&Company Resto Bar in Mississauga fails at customer service

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Sometimes when you eat at a restaurant or lounge and the establishment makes you feel welcome; they make sure you enjoy the experience. Other times you try to go to &Company Resto Bar in Mississauga and the marketing manager acts like despot before you even step foot in the bar.

This is an accounting of one of these instances.

I’ve been trying to organize a pre-wedding bridal party for a friend (or a bachelorette if you may), and after hearing mixed reviews and opinions about &Company, I wanted to give it a shot anyway. I called them everyday, most of the time twice, for a week without a response or call back, until I finally e-mailed them.

First e-mail sent to ANDCompany (&Co) in Mississauga. (please excuse the typo, I was in a rush!)

That evening I got a phone call from Leith Kingsley, marketing manager at &Company Resto Bar, regarding the e-mail. He asked me for details about the reservation, so I told him I was unsure of the number, and that it would either be 10, 15, or 20. He said he will put me down for 10, but if the number changes, all I would have to do is e-mail or call him and let him know ahead of time. No word of a reservation policy was mentioned.

The next morning, after most of my friends RSVP’d, I e-mailed him about changing the number from 10 to 18 people, and asked him to confirm that this can be done… and what did he respond with?

Response from the marketing manager at ANDCompany (&Co) in Mississauga.

Shocked. Having worked in the restaurant and bar industry for years, I have never heard of such an absurd policy, especially not for a local restaurant lounge in Mississauga.To be honest, I felt a little embarrassed for the marketing manager, him suggesting that I may have confirmed party members who won’t show up last minute. This was the wrong way of approaching a new customer.

At this point, I was furious and got James involved. He loves these kinds of situations as much as I do, and we responded with this:

My response (with the help of James) to the marketing manager of ANDCompany (&Co) in Mississauga.

To which Leith Kingsley replied with:

Marketing manager at ANDCompany (&Co) responds to my furious e-mail.

Instead of trying to accommodate my party, he took the easy way out and decided to cancel the reservation. Congratulations &Company, congratulations on your exceptionally poor service and marketing. The Internet was right about you.

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If you’re curious, here are some of the reviews I found online about &Company Resto Bar in Mississauga.

Reviews that previous customers have posted about ANDCompany (&Co) in Mississauga.

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My top three Ameri-spiring commercials of all time

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The Superbowl just passed, and Clint Eastwood’s It’s Halftime in America spot tugged on my red, white and blues.

Even though he sounds like Leonard Nemoy from either Transformers 3 or the new Star Trek film, it was still very enjoyable. Eastwood was the mayor of Carmel California, and I’m not talking FourSquare, imagine this guy talking down to a councillor about a zoning amendment… (bad city hall joke)

This is ranked #3 on my Ameri-spiring commercials of all time.

#2 is Levis, Go Forth. It seemed as though this was a re-branding exercise, but it didn’t work. People were supposed to go forth and literally search for hidden treasure somewhere in America. The only treasure that Levis gave away was this ad.

For me this advertisement does everything that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life should have done, but it does it in under two minutes. I don’t feel the need to shoot myself while watching it.

Finally the ad that I feel is the greatest Ameri-spiring commercial of all time. A serial killer lends his voice to it, and the founding fathers have never seemed quite this bad ass.

Good for you, America, for bringing forth this Dodge Challenger commercial titled Freedom.

Dodge, you would.

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A grave undertaking

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By James Rubec

I took a hike and found a project.

Halloween is coming and I need to find some ghosts. Graveyards are interesting places, the older the better. Yellowknife, NWT, only has two. On Oct.16, I checked out one of them.

A friend of mine and I hiked from the Yellowknife Cross Country Ski Club’s parking lot, over some Canadian shield into Back Bay’s Old Cemetery.

Yellowknife was first settled about 75 years ago. Sparsely populated by prospectors and bush pilots, many died young because of the work environment that is the North. Some who died were buried in a valley between what is now a highway, and Back Bay.  The terrain of the Northwest Territories is unforgiving, with little in the way of flat ground, and much in the way of cliffs, crags and mossy stone.

In the cemetery there are no more than 30 graves, tombstones or crosses, many of which are broken, or partially grown over. The sign identifying the space as a graveyard has been shattered and left in pieces rotting.

Many of the graves are marked by white crosses, the smallest, saddest crosses I’ve ever seen, some aren’t standing, others aren’t there at all. The tombstones are few, but ornate. A pair marked the graves of newborns that didn’t make it to eight weeks old, another had a defaced picture of a 25-year-old (Peter Gene Hendrick).

Peter’s grave has an etching on its top right-hand corner, and down its side. It almost seems like the etching was done at some point after the epitaph.

Graveyards are full of stories waiting to be unearthed… who were these people? How did they die? What were their lives like? The graveyard was small, unkempt and forgotten.  The most recent addition was a bridge that crossed over a small stream.

The bridge wobbled. Winter is tough in Yellowknife, and this was not considered in the bridge’s design. Evidence of previous bridges was rotting and broken under and beside the current bridge, a graveyard of shoddy planning.

One of the graves was marked for a man from Grand Prairie, Alberta. Clayton Merrit McAusland, born June 30, 1911. He died in Yellowknife, on October 4, 1939. I’m going to call Grand Prairie and try to figure out who this guy was.

View the full gallery of images here.

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