Still, I’ve never, ever had a problem with Nordstrom. And when I’ve come close to a potential problem, I’ve just needed to notify them and it has been fixed. My cousin once bought something there and then accidentally stained it - she loved the item, so she took it to the store with her so that she could buy an exact match color, brand, style, etc. A sales clerk (they are commission sales there) noticed her and asked, my cousin explained how she had stained the item, etc. The clerk exchanged the item straight across. Of course, this made my cousin a customer for life (& she shared the story, which brought in other customers, so the clerk more than made up the cost of the item in the first place.)
They’ve ordered and searched and hunted things down for me. I’ve had non-receipt returns and egregious receipt returns (things I’m almost ashamed of). The merchandise quality is usually very good & they’ve fixed it everytime it wasn’t. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve their reputation.
I would say that, as a general rule for nowadays, the bigger the chain, the cruddier the service, prices, and merchandise as a whole.
Best Buy, Home Depot, Blockbuster, and many others are all excellent examples of this.
Fortunately, other than groceries and the bare essentials, I do virtually all of my shopping online. I did get my Playstation 2 after finding out that it’s one of the rare cases where prices good enough to make up for shipping are hard to comeby. I went to Target, which is usually a pretty reasonable chain…
…only to spend nearly an hour for the purchase! I accepted the 10% discount for signing up for a Target card, but the credit line they offered me was only $200. Whatever, I thought. I asked to put the rest on a debit card. This was fine until I had already signed up for the card and tried to do it. I ended up having to make a run to an ATM. Apparently, using more than one card is verboten, and even though this was their mistake, they would not allow me the discount unless I used the card for the purchase, so I couldn’t even use the card instead. Also, they had already torn up the $5 gift cards I had (free gifts from online surfing) and said those couldn’t be refunded if I wanted to use the debit card. The clerk was nice, but the manager was rude and unrepentant for giving me the run-around.
Urgh. Target, you were the last resort for my chain shopping needs.
Blockbuster usually has good service and all, but my local one back home had aweful selection. I, like fluiddruid, am a gaming fan. This Blockbuster almost never has the newest, and therefore most desirable, games until about a month after they come out. I’m one who likes to rent before I buy, so this is often a pain.
Also, I occasionally want to see some foreign films. The wonderful No Mans Land took about two months to reach the store! They still don’t have Kandahar. Grrr.
Home Despot, on the other hand, I seem to have good experiences with. I’m hardly a carpenter, so I cannot comment on the state of the lumber, but I did have a summer job of painting houses. The guy in the paint section was very courteous, and knew where everything was. I never had problems exchanging, or anything, and the lines were short. Of course, I always knew what I wanted (Behr Premium Plus Ultra Pure White Interior Satin Enamel), so the help that I did need was minimal.
Installing a new faucet was a snap with them, too.
And I agree about the dilution of good employees as the number of stores rise. But, in this economy, where jobs are premium, I’m willing to let it slide for a while.
As a side note, the movie No Mans Land is an outstanding film. It tells the story of a Serb and a Croat encountering the other in no mans land in the war. Through some unfortunate circumstances, they are forced to stay there, neither of them willing to kill the other. Ask anyone who’s seen it. It’s bloody good. Drop everything and go rent it right now. Do it! NOW!
Best Buy salespeople used to work on commission. They’d pounce on you when you walked into the store. They discovered people weren’t returning because everyone felt like they’d been oversold. They had the reputation of being the car salesman of the electronics industry.
They changed their model more than a decade ago. No more commissions, bigger stores, cheaper prices. And its worked. Their stock has outperformed (except recently, when no one stock is outperforming), they’ve expanded like crazy and have put much of their competition out of business. If you want help, go to a store where they pay commissions and have professional staff (instead of high school and college students they pay $7 a hour to). If you want a cheap DVD player, or want to pay $10 less for the expensive DVD player, go to BestBuy and deal with the hassle. Remember who BestBuy competes with in Home Electronics - it isn’t the high end - they are competing with Target and Wal-Mart.
