I know its a zombie, but it makes me want to share my Walmart tale related to this.
A few years back I was buying three hammocks, at around $90 each. The first box I put on the belt had a shipping label on it, and the woman scanned that. I started to say something when, to my surprise, it registered as some other item for $13. Being honest, I said that she seemed to have scanned the wrong barcode, and that it should be a lot more. She had already hit the “3x” button so now I was getting ~$270 worth of merchandise for ~$40. She just looked at me and shrugged, and asked me for the $40.
mmm… OK.
Just want to add: They pay their employees very well, too, which means someone needs to give a shit about customer service over there, because there are always employees of other stores willing to get a job at Aldi’s.
Seriously, if you want to make a huge impact on poverty, shop at a business that cares about its employees.
Called Walmart yesterday and got a refund on those dog buscuits but something told me to check on the cat food, which is due to be here tomorrow. Looks like those won’t be right, either.
Two 13 pound bags should not fit into two 12 pound boxes!
(yes, this is from November, but it struck a nerve)
I posted a while back about B&N because of their annoying desire to use the B&N name for their online and brick-and-mortar businesses, but treat them as totally different when it comes to price. Walmart does the same thing (or at least they did the same thing a few years ago).
It goes like this:
You find a Really Neat Book on the shelf and see that it costs $39.95, and grumble at how outrageous that price is, so you scan it in your handy smartphone app and see “Available from these online retailers from $21.95”
Number one on the list is B&N, with Really Neat Book available for $21.95
You go to the nice lady at the customer service desk and show her your phone, and she scoffs and says “But you don’t understand, they are an online business without the overhead we have of maintaining a store and blah…blah…blah”
You then say “But this is your own store: it’s B&N. Can’t you match the price?”
She sighs and tries to explain to you how silly you are to expect the two businesses with the same name to be the same. “Sorry, we don’t match the online prices”
“Ok. Thanks. Bye.”
Really Neat Book arrives three days later in the mail from the third option: Amazon.
I wouldn’t mind if she were lecturing me about comparing B&N prices with Amazon prices, but we were discussing B&N only.
They want to use the value of their business name recognition built up over many years in order to attract customers, but once you are there they say “Nope, we aren’t the same”–they want to have their cake and eat it too.
I suppose I wouldn’t have minded had she said “The best I can do is $27.95”, which is still $7 more than the online price, but that would be reasonable (IMHO), depending on how much I wanted Really Cool Book. Keeping it at $40 and smiling while telling me why I am so dumb to expect it to be cheaper was insulting.
The Caribbean is a pretty large place, it includes places like parts of Mexico and Panama. In the Dominican Rep. there are no Walmarts, or Kmarts, but there are a couple local chains that sell the same type of cheap Chinese crap, with the same level of service. I avoid them too.
Living in an island is expensive. That’s the case everywhere.
You know, I don’t hate Wal-Mart. I go regularly actually, since there’s one very near my workplace, and I tend to go during my lunch hour.
That said, I’m typically going for short trips for what I think of as “fill-in” shopping, meaning stuff to fill in the gaps between more conventional grocery store runs (produce, meat, dairy) and warehouse store runs to Sam’s or Costco (detergents, bulk food, etc…)
So if my wife’s going to cook something for dinner, and we find out that we need green onions, I’ll get them during lunch from Wal-Mart, along with the light bulb to replace the one that just burned out, and another couple of 12-packs of soda while I’m there. There are a few particular branded items that are either only carried in large sizes at Wal-Mart, or that they have far and away the best price on- mostly in the category of things like shampoos and detergents. So I usually get those while already there.
In general, we don’t do our primary shopping there, and I don’t go after work or on the weekends.
The checkout line business is a pain in the ass, even during lunch.
And if my shopping list is primarily non-food items or items that I can get at either store, I tend to go to the nearby Target, even though it’s slightly more expensive- it’s well worth it to go to a quiet, clean, orderly store with short lines. I’m not going to deal with Wal-Mart to get a bottle of generic Claritin, some Hot-Wheels for my son, and a bottle of hot sauce.