My father always used to say that: “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Guess it’s some sort of Texas catchphrase. Well, the local Safeway just made that saying come literally true!
The bargain basement turkey having proved inedible for the human and indigestible for the dog—she barfed up a pile of it all over the office this morning—I went by the store during today’s voyages, by way of picking up some hamburger for her. Figured to have to spend about two and a half bucks a pound, a pretty typical price in that place. But lo! I found some for $1.49, not too bad at all.
On the way to the checkout stand, I stopped at the customer service desk to mention my misfortune with the foul fowl. Really, I didn’t expect them to do anything about it, but just thought they should know one of their products was looking a bit suspect. To my amazement, the manager whipped out a gift card and racked up the price of the defunct turkey on it!
Wow!
It covered almost all of two gigantic packages of hamburger, which was hugely on sale. The red-card discount knocked a $54 bill down to $29, and thanks to the gift card, I walked out of there with enough hamburger to feed Cassie for the next four or five weeks plus a bunch of other junk and paid $10 for the lot.
I felt really pleased: $1.49 for boneless meat is a much better buy than the $1.29 cost of the bone-in turkey. Though I had intended to use the carcass to make stock, even if the bones had been usable, soup made with onion can’t be used to feed the dog (and wouldn’t go far in that direction, anyway), and besides, I’ve got gallons of home-made chicken stock in the freezer.
So there you are: a$k and ye shall re¢eive. I didn’t even a$k for anything!
Thanks, Safeway!
🙂
Image:
Daderot. Columbia Expert, 52-inch, 1882. Public Domain.
My last two customer service complaints met with failure, so I’m glad to hear of your success.
I wonder if they had other complaints so they knew it was bad. Last summer we bought a watermelon that, upon opening, was pretty much completely dried out. We called the store and they told us that they had a bad shipment and to just bring our receipt in. Once we did so, they gave us a gift card for $5 or $10 (I forget) in addition to the refund. I’m wondering if they’d had a few people complain and the quick refund was their way of trying to prevent a possible uproar (I can imagine a few peeved people who paid for a turkey, didn’t like it and had a store refuse to do anything about them turn this into a 5pm News story).
Hm. Certainly could be — it really was an unusually bad turkey, even by U.S. standards. Flavorless is one thing, but bad-tasting enough to make the dog throw up is something else altogether. I sure hope it was a fluke, ’cause it would be terrible for someone to serve that thing up for Christmas dinner.