I am in no way affiliated with the Petcetera chain of pet stores but I must say, their Petcetera Plus membership is something I swear by.

The Petcetera chain of stores went under a while back. They had all kinds of going-out-of-business sales, which were pretty good, and then closed shop. To my surprised, our location in Kitchener opened up again a few months later. As it turns out, a bunch of the retail stores were bought back out of bankruptcy and opened up again. Same stores, same logo, but new Petcetera, they say.

I signed up for a Petcetera Plus membership when I first got Lewis, my cat. At the time, it didn’t seem to really be worth anything. I got “points,” I think, and that was about it. I never heard about any exclusive membership deals and I didn’t shop their very much since their prices, for food and litter, were considerably higher than a department or grocery store. But when the chain closed and then reopened their stores they also relaunched the membership program, in a serious way. The number of really good sales and coupons that the Petcetera Plus membership has been giving out since the chain’s reopening has been incredible. One week it’s all cat and dog toys, half-price. The next week it’s half off all carriers and crates. And this week, I got a $20 off coupon just for being a member, good for anything in the store as long as you spend $50. That meant that a bag of dog food for Penny, normally $55, was only $35. That’s like free money, people!

Truly, I’m not an advert for Petcetera but if you’ve got a pet, and live close to a Petcetera, it’s worth checking out. If you become a member you receive maximum 2 e-mails per week and those e-mails only serve to tip you off to the great sales that they seem to always have. I’m not a member of a lot of things, but being a Petcetera Plus member is something that I genuinely swear by!

Well, if the bad guys deserve some bad press then certainly the good guys deserve some good press, too. This Adventure in Customer Service is a good adventure. The tale of a company that’s clearly doing things right and that’s something we can all appreciate.

With some of the windfall from our October wedding, Maria and I brought a dish rack from simplehuman. This brand, which I haven’t really heard of before, seemed to be pretty prolific in many of the houseware chains that we visited. All of their products whether it was trash cans (which we also bought), storage units, kitchen tools or, in our case, dish racks, were priced fairly steeply but we figured that the mantra you get what you pay for might be true. So we bought a dish rack, an expensive one, and we were pretty satisfied with our purchase. At our house the job of doing the dishes is mine—Maria does the laundry—and this dish rack had everything I could’ve ever wanted. It was spacious, sturdy, fit dishes and cups of all sizes perfectly and even had a place to hang two extra glasses off the side and a slot designated for cutting boards or baking sheets. This dish rack was amazing.

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So I’ve been inspired, after being rubbed the wrong way several times, to regale you with some of my harrowing tales of customer service—or rather, lack thereof, in a new series I’m calling Adventures in Customer Service. Instead of being a great big complain fest, I’ll try to turn it into positive lessons that we can all take from my experiences and maybe they can serve as cautionary tales. Oh, and I do have a few positive experiences to share as well. Need to shine a light on the good guys, too.

I have a 2007 Toyota Yaris. For what it’s worth, it’s a great car. It gets very good mileage, drives well, fits lots of stuff and people for it’s size, and I’ve only had one problem with it so far, a very minor problem, but it was an absolute headache to try and resolve. To be sure, this is not a complaint about the Yaris itself but rather the dealership I took it to to be repaired.

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