My wife had purchased onl;ine for me one of those new Simonize Cordless Buffer/polisher dealies they are advertising. The unit, while being a good wax applicator, is a hopelessly inadequate buffer and for that reason, I decided to return it. In the television commercials, we are witness to Joe Neighbor efforlessly buffing the hell outta his car while his hapless neighbor struggles to complete the same job by hand.
So you can imagine how I might have gotten the impression that this tool would buff my car to a mirror-like shine.
We arrrive at a local Canadian Tire store and proceed to customer service to process our return as instructed on the receipt that came with it. The receipt said that returns would be processed on any new items that are unopened and unused. However, you can’t know this unit won’t buff until you actually try to use it, so I felt that the ball was in my court.
I approached the counter, and put the fully repackaged box down. I said to the woman “I’m returning this because it doesn’t perform as indicated on television”
She takes the receipt, and mentions to me that the item cannot be returned normally because it was used first. I told her that I had to use it once in order to determine that it doesn’t work well. At this, she suddenly launched into her Analogy Of The Day ™ which was basically that if I had purchased a vacuum, and it wasn’t powerful enough, I couln’t return that so why should I be able to return this.
If in a commercial the vacuum was depicted as picking up a bowling ball, but was actually only capable of picking up a tennis ball, you should be entitled to a return, even if you had to use it to find out. The irony of comparing a vacuum to this product which also sucked didn’t occur to her. When I tried to explain why her analogy was false, she told me she had to make a call to see if she could be permitted to process the return.
She made the call, and got transferred to a supervisor. While on hold, she decided to bring up the vacuum comparison again. Again, I got cut off before I could point out the logical fallacy by the supervisor coming on the line.
Eventually, she passed the call off to someone else who simply marked the item as defective and refunded the money in full.
I have to say, Canadian Tire is the one store that I really miss from home. Everything else I could possibly want is here, but not good ol’ Crappy Tire.
I have never, ever had any problem returning or exchanging at the store. Perhaps you just got an idiot.
And her vacuum analogy doesn’t work either. I bought a vacuum at Target and it had someone else’s Christmas tree needles in it. (It was also noisy and weak, once I got it cleaned up.) Returned it, no questions asked, got a full refund. So where in Canada can’t you return a vacuum?
Yeah, Crappy Tire has it’s share of dingbat staff, just like most chains. Perhaps your CSR is just passing through on her way to an illustrious career in public service.
Ya gotta love Canadian Tire Money though, eh? My husband has it stuffed into every drawer in the place.
I don’t know why he bothers really. Even if he amasses a wad of Brobdignagian proportions, seems it’s only ever worth about a buck and half.
I’m not really knocking the place, though. It’s handy.
The one time I had to go through a similar situation with Canadian Tire, it turned out very well.
I tried to return an alternator I bought for my Firebird (the regulator died on the new, Canadian Tire alternator soon after I installed it, and moved to the other side of Canada), with receipt in hand.
First problem was that the store I bought the alternator from was eleventy-billion kms away, and the second problem was that the part number on the reciept didn’t match the part number on the alternator!! It looked like I was trying to pull off some sort of Canadian-Tire-parts-returning scam, by buying cheap items, and using the receipts to return expensive items I had lying around.
After getting denied by the parts counter guy a couple separate times, he directed me to a CSR in a head office who I met with, and promptly/politely offered me a new alternator. Made me feel all warm and fuzzy to be treated well by such a famous institution in our country.
