I brought my set of four cooking knives (three sizes of chef's knife from Haenckels and a Chinese cleaver) for sharpening. I finally picked up my knives today, and the outcome was not the best -- the 8" chef's knife is not strictly convex (sorry, I'm a mathematician :) ) and all knives have some harsh edges at the base where the blade meets the tang. But they are old knives and the edge on the blades is decent enough. However, my real problem, and the reason for the low rating, is that I was blatantly misled by their staff about how long the job would take! And no apologies, just feeble excuses afterwards!
The story is: I emailed their staff to find out when I could expect my knives back, and I was told "15 minutes at the Norfinch location and 2-3 days at the Queen street location." I took them at their word, and brought my knives in. However, the sharpening job actually took 13 days. From start to finish -- 13 days. That's a long time to spend cooking with the back-up knives from Loblaws. I asked repeatedly about my knives and mentioned the emailed promise of a 2-3 day turnaround time, but I was basically told "stuff happens." The excuse provided was the Canada Day holiday --- but of course that only accounts for 2 days' worth of delay. When I persisted with my emails, I was met with silence. When I finally picked up my knives, I explained the situation again, and the promise of a rapid turnaround time, and I was told "there are never guarantees with sharpening."
I really got the impression that Nella didn't particularly care about my customer experience --- they were too busy sharpening the knives of the various professional chefs participating in Summerlicious (as they mentioned) to worry about whether my sharpening job took 5 days or 13 days. I will have to look for someone else to sharpen my knives in future.