Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday, where I always write about a piece of gratitude from my life, which for today is for something that came out of a friend’s pandemic house cleaning.
I’m sure many of us have done various pandemic projects around their home during the last year given how this pandemic has kept us more at home than not. I know that’s the case for me at least and thankfully for a friend of mine as well, who during some of his own clearing out of piles of stuff discovered a slew of gift certificates from Cold Stone Creamery.
I love Cold Stone Creamery and occasionally go there and get a treat for myself, especially after a long day. So, when my friend handed me a stack of paper gift certificates from them, I was ecstatic, until I saw they had expired way back in 2005! But, I said what the heck and went to Cold Stone not too long after receiving them from my friend and tried to use one of the eighteen $5 paper vouchers. It didn’t take long for the manager there to see the expiration was from 16 years ago. She actually laughed that I had tried to use one. I told her it was worth a try and she suggested I contact their corporate if I wanted to pursue it further. Hell, why not I said. So, I did. I contacted their corporate by opening a ticket through their email system and followed that up with a phone call a few days later.
I had zero expectations that my contact to Cold Stone corporate was going to achieve anything and assumed they would probably just tell me the same thing the store manager had, that they were just too old. I was pleasantly surprised though when the same manager who had turned them down the first time contacted me and said her corporate had given approval to honor them. She asked me to come into the store as soon as I could, so I opted to do so the very same day, as I wasn’t convinced it was actually going to happen.
Sure enough, that manger took my certificates and gave me a $90 plastic gift card that had no expiration date and even threw in two free ice creams that day for me and my friend Rob who was with me at the time.
I guess it goes to show that sometimes good things do happen when you least expect it, as I most assuredly didn’t expect gift certificates with expirations dates of over 16 years ago to be honored. I’m grateful I have a personality that pursues silly things like this, even when to most others, they’d probably have been thrown away after the first rejection. And I’m grateful as well that I now have a lot of ice cream treats ahead of me to enjoy this summer for free!!!
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson
