After my post eviscerating Lowe’s (In particular, the Lowe’s at 24500 Miles Road in Bedford Heights) I thought it might be a good thing to illustrate a counter-example.
Last night, me and my wife ventured to the Regal Cinema in Cleveland Heights to watch a satellite broadcast of Glen Beck’s Common Sense Comedy Tour. (Hey, I saw all my liberal friends wince. Two things; One, that isn’t even the point of my post. Two, if you know my views at all you should realize the more Glen Beck embraces apocalyptic libertarianism, the closer he comes around to my way of thinking.) Anyway, one-time event, $18 ticket, satellite. . .
We should have known something was wrong when the sound didn’t match the pre-show reel. I think everyone in the theater assumed that the pre-show graphics just didn’t have sound, they were just piping it in from another theater. Then the show started. The sound didn’t. For fifteen minutes we got to watch Glen Beck as mime. (Not his forte, perhaps the discipline is too French.) People left (including me) to see what the problem was. Apparently, the sound in that particular theater was screwed up. They were working to fix it, but they wouldn’t be able to start the event over (satellite you see, not like they could restart the film). Some people left and got their money back, but most of us stuck it out, sitting in a darkened theater presided over by a silenced Glen Beck (hey, who said, “I wish?”) talking about payroll taxes, foreign policy and ACORN’s infiltration of the projectionist union.
They finally got the issue resolved with the sound about five minutes before intermission. Then the manager came out and, very apologetically, explained how they couldn’t restart the show, but he was going to give us free passes to another show, our money back, and we were free to stay and watch the unsilenced half of the event.
That, my friends, is how you actually deal with situations like this. It’s unfortunate that most businesses we interact with on a daily basis have become so large that no one dealing with actual customers has the authority to handle an exceptional situation. (Have you ever tried to dispute a charge on a utility bill, how many layers of the onion do you have to peel back before you can get someone who isn’t reading off a script taped next to the phone?) This poor guy took a theater full of people who were on the verge of launching a spontaneous tea party in his lobby, and basically turned them all into fans of his establishment. Kudos to him, and to Regal Cinemas.
1 Comment
michelle · June 12, 2009 at 8:42 am
And even though it was disappointing to miss the first half of the show, it did give us all a chance to talk with each other and exchange email addresses and that’s the message of the 912 project anyway.
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