In wake of Storms CVS and Staples stick it to Seniors

Message (Photo credit: MarkPritchard)

Yes this is another one of my rants.  But let me spell it out.  Our area was hit badly by Hurricane Sandy.  My parents who are 78 and 80 years old live nearby.  We were without power and they were evacuated pre storm.  My parents' house is below sea level and close to the Long Island Sound, in other words they always get flooded.  They finally got their power back, pumped out their basement, and were settling back in when the Nor'easter was predicted.  So they drove their cars out of harms way (parked over night in the Staples / CVS / Mrs. Greens parking lot up the street).  The next morning, after the snow, we picked my father up at home and brought him to the parking lot.  We got there at about 8:00 am.  Both their cars had been booted and a guy was waiting in a white van.  He kept saying, "You did a very bad thing."  and proceeded to charge them $70 per car to remove the boots on the wheels.

The person from the tow company insisted this was the policy of the group of stores that owned the parking lot.  I am appalled that these stores have so little compassion.  Did they do anything to help those in need during these storms, like maybe making their parking lot available (such a small thing).

In the end this is a failure of customer relations for these large chains.  I out this as a comment on facebook and one friend made the simple comment "Staples was started by ... Mitt Romney.  Maybe he was reading your wall".  Yes I am a liberal democrat, and proud of it!

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Petland - another consumer relations failure

This seems like the season for consumer relations failures to me, not the Season to be jolly. Once again I find myself in the position of being at the wrong end of a consumer relations failure. I am the consumer. I've been buying my pets and petfood on and off from the local petland for about 17 years. There seems to be a new manager there. None of the people I've spoken to after this incident had anything good to say about him. We bought some bird food there, in August, 2009. Like a trusting consumer I brought it home and put it away with my other birdfood.

But I digress, the problem really started when we started getting an indoor infestation of moths. We put one of those Bug and Fly Catcher Ribbons (Fly Paper) and it was filled with moths within a couple of days. We've changed it many times since. We kept trying to locate the source of the moths and couldn't. We repackaged just about everything in the kitchen area. Finally we were changing the bird's cage and were low on food. I went to look in the cabinet for bird seed and found the package we had bought in August. I was just about to open it when I saw that it was completely filled with web like ganglia connecting all the seed balls. When I looked more carefully I saw green moth larvae crawling around inside the SEALED bag.

When I turned the bag over I saw the expiration/use by date on the bag was 02/20/09. The bag of seed was sold to us after the expiration date.
We took the seed bag back to the Petland store where we had bought it. The manager there said that since they hadn't sold that item since September, it was older than 3 months old and so therefore he could not refund or exchange according to policy (I just looked on the Petland website and see nothing about 3 months in their return policy). He refused to budge on this. The previous manager said if we ever had a problem just bring the unused or unopened package to him and he would take care of it - which he did. That is one reason we kept going back. Despite the fact that the seed company would refund our money in full if we return the sealed package, apparently Petland was unwilling to take it back and keep a customer. For the measely 7.99 that store has lost the thousands of dollars we spend there annually on petfood, because there is no way that we are going back there.