If it is post office, in general you have to take it in, UPS will come to the house and pick it up if it has the return label on it.
I’m pretty sure most people’s reasoning behind this is that the company will try to screw them so it’s okay for them to try to screw the company.
I’m not saying what they are doing is right, but I can at least understand why they do it. Most companies, if evaluated as individuals, would be sociopaths. They only care if it hurts them. You can’t be surprised when the people dealing with them take on the same characteristics.
Oh sorry, I don’t think I explained that!
If you returned something because you didn’t like it you have to pay for shipping. If you were returning something because of a company mistake or for being defective, the company picked up the cost. People were encouraged to mail them in and the company would reimburse them for shipping. The most expensive option for the company was to send out UPS to pick up the package at no cost to the customer, but for most people that is more convenient because they don’t have to take the package anywhere.
That’s what she insisted on every time because her time was too valuable for the company’s mistake.
When I worked for Home Depot we got:
The people who bought real Christmas trees and then returned them after New Year’s because the tree had died.
People who tried the thing with the paint. We did accept returns but we added random colors to every can so no 2 cans had the same color when they tried to buy it back.
People who ordered a flooring installation and when their very expensive special order flooring was delivered, they’d harass the poor installation guys about it being the wrong floor. Eventually they’d talk to me or my boss and they’d usually insist they’d be willing to take it for a heavy discount.
The customers who would bring in a huge list of window treatments for me to cut. When they’d leave, I’d keep the list because they so frequently accused me of cutting them wrong (when compared to the list, I was right. Their measurements were wrong).
Customer A would buy something like a snowblower. They would pay for it and leave, planning to pick it up later. We’d store the snowblower later. “Customer” B would come in, walk to the shipping area, sneak in, and walk out with the snowblower. They’d walk right past the completely oblivious front end people. Customer A comes back and is royally pissed that their snowblower is gone.
Then there are the foodservice customers who complain that I screwed up their order…after they’ve eaten the whole thing.
That was a classic example of HD’s corporate stupidity. Allowing Christmas trees to be returned was encouraged as a company policy. They argued it let people know we were serious about our plant guarantees. If it dies within a year you get your money back. It sure did work great for publicity, not in the good way they were looking for, instead every low life on the planet got the idea they could rob home depot through returns and have continued to do so for years.
At the same time HD was encouraging stores to take back Christmas trees were the same years HD allowed returns on plants without the receipt for store credit. So we had every moron grabbing random plant life and attempting to return it. One of my favorite stories(unfortunately not my own) from that era was the story of someone attempting to return poison Ivy. ‘No sir I assure you Home Depot has never sold poison ivy and we will not refund you for it under any circumstances but good luck with that rash’
[QUOTE=cosmosdan;12756704but I’ll wager they keep an eye out for chronic returners.[/QUOTE]
Many years ago, I worked for a family-owned potato chip company. Now potato chips bagging machines move quickly, and have a fair amount of vibration. So every so often a nut or washer works loose, and ends up inside the bag with the chips. So we would occasionally get a call from a customer about this. They went right to the manager of our quality control lab, who responded as follows:
[ol]
[li]Apologize to the customer.[/li][li]Reassured them that the chips were safe to eat, as these were stainless steel nuts/washers/etc., and they were lubricated with food grade oil. (Usually, they had already eaten the chips – these heavy items tended to fall to the bottom of the bag.)[/li][li]Ask them to mail the item to us (which we would reimburse), and gave them the factory address.[/li][li]Made a record of this, with the customers’ name, address, & phone.[/li][li]When that item arrived, we mailed out a letter to them, repeating all this, thanking them for returning the item, and included coupons for free chips of at least twice as much as their original bag, plus the mailing costs.[/li][/ol]
Most customers were quite satisfied by this, and were happy with the response.
But there were always some who saw this as a chance to get free potato chips. They would call repeatedly to complain of this, and would send in dirty bolts off a car engine or something. So that was one of the purposes of keeping the record of complaints – about the 3rd time someone called wanting free coupons, they would not get them. Some ‘customers’ were just out to scam you. They would usually yell & scream that they would never buy our product again. Her answer: “Well, that’s probably for the best, sir, since you seem to have such a tendency to find nuts & bolts in our product.”
DOWNRIGHT STEALING
This happened to me once at the grocery store.
