I am writing to alert you against ordering a celebration cookie from the Liverpool Street Station, London branch of Millie’s Cookies, by recounting my poor experience on Friday 13th Feb 2009. I have never known such awful management and disorganisation. I was in a queue of about 8 ladies who had pre-ordered Valentine’s cookies a few days in advance to be collected at 5.30 on Friday 13th. I ended up getting mine only at 6.45 and a couple of them(including a heavily pregnant woman) were waiting standing even longer! The mismanagement was in the fact that the branch had 4 people serving a not very long queue of customers and just one stressed out and slightly aggressive person dealing with the celebration cookie pre-orders. The manager of this branch was hiding in a kitchen offsite making the cookies. We suggested that either we would come and collect the cookies from the offsite kitchen ourselves to help out or that the manager should assign some more of his staff to dealing with the growing queue of people waiting for celebration cookies, but this message was either not relayed to the manager or plain ignored. The person dealing with the cookie pre-orders was very slow and was either not dealing with the cookies in a very logical way or just playing for time with us whilst the cookies were baked from scratch! We had all filled in order forms setting out our names and numbers and Valentine’s messages. Considering it was Valentine’s day, many of the messages were pretty much the same, ‘I love you’ etc. So, what does this gormless manager do, but organize cookies orders by the message on the cookie rather than the name of the person ordering it DISASTER! The person dealing with the pre-orders asked us what our messages were on the cookies and them disappeared to go to the offsite kitchen for 20 minutes, would come back and state that our cookies weren’t ready, would ask us the message on the cookie again and then disappear for 20 minutes again. This process was repeated 3 times! When we suggested it may be easier to write down all our messages on a piece of paper so she did not have to come back each time she forgot, she finally agreed to do this. People were getting to the point where they were missing trains and late for engagements, so we asked for refunds or vouchers or something. I myself was at the point I couldn’t wait any longer as I had a friend waiting with me and a dinner appointment. We were offered a paltry little basket of broken cookies to share — SHAMEFUL! When my 2 cookies eventually arrived, they were on ordinary cookies, not dark chocolate as ordered and one had the wrong message I had bought one cookie as thank you for a friend saying ‘World’ s No. 1 seamstress’ and it had come back as Love you lots seamstress’. When I mentioned that this was not what I had ordered, they pointed to my order form where someone had crossed out my message written in black ink stating ‘World’s no 1 seamstress’ and written over it with blue ink stating ‘Love you lots seamstress’. The person dealing with the pre-orders had the audacity to insult my intelligence by trying to tell me that was what I wrote! I got both cookies at 6.45 and due to an angry mob now developing, Millies gave us all a box of free cookies, however this did not seem like compensation for the time wasted and stress!