Same thing with Home Depot. If I want advice on what kind of paint to buy, I go to the paint store. If I need to know how to fix my toilet, I go to the little hardware store down the street with the old guys in it who have a wealth of hardware knowledge. If I want to discuss intellegently what perennial will do well in shade in clay soil, I visit the local nursery. If I want a cheap paintbrush or a flat of petunias and am willing to deal with a Disney World sized parking lot and a checkout lane eight people deep - Home Depot.
(And I love Nordstroms. Shopping with sales help there is like shopping with your mother - “Can I get you a different size?. Oh, you know, I think this would really look good on you.” But, their is a price associated with it - nothing at Nordstroms is cheap. Your boots however, are licked clean by they time you leave.)
I love my local Home Depot. All things considered, I’ve been extremely impressed with the depth and breath of the knowledge of their staff. Occasionally I’ll get someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but that’s the exception.
With respect to their lumber selection, HD isn’t the very best place in town to buy lumber, nor is it the very best place in town to buy plumbing supplies or electrical supplies. There are specialty stores for that. HD is a wonderful all-purpose home improvement center, and that is what it is intended to be.
I am plenty tired of Circuit City, mostly because of the receipts, and the checking of them, They’ll look in the Circuit City bag, But not in a purse or a backpack, gooood call motherfuckers! I have no intention of wasting time online filling out a bloody survey, just for a ten dollar cd!!
And I have not bought a thing at Penney’s for about five years, because I could not find anyone to sell me a backpack, which i bought at Eddie Bauer’s.
You know what else? I went to Ulta because i had a gift certificate and, while the clerk was trying to sell me on one of their club cards, and her spiel. She said something so dumb after she finished ringing my crap, and it goes like this: I can’t scan this stuff if you do not have a club card.
I’m standing there with this look, like i’d appreciate being swallowed up by the floor now, and with certificate in hand, she takes it, after about a minute of this shit.
I wont say the name but it rhymes with fall apart . They were just rude, impatient,condescending enough to get away with it.Ya know what i mean? I swear some of these people have it down to a fine art.Is it just me?
This is exactly what I do. Causes some problems with my wife who wants me to go to these places, find what I need to go then go to a cheaper place like HD to buy. I object strongly and feel I should buy at the place that gives me advice.
Are we limited to brick-n-mortar stores? Because I’d like to put in a vote for Amazon.
I’m constantly told how great they are and they bug the crap out of me. First, lately they’ve been flat-out lying about the availability of products. I ordered a CD that supposedly shipped in 2-3 days. After a week without an email confirming the shipping, I investigated. Oh, it turns out they don’t have that CD and, furthermore, don’t intend to get anymore.
I posted a review of the CD warning potential purchasrers that Amazon didn’t have it and wasn’t planning on getting it (it still said it shipped in 2-3 days) and the review was scrubbed by Amazon. It’s currently listed as shipping within 24 hours, but since I already bought it elsewhere, I have no idea if that’s true now or not.
I’ve had other incidents of this - things that are supposedly in stock and yet aren’t, making Amazon no different from any other shady online store, and yet they have this great repuation.
Their front page sucks rocks - it’s the equivalent of walking into a store and immediately having fifty salespeople run up to you and cram sales flyers in your face. I find it very pushy and annoying.
It also amazes me how much overhead they’ve decided to create for themselves. Why is there a “Page I Made” composed of stuff I’ve browsed recently. Who gives a crap? The listmanias, the “So you want tos” - I’m amazed people are so detatched from the world that they’ve fallen for this fauz “amazon community”. Someone’s getting paid to maintain that crap, and you know we’re footing the bill in the end. My local bookstore doesn’t have a bulletin board somewhere where they list all the books I’ve browsed at - why should Amazon?
Amazon used to be better. They sold books, plain and simple. They’ve decided to saddle themselves with all kinds of foolishness on top of that. I purchase very little from them, and use my wish list there mostly as a reminder of things I want to pick up at my local bookstore or the library.
They’re cited as a web business done right, but I find them extremely crappy and bloated and just as unreliable as many of the fly-by-night sites I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with.
