My partner and I normally bring our dog to the Hunt Club location, which I can’t say enough good things about. We did initially bring him in for a nail trim at the Hunt Club location, but they were very busy and couldn’t take us for an hour. Being sort of pressed for time, my partner called this location to see if they were busy. The person he spoke with said that they weren’t currently busy and that they could take our dog in if we brought him right away. We left the Hunt Club location to head to this location where we waited for someone to serve us.
Finally someone greeted us by rudely saying, “what are you guys waiting for?”, which I thought was strange coming from a customer service background. My partner told her that we had just called, and explained to her why we were there. After pulling up our file, she came out from around the counter to ask us if we knew that there was an alert on our file about our dog biting someone and breaking the skin. Caught off guard and completely taken aback by this question, I said, “No sorry, that’s really weird because he’s usually very calm.. no one has ever told us that before”. She persisted to argue with us saying, “well I can only go by what the notes say on the file and we can’t take a nervous dog in when we’re busy like this”. She made it seem as though we were lying about not being aware of this, and was very defensive from the beginning, as I was only trying to answer the question she had asked me. Finally, my partner ended the conversation by saying, “alright well, we’ll go elsewhere”. We walked over to the cashier to see if we could speak to a manager and unfortunately the person we spoke to at the grooming station WAS the manager. For the future, it is deeply encouraged that the “manager” Nicole receive some training in customer service because talking to her literally felt like we were being interrogated by a police officer or something. The whole situation was just honestly unfortunate because we called them ahead of time so we wouldn’t have to drive there if they were too busy to take us.
After the incident, we brought our dog back to the Hunt Club location. They pulled up our file and didn’t mention anything about an alert. We asked them if there was anything weird showing on the file because of what we had just experienced at the other location. They told us that there were no notes or alerts on file other than one dating back to over a year ago (our dog is only 16 months old, so this would have been from one of the first times he got his nails trimmed - he has gone to get them done every month since, and has been through extensive aggression training as well). At this point in my dog’s life, it was a little alarming to find out that he had bitten someone/broke the skin and no one even bothered to tell us at the time that it happened. However, that’s just because it didn’t happen at this point in his life at all. It was just a lousy excuse to not have to make the time to cut my dog’s nails, which literally takes five minutes out of your day.
I normally don’t post negative reviews and I totally get that people have bad days. Unfortunately this is not the first time we have felt this way leaving this location. We decided to give it another try, but after today I can tell you that we will never be back. Trust me - if this location is just a bit closer to you, I would strongly recommend driving a little further to take your business to the Merivale and Hunt Club store.