Papa John's Customer Service - Good Will?

     Here is an experience I had recently, It may be trivial, but the days of customer good will are declining, and I want to see what the response will be from Papa John's will be, since they have a great feedback form on their website under "customer service".

     I wanted to take advantage of the Papa John's Pizza $5.99 1 topping carry-out special. So I walked in and ordered a large sausage with "light sauce" as my wife prefers Domono's. But if I am buying I prefer Papa John's. So I went into a different store to shop for the 15 minutes. I returned and it was done, so I grabbed it and drove home. When I opened the box, my wife pointed out that it was not "light sauce" and proceeded to scrape the toppings off and then get rid of all the sauce and tried to put the sausage and cheese back on. I then looked at the box and and it said "extra sauce". And in my house that is like culinary malpractice. So I called and talked to the guy in charge and he said he thought I said "extra sauce". He did say that he would make me a new "correct" pizza if I brought the bad one back with only 1 piece missing.
     Well I was already at the dinner table and my wife and I each had a piece on our plates that was almost eaten, I thought that request was rather odd. And since I had driven there and was already home, I really did not feel like going back, so I asked him if he could just take my name and in a couple days, when I felt like pizza again, I could stop in and get another $5.99 pizza. He said that was not an option and offered to make me a replacement pizza right now if I brought the other one back. I reminded him that a couple years ago that the manager screwed up one of my pizzas, and made me another pizza, let me keep both and gave them both to me for free! That was a great day in my life and gave me a great feeling about Papa John's. So I said "screw that" and hung up and I guess I was going to do Pizza Hut's $10 deal or Domino's from now on.
     Still being a little upset, and watching my wife struggle in the sauce pool, I decided to call back and see if he would deliver me another (free) pizza to my house. He agreed, so I asked if I could change it to pepperoni instead of sausage (per my wife) and he said "no" he could only replace the original order (sausage) - and to make sure there was not more than 1 piece missing. In about 20 minutes, a delivery kid came with the new "light sauce" sausage pizza. He opened the old pizza box to inspect it - well we smushed the remaining pieces around to look like a total of only 1 piece was missing, and I guessed it passed the inspection because he gave us the new pizza. And I have to admit, it was fresh and good and "light sauce".      

     My point is, I think that the "1 piece missing" rule is ridiculous. And it was a blatant error on their part to put extra sauce on a pizza ordered with light sauce, and in that case, to make the customer happy, all bets are off. I remember somewhere in the conversation, that the manager said "it comes out of my pocket", if that is the case, there is something wrong with the Papa John's system - making the manager financially responsible for maintaining customer good will?

I will update this blog with whatever the response is from Papa John's

     UPDATE September 8, 2012: I have received nothing back from Papa John's - I spent about an hour preparing and writing what I thought was a polite and detailed submission on their feedback page and NOTHING. I have lost confidence in the company - another company that got too big for it's britches. It's too bad too, I really used to like Papa John's...

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Delete cookies / cache in Internet Explorer 8

It used to be in the good old days (before Internet Explorer 8), to delete my cookies and temporary files, I would right click on my email icon in the start menu and choose "internet properties". In the general tab and I could delete my temp files, cookies, saved passwords and browsing history with one click. Well I can still do it this way, but in Internet Explorer 8, this does not delete your web "cache".

Your web cache is another set of temporary files that helps regularly visited web pages load faster. However, it also will store files to web pages that you may never visit again. The cache folder can contain images, shockwave files, flash banners and other files that can be large and eventually take up needed space if not deleted.

I stumbled on to this when I noticed a few things odd on my computer. I sometimes work on websites and it is handy to right click on a web page and choose "view source" to see the html code. All of a sudden one day, this would no longer work. Then when I would defragment, I would look at the files that were being moved, and some were shockwave and flash files that I knew I had not recently added. Some files had Google in the file name- so I knew it was advertising of some sort. And having deleted my cookies and temporary files in the way I always did in the past, these files should be gone. Also, the last time Norton's did a full system scan, it took like 3 hours and I had 1.5 million files scanned, no malware or viruses, but 63 tracking cookies that were deleted. Norton's spent a lot of that time on the "web cache" area, so a light went on in my head. (on a sidenote: I also noticed that when Norton's did an idle (full system) scan, it would never make it all the way through).

I did a Google search on "how to delete web cache" and found the answer. Here is how to do it in Internet Explorer 8:

1. From the Safety menu in the upper right, click Delete Browsing History.
2. Deselect Preserve Favorites website data, and select Temporary Internet files, Cookies, and History.
3. Click Delete.

At first, I was a bit concerned as this took over 5 hours, but it finally did clear and I was good to go. This must have been all the "cached" files since I upgraded to IE8. This did the trick, and I am surprised that there is not more information on the subject. I m not a brainiac, but I am not completely stupid on the computer either. I just want to pass on this information so that it may help people that were in the same boat that I was in. I would recommend to delete your "web cache" at least every month. Yes you will have to re-login to your Facebook, Twitter and other login pages, but trust me, my computer runs like new again...

NOTE: I ran a Norton's full system scan again today (after 2 days surfing) and there were 871,000 files scanned. So deleting the web cache dropped around 700,000 files! This scan took about 30 minutes.