Olive Garden & Taco Bell

I bet you are wondering what the title to this post is about.  Hang in there and I will tell you.

Last March, Gerry & I took a trip to Ruidoso, NM to visit with friends there for a few days.  I blogged about the trip at the time so it may sound like old news.  We stopped to get a bite to eat at the local Taco Bell and ran into such lousy and non-caring service there that we will never go back there.  Among other things, they overcharged us from what was posted on the sign behind the counter and when Gerry questioned them on it they said that is what the computer rang up.  Gerry asked to speak to the manager and a very young person came out and said he was the manager and that the computer rang up that amount and that was that.  She asked how come there were two prices for the food and he brushed her off rudely.  He told her to stay calm and ended the conversation.

Gerry tried numerous times to send an email to Taco Bell to voice her displeasure with the lousy service and rudeness as well as the overcharging.  Each time it came back saying the message was too long.  She cut it down to a bare bones number of characters much lower than the length allowed.  Still no luck, it was rejected again.

Now we get to Olive Garden and a problem with them.  They offered us samples of the wine they were pushing and we tried the wine and didn't care for it.  We did order other wine and the meal was fine along with the service.  The check arrived and I skimmed it and paid the bill and we left.  Later, Gerry noticed they had charged us 25 cents for each of two samples.  We did manage to send them an email questioning the charge since we hadn't seen that before.  The Olive Garden representative replied very quickly and apologized for what had happened and explained the rules for that State requiring a small charge for samples and the money collected went into a charity fund for the area.  No problem.  She then offered to send us a gift card for our troubles and the card arrived last week.

It is interesting to see how two large companies handled a problem differently.  One was easily accessible, prompt with their response and left a good feeling with us.  The other was not accessible and left a bad taste with us.   Guess which company will continue to get our business and which one won't.