Complaint Review: LONGOS - thornhill Ontario

We have been shopping at Longos for over 15 years as we always believed they valued our business. However to our disappointment, this location singled us out, and made what was a simple return embarrassing and uncalled for.

We shop in this store weekly spending anywhere between 160-$230. You know that grocery bill thats a foot long? Who ever keeps a grocery bill? There usually good about it returns however this experience we just had, severed us to ever want to return. We had a box of sealed unopened unused Tomato sauce (from italy). The expiry date was very well about 11 months past...so we returned it. Not having our bill,totally our fault. The lady behind the service desk refuses to take it back as we explained it was bought a few weeks ago and we overlooked the item and in the past we had similar issue with yogurt, sometimes the stock gets lost or mixed up. She refused, we asked to talk to a manager who was as sincere and caring as a used car salesman. Needless to say they did not accommodate us. She even said "we don't carry that anymore" and than blurted to the manager "He brought something back last week too!" 

Quite taken back by this comment, as if were criminals for returning an item or 2 or even 3 that was unsatisfactory we saw nothing wrong in doing so. Seeing as we buy hundreds of items each month given the length of our tenure, we thought nothing of it..thats the grocery business...right? wrong!  So we said to this manager were not talking about a $200 item here its a box of sauce, we never knew your staff is singling us out let alone has the audacity to talk to someone like this.

With his arms crossed insincerely he says "I'll take it up with her and address that later but we cannot take back your item" We had our cart in hand ready to shop thinking any sane business person that had any respect for seeing someone spoken to this way would have apologised let alone return the item.

So we said we were about to shop in here, left the cart went to a competitor across the road bought virtually the same items we normally buy and the amount was $30 cheaper!? So we realised that longos is very expensive store by comparison. 

Therefore one might expect more, but in this case we got much less. The best part. We were made to feell like "Your bringing back and item we don't even carry anymore" So we walked back in to check as we thought maybe we are wrong and should take a step back. Not too our surprise they did carry the EXACT same item in the EXACT same package made by the EXACT same company. All this for a an item under $4. We even tried calling head office to voice our concern but no one there answers the phone, you need to know an extention. So we called the store back and explained we are trying to call head office but the voicemail will not allow you to hit 0 and get an operator. Can you tell us an extention of who to call we asked? The manager told us..."We don't give out extentions"  We finally emailed them and they did respond but were past that now. We don't want any good will gesture, we just wanted to be treated like valued customers and not singled out and and made to feel like this. Poor staff, over priced food, unacceptable head office set up. I guess they need to charge more for their products to get the proper infrastructure.  We never wanted to even post this but its well warranted and we hope they can now spend thousands of dollars to have this removed. But we will share this on another 400 forums to give them the press they so rightly deserve. Longos? Long gone!