OPEN LETTER
Open Letter to Bigelow Tea Company
I wish to register a complaint
Dear Bigelow Tea Company,
I am writing to express my extreme distaste for Pomegranate Blueberry Herb Plus Omega 3 tea. Something as simple as tea, which usually brings peace and harmony, has left me mortified, humiliated, and ashamed.
After all, I am what one would call a connoisseur of the leaf. Now, alas, my reputation has been marred, owing to your splendidly deceitful packaging of Pomegranate Blueberry Herb Plus Omega 3.
May I now be considered the common sewer of the tea establishment here in regal South Jersey?
It was Easter. After a delectable meal of the finest quality of mutton and chops and potatoes and mushy peas, I served my holiday guests your bouquet blend of broken-hearted bandits in the finest china. I used a fresh, rolling boil from my electric kettle, imported exclusively from the British Isles, where I discovered the glories of tea and rolling boils as an undergraduate at University in the North of England.
My dinner guests generally assume, as custom, the quality of my tea to be of a choice curation. Was it your fault, kind sirs, or madam, or mz, as the case and pronoun may or may not be, that I ran out of my Yorkshire Gold Blend from Ireland? Was it your problem that oversight led to a dearth of Charleston Tea, acquired while on a tea pilgrimage to the Charleston Tea Plantation in South Carolina? No. I was even bereft of Barry’s Tea from London and Mr. Tips as well.
Sadly, no. I had five or six deadly desiccated Lipton tea bags in my “junk” pantry, that, miraculously, would have been of a far superior pour than Pomegranate Blueberry Herb Plus Omega 3 tea!
And we’re talking Lipton! Egads! I would need four Liptons to equal the strength and virility of one teabag from my importers in Pakistan!
It was a calculated risk that I picked up Pomegranate Blueberry Herb Plus Omega 3 from the grocery shelf the Tuesday last. I knew my elderly guests liked fish oil tablets for health and well-being. The name of your company, in some lower realms of the Tea Drinking World, is commonly enough respected, so I wished to procure for my guests, who had driven far and wide to join me at my table, an excitable surprise.
And what treat greeted guests with tea and scones? The smell of tuna oil greeted the olfactory senses of my guests! It was not only putrid, but disgusting, horrifying, mortifying, and downright, nasty.
In short, it was bad.
Very bad. In fact, the only guest who did imbibe was a woman who had no sense of smell or taste. “It tastes fine,” she said. “Like hot water!”
And now I cannot serve tea without guests, so accustomed to my reputation, without them asking for the ingredients. My reputation has been tarnished due to your truly horrible product. What is a word that means greater than sad? Please supply the adjective of your choice here.
I would imagine that such a name as Bigelow has provided tables the broadest array of tea flavors, but now I will question the ingredients before I place Bigelow again in my grocery basket. Who would place fish oil in tea? Don’t you have tasters to taste the product? Do they have noses? Taste buds? Sense?
I could have stolen water from my fish tank, after asking the pardon of Sushi, the name of my purple beta fish, and served that, and I am sure week-old fish water would have been better than Pomegranate Blueberry Herb Plus Omega 3.
Since I cannot take the product back to the market, I am requesting a coupon to purchase a non-Omega 3 tea from Bigelow. Perhaps other blends from your company may come in handy in an emergency. Do the right thing.
Please respect the tea leaf.
Thank you for your time.
Best regards, W. B.
Dear Bigelow Tea Company,
I would like to thank you, heartfully, for the coupons included in your latest correspondence as a response to my complaint from a fortnight ago. Usually, such letters as mine, as I frequently compose to register complaints, I would imagine, find their death in the wastebasket or the shredder, but it is with optimism for capitalism and for the future of tea drinkers everywhere than you have promptly, and more than generously, compensated me with several coupons for Bigelow Tea.
It is with much gratitude. It’s a testament to perhaps new management after the old one was sacked after the travesty of the “fish oil” additive, that times, indeed can change, and wrongs can be righted. Thank you, again, for respecting the leaf. When the time comes to “try” Bigelow again, I will write a review and send my thoughts and corrections to your company.
Yours affectionately,
W.T. Bowne
Thank you for reading! You can follow me on Medium at Walter Bowne.
Cheers! Happy tea drinking!