She hopes an appeal through the media will help return a man's floor mats

If you’re an older man, a veteran, who had your red Chrysler minivan washed last month at the Cumberland Road Detail Hand Car Wash, manager Charlotte Watts wants to tell you she has your floor mats.

She has something else, too: A sincere apology.

Watts this week published a “jeer” in “Cheers & Jeers'' in The Fayetteville Observer’s Opinion section. The person she jeered was herself.

“He had his vehicle cleaned and returned 15 minutes later,” she wrote. “He told me that his mats were missing on one side .... I told him that I had no idea where his mats were because there were no mats at the shop. I was unprofessional and asked him to leave.

“Two weeks later someone in another vehicle returned his mats. I do not have his name but I want to somehow say I am sorry and that I have learned my lesson on the old saying that ‘The customer is always right.’”

Watts on Wednesday said she is putting the appeal in the news media because she wants to do all she can to make the situation right.

“It’s the right thing to do,” she says. Because of “the way I treated the man.”

Watts helps run the car wash, located near Hope Mills Road, for her son, Angelo. She said the man with the red minivan came in on a slow weekday afternoon, maybe a Wednesday. There was one vehicle behind the van, belonging to one of the car wash’s regular customers, another veteran who is a double-amputee.

Watts, who is also a veteran, was helping clean the minivan and replaced two mats herself. She instructed one of the other employees to retrieve the other two mats from a table where they were drying.

The customer praised the shop’s work and said he planned to bring another vehicle in to be washed. Fifteen minutes later, he was back.

He said the car wash had not put in two floor mats on the driver’s side. The man knew his mats because of distinctive blue flower-like designs attached to them.

Watts, however, was convinced the customer was wrong about the mats being left.

“I have been here three years and never treated anybody like that, because of the fact that I had personally put the mats back in the car,” she says. “So I knew they were in there. What I failed to realize is the person who vacuumed the other side — they didn’t put the mats back in.

“So I was rude. Just rude to the man.”

She said the irony is that in the past, she had given customers compensation for things they said were missing, no questions asked — even if sometimes she later suspected they were getting over on her.

Two weeks later, the regular customer whose vehicle had been behind the van and his wife came to the shop — with two mats the wife said were not her husband’s. Watts immediately saw the blue designs.

“I knew right then,” Watts says. “I realized right there I didn’t have his phone number, he’s never going to come back. I gotta find some way to apologize to this man because I was wrong.

“I was just wrong.”

She also said it wasn’t good business.

She says. “He was trying to tell me the truth. I wanted to be right. If anything I just want other businesses to take my lesson: Listen to people.”

Columnist Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.