Winder Dairy: 1 / The Rock: 0

I’d first like to explain that I am the world’s most unaffected person by sales people and closers and all smooth-talking, gelled-up professionals whose job is to make me spend more money. That’s why *my* job this evening was to call Winder Dairy and cancel our weekly milk delivery. Don’t get me wrong: We LOVE the milk. If you haven’t tasted it before, I’m quite confident that once you did, you’d wonder to yourself, “What in the world is this white substance I’ve been buying at the grocery store all these years?” The problem is not really the quality, but the fact that we’re paying almost $10.00/week for a GALLON AND A HALF of milk. That’s all we have delivered. Yep.

Which is what I explained to Scott (the quality assurance manager) when I told him that I would like to cancel my service. He naturally told me that he completely understood my reasons and then explained to me that I was paying for the quality. He used an example of the hormone-free milk from another grocery store (the one we usually shop at), told me the price, showed how they (Winder) were less expensive and THEN pointed out the fact that I was also getting it delivered fresh from the farm to my door. He offered me the obligatory free stuff. I was still firm. Then he touted the benefits of ordering MORE product, because you’re actually spending less money since you don’t buy things at the grocery store that you don’t need, blah blah blah. Plus everything is so good, blah blah blah. And the delivery fee doesn’t increase with the more that you purchase, so you’re actually getting more bang for your buck that way.

Wow, this Scott guy is really cocky. That’s what I was thinking. Here I am trying to CANCEL my service and he thinks he can convince me (The Rock) to purchase MORE from them? He must be on drugs. Then I make the mistake of telling him why I don’t purchase other products from them. Also decidedly NOT due to poor quality, but really a service issue. You see, we don’t need a whole dozen eggs EVERY week. But Winder swears you can change your order from week to week. It’s simple. It’s online. It’s never EVER worked for me. When we were buying other products, there was really no way of knowing what would show up in our cooler from week to week. I don’t think the drivers even use order sheets. I think when they load up their trucks in the morning, they just grab things willy-nilly and you get what you get. And then I got paranoid that my billing was wrong, but I couldn’t really confirm that because you don’t get an invoice until the end of the month. So then you have to try to remember all the random items that were delivered to you and see if you were actually charged for only the items you received.

I explained all this to Scott. And then he sympathized with my service issues. He seemed mildly outraged, even. Then he gave me his direct number and told me that I could call in my order changes directly to him each week. In fact, he wanted to keep our business so badly, he offered to call us each Wednesday evening (deliveries are on Thursday) and ask us if we need to make any changes to our order. Whoa. I didn’t see that coming. I was prepared for all his other sneaky “quality assurance manager” tricks. But that one? Where did that come from??? Before I knew it, I was telling him that we’d give it another shot.

*failure*