Too Technical

If you're thinking of paying for assembly on that fancy new grill from the Home Depot in Ashland VA, you might want to think again:

Stale complaint about Fresh Market

Here's the text of a letter I wrote to Fresh Market back in December. I never received any acknowledgement, let alone a meaningful reply:

23 December 2008

Fresh Market
628 Green Valley Road
Suite 500
Greensboro, NC 27408-7041

To Whom It May Concern:

Here is why I won't shop at Fresh Market again:

Monday 12/22/2008, approx 4 PM, Fresh Market, Parham Road, Richmond VA:
I took my number at the meat counter and waited. I wanted a standing rib roast for $7.99/lb, as had been advertised. Although I'd originally thought to get a two-rib portion, as I waited I realized that since I'm only serving Christmas dinner to myself this year, a single rib would be enough. When my turn finally came - after the comedy of errors that is your paper ticket system, I said "I'd like a rib roast, but I only need a single rib." I was brusquely told "that's a steak." Now maybe in the world of butchery, that is the correct terminology, but to me, a steak is something I can throw on the grill, not a giant hunk of meat that's going into the oven. Whatever ... I was spoken to rudely and I wasn't even given a chance to select the "steak" that I wanted. The man just grabbed a piece from the case, went to a scale halfway down the counter to weigh and price it and then came back to hand it to me.

Of course when I looked at the price label, I'd been charged $10.99/lb. Attempting to argue this with the staff at the meat counter would have been a waste of my time, and I certainly did not want to inconvenience the many other customers who’d been waiting their turns, so I chose to go find a manager. That was nearly an exercise in futility, but finally somebody came to talk to me. I explained what I thought was a pricing discrepancy and was immediately told that the everything had been done correctly, and that the additional three dollars covered the "cost of butchering," but that he would reprice my item. I started to say "but if I chose just *two* ribs, it would have had to have been cut from a larger piece . . ." and was interrupted by the manager who told me "I'm not going to argue with you about it." What I get from that is "I can't really defend this pricing" or "your customer feedback is meaningless to me" or "shut up and go away - which, in the end, is what I did.

In retrospect, it seems to me that I probably used up a lot less of your employee’s time than anybody getting a larger roast, so maybe I should have gotten a discount, not been charged a premium. Heck, my "steak" probably isn't even "trimmed away from the bone, then tied back together for ease of carving with great bone-in flavor," so I'm at even more of a loss to understand this $3 charge for "butchering".

My plan had been to get the roast, then shop the rest of the store to pick up all the other items I'd need for my Christmas dinner. It wouldn’t have been the largest sale rung up on your registers yesterday, but it would have been a significant sum for one person. Given the circumstances, however, I chose to pay for the (repriced) meat and leave. Never to return.

The bottom line -- Fresh Market is not in a particularly convenient location for me; you obviously don't compete on price; and while the quality of some of your food may be good, it's not that much better than other places around town that I would willingly put up with such horrible customer service. Oh, and thank you so much for not having a way to email this from your website. Obviously contacting the store was not all that useful, so being able to express my concerns directly to corporate without using up a stamp would have been nice. I guess that customer convenience just isn't in your plans at all.

I don't want anything from you, but I felt this important enough to share, and rest assured that I will a lot of people about this.


Larry Mac

There's a Trader Joe's and a Whole PaycheckFoods Market a helluva lot closer to my house, plus Tom Leonard's Farmers Market and all the usual Richmond market grocery suspects, so yeah, not bothering with the Fresh Market at all these days. My Christmas dinner was pretty good though.

What were they thinking?

I got home from a business trip the other night and I was lying in bed with the laptop, catching up on emails and message boards and such, while playing back an old episode of Eureka on the TiVo. My focus was on the computer screen, not the TV screen, so I wasn't fast-forwarding through commercials like I might normally do.

An ad for some type of medicine came on; as noted, I wasn't paying too much attention to the TV, but I kept hearing the announcer talking about "ass effects". I thought we'd left all that behind with the Olestra fiasco. No, wait, the announcer was actually saying "Aciphex", which is a prescription medicine for acid reflux and heartburn.

But seriously, nobody ever listened to the name being said? Ass Effects sounds like a new product from the makers of the WonderBra, but for a slightly different location.

There's a reason why marketing executives were placed on the Golgafrinchan B Ark.