Severing The Tie — Sur La Table in King of Prussia

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A cou­ple years ago, I broke up with my favorite culi­nary haven, Sur La Table. It took some time but after much thought and dis­cus­sion, I decided to give them another chance with the caveat that I would never order online from them again after the drama with their order­ing depart­ment. Things hap­pen and when you deal with crappy cus­tomer ser­vice online, you tend to be a lit­tle scarred.

After I moved up to Philadel­phia, Sur La Table and I made up.  The Marl­ton, New Jer­sey store is one of my favorites. It’s spa­cious, homey and the peo­ple there are phe­nom­e­nal. One prob­lem for me is that I live in Man­ayunk so a trip to Marl­ton isn’t done on a whim for me. If I hap­pen to be in Cherry Hill, there are times I will mosey on over but to go there quickly for some­thing is not the norm for me. Cook­ing Classes are def­i­nitely out of the ques­tion dur­ing the week as the 9to5 is near King of Prus­sia and I’m always busy here. Plus, the sous pug, Wiggy, doesn’t seem to be the fan of me being gone for that long in the evening.

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I was to hear about the Sur La Table open­ing in the King of Prus­sia Mall. King of Prussia’s Williams Sonoma has become a sec­ond home for me (hello – Brian there is one of the *most* help­ful sales­peo­ple I know!) KOP also houses a Kitchen Kapers so nor­mally if I’m look­ing for some­thing, I can find it there. But, for the oppor­tu­nity to actu­ally shop at Sur La Table quickly dur­ing the day should I need some­thing for my culi­nary exper­i­ments – umm.. HELLO! SO THERE!

Know­ing how I am, I wasted no time in head­ing there for open­ing day. It was busy, as to be expected, but what shocked me was the qual­ity of the sales force in the store. We had one per­son who was brag­ging in front of the store that he “made up the posi­tion” to stand out­side hand­ing out cat­a­logs to passers-by (which, btw, he did not while I was watch­ing him nor did I get offered one). There was a blonde chick who just was beyond rude to every­one and clearly didn’t know what the prod­uct lines were. (She actu­ally exclaimed “Like oh my god, this thing is *soooooo* cute. What’s it for?” while hold­ing a bast­ing brush in some pas­tel color). I can’t begin to tell you how many sales asso­ciates they had on the floor who did not know where any­thing was and would pur­pose­fully avoid eye con­tact so as not to have to answer ques­tions from the cus­tomers. I heard more about the blonde girl’s week­end adven­tures as she gos­siped loudly to the other sales asso­ciates and *I* wound up help­ing a cus­tomer with their Le Creuset choice. Clearly the sales staff was too busy doing nothing.

I mus­tered that up to open­ing day jit­ters and was dis­ap­pointed that the sales asso­ciates were not famil­iar with the prod­ucts nor seemed to care. This is not the type of ser­vice you would ever get in Marl­ton – nor in Palm Beach. How­ever, I have to be hon­est – in King of Prus­sia, crappy cus­tomer ser­vice appears to be the norm – even in Nord­strom. Sure, you get some great gems of sales­peo­ple (Joey C. in Nord­strom, Brian in Williams Sonoma, Orlando in Gucci) but more often than not, you have sales asso­ciates that tend to think they are above the typ­i­cal sales staff because they work in “King of Prus­sia.” My response – when they work on 5th Avenue in NYC, then they can try to hit me with that atti­tude – until then, I will call them on their bull. So, I fig­ured I’d give Sur La Table another shot after open­ing day because, well, open­ing day can be crazy.

Today, I went in there to get a yogurt maker because I was work­ing on a piece about home­made yogurt. I resisted order­ing it from Williams Sonoma as Sur La Table had it avail­able and I didn’t have to wait for shipping.  Well, not for noth­ing, frankly I should have just lis­tened to Brian and ordered it at Williams Sonoma.

The girl at Sur La Table was a sweet girl but very “deer in head­lights”. It’s been two weeks almost and she didn’t know where any­thing was. OK – she’ll learn. For sake of this story, we’ll call her “Sales­girl A”. Sales­girl A went in the back twice to see where it was and it was nowhere to be found. They had two units in the store and appar­ently the whole Scooby Doo gang couldn’t locate a thing. So, while I wasted 25 min­utes wait­ing around, I became more frus­trated as the clock ticked. Y’all know how I detest wast­ing time.  I resolved that I was not going to buy the floor model. Call me crazy but there is a rash of food poi­son­ing float­ing around town – hell even I caught it from a bad salad at Friendly’s on Ridge Pike –and who knows what could be on there after two weeks being handled.

Sales­girl A and her man­ager, Marge, went again to look for this elu­sive – not so small – box. How­ever, when I have a sales asso­ciate next to her (we’ll call her “Ms. Excuses”) basi­cally chastis­ing her with an atti­tude of “that’s the wrong item. We don’t have a data­base. blah blah blah” I had half a mind to have a come to Jesus ses­sion with Ms. Excuses. Ms. Excuses pro­ceeded to give excuses galore as to why things couldn’t be found as the con­struc­tion was delayed for a few days, hin­der­ing the open­ing and orga­ni­za­tion. And then Ms. Excuses tried to say “well Rick might know where it is.” I had to smirk because that was one of the peo­ple help­ing Sales­girl A try to find it.

What really pissed me off is Ms. Excuses brought out the floor model in front of me again as if to say “well you could buy this one.” I was through – typ­i­cal King of Prus­sia atti­tude of ‘you will take this because I told you to take it and deal with it because this is King of Prus­sia and we know bet­ter than you, the customer.’

OH. HELL. NO!

Lis­ten, their man­ager, Marge, has a tough job – she has to deal with Ms. Excuses and that alone is more crap than the aver­age per­son could deal with.  I did enjoy deal­ing with Marge because she was the one per­son who actu­ally seemed to give a crap about the cus­tomers in the place. How­ever, these recent expe­ri­ences at a brand new store has me think­ing. I broke up with Sur La Table for a rea­son – crappy cus­tomer ser­vice. When this hap­pens in a BRAND NEW STORE, there is a problem.

I think that the time I wasted in Sur La Table would have been bet­ter spent at Neimans fondling some Louboutins. At least there, when they give me atti­tude, I give it right back – and I’m armed with a stiletto.

Related posts:

1. The Break-Up: Sur La Table — It’s Over.
2. Book­mark This: Sur La Table’s Bak­ing Blog…
3. Gift Alert: Sur La Table’s Tangine Gift Set…