Please remember I am not in the US, I have never worked in the US, nor in a big box store.
Where I worked, going from a 33% sale to a 50% sale meant less profit for the store.
But this is beside the point. OP Was happy with a 33% sale, bought the items, but later when heard he could get them cheaper wanted to return them, for no other reason than “now they’re cheaper”
Where I come from, this is not right. Naturally people want to save money, and I hold no animosity at all towards OP for that.
Just that for me, I wouldn’t do the return on the basis of “now they’re cheaper than they were last week”.
If they’re the last title in the store, you can take you chances…
Profit is the goal. It isn’t just a sale. If they felt a hold for 24 hours or some other restriction helped prevent the “return and buy it again for less” thing then that speaks to bottem line. I’ve never heard of a policy like that though. Probably because any benifit would be far outweighed by customer ire and lost sales. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking :o
It’s hard to enforce those exceptions when the return policy prints on the reciept and the exception doesn’t. Customers rarely read signs completely and I wouldn’t be surprised at all for a customer to come back for a refund because they sincerely didn’t know.
I do find it hard to believe that nobody mentioned the no refund thing when the refund was asked for but employees vary. Still, once the refund is allowed, to refuse the resale was really stupid and lousy customer service.
Not bloody likely. The 50% off sale has to run before the 14 day return policy expires. The customer has to know about the sale. It will happen, but not enough to become a big loophole.
I do think companies do have the “does not apply to previous purchases” disclaimer on sales flyers , or they used to. The problem is it’s hard to enforce when you have conflicting return policies. That’s why most major retailers have some sort of price gaurentee and will make the adjustment.
I decided to try something different. Rather than take the DVD’s back to the original store I had bought them from, I went to a different Barnes & Noble.
I explained what I wanted to the clerk in that video department - that I wanted to return the DVD’s I had bought during the buy 2 get 1 free sale and buy them back under the current half off sale - and he said “Sure no problem.” But then he hesitated and added “Well I better ask my manager but I don’t think she’ll have a problem with that.”
So I went and got my DVD’s and he called the manager over. She did not have any problem with it. All of my DVD’s were returned and I then bought them back at the lower price. I even bought an extra one because I was happy. And a couple of CD’s.
The trick of buying the DVDs at 33% off and then returning them and rebuying when the 50% off sale begins is kind of pointless at Barnes and Noble because
A. The same DVDs are available during both sales for the entire duration of the sales, so if they don’t have what you are looking for, you have plenty of time to order what you want. It only takes 3-5 days for special order DVDs to make it to the store, many times it’s closer to 1-2 days.
B. You are allowed to reserve titles simply by calling and asking for them to be held in your name, so why go to the hassle of actually buying them and trying to return them? You can make reservations via the website as well.
Glad to hear everything worked out for you, Little Nemo! And I’m sorry about what happened the first time you tried.
A blow for the little guy, the consumer, the ordinary nerd with common sense, armed only with a modicum of disposable income and a grasp of basic logic.
And if your victory annoys any n00bs here, or uptight middle managers at a bookstore, all the better.
hahaha, speaking as somebody with years of experience dealing with both middle managers and customers, it’s customers who are by far the more uptight ones.
A win-win for both sides IMO, since Little Nemo not only got his original DVD’s for half-price, BN also sold a couple of extra items that Nemo might not have purchased originally.