OfficeMax...NOT Exceptional SERVICE TODAY

Normally when you ask me about OfficeMax I cannot possibly laud them enough, but today the experience was far from stellar, in fact it was pretty sad. Which did allow me to connect with some feelings around being of service, being heard, and feelings of abandonment.

To share, I walked into the store, right to the section I wanted to get to, to purchase an internal drive for a laptop. I was approached by a gal (and yes she'll remain nameless, but when her manager reads this, she will be spoken with, and should be).

The experience started off great, I found what I needed and was then offered an extended warranty plan which I declined as OfficeMax does have a nice return policy if something does not work and since I have installed more than 100 of these drives myself, the chance of anything going wrong on that side...slim to none.

It was after that refusal of the warranty that things went south. As she walked off to get my drive, she saw another customer, approached them and instead of saying "I'll be right back, let me finish with this gentleman", she began to get into a lengthy discussion with this other customer and walk them around the store showing them things as if I did not exist. I had to double check that I was there and in fact I was.
I finally had to grab another sales person to get the drive from the back of the store which he promptly did and it was waiting at the front for me when I arrived.

Prior to that the woman who'd first approached me came back and gave me a casual "oh, I'm sorry, if you want I can have someone go in the back and get your drive for you" as she has her arms filled with goods for this woman who is looking at her and shaking her head.

I laughed and said "Nope, already handled by another salesperson, but I'll be more than happy to write about this experience on the web"

a 5 minute trip turned into 20 minutes.

Now there is a lesson to this as when I was coming out of the parking lot there was some evidence of multiple speeders and an opportunity for an accident. I will thank the universe for the delay imposed by this person, but she did not appear to be in her body when she was with either me or the other customer so one can only presume that she'd had a rough evening, or some difficult news at home.

For the record this happened at store #427 in Scottsdale, and it's a store that I frequent as I love the service there. Today was a sad exception to another otherwise pristine set of experiences. I hope this assists in a remedy for such things. Other customers might not be as polite as me in their responses.

Blessings.

Michael