It was all an Unemployed Dream.: King without a Crown

I'm going to try my hardest to refrain from developing reoccurring characters in this blog. Too often I received criticisms that my previous blog was too peppered with "Smitty" and "Freedman" stories and to some of my friends, those names mean nothing. However, seeing as how there is only a select group of people I see with great frequency in the suburbs, if the same name pops up from time to time, my apologies.

Anyhow, my friend Chris and I went to play some frisbee yesterday. Or so I thought. Chris roped me into going to Chipotle with him which wasn't really a big deal on my end. I was kind of hungry anyways, and I'm vulnerable to Chipotle, facts Chris obviously knew, which made his decision to hide the fact he wanted to go there all the more curious. But regardless, it was a beautiful day and we walked the roughly two blocks to Chipotle.

As I was only kind of hungry, I just got a quesadilla. Now, I can hear a lot of my friends laughing and lobbing obscenities at me through my computer, and it has nothing to do with the fact that my quesadilla was tying up one of the burrito presses (A woman in front of me got one too, for the record). At some point in time, it became unacceptable amongst my friends to not get a burrito, and it was equally unacceptable to not finish it. The exception was if we were going after school in high school, when we used to justify not wanting to go "all in" with a burrito, and instead opting for tacos as most of us would be eating dinner a few hours later (I have since picked up marginally healthier eating habits for those of you counting my calories at home).

Not wanting to totally embarrass ourselves, Chris got a burrito. He actually pulled off a move I'd never seen before. When asked what he wanted (after the chicken and beans), he said "everything." As somebody who has spent a lot of time in Chipotle, this was a total first for me. I thought it couldn't be done. The thought of a burrito with four different types of salsas just struck me as being similar to a high powered train that goes nowhere, but Chris insisted he knew what he was doing.

Anyhow, before we could eat, Chris had to set up his burrito, hot sauce bottles, and beverage in such a way that he could send a picture back to his friends in Thailand. Apparently they like seeing really Americanized things. I complied by sitting in the background stuffing my face of my quesadilla.

Now posing inside of a mildly crowded Chipotle while Chris channeled his inner Annie Liebovitz was only making me somewhat apprehensive. Until the general manager came over that is. He was so happy that we were enjoying our food, and documenting it, that he gave us each a coupon for a free burrito.

Now this, was an awesome moment in customer service (that was only mildly ruined by Chris demanding I give him my coupon back because I didn't have anything to do with the photo, which was actually partially true). I feel like the number one goal of any restaurant, is to give their customers an enjoyable experience, which normally includes the food, the wait time and overall experience inside. This manager totally realized the fact that we were both frequent diners and brand loyal to Chipotle, and by giving away $11 in free food, he knew he was going to keep our business for a while into the future.

And you know what? He's right. I actually tried to go back to claim my coupon today, but I couldn't get Chris on the phone and feel at my fattest when I drive to get fast food just by myself, so I exercised some self restraint. Regardless, the gesture he made reinforced the fact that Chipotle, unlike so many fast food chains, has more personality, and is more concerned with overall customer experience.

Now the converse of this was the twenty minutes I spent in Kinko's today. I needed 8 pictures printed off of a jump drive I brought in (in the process of typing that sentence, I initially typed zip drive, which made me think of 8th grade, which made me think of the time I purchased a Krayzie Bone CD, but I'm getting off topic). I didn't assume this would be a relatively smooth process, because the employees at Kinko's always seem like they'd rather be doing anything else than working at Kinko's. The employee who helped me, looked like a Steve, popped my jump drive in and hit the refresh button like 10 times in 12 seconds before the drive showed up. I thought about making a Mac joke, but I assumed he wasn't in the mood. He dropped my files into a PDF, a few clicks later, we're printing. Boom. Painless. I still had to time to stop into Nordstrom Rack to see if I could add to my growing flat brim hat collection (which is currently at one for those of you keeping track).

Six out of eight of my printouts were fine. Two were not printing to scale, so I mentioned this to him. We brought up my original files, and sure enough, it was no error on my end. He then told me his printers cut off the edges a bit and there was nothing he could do. At which point I said okay. Then there was a bit of awkward silence as a I stared at my clearly flawed printouts. After like 7-13 seconds of this, he said "Do you want me to try to fix it?" I could only laugh because this seemed like such an obvious question, but yes, I finally told him.

Twenty minutes later, and several failed print attempts later, I had my ads. All things considered, this isn't even in my top 3 worst experiences at Kinko's, but these things are important. The fact that Kinko's customer service is terrible should be important to the higher ups. For one reason or another, and maybe it's because if you need printouts there aren't a lot of other options, Kinko's employees are never friendly and most of the time they act like you're doing them a disservice by making them do their job. Now unfortunately, with printing there aren't a lot of other options, so I can't just take my business elsewhere. But I certainly don't have a positive view of their employees, or a positive view of how they run their business as a whole.

I don't ask for much when I leave the house (And the waitress at California Pizza Kitchen learned the hard way by giving our family forced schtick, to the point I demanded my Dad tip her less because I didn't want to be the guinea pig for her act). If you're in a retail job though, I don't think it's too much to ask to be friendly, or at least pretend be.

I suppose if I was around rude customers all day, it might make me a bit jaded too, but just know, customers make note of these things, and your managers probably do to.

Although, I've never met any managers at Kinko's, so if they're even angrier than the employees, we're all screwed.