Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Delivery Failure

A couple of weeks ago, POSSLQ and I wandered into Kroger for some grocery items, as we often do.  Near the front door, there was a little booth with several tickets on it and a nice lady proffering a pen so you could put your name and number on the ticket.  The "catch" was that you had to listen to her pitch for the Dallas Morning News.

So, we listened and we actually signed up for the special deal she was offering and she said that we should start getting the paper by Wednesday (this was 2 Mondays ago).  Well, Wednesday came and went and no paper...and then Thursday, Friday and Saturday... Sunday we went to Kroger again to do our grocery shopping and there was another woman at the little booth and we mentioned signing up and still having not received the paper and she told us to contact circulation and inquire "WTF??" (her words).


So, we zipped off an email to circulation.  The following is what we received in reply:





Thank you for your request for new service. We apologize for the inconvenience, but unfortunately there is no service in your area due to safety concerns. That payment should be put back into your account. If you require further assistance, please call customer care at 214 745-8383 or 800 925-1500.


Thank you, The Dallas Morning News

So now I have some issues to address:

We have lived at the same address for four years. In that time we've had no "safety concerns".  Unless you count my concern for the parental tendency to let small (under age 6) children run around outside until well after midnight with no apparent adult supervision.  

All other types of delivery services, UPS, FedEX, Pizza Hut, several fine Chinese takeout establishments have absolutely no issue delivering to my apartment. Even after dark (in the case of food delivery) and some of these folks (food delivery) carry CASH.  I did, once upon a time, live in an area of Minneapolis, MN that was so sketchy that you couldn't get a pizza delivered there because too many drivers had been robbed/beaten up. 

More importantly, though, is this:  they had charged the credit card for the subscription OVER A WEEK AGO and had not contacted us AT ALL to tell us that we were not EVER going to receive the paper. I'll bet if we had not contacted them, they would have kept taking payments, as well (and I will be watching LIKE A HAWK for them to try to do so).

They had our address, a phone number and an email (all required to subscribe) so there is absolutely ZERO excuse for them not having made an attempt to contact us.

You would think, with newspapers complaining about subscriptions falling off as more and more people turn to the internet for their news, that they would at least TRY to make some effort at customer service.

Dallas Morning News, I am deeply disappointed by your lack of customer service.  You lost what would have been a good, long-term customer.  And I'm not going to be quiet about it.  While I am guessing that one lost subscriber doesn't matter to you, your poor customer service will drive others away and it would be so easy to remedy... if you had just reached out to us first, I wouldn't be so upset. It's disappointing that common courtesy is no longer common.