Customer Return Story – Bargain Bin
Bargain hunters are everywhere. If it’s not about internet discounts, free shipping, or coupons, they don’t want to hear about it. So, as you can imagine, we have more than a few regulars that come into our “Discount Warehouse”. This happens to be fresh in my mind because it happened last weekend! We sell a lot of items that have been previously returned to other stores. Sometimes they are missing hardware, sometimes the packaging is damaged, but typically the item is in great shape, so you can imagine my surprise to see a huge lot of wireless headphones come in. I quickly snatched up two pairs for myself and brought them into the back to away the end of shift. During lunch I was inspecting the headphones, looking for dents, scratches, or other minor defects, but they were in great shape. Well, I should say, the headphones were in great shape, the hard plastic packaging, not so much. I could tell that someone had taken to the first package pretty aggressively. It was all marked up with slices and punctures. The second package was even worse yet! There were brown bubbles on the packaging and it was warped on two ...
Customer Return Story – A time for Giving
This was one of the most disturbing displays of “adulting” I have ever seen. I was barely 16, working at a small nursery selling Christmas trees. It wasn’t the best job in the world, but it was easy money and I got to be outside most of the time. Perfect for a hiker and nature enthusiast like me. The Christmas rush had just ended, and we were preparing the store for our “New Year New Sales” special. We packed away the Christmas merchandise and whatever discount holiday items didn’t sell, and set up new displays for the next promotion. I remember clearly, it was January 5th and this poor lady came slamming into the store, dragging behind her the most pitiful looking Christmas tree since Charlie Brown and his friends celebrated. She had two small boys on the tail end of the tree, helping push the once mighty decoration thought the double doors and onto the sales floor where she plopped the