Today my family and I were treated poorly at Venchi and found the shopping experience to be confusing, overly complicated, pretentious, and the customer service severely lacking. We will not be returning. I don’t wish for anyone to be fired, but I am sharing what happened today because this was a totally avoidable interaction that doesn’t need to happen again.

Today was our first visit to the store. The store was busy, and it wasn’t clear to me once you got into the store (from waiting in a long line outside the store) how to place an order. There were two employees working the gelato counter but things appeared disorganized behind the counter; there was little communication between the two serving ice cream and with the customers (no “hello”, “welcome”, “how mayI help you?”) From watching the customers ahead of me, I assumed it was ok to move up once the person ahead of me was being helped. Things were busy and bottlenecking at the entrance and it made sense (for the sake of efficiency) to move to the next available employee and move up and out of the way. Neither employee said anything to us when we did this. I said hi to the employee at the counter who I assumed would be helping us, but she ignored me and went to the register. I didn’t think too much about this because everything was confusing and i wanted to assume best intentions. But I was totally surprised when she yelled at us from the register to get in line. I was confused because we were in line. The tone of her voice and the way in which this employee spoke to me in front of a store full of people (condescending, rude, and aggressive) was completely unacceptable. My kids and I made an innocent mistake, but she behaved as if I was a problem, I needed to be put in my place, and someone she ultimately didn’t want to serve. Though we were next in line, she wanted me and my little toddlers to go back 2 feet, and then move forward to where we just were. It was comical and humiliating to do this because she didn’t want to be reasonable, flexible or understanding, but instead wanted to slow things down even more and reinforce an unknown rule in a very public way.

So some take aways for the employee/manager who I hope sees this:

1. Treat everyone with kindness.
2. Greet everyone that comes into the store.
3. Be helpful. Fix problems. Don’t create them.