Barnes & Noble — Restaurant in Asheville

Someone needs to be trained in customer service! I usually have a fantastic experience with the Starbucks in Barnes & Noble. This time was not a great experience at all. It took them 5 minutes before they even acknowledged me. I could understand if they had a bunch of online orders currently and if they would have immediately acknowledged me and said, it will be just a few minutes. However, at that particular time this was not the case, they actually had to get done with their personal conversation before they acknowledged me and finally when I was acknowledged, I was told that then that it would be a second before they could help me. That’s not being customer service minded. Evelyn took my order and she was extremely rude. I asked her two questions regarding the pumpkin spice and each time she seemed annoyed that I asked her? I paid for my order and when I received it, I realized that an item was not in the bag, so I turned right back around to inform them, again they refused to acknowledge me. I had to stand in line again just to be acknowledged. By the time I received the missing item, my drink was watered down. On top of it, Evelyn kept slamming the door to the small oven. I don’t know if the oven was broken or glitchy and I am no tech but I don’t see how slamming that oven every 15 seconds would fix it? It was pretty obvious that she was not happy or having a bad day. I didn’t see the other girls name tag that was making the drinks but she was just as bad for no acknowledgement. I’ve worked in retail for years. I take no pleasure in writing this bc I understand that everyone’s short staffed currently but as the old phrase goes, “if these girls can’t take the heat get out of...

Was on vacation here in Asheville for Christmas stopped in and had 7 minutes before closing. My daughter went up the escalator to look and an employee told her that she needs to leave. Instead of saying we’re about to close she said that to my daughter. When I went back to tell the lady at the front she apologized but I knew nothing was going to be said to her. When her dad went to ask the employees what was the lady name to call corporate nobody knew who she was. I called the inside and spoke to Peggy who was the lady who actually said it to my daughter but told me she didn’t say it and I wasn’t upstairs so it’s her word against my daughters and I’m just angry. Then was laughing like it was a joke. She didn’t think her lie all the way through because if she told my daughter she had 3 more minutes like she stated my daughter would of kept looking and not come straight down the escalator. This lady feels comfortable to say something like that. I told her if I put my daughter in front of you and she said you said that then you did. My daughter loves the bookstore and would stay until the last minute. She gains nothing by lying on...

This Barnes & Noble is a good bookstore and most always a destination whenever we make a trip to the Asheville mall as it's a nice place to drop our older kids off to peruse the books while we adults go and get the stuff done we need to do. It's well maintained and customer service is usually pretty good. Though, we did have an incident when, leading up to our daughter's tenth birthday, she had wanted a particular book. When shopping for it at this store we found the only copy of this book in the store had a bad crease in the cover and thus our daughter rejected it. However, at her birthday party, her friend had bought her this very copy of the book with the crease in it. We tried to return the book to the store for credit and, whereas I understand the management's position in not accepting the return, the staff was a bit rude, basically said we were lying and that they "would never have sold a book in that condition." The incident left a bit of a bad taste...