs could be used to save other lives. The man\u2019s wife called Southwest to arrange the last-minute flight and explained the emergency situation. Unfortunately, the man was held up by L.A. traffic and long lines at LAX and didn\u2019t make it to the gate on time. When he finally made it there 12 minutes after the plane was scheduled to leave, he was shocked to find the pilot waiting for him. He thanked the pilot profusely, and the pilot said, \u201cThey can\u2019t go anywhere without me, and I wasn\u2019t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We\u2019ll get you there. And again, I\u2019m so sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n If you order a PlayStation online and it gets snatched from your doorstep instead of being delivered safely to your living room, that\u2019s your problem, right? Or maybe it\u2019s the delivery service\u2019s problem. Or it\u2019s the problem of the neighbor who signed for your expensive gaming system but didn\u2019t bother to bring it inside to protect it from sticky fingers. Wherever the blame lands, it\u2019s definitely not the problem of the company who fulfilled their end of the bargain by shipping the system using a secure method. However, when this scenario<\/a> happened to an Amazon customer a few years ago, he called them to beg \u2013 plead \u2013 to see if there was anything that could be done because his son was expecting a PlayStation from Santa. Much to the customer\u2019s shock, they not only sent another, but they didn\u2019t even charge him for shipping. It even made it there on time for Christmas.<\/p>\n Because of their son\u2019s food allergies, a family vacationing at the Ritz-Carlton, Bali, was always careful to bring their own supply of specialized eggs and milk. In this particular instance, however, the food was ruined en route. The Ritz-Carlton manager couldn\u2019t find any of the special items in town, but his executive chef recalled that a store in Singapore sold them. The chef contacted his mother-in-law, who lived there, and had her purchase the items, then fly to Bali (about 2.5 hours) to deliver them. Only at the Ritz-Carlton<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2011 a member of the security staff noticed a woman crawling around on her hands and knees on the sales floor. When he discovered that she was looking for a diamond that had fallen out of her wedding ring while she was trying on clothes, he got down and searched with her. He also recruited a small team of people to help comb the floors. Eventually, the crew painstakingly picked through the dirt and debris in the store vacuum cleaners before coming up with the woman\u2019s diamond<\/a>.<\/p>\n This one may turn out to be apocryphal, but the story was all over the place<\/a> after the launch of the iPad 2. Apparently a man bought an iPad online, then returned it to the company almost immediately, affixing a Post-It to the front of the device that simply read, \u201cWife said no.\u201d Returns processors must have gotten a kick out of it, because the story eventually made its way to a couple of Apple VPs, who refunded the customer and<\/em> returned the iPad with an attached Post-It that said, \u201cApple said yes.\u201d<\/p>\n Most of us have experienced it at one time or another \u2013 the dreaded vehicle recall. It\u2019s usually some minor part, but replacing it ends up being a huge inconvenience for the car owner, even when replacement parts are free. Lexus certainly knows how to take the sting out of that. Although previous recalls had been addressed by sending technicians to the affected customers\u2019 homes to fix the problem on the spot, when the Lexus ES 350 sedan was recalled in 2006, the company decided to ask owners to come on into the dealership. Instead of sitting in a waiting room waiting for their cars to be worked on, customers were given a brand new Lexus instead, no questions asked.<\/p>\n A writer was in Nashville for a blogging conference in 2012 and adored the clock radio at her hotel, the Gaylord Opryland. It wasn\u2019t just any clock radio, but a clock radio\/noise machine with very specific spa-style music that relaxed this writer as if she were actually getting a deep-tissue massage every time it played. Wanting to experience the same serenity at home, the blogger took to Twitter to ask the folks at the hotel where she could purchase one. Their response, essentially, was, \u201cSorry, it’s made just for us, but here\u2019s a similar one at the Sharper Image.\u201d Unfortunately, the one they recommended lacked the spa music feature that the blogger loved so much. She told them as much and thanked them for the effort anyway. When she returned to her room later, she found a second clock radio sitting next to the permanent one, along with a note<\/a> saying, \u201cWe hope you enjoy these spa sounds at home.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a lot of examples of crazy customers and bad customer service, here’s some proof there is some good in the retail world. \u00a0I’ve heard the one about Nordstroms and the tire return before, and it has been validated as a true story. One of my personal favorites happened at a store in what used Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-stories"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":459,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions\/459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-tales.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}3. ZAPPOS<\/h4>\n
4. TRADER JOE\u2019S<\/h4>\n
5. SOUTHWEST AIRLINES<\/h4>\n
6. AMAZON<\/h4>\n
7. THE RITZ-CARLTON<\/h4>\n
8. NORDSTROM<\/h4>\n
9. APPLE<\/h4>\n
10. LEXUS<\/h4>\n
11. GAYLORD OPRYLAND<\/h4>\n