I had a bad retail experience last night. I showed up a store in our local mall with a gift to return. It was 25 minutes before closing. I figured I had plenty of time to make my return, get my gift card and pick out something else. When I arrived to the cash wrap there were five customers in line and only one cashier. Since the line was long I went over to another part of the store where there are more cash registers and asked an employee if she could help me with a return. “No, all of the registers except for that one are closed,” she said. “But there are five people in line,” I explained. “I’m sorry,” was all she said.

Well that’s just annoying. Why does a store have four employees working, at least 6 cash registers installed and only have one “open” for customers? I continued waiting for the next 20 minutes. One customer behind me left after getting tired of waiting. Finally it was my turn. The employee was obviously annoyed that it was now two minutes to closing and I was apparently asking a lot of her. She then proceeded to use her headset to ask another employee to ring up another customer who had just shown up!

So not only did I wait in line for 20 minutes, get lied to about the cash register situation, and hear the employee ringing me up say a swear word, but I didn’t have time to make the purchase I had wanted to make. I’ve been contemplating whether to send an e-mail to their corporate office about the experience.

My soon-to-be-brother-in-law has no reservations about informing companies when the service is bad. He delivers his commentary in a polite, yet constructive way and often gets rewarded for it. He’s been given free airline upgrades, gift certificates and coupons for the inconvenience he’s experienced. He doesn’t exploit this, he simply does it when he feels the service is bad enough to warrant it. So what do you think? Was the service I received bad enough to send some constructive criticism their way? Or would I just be wasting my time?