scribble, scribble, scribble…

Update, 4/21: The manager of the East Towne JCPenney ended up seeing this blog post, and left a message for me yesterday. I just got off the phone with him. He let me know that the employee we had a problem with was typically a very good staff member who just had a bad moment. I believe it, having been there myself a few times when I was in customer service. Anyway, the issue has been addressed, and I really appreciate how quickly and how well Penney’s handled it. All companies should be so good about this sort of thing.

There are two Penney’s in Madison, and we shopped at both of them this weekend, and had pretty disparate experiences:

On Saturday, I went looking for a suit. Now, I work out of a cave for the most part, and it’s a great cave (thank you, in-laws and previous owners of this house, for furnishing it so nicely), but the dress code is less “casual Fridays” and more “I am probably in just my underwear right now.” (Apologies if you are eating.) So while I need a suit occasionally—for instance, I’m going to a business event in Chicago this weekend—it’s mostly going to hang in the closet.

As a result, I wanted to spend as little as possible and still end up with something nice. I headed to Men’s Wearhouse, where I was helped by Iven (his title is “Assistant Manager II”), who was quite personable, but who heard that my budget was around $300 and immediately showed me a $400 suit. He showed me some other options, but they weren’t really tenable. I told him I’d think about it (thought: My wife will kill me if I buy this suit) and scooted over to Penney’s across the street at the West Towne Mall.

BOOM. Stafford Suit Separates, on sale. $150. No one’s gonna mistake me for a magnate or a tycoon or a mogul, but I look respectable and had enough left over to get a couple of shirts and ties, a belt, another pair of slacks, and some shoes. The gentleman who helped me—John—was pretty low-key and friendly, if not overflowing with fashion advice, and I’m giving him some props here. PROPS.

Cut to Sunday (i.e., yesterday), when the lady and I dashed over to the East Towne Mall to get my new suit pants hemmed and to look at patio furniture. Prices at the furniture store—pretty outrageous! Prices at JCPenney—highly reasonable, and augmented by a 20 percent nearly storewide discount that day. So we picked out a table and four chairs and went to check out.

Now, what we wanted to do was not particularly complicated: The chairs were in stock, but the table needed to be ordered. We wanted to pay for both at the same time (to get our 20 percent discount), and then pick everything up at once, when the table came in (because we’ll need to borrow or rent a truck to get them home, as our car is small). Not that hard, right? Just set four chairs aside, and we’ll get them on Wednesday.

Well, the guy at the register was Having a Day. Not like an “I’m Depressed and Man, This Is a Pain” day; this was a “Dealing With Customers in My Capacity as a Provider of Customer Service Is Just Waaaaay Too Much to Ask of Me” day. First, when another salesperson started to ask him a question, he threw up his arms in front of his face and cried, “I’m not really here! I’m not really here!” I guess he was about to go on break or something. But then he started to help us, got a fifth of the way through, had clearly missed some significant steps in the process, clapped his hands and told the obviously new employee next to him, “OK, you finish up with them!” and dashed off. She was very nice, but, again, obviously new, in that she did not really know computers or how they worked, which was disadvantageous, as ours turned out to be a pretty computer-intensive transaction. Finally, another salesperson showed up and helped her through it, and twenty minutes later, we were free.

We think our chairs will be there when we go to get the table on Wednesday. Anyway, I sympathize a little with “I’m not here” guy, because he seemed to be sort of in charge, and I got the sense that he maybe ended up handling a lot of complicated stuff; and that is just an awful feeling, to be the only person at your job who can handle the complicated stuff. On the other hand, I might be wrong—he might not be all that important there, just a prima donna—and more to the point, you just don’t up and leave in the middle of a transaction. It sucks to get caught up in something right before your break or clocking out, but cripes: Stop, take a deep breath, spend the five minutes it will take to get through the rigmarole (it’s not like we were hoping to drag the experience out), and avoid getting called out by name when I inevitably take the survey mentioned on the back of the receipt so that I can get a 15-percent-off coupon.