Which came first?  The chicken, the egg or customer service?  The answer, according to my long-gone dad, would have been door number three.  He was an entrepreneur, multi-business owner and self-made man in the best sense of the word.  He drilled it in me from a young age that the customer is always right – even when they aren’t!  I loved being in his ‘shop’, as he called his places of work.  I worked the counter from a young age in his watch and jewelry repair business that was in located in Manhattan.  In that small balcony space, overlooking the bustling first floor of Gimbels Department store, I earned a master’s degree in business, before I even finished middle school.

This training served me well in my own endeavors, both as an employee and a business owner.  I never get upset or blame a newly employed teenager for their lack of product knowledge or customer service skills.  I look to the manager who, as a mentor, is supposed to be teaching the next generation not only about those traits, but also about the importance of being polite, on time, and how to smile!  Greet the customer upon entering the store.  Thank them on the way out the door, with or without a bag of merchandise in hand.  Most importantly, never let a customer leave your place unhappy.  Those are the values instilled in me by my dad.

On a recent trip to Natural Grocers two customers left the store unhappy. One right after the other.  I am going to start at the very beginning.  When I came to Denver in the late seventies, I happened upon a little store called Vitamin Cottage.  I had never shopped at a health food store before.  My little burg in New York did not have one.  We had Waldbaum’s, where the produce manager smoked over the lettuce and flicked his ashes on the apples.  I am not kidding.  This health food store in Denver was  replete with vitamins and lotions, and potions: I felt like a kid in a candy store.  I loved perusing the aisles and buying whatever my meager paychecks would allow me to.  When I lived in what is now called Cherry Creek North, I could walk to a location on Second Avenue.  (I tried to fact check this – it could have been First Ave.)  I would walk down the alley, past Veldkamp’s Flowers and pick up some new to me items. 

For as long as I have lived in Colorado (off and on since 1979), I have been loyal to the humble store started by Margaret Isley in 1955.  Originally called Builders Foundation, Isley, along with her husband Philip, were ahead of the health food trend.  The first brick and mortar store was on Colfax in Lakewood and Cherry Creek was the second location.  Now they have too many outposts to list and are called Natural Grocers.  I still shop there, most in Cherry Knolls or Highlands Ranch.  I buy organic produce without having to think twice (all the produce is USDA Certified organic), love the demos, and of course they carry Lily Farm Fresh Skin Care, my go to for more than three decades.

Another plus for shopping there is their consistently low price on three staples in my diet.  Steel cut oats, tri-color quinoa, and eggs.  Sometimes I pop in just to pick up one or two of these, and sometimes I do my big shop there.  Sometimes  I go just to get eggs at the low price of $1.99 per dozen.  If you shop at the ‘regular’ grocery store you know that eggs of lesser quality are higher priced.  At Cherry Knolls the egg reach-in is located in an odd spot, so much so, that there is a sign on another refrigerator that reads “Eggs this way” with an arrow to show you the way.  Recently I tried to buy two dozen eggs early on a Tuesday morning.  No eggs, at least the kind I wanted.  Also, no bananas.  So, two strikes for two items.  I am not sure how I felt when the clerk told me I was shopping too early to get what I wanted.  To me?  No biggie, I will come back another morning, and later in the day.

I returned two days later.  I had already purchased bananas elsewhere, so this was an egg hunt, and not the Easter Bonnet kind.  I stood at the reach-in and the shelves were bare, but I thought I found two dozen of the kind I wanted.  When I was rung up my total was not $3.98 as it should have been.  It was a dollar more, which financially speaking is not a big deal.  Still, I asked the clerk why and her shoulders shrugged way up beyond her ears as a plausible answer.  I looked at the receipt and saw two different prices for two different kinds of eggs.  So, I checked the SKU’s, and they were off by one digit, then I looked more closely at the packaging and saw one was soy free and the other was not.  That is where the difference came in.  I proceeded to educate the clerk on the products that the store where she works sells, but I refrained from explaining how Universal Product Codes work.  If you want to know, just ask me the next time we are together.  I am a plethora of useless information. 

In the days before computerized sales systems that also take inventory, my dad would have reached in his pocket and given the customer a one-dollar bill.  He was that committed to keeping customers happy.  I was met with a “Whaddya want to do” laissez-faire attitude.  I intuited that the cashier wanted me to say that it was no big deal and let the line move along.  But there was no line of health-food aficionados behind me, so I told her that I would go to the secret corner where eggs are stashed and get the ones I wanted, and we could do an exchange.  She didn’t offer to take the trip herself, which again, my dad would have insisted his employees would do, but she did reassure me she would be ‘right here’ when I returned. 

Of course, she had abandoned her register in the three minutes it took for me to walk down the aisle, open, the fridge, and make sure I had the right series of bar-coded numbers that would get me back my single dollar.  But I waited, because now it was getting interesting.  I realized that it was no longer about the money, it was about the experience and the fodder I could use in ---  you guessed it --- my blog!  She finally meandered back over and told me I was so quick.  Mmm.  OK.  She fiddled with buttons on the computerized register and voila!  It showed a 98-cent refund was due me, and I wasn’t about to put my two cents in and piddle over pennies.  Then she pressed a few more buttons and I watched my refund go from 98, to 68 to 48 to 28, then 8 and finally zero while she said she did not know why the register wouldn’t open.  By now there was a gentleman behind me with a small box of sundries (no bags at Vitamin Cottage), and also another employee there to watch the cascading numbers.  I have to mention, neither of these women said any reassuring words to me, the bemused customer.  No I’m sorry, or just a minute, or anything.  I was kind of like I was not even there.

But the man behind me in line noticed and was huffing and puffing while he opened his wallet and shoved a dollar bill in my direction.  Just take it!  He was pissed!  I told him that I didn’t want his money, that it wasn’t a good ending, that I wanted to see what happens.  Some of this I said aloud, and some was only in my head, by the way.  He threw his box on the floor, and it made quite a noise with all the glass vitamin bottles clanging together.  Still, no reaction from the clerks who just watched him storm out of the store, grumbling and cursing.  Wow, I thought!  This is good, but I don’t want to be here when he returns with a weapon, like a heavy box of granola or something.  So, I too said, forget it!  And while I didn’t play along with the Little Pig scenario of heavy breathing and showmanship, I did leave my beloved little store unhappy. And I learned that at Vitamin Cottage the customer did not come first that day.