I have a Blockbuster story from this weekend. I went to rent Hard Day’s Night on DVD. It’s only been available a couple of weeks, so I go straight to the New Releases “H” section. No go. I try the “Bs” in case it’s under “Beatles”. Nothing. I look in the regular shelves under comedies (they don’t have a separate section for musicals). Nope. I ask at the counter, the guy tells me “It’s under Special Interest”. Okay, so I go to the Special Interest, in a dark corner where they keep documentaries and everything else they don’t know what else to do with. Apparently, someone is under the impression that it’s a documentary. I should have disabused them, but I didn’t bother. The icing on the cake is that on my way to the Special Interest section I spot “Yellow Submarine” in the action section, under “B”.
I pretty much only shop for clothes/shoes at Nordstrom. Their customer service is exceptional. <pet peeve>it’s Nordstrom, not Nordstroms</pet peeve>
A couple years ago I ordered a winter coat from their catalog and when I got it, I realized the lining wasn’t sewed in correctly. I called their customer service number to ask what I should do and the sales person gave me a Fed Ex number to return it and sent another coat overnight! A week later I received an apology and thank you letter from her. Where else would that EVER happen?
The store everyone loves that I hate is Ikea : poorly made, shoddy products, a vortex-like layout, hideous service and a craptacular experience all around. You can’t get out of that hell hole in less than an hour and the stuff you buy always looks like shit.
I will agree WHOLEHEARTEDLY about Home Depot.
I am in the process of “doing up” my new home and every single person I dealt with there didn’t have a clue.
Paint? Should be simple, right? Oh no. THREE people working on one order (7 gallons: 2 flat, 2 eggshell, 1 flat, 1 kids, 1 semi gloss). They could not get it right to save their lives. No, I do NOT want 2 flat Coral, it’s 1 semi-gloss–See, ya putz, I even wrote it ALL out for you! After 1/2 hour I left. Went to Menard’s, saved some green and was attended to by a great kid with a clue.
When I asked him about paint removal (strip and varnish a dresser with at least 4 coats of nasty paint) he called someone over to help me, stating he doesn’t know as much about it as they other guy.
Honesty. Whoda thunk.
My disgruntled over rated store today, however, is Linen n Things.
Clearance does NOT mean marking down a comforter from $300.00 to $275.00. Whoopdee fucking doo. Try to find a person there to assist you! It’s like looking for a Girl Scout at a Christina Aguillera concert. Ain’t happening. And when I leave the store, please do not have some moron ask how my shopping was. Is there a bag in my hand indicating any purchase was made? Uh, NOPE. So why ask how my SHOPPING was when I didn’t DO any. I just snarked at your prices ($25.00 for a smallish bag of plastic fruit. $25.00!), gagged at what you consider stylish, and left.
People keep going there even though it’s now owned by Krogers–the chain from Hell.
Wise up, Omaha! The Baker family doesn’t own the place any more. The prices are no longer competive, for the most part. The selection sucks. Their labor practices have run off all the good, helpful employees who knew you since the days when you both had hair.
I only go there to cherry-pick the occasional loss leader. 10 years ago, before Fleming’s bought them, mismanged them, and fire-saled them to Kroger, I rarely shopped anywhere but Baker’s.
I’m curious about this. When you say “sell”, do you mean no one was there to help you find and select from the stock of backpacks, or there was no one at a register to check you out? I guess it’s just my anti-socialness, but I will never hold it against a store if no one offers to help me; in fact I like being left alone to find things on my own. Having trouble finding a staffed register sucks though.
"I would say that, as a general rule for nowadays, the bigger the chain, the cruddier the service, prices, and merchandise as a whole. "
Indeed. This is especially true with Wal Mart. I’m almost never comfortable in that store. It seems to me that a lot of workers there are disgruntled (especially at Customer Service) and it shows.
K-mart I’ve never had a problem with though. Same with Blockbuster(though I haven’t been to one in AGES).
I would have to agree about Amazon.com. I ordered a hard to find DVD that it said it could ship in 24hrs… They sent me an email that it had been shipped, and then four weeks later they sent me an email that there had been warehouse problems and they haven’t had inventory on it in a long time.
I don’t mind that their inventory was off. I cannot understand why it took an entire month to tell me about it, or why they had told me it had shipped.
