Another spectacular marketplace experience:

This incident is maybe two years ago and I was in a Sears, not normally a place where I'd grown to expect to find customer service above more than a bare minimum. I've watched over recent years as products changed, some disappeared, along with a sales staff that seemed to become fewer and fewer while lines of customers waiting to make their purchases at more centralized sales hubs grew longer. In spite of this evolution, I have remained a fan. There is nothing like a browse through a tool department to sharpen one's mood and imagination.



On this day I had some plastic gift money remaining from recent celebrations and I wanted to spend it on a small air compressor that was on sale. When the sale was completed I asked if there was a dolly I could use to wheel the large, boxed compressor across the store to the package pick up area. Without so much as a pause, the young sales associate stooped down and picked up the box and carried it across the store for me, waiting while I stumbled along after him. He waited guarding the box until I got my truck out of its parking space and over to the loading area and then he even loaded the box for me.



I was pretty amazed at his service, rendered with a no-big-deal kind of attitude. I was so impressed, in fact, that I intended to call the store when I got home to applaud this employee's extraordinary assistance, but by then my good intentions had become tangled with some apprehension that such a commendation might well earn him some sort of disciplinary action; failure to follow safety procedures or the like. So in the end I kept quiet except to mention my experience to a handful of friends. The net result, though, was to brighten significantly my impression of dealing with Sears.