Orphaned Coyote Pup

Sunday, November 30, 2008

Life, of course, is not always a bowl of cherries ...

Mixed in with the good, as always, are the bad shopping experiences: The electronics giant who fails to send you your promised rebate and then claims you did not provide all the paperwork. In fact, at one point you are told that no rebate was ever offered for the mp3 player you bought your wife for Mother's Day. B___ s___! You've already received the companion rebate offered by the store where the purchase was made, so you know your request was correctly packaged! You search for days and days, propelled mostly by irritation, but you can't locate the copy you made of the receipts you sent in.



Another shocker comes when a young sales clerk answers your query about the price on a jacket you found on a 40% off sales rack by taking the item from you and walking away without an answer. In fact, without even a word. When you ask him again for the price, he says the item is no longer for sale. Research, he adds, will have to be done by senior staff, and maybe the jacket will pop back up for sale later in the day, maybe tomorrow. It's a 40-mile-, almost-one-hour-long round trip from store to home and gas is running at just over $4 a gallon. You want the jacket now, not at some indefinite time in the future. Just tell me how much.





So what can you do? Among the many possibilities, the first effort ought to be to issue a strong protest. Do it verbally and instantly in the store. Keep your cool, watch the profanity, don't use threats or anything else that might get the cops called or lessen the effectiveness of your position, but let the sales staff know how you feel about what has happened. Do it in a voice loud enough for nearby shoppers to hear. Ask to talk to a manager. Get her or his name and telephone number to use when you get home. Let everyone within listening distance know that this experience has significantly diminished the company's usefullness in your view. Establish quickly and strongly that until the problem is resolved to your satisfaction you are no longer a customer of this business. Some follow-up tactics to use when you feel business has failed its part in a transaction will follow soon.

Have you had similar experiences? Please share them! Whether good or bad, if you remember them, they are worth mentioning. If we had businesses, we would want to know how our customers felt about dealing with us. Let them know.

1 comment:

  1. I think the sales clerk really liked that jacket and decided to keep it for himself. Wondering how much time you spend shopping....
    Back to weeeding, which I now understand is sometimes called gardening.

    ReplyDelete

In the belief that discussion helps make for a better conversation, please leave your comments below. (Please try to be civilized.)