Time to follow up on my earlier note about complaining about Home Depot. Here is the note I received back today

Dear Dan,

Thank you for contacting The Home Depot Customer Care.

We appreciate receiving feedback from you about your experience at the
Pleasant Ridge Home Depot store. We apologize for not meeting your
expectations.

Please know that the feedback you have provided is taken seriously and
will be used in the overall evaluation of the services we provide to our
customers.

We would like to offer you a $25 Home Depot gift card in the hope that
your next shopping experience will be a more pleasurable one. In
addition, it is our way to ‘thank you’ for taking the time to provide us
with this feedback. By doing this, you are giving us an opportunity to
improve.

Thank you, again, for sharing your comments and bringing this to our
attention.

So there you go. I would like to take a bit of time to make the distinction between making up complaints just to get free stuff and complaining because you were unhappy with something.

I think companies want to get feedback about how they’re doing, and ways in which they are not meeting their customer’s needs. I also have been known to give positive feedback when an employee really goes out of their way above and beyond. I don’t do that very often because I don’t think it happens really often, but I remember emailing about a particular Meijer pharmacist that I felt really went out of his way to help me.

Anyway, I highly recommend complaining when you receive poor service. a) you are helping these companies improve their performance for all of us and b) free stuff!!! 🙂