The grocery store has this “customer friendly” system. You can pick up a scanning price gun at the front door of the store. The general idea is that it is a time saver for customers and clerks. As you shop, you scan each item before you put it in your eco-friendly bag as you walk around the store. It keeps a running tab of all the items you select. Then when you get to the checkout line, all you need to do is hand the gun to the clerk and they download the list into the register and you pay the register person. No need to unpack your bags and the clerk doesn’t have to waste their time scanning each item or bagging it up, because you see, you’ve already done all that.
Well, one day the lady in front of me has about five of those eco-friendly bags in her cart that are absolutely stuffed, including some probably-not-cheap packages of fresh deli meat. She hands the clerk the gun and the total comes somewhere near $20.00. She pays the clerk and she leaves with all her bags. I asked the clerk if he really thought that her total was right and he agrees that she probably was stealing lots of food and calls the manager at the service desk. The lady has to pass by the service desk to get to the exit. She walks right by the manager as the clerk is explaining the situation and the manager agrees that she has a large number of bags for $20 bucks worth of stuff. But nobody did anything. The manager told the clerk that if he can’t prove she is shoplifting then they can’t accuse her of anything. The lady left the store. The clerk just shrugs it off and says “Hell, it ain’t my store she’s robbing” and starts to ring me up.
Now, I’m not going to start stealing groceries from this store, but to me this seems like a system designed for the sneaky to exploit very easily.
[quote=“t-bonham@scc.net, post:66, topic:548829”]
I once got a box of twinings tea that the wrapper malfunctioned, and about a third of the paper wrappers were neatly sealed without tea bags within. I mailed some of them back to twinings with a pleasant letter asking them to check their packaging line … they sent me back a coupon for that wooden case that came with 1 5 pack of every flavor they had =)
I was perfectly happy just pointing out the problem, I wasnt expecting a response quite like that one =) I was figuring maybe a coupon for a replacement box.
I worked for a time at Home Depot-and I can vouch for the fact that they took everything back (that policy has since changed). People would dring in some rusty, broken shovel that their grandfather bought in 1920-and the returns clerk would give them a new shovel! One day a guy with real brass balls tried to return 24 broken windows-the contractor had left them at a building site, and kids had smashed them all with rocks 9I don’t know how that ended).
Near the end of my 12 year stint with BestBuy as a manager I got pretty good with telling customers to take a hike if I didn’t like what they were pulling.
Our store did good numbers and I was in good with the regional staff so I knew how far I could push it with some of these clowns.
I had a lot of fun entertaining the underpaid customer service staff who had just take a verbal beating by some loudmouth customer.
I remember getting a call from the front desk after we closed about a lady who they had told “no” to over and over but she refused to leave until we granted her wishes. Since we couldn’t physically remove anyone from the store you’d have to get the cops involved which was a hassle.
So I went out and let her curse me up and down non-stop. I didn’t even try to talk with her, I just let her rant while I said “mm-hm, yep, i see”. I noticed if I walked a few feet away from her she unconciously followed me everywhere.
So I slowly walked to the front door and outside. She ranted the whole time and didn’t even notice we had moved outside. I finally interupted her and said “I’m really sorry but we just can’t help you out today” took one step backwards into the store closed the doors, clicked the lock, and turned my back on her.
I didn’t turn around but by the looks on the employees faces and them saying “ho boy is she mad” and laughing I could tell she was none to pleased.
Our local supermarket in the UK has the same system. Scan your items, pack into bags as you go, and just hand the scanner to the desk at the end of your shop and pay the total.
Every so often - at random - you will take the scanner to be downloaded and the system will request a re-scan by the checkout staff. They’ll then scan each item again to check the totals match.
I’ve only be rescanned twice in 3 years, so it’s reasonably low risk, but enough to put most people off pilfering.
The staff always ask “did everything scan OK?” - I guess this is to give you one last chance to say “um… actually this £50 bottle of single malt scotch doesn’t seem to have made it on”, at which point they will usually scan it and say no more about it.
I also wonder whether the system is programmed to recognise pattens of shopping to highlight high-risk targets… people tend to steal meat, booze and razor blades, so maybe these get flagged up.
I can see why supermarkets are so keen for RFID chips - must reduce the risk of thievery significantly.
I absolutely can’t believe this place is still in business when they seem to be actually encouraging customers to steal. Man, oh, man. I wonder whose bright idea this was.
A friend of mine has his own little business fixing up dings on windshields. Besides individuals, he also has contracts with several rental car agencies, so he does OK. I heard him talking on the phone once with a customer who was being a jackass from the get-go. After listening for a while, my friend said, “You know what? I don’t think I want your business,” and hung up.
It was almost enough to make me go into business myself.
