Awaiting Your Reply: A Short Story

Good Foods, Inc.
Town Square Shopping Center

Attn: General Manager

If there is no general manager in your store, please direct this letter to whoever is in charge of the entire store operations. Please send me your reply by Thursday so that I can receive it by Saturday. Then, when I visit your store with my family on Sunday to do my weekly shopping, some of my complaints and suggestions will hopefully have been implemented.

My name is Margaret Thingsley, and my husband and I and our two teenage boys make it a duty to shop every Sunday at your store for our entire week’s shopping needs. We come right after church services and we immediately head to the washrooms as it is very difficult to get to the church facilities right after services end.

Why is it that most of the time there is no toilet paper in the women’s room either on the roll or on the supply shelf in the washroom? Surely you can find an employee to make hourly visits to maintain the cleanliness of the male and female washrooms.

Your parking lot is not much better. There are always papers flying around and I don’t think the parking lot has had new striping for years. Can you not afford a coat of white paint for those lines? I am not even counting the potholes in the parking lot. These should be filled before someone sues you for the cost of an expensive tire.

I believe in charity and charitable causes as I am a large giver of charity to my church. But I don’t appreciate – and neither do many of the folks that I see entering your store at the same time I do – having people standing in front of the store with baskets or cans or bars of chocolates begging for monies. The Salvation Army is a respected charitable organization but those others are unknown to most of us ordinary good citizens. Get rid of them and do it soon.

If not, I may think about standing out there myself asking for donations to my church, which I am sure will really offend your customers who are not members of my religious denomination.

My family always requests paper instead of those plastic bags when we are checking out our usual six, yes I said six, bags of groceries. I have asked for over two years when your paper bags will have handles on them. It is very difficult for our family to carry the six bags of groceries up to our second floor apartment.

My teenage boys and my husband are strong but holding those bags against their chests and walking up narrow staircases is not easy. Your competition across the highway uses paper bags with handles. I know that these cost one cent more per bag. But think of the goodwill and the possible loss of customers like me because you don’t want to spend one cent more per paper bag.

Shopping could be a lot faster for my family if so many of your shopping carts had four wheels that rolled instead of having at least one broken wheel on most of your shopping carts. Those broken wheels cause more damage to the floor over a period of time than the cost of a new wheel on each of those broken-down shopping carts.

I am sure you have a maintenance person able to do such wheel replacement, although sometimes I see many bulbs burned out in your store and I wonder if you really have a maintenance person on staff.

Your employees at the checkout counters are most helpful but it would be nice to occasionally see a store employee walking around the store trying to help customers locate items they cannot find by themselves.

I think your busiest employee traffic is the number of employees I see exiting the store washroom. There must be card games being held in the washrooms, for once the employees go in they forget to come out, that is until break time and then they disappear again.

And at 5 feet and my husband at 5 feet 2 inches it is difficult for us to reach our food choices on the high shelves that your company has deemed to place our favorites. I or my husband usually has to lift our boys to enable them to reach our choices that are on the top shelf. Maybe each aisle should have one of those picker sticks that can grab items off the top shelf. Talk to headquarters about that one.

This letter is being sent registered mail, receipt requested, which has cost me more. But I hope and expect quick action on your part on the issues I have mentioned.

Very truly yours,

Margaret Thingsley

Albert Zimbler is a 92-year-old author of six humor short story books on Amazon of which MORE DATING AND MATING SECRETS OF SENIORS AND OTHER HUMOR SHORT STORIES is the latest. He also teaches senior improv. Click here to see his Amazon author profile.