I have rarely gotten good service here, but it does happen. I've never had anyone go out of their way to help me though - which is OK because that's not something I feel I deserve anyway - just decent service without an attitude - after all, I'm paying and putting money into their pockets, right?
There's a restaurant in microcentro called El Establo (I'm sure many have heard of it). It's a bit pricey and depending on what you order, you may not like it. They serve really good brochetas (chicken, lomo and mixed), for example, or good pizza (reasonably so for Argentina) or almost always a superb matambrito de cerdo, but if you order a lomo or bife de chorizo you might be a bit disappointed from time to time. I've been to the place enough over the last few years that the waiters know me and take pains to make sure I'm well-attended, much to the chagrin of friends I know who go there without me and get so-so service
I find that often (but not always) to get good service, you need to know the people a bit.
My worst story on service to date comes from DirecTV. I had a US debit card on record with them to pay my bill by automatic debit. It had been registered with them for about three years previously and had served to pay the bills just fine during that time.
Earlier in the year, my debit card was about a month away from expiring and I hadn't received my new card yet. We now had a bank account here in Argentina and I decided that we should change the account to use the local debit card instead of the new one that would come in a couple of weeks from my bank in the States. At the time, there was no problem, all done nice and quick over the phone to change it over.
The following month, I received a double billing. One here locally and one on my account in the States. The billing had apparently happened before my States debit card expired. Called up DirecTV and they apologized profusely, said they would take care of it. I had a credit for the following month for the overpayment.
Next month comes along we are charged in our local account even though we have a credit for a month. In addition, a couple of days later we start getting messages on our TVs that our card was rejected. We contact customer service and they tell us there doesn't seem to be any problem, our account has been paid, etc, etc. I tell them about the credit, and ask them why we are getting the message about a failed debit. She said sorry, the credit would be applied next month - she didn't know why it wasn't applied the current month. As for the message, she didn't know. The message went away shortly thereafter in that month.
The following month we did not get charged locally, but we did continue to get the message that the card was rejected. Again, on calling customer service we were told that this time the credit from two months ago was applied and she's not sure why we're getting the message. And true, we were not charged locally, so at least that worked. The message goes away again after talking to CS, but about halfway through the month we start getting messages that we need to pay the bill to ensure our service is not cut off. Again with the call to customer service, again they don't know why we're getting the message.
Of course, somewhere in this I remembered about my US debit card and the original double-billing. Longer story a little shorter, we found out that they still had the old US debit card registered and they were still trying to charge it as well, which was causing the messages, even though our account was kept current by automatic debit from our local account.
To this day, we still get the same messages. For a while there I thought we'd resolved it (yet again) but we still get it.
I've thought many times about cancelling DirecTV and going with CableVision. The problem is we have a DVR box as one of our DirecTV boxes (out of the three we have) and we use it quite a bit. A friend about 3 or 4 months ago did that himself, converting to CableVision from DirecTV, on the promise that they too had DVR boxes available. When he got the service installed (two weeks later than they had scheduled after three reschedules - not too bad for Argentina) the technician brought him out a regular (though to be sure, it was HD) box and apologized because there was a huge waiting line for the DVR boxes. Due to the import restrictions the government has put in place, of course...
Of course, in all this, McDonalds has to play a bit of a role as a bad service provider (although not too bad, really, just at times). We go there for takeout about once a week or so, just for something different. Once, we tried a delivery service (can't remember which one), but the order took more than an hour to get to us, the food was cold, the fries soggy and half of two of the four cokes were nearly empty from the trip. Not McDonalds' fault for that I don't think, but that's just an aside anyway.
The real problem comes from how many times I've gone there and had a bill anywhere from 60 pesos to, say, 180 pesos, and they can't make change when I make my order, when I try to pay with 100 pesos bills. It really does chap my a*s. I can understand smaller places having this problem - after all, if you go to the bank for change, you actually have to pay a service fee to get it. But McDs is a BIG company. Can they really not have change? Even if they have to pay a little extra for that, I'd bet they could absorb it a lot easier than small businesses. Almost always when they are short on change they insist that I pay with my debit card. Before I had a bank account here, I got killed on international transactions fees and currency conversions and I didn't feel like I should be asked to foot the bill. Now, it just really pisses me off and I refuse to do it even with a local account.
And two days ago, I got the same treatment from Farmacity a block away from my apartment. It's the first time. I might even have paid with my local debit card because it was so rare. The bill was about 160 pesos and I gave the clerk 200 pesos (I had no other change in enough quantity to actually pay). He looked at me with scorn (I swear!) and literally tossed the bills at me, which fell amongst the items in the shelves in front of the counter and said "there's no change. Pay with change or your debit card." I was blown away - that was the first time that had happened to me, anywhere, with such rudeness. I bent down and fished the bills out of the bins in front of the counter, looked at him in the eyes, and told him to "suck..." (well, you get the idea) and then walked out. I was trembling with anger and realized I really should have stopped and asked to see a manager, but my mind doesn't work so well when I see red...
