August 2021 by Magen Crabtree
To the manager of the floral department. My family lost my grandmother this week and it has been a heart wrenching roller coaster of sadness for a lot of people, in Chillicothe and places all over the state and even some other corners of the US. Flowers have always been very important to our family, grandma included, and I personally have used Hyvee floral (in two other towns and three other stores) for special events like my wedding, bridal and baby showers, and lots of other reasons. While we were heartbroken to be making these arrangements, it was important for us to choose flowers that she would have loved. I don’t know if you personally have ever planned a funeral for someone you loved, but you might understand the importance of wanting to get certain details really well taken care of. Well you made this impossible for us. We asked you to write our order down, twice I believe, and even after it became apparent that we had a large order with multiple arrangements you still refused. So two days later we came to pay for the flowers and there are mistakes. At least a handful of things that were discussed, and witnessed by many people, that were missing. That number of mistakes alone, I would be mortified by and would never want to put my professional name to. But you made it worse. You argued with us, and you were horrible to us. We tried to help fix the situation by offering to buy more flowers that were in the store and have them added. Again more arguments, cutting us off and using a hateful tone constantly. Not even once did you apologize or acknowledge any error on your part, you met our requests with hostility. I had to BEG you to sell us the last Orange lily in the store - because lilies were her favorite flower, which we stressed several times - because you sold the rest of the ones you had, after we had ordered for them days before. A few of them actually showed up at her funeral in other bouquets, from your floral shop. You made mistakes, fought us to fix them, and were horrible to us the whole time. You added so much stress and grief to an already stressful grieving time for us. I can’t imagine what happened to you to make you this way. If you didn’t want to deal with a large family or large order, you had another employee who seemed quite friendly and you could have given her the job. But it seemed like you almost chose to make this difficult for us. And you very much succeeded. Grown adults were crying over flowers because of the way you treated us, multiple times. Someone can be refunded their money, but YOU added grief that will always be associated with my grandmothers funeral and it will never be forgotten. I can only ask that you do a bit of soul searching before you crush another grieving family. Or, if treating people with any sort of kindness is difficult for you, maybe step back. You have absolutely no business working in customer service if you are going to treat people this way.
