South Dakota – Lost Luggage

This story is from one of my business trips. It was early on in my traveling career when I still checked luggage rather than carried it on. This trip to South Dakota changed my mind and I started carrying my bags on.

Anyway, another consultant (Laura) and I were in the Indianapolis area at a customer site and had to get to Vermillion, South Dakota for our next customer visit. Since there are only a few ways to get from Indianapolis to Vermillion, we scheduled a travel day between the two customer visits. 

The morning of that travel day, we wore our most comfy clothes – t-shirts, shorts, and even flip flops. Not exactly what you should wear to a customer site, but we were traveling this day so we wanted to be comfortable. 

Our schedule was to fly from Indianapolis to Chicago and then onto Sioux Falls. Our flight from Indianapolis was running late and we had a tight connection in Chicago. Fortunately, we made our flight from Chicago to Sioux Falls.

As we pulled away from the gate in Chicago, I saw my purple suitcase sitting next to the luggage cart. Sigh, shouldn’t that be on the plane? I tried getting the flight attendant’s attention but didn’t have any luck. I’d have to figure things out when I got to Sioux Falls.

When we arrived, we went to baggage claim and found that Laura’s bag also missed the flight. Fortunately, United had another flight scheduled for later that night, and the baggage claim staff assured our bags would be on that flight. The airline would bring them down to Vermillion to our hotel for us. We left the Sioux Falls airport and made our way down to our hotel in Vermillion, an hour away.

Of course, it’s never that easy. United canceled the later flight (and the last flight of the night). We found out too late to drive anywhere to buy clothes as every place was more than an hour away. There was a store next to the hotel that looked like they may have clothes, but they didn’t open until 9 am, the same time we were supposed to be at the customer site.

We sent a note to the customer explaining the situation and asked to start our visit at 9:30 am. At 9 am the next morning, we were standing at the doors of the Pamida, waiting for it to open. As I think about it today, we reminded me of the lady in the Mervyn’s commercial saying, “O-pen! O-pen! O-pen!” (If you’re not familiar with the Mervyn’s commercial, check out the last few seconds of this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebD2r-8vo8Y)

If you’ve never heard of Pamida, you’re not alone. I hadn’t either. It was a department store chain in the Midwest. To me, it seemed like a step down from a K-Mart. I wasn’t very excited about shopping there but we needed something other than shorts and flip-flops to wear to the customer site. 

It took a while but we did find something reasonable enough to wear to the customer site – black jeans, a nicer t-shirt, and black shoes. This day was the only day I ever wore those clothes. I think I donated them when I got home.

We got to the customer site by 9:30 am. As we got settled, I apologized for our clothing, indicating that we would usually never dress like this. After saying that, the only thing floating through my mind was, “Oh crap… they probably shop at the Pamida all the time, and I just insulted them!” 

We moved on and had a successful day with the customer. Laura left later the same day and caught up with her luggage at the airport. I got my luggage later that night in Vermillion and dressed like me the next day for the customer visit.

I learned a lot about business travel on this trip:

• Carry on your bags whenever possible.

• Don’t dress so sloppy that you can’t show up at the customer site.

• Watch what you say to the customer about their local shops.