I was placed in charge of a company picnic. I needed approximately $700 of special paper products and food from Walmart. This was large quantities of a few items — to much to get off the shelf. I spoke to the paper products manager four times over the course of three weeks to have the paper products ordered. Each time, he said that he was ordering the items and they would be in the store in about a week. When I would call him to follow-up (he never kept a promise to return my calls), he would give me another story about what he could or could not order. This was even after I had personally spoke with him in the store initially. I gave up and decided just to go get what he had. When I arrived at the store, he had nothing that we discussed. Not one. He had various excuses but the bottom line was that he did not do anything he said he would. He wanted me to come back in a week but I had no confidence that he would do anything again and we could not wait any longer. He hunted through the store and came up with subtitutes that were not what we wanted for the picnic but that would have to do. To his credit, he did give us discounts, but the products that we got were not what we wanted. We still had to go to another Walmart on Ashford Dunwoody Road in Atlanta to try to finish the order. I had spoken with a manager at that store on July 2 to have him order a large quantity of foodservice size canned fruit. Since I could not pick it up until the week of July 7th, he said he had no place to store it but would order it on July 5th. When I called that store on July 10th, he never order anything — same story as the other Walmart — no follow-through on a promise. We bought the fruit that was available and beverages that we could not finish at the first Walmart. We stood for a long time in the checkout line, then the cashier would not accept the tax exempt number that we had just used less than 2 hours earlier at the first Walmart. They said we had to have a gray card — that the first Walmart never gave us. After arguing for 30 minutes with the customer service manager and then the store manager, they finally let us use the number that we had just used and made us feel like they were doing us a big favor to take our money. Finally, because the manager did not order as promised, we are still not finished and will need to go to another store to get the remainder of the fruit I know that Walmart did not rise to the top with this type of service and complete non interest in the customer. Rather than feel valued for our $700 order, we were made to feel like we were just causing them trouble. I doubt we will be causing them trouble in the future.
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