The story of organic green gram

Stepped into a new neighbourhood shop recently. The name board "Eco-nut" was partly the reason.They had small lattering which said they sell organic food sourced from Kodaikanal.Aha, i told myself, some change from the routine purchases kumar picks up from Nilgiris.I went in and was immediately bowled over by the novelty of foodstuffs stacked up there.The lady who obviously is a owner helped matters along by enquiring if i was a first time customer and mentioning favourably about my saree and my taste!!
The fridge was stacked with all sorts of homemade bread with esoteric names(and shapes too)I picked a couple of them as i had decided to be less partial to rice and more partial to wheat products.Next a dull bottle 'plum jam' caught my attention. plop it went into my basket(it made me believe plum jam is all goodness and wellness of kodai hills brought to arid chennai and the sugar is of course the organic variety!)I picked up brown poha(non polished one) and mango jelly for aunty.I made a beeline for whole moong dal and i visualised soaking it, sprouting it and spreading health all around.
It is the beginning of the story. Soaked it, I did and next day, strained the water and transferred the grains to a caserrole for sprouting.So far so good. Evening i found them sprouted enough and took it for cooking. Made delicious dhal(so i thought). I have dinner early, so when i was particularly looking out for a special native taste, i thought i found it and before long bit into a hard grain. Thought it was an aberration, only to be rudely biting into a few more in my next helping. I brushed it aside as not worthy of my attention(as i was busy watching a weepy serial!).Kumar tasted it and very delicately mentioned not to cook organic moong for him any more; he is not particularly partial to them, he said, of late!I took it not so lightly and wanted to know why he does not care for health foods. To which he said, health is all quite okay except that they tax his teeth a bit too much for his liking.
I am not one to let go of any such incident lightly. Next time i soaked moong again i made sure i soaked it for 24 hours instead of 12 hours. While transferring it to the caserrole i noticed keenly;I found there were quite a good portion of the moong dhal which had refused to budge and stayed almost unsoaked. So these are the culprits i thought; It is a question of non grading of the moong by my Eco nut lady.
I made it a point to give them this feedback from an enlightened customer, to help them on their way.But this time i found her husband at the counter and when i mentioned this sad story, he flatly denied that there is any problem. We eat sprouted moong from the shop regularly, he said.When i persisted, he said, yes, in a cup of moong dhal there could be a few,'very few maam' he added to emphasise.I was shocked, does he tell me that while eating moong dhal, a few hard ones cracking the teeth is okay?
Here i am a customer, who takes the trouble to give feedback and here is this owner guy who is rubbishing it. I told myself, if this is his attitude, i dont expect to see the shop in this address much longer. It has also reduced my passion for organic food i can tell you.
I have had an earlier stint as a trainer and i took my assignemnt of sensitising the staff to customer feedback quite seriously.So much so it has become a part of me; you can take away a training assignment from me, but you cant take away what it did to me!So it was that the trainer in me came to the fore and it told me, there is this whole lot of populace waiting to be trained on how to handle customer feedback;" dont defend; listen and listen keenly and acknowledge that they have an issue; thank them for the time and effort ; and finally do something about the feedback to improve your business".
Tch, tch, wasted opportunity.