A little help over here, please? Monday morning rant....

Anyone else having this experience? You call a company, you get shifted to one of those automated menu messages where not ONE of the options is what you need? Or worse yet, the phone rings many times and either goes to voicemail or is ignored? You sign up online (sometimes repeatedly) for more information and never hear from the company again? What the heck happened to customer service?

All summer, I've been chasing several businesses that I dealt with in the past and have little success getting a response the first, second or third time. My pork supplier that I've worked with for 3 years now, has only bothered to respond once to my numerous emails and phone calls, and that was to say she'd "check her messages". And I was ready to throw lots of money at them! Two other farmers I buy from either do not confirm my order and payment or are slow to do so. Bought tickets for the local beer festival online, because that's the only way they wanted to do sell them, and it took 6 WEEKS to get a confirmation that they had my money. Tickets didn't show up till 2 weeks after that! The auto body shop that I've dealt with a couple of times hasn't bothered to reply to emails/calls AT ALL! I'm having the work done by another, closer but slightly more expensive, body shop. I just spent 2 days chasing down the Ziebart dealership to ask a question and make an appointment--finally got him an hour ago after strong-arming his assistant. I'm ready to go for a test drive in a car and possibly purchase in the next day or so, but can't get the Online Sales Manager to actually call when he says he will.

I could understand the slow/non-responses if I were simply a casual customer but these are businesses that I've done business with before! I realize that the economy is recovering slowly but I would think businesses would go the extra mile to retain old customers and attract new ones. I just don't get it.....

You may now return to your regularly scheduled day.