Now that's Customer Service.

I want to relate to you a heartwarming christmas story that happened in the big city next to where I live. The city in question is Windsor, Ontario, Canada. First of all, Windsor is known as the sin capital of Canada, in certain quarters. We have a casino and a thriving bingo industry. We have what is referred to as the windsor ballet, which are our 1st rate strip bars. They are popular with our american friends, because the strippers take everything off, tops and bottoms, hubba, hubba. Also we have many bars in the downtown core that cater to hoards of unwashed drunken american youths. On a weekend nights if you are foolhardy enough to go downtown you have to jump between puddles of vomit and blood. If you are an ultimate fighting fan, you should come on down and save some money for there are free fights going on everywhere. It is like you are on the set of a Chuck Norris movie ,although some of their techinques are quite weak, not up to the standards of BUM Fights.Also your ears are assaulted by hoards of drunken teenage girls, yelling; whooo. whoo, whooo, like they have a chipmunk in their pants. I should tell you that Windsor is a border town right across the river from the great Detroit, Michigan. The drinking age in michigan is 21yrs, and the drinking age in my province is 18, so you can see the bar owners of Windsor have a real goldmine just across the river.

While any ways there are some uplifing stories on the mean streets of canada's sin city. This one unfolded at the A&P grocery store in the more run down west side of town. By the way The A&P is one of Canada's oldest and largest grocery chains. Well anyways, this particular store is opened 24 hours, but due to the christmas holiday, they decided to close the store early for the day.. The problem was they left the lights on and the doors open. This was truly a case of "lights on, but no one home". It was a normal shopping day for many people, so the store began to fill up with customers, but no staff was there to serve them.

eventually about 20 people were in line at the checkout, and were patiently waiting for to be checked out. Finally after a quarter of an hour someone woke up and realizes that there was no staff to be found. They did the noble thing and called the police. The police showed up with some management types. The amazing news was it seemed that nothing was taken. Which was suprising due to the fact that this store was located in a area of the city that was kind of run down and had a higher crime rate than other metro areas. The wonders of the season. Of course the spokesperson or spokesthing, whatever you call them now a days had no comment. I have a feeling that a few employees were given a pink slip for christmas, OOHHH, OOHHH, OOOH, now that's christmas.

My first reaction to this story was: is the level of service in that store so bad that the customers did not even realize that there were no employees there? Boy the idea of customer service has really taken a beating in the last couple of decades. Than I thought, well it was a late night run to the store, maybe many of the people were tired and were in a type of trance, they were just going throught the motions. It is very similar to the way I am at work, you know like "Night of the Living Dead" mode. Or maybe the people there were not the sharpest knives in the drawer, if you know what I mean. OR some of them may have felt that it was a new self serve store. On finally thought, I believe it had something to do with the power of the spirit of the season. Very heartwarming story in many ways and a lesson on customer service.

This story, which I believe Paul Harvey will try to swipe for his radio commentary can be found in the Windsor Star windsorstar/index.html. If you are interested in the going ons in Canada's sin city, give it a look see.