Veranda Asian Market — Local services in Portland

I swung by Veranda Asian market (my regular Asian market) the other night to get a few things. The cashier wasn’t going to give me my receipt but I asked for it. Thankfully I did. When I looked more closely this morning, I discovered that the cashier rung the most expensive item twice. The item is pictured here.

This store is decent in appearance though can be cleaner and options are plenty but there are certainly things I do not like about them. One of those is not putting prices on a lot of their items. I have talked to them about that before but they obviously didn’t listen.

Anyway, yesterday, I went back to try resolving the issue. The same lady was there and as I told her what I am there for, she goes, “are you sure?”

THAT is what infuriated me the most. The audacity to insinuate I was lying. Dude, I have the item in my cooler in the car. You can take it back. Ugh, so frustrating.

Then she tells me she couldn’t issue a refund and that the only way is if I wait for her manager. I honestly do not have time for bullshit. So then I ended up getting a replacement item which didn’t have a price on it. Well, it cost me another $2. Before I walked out, I told her, “this is the last time I’m coming here. You just lost...

After having seen the photographs online of the copious amount of ducks and pork hanging in the window, I was compelled to travel to see what the market is all about. I was incredibly disappointed to arrive to a single old appearing duck hanging and a rather dry looking pork side. The people in the store were about okay did help me find and choose some of the items I was looking for however....I left feeling dissatisfied and confused about why they are advertising themselves online falsely. If there is a service such as take out food etc then why not meet the asserted promise? If you don't really have all the items you say you do online, then update the web presence to accurately reflect what you do actually carry. Furthermore, I understand that I am in a foreign market and I speak more than one language myself but I find it incredibly rude when two people are standing before their customers having a conversation in a language other than the language of the land. It's really off putting and inexcusably rude. I will not return...

We normally love this place and would make special trips when we were around forest ave but the last few times we went the short-haired older woman that we tried to get help from was extremely rude and very short with us.Thinking it might have been a bad day I asked one of my asian friends that goes there pretty frequently and she has ran into her as well and stopped going there altogether, preferring sun and hong kong market purely because of this woman's attitude.

As for the store itself it has a great selection of things you can't easily find other places, awesome sesame balls when they were making them pre-covid, and an overall awesome experience. My advice to the store is don't have this woman helping customers or talk to her about having a better attitude towards the people frequenting the store. It might be because we are in Maine and rude people are somewhat jarring compared to elsewhere but you are losing customers because of a poor attitude when everything...