A young woman walks into a local shop to buy a widget or two. There is a customer ahead of her being attended to by a shop assistant, but there are two other employees who don’t appear to be doing anything particularly urgent. One is packing boxes on to a shelf and the other is chatting on a cellphone.
The young woman is in a hurry and anxious to get her widgets and move on – but everything and everyone around her seems to be moving in slow motion.
A young woman walks into a local shop to buy a widget or two. There is a customer ahead of her being attended to by a shop assistant, but there are two other employees who don’t appear to be doing anything particularly urgent. One is packing boxes on to a shelf and the other is chatting on a cellphone.
The young woman is in a hurry and anxious to get her widgets and move on – but everything and everyone around her seems to be moving in slow motion.
Dear Reader, you are probably nodding as you read these words, because we’ve all had this type of experience in Grahamstown, where service is renowned for its surliness.
The young woman can’t stand it any longer, so she yells out, “Who do you have to sleep with to get service in this place?”
Everyone looks up at her as she goes on, “I’ve been waiting for ages to get some service!”
If her outburst was designed to hurry people along, her plan backfired. Customers and employees alike just stared at her as she launched into a rant-and-rave rhapsody. Then she said it: “I work at Grocott’s and I am going to write an article about the pathetic lack of service in this dump.”
The above story is fictitious. Or rather, it is a composite of several stories conveyed to our newsroom over the years.
We often hear of people claiming to represent this newspaper in an attempt to scare shop owners who might be afraid of negative publicity. They do it to get better service, or sometimes to claim freebies.
It is relatively easy to do this type of scam because most owners of commercial establishments in Grahamstown know that for a very small newspaper, we use a large number of students who do, in fact, legitimately write for us.
This type of scam is just that, a scam.
We do not condone the use of this newspaper’s name to sort out personal problems – and even when our own staff have problems with poor service they may not threaten a businessperson with negative publicity.
People take chances and if ever you are in doubt about whether the person in your shop is actually working for Grocott’s Mail, please phone 046 622 7222 to verify the bona fides of that person.
