Blogger Auntie Lucia alerted me yesterday to a post she wrote about how ice lollies she had bought from Cold Storage's Chancery Lane outlet turned out to be a watery mess.
Reading that, I guess one would think that such lollies would be in that state anyway if left unrefrigerated for a period of time.
But Lucia says: "Nope, i ... didn’t leave the box (of lollies) lying around on the kitchen or dining table. It went straight into the freezer."
And she adds that she had not been carrying the box around for half a day.
"I live across the road from the Chancery Lane outlet and drove home right home after paying my bill at 15.14.56," she explains. "As I drove, not walk home, it was a bare 5-minute drive and hardly long enough for the lollies to have melted."
At around 4pm, when her mum’s helper Siti went to the freezer to get a lolly for mum, she found on opening the box, that "each and every one was lembek or soft."
Unconvinced, Lucia checked and "sure enough, every lolly was soft, clearly having melted since don’t know when within their wrappers and the box they came in."
Her first reaction was to throw the whole pack away and forget about the $4.85 she had paid for it, remembering at the back of her mind what a nephew once said: “Your time is so cheap meh!”
However, on second thoughts, she decided "not to let Cold Storage get away with it" and, armed with the pack of melted ice lollies, drove back to Cold Storage across the road.
At Cold Storage, she "was somewhat mollified by the carpark lady guard who on hearing that I’d come to return “bad food” allowed me to get into the carpark without paying the mandatory $1.50 parking fee. At least she empathised with my having to make a return trip."
She bristles: "Indeed, had my reception at the supermarket been as acommodating, I might not have written this post at all.
"But no, the supervisor I spoke to and showed my unacceptable purchase to said with a deadpan face:'Ok, you go and get another box.'
"No word of apology. No pleasantries. Nothing. And she wasn’t even serving another customer.
"Actually when I set out, I had intended an exchange. But her take-it-or-leave-it attitude invited me to leave it so I said: 'No, I want a refund.'
"To which she replied: 'Did you pay by card or cash?'
"As I fumbled in my wallet for the receipt, she repeated her question, deadpan.
“ 'Card,' I said, still fumbling for the receipt.
“ 'Just give me the card.'
"I did as instructed, even though by then I had found the receipt and proffered it and which she ignored.
"The refund went through at 16.12.25."
Lucia says the lollies she bought was "not a First Choice brand but an F & N brand, so you might say the fault lay with the manaufacturers." But as the supermarket distributing the lollies, she thinks Cold Storage has a duty to ensure that the stuff it sells is edible.
This was not Lucia's first encounter with Cold Storage. The first was in June when she discovered that its weighing machine was faulty. I had published her complaint in my blog and the supermarket duly contacted her to do damage control.
Moral of this latest encounter, she says is that "I should have learnt my lesson and give the Chancery Lane outlet a miss."
But its nearness to her home is Lucia's " Archilles' heel". "So serves me right for going there again and again, despite the overcharging and indifferent service," she sighs.
No comments:
Post a Comment