The Squeaky Wheel Rides Again

From: Pathmark Customer Care <customers@pathmark.com>
To: “Joshua Way” <joshway@joshway.com>
Date: Fri, 10 Sep 2004 06:22:38 -0500
Subject: Re: Pathmark of Nanuet

Dear Mr. Way,

Thank you for contacting Pathmark Customer Care. What distinguishes us from our competitors is our unwavering commitment to service, not our “pungent stank” as the opening line of your email suggests.

I am truly sorry that you were dissatisfied with your recent visit to our Nanuet store. And if in fact merely walking through our front door forced you to “confront mortality in a profound new way,” I am sorry about that as well. We are very proud of the management team and associates in Nanuet, and would like to assure you that any issues you encountered there were out of the ordinary.

For example, you claim in your email that our freezer case was “three hundred degrees below absolute zero” and that your extremities “became brittle, fell off, and shattered on the floor” after brushing against the ice cream shelf. I’m not a scientist and cannot refute this claim definitively, but I have doubts.

I also question your allegations that the floor of our meat department is “permanently stained by gallons of spilled entrails” and that the air is “thick with the stench of thirty years’ worth of rotting animal carcasses.” Our Meat Manager Joan Hurly is a dedicated professional, and not as you say a “deranged psychopath who apparently believes she can purge her sins by tearing into the flesh of the nearest living thing.”

Additionally, our bread aisle is stocked daily with only the freshest varieties. It is not, as you indicate, “a breeding ground for alien fungus so foul and mutated that even fire cannot destroy it.” We take issue particularly with your description of our own brand of English muffins, which are made fresh each morning from the finest wheat and flour and not from “newsprint paper and coyote leavings.”

It is true that inflation and other industry factors have led to an inevitable hike in the price of breakfast cereal. Still, you may go too far when you state that in order to purchase cereal at one of our stores one must be prepared to “sell all of their possessions and live in indentured servitude to the Pathmark Corporation for their entire adult life.”

I must confess that after the tenth paragraph I began to simply skim through your complaints regarding our so-called “indoor landfill” (we prefer to call it the produce department). But I took exception to some of the things I did read. In particular, you say that our produce features “more fur than the Westminster dog show” and a “smell that could reverse time.” This just isn’t true.

Furthermore, our world famous farm-grown tomatoes have been a family favorite for generations. They are not, as you describe, “genetically altered Hell-beasts with twisted facial features and distinct personalities,” nor do they “scream aloud pleading with shoppers to end their misery with a mercy killing.”

The checkout staff at Pathmark are a well trained team of motivated young people, not a “congregation of the undead trapped by some unforgiven iniquity between this world and the next.” And Daniel Rodriguez, the associate who rang you up at the end of your visit, is a particularly hard working and conscientious young man. He does not, to our knowledge, prepare for his evening shift by “inhaling a handful of Ecstasy,” “chasing a bottle of rum with Nyquil,” or “closing his head repeatedly in a bank vault.”

Perhaps Daniel was having a bad day, and wasn’t as you assume “carrying out demonic orders to destroy each individual food good” you were purchasing. We have a training video that instructs our clerks on the proper manner in which to pack items in a grocery bag. We do not “offer cash bonuses to the employee who cracks open the most yogurt containers.”

Finally, we have great confidence in the Nanuet Store Manager Steve Fisher. We are inclined to believe him when he denies your report that he beat you “rabidly about the face and neck with a stale loaf of French bread” when you asked him to confirm a sale price. Mr. Fisher has been with Pathmark for twenty-six years, and so it is very unlikely that you saw him profiled on CNN recently as the “next Bin-Laden.”

We strive for quality at Pathmark, and we feel that we have earned our customers’ loyalty and respect. We regret that you found your visit so unpleasant, and would ask that you give us another chance. We think you will find that a Pathmark store can be a fun and relaxing place to shop and save, and not a “dank and unforgiving cesspool where old people go to die.”

Best wishes,
L. Freeman.
Pathmark Customer Care.
Customers@pathmark.com