That is a beautiful story.
The clerk and the manager are bad employees and idiots. It does sound like an incredibly bad system though.
Um no. A company isn’t trying to screw you by offering something for sale.
I once had a customer get upset when I asked him for a deposit on a special order.
“I’m an attorney and it’s against the law to make me pay a deposit on a special order.”
“Is it against the law if we just don’t order it for you?”
“Well I’ll pay it but I don’t like it.”
Also keeps any fraud charges from being federal mail fraud. This woman seems to have been smarter than the average bear. If you do choose to engage in fraud, don’t use the USPS.
My sister-in-law had a customer along the lines of the Victoria’s one, but nowhere near that bad or malicious about it. SIL used to be the head manager for a location of a chain clothing store aimed at older middle-aged women. They had one customer who the clerks would cater to because she bought a lot of stuff. (I forget if commissions were formally implemented, or if there were smaller bonuses/incentives for sales made.) She’d usually arrive less than a half hour before clothing and would take for-freaking-ever to pick out clothes, but she’d walk out of there with hundreds of dollars or more in clothing. The clothes weren’t horribly expensive so this was a fair number of items typically.
She’d also buy through the website. How did my SIL know this? Because returns from mail order could be done through a retail store. And every month or so, this “good” customer would come in with a whole mess of their clothing, almost always with tags still on - and often the website items would be still in sealed plastic bags straight from the warehouse, so it’s not like she could have even worn those. Then she’d spend an hour or more returning that stuff, including double-checking the items, the money she was getting back, etc. That would take a clerk and cash register out of commission during that time, not to mention sometimes requiring a manager to check out the situation. Also, all of the returns (even though some were website-ordered) still counted against the store’s “take” for the week and made them look bad.
I knew about this because at one point I was in the car with my SIL, and she got a call from work. It was closing time and the lady was back with a boatload of clothes. Thousands of dollars worth, IIRC. After the call, my SIL was verbally composing a rough draft of the “we’re so sorry we’re unable to meet your needs for apparel (so never come back again)” letter she would be sending to the soon-to-be-former customer.
I don’t know what the deal was with this woman. I’d suggest she was trying to eBay sales items for higher prices and returning what didn’t sell, but I don’t recall SIL saying she’d buy any clothing size. More likely she was a shopping addict who was getting her fix by buying stuff, then returning some of it to try to stay within a budget.
Most of the ‘5% of customers who cause 80% of problems’ are just bullies and despite their rants won’t do anything else, but at one warehouse I worked at a customer who was upset at being charged for shipping (they were in effect trying to rent the item without paying) decided to take action. He returned the product in a box filled with dried cow dung. I’m sure he thought he was being oh-so clever.
When our returns person opened the box and saw brown & smelly they rightly called a Biohazard alert. We had to evacuate and the local fire company had to go in, etc. etc.
The guy ended up being billed by the township for the time & resources used. The company was contemplating a loss-of-time lawsuit against the guy but it was a slow period and we caught up with orders in time.
This reminds me - once I was at a campground/cabin rental place where you had to check in and get assigned your spot at this central convenience store/bunkhouse building. This was a hike in kind of place - you parked in a gravel lot, walked up to the bunkhouse, then hiked on to your spot. Anyways, while we were waiting to check in, these two guys pulled up to the one handicapped parking spot in front of the building (presumably for the bunkhouse & nearby cabins), and of course didn’t have the plates. An older guy who was clearing up garbage around the building came over and told the driver that he shouldn’t do that - to which the guy let go with a huge diatribe about how he couldn’t stop him and what was he going to do about it? and also claimed that there was no way an actual handicapped person would show up because they don’t camp, etc. Eventually he said “you know, I’m sure your boss would be interested to know how rude his janitorial staff are to paying customers - I’m going to have a word with him about you”.
With that he stormed into the check-in office. And low and behold the old ‘janitor’ guy comes in the back door into the office a minute later. He looks right at this guy and says “Yeah - I am the manager. And the owner. Now get the hell off my property!”
The look on this guys face was priceless. Never have I seen customer asshole behaviour backfire so spectacularly. He tried to argue his way into staying there but the owner was having none of it. The guys eventually slunk out after they threatened to report the campsite to Parks Canada and the owner pointed out that this was private property thus he could choose not to serve anyone he didn’t want there.
All this was for a parking spot maybe 200 meters closer than ours, in the gravel lot. And this was on a long weekend in August in a popular camping area - I’m pretty sure they didn’t find anywhere else to sleep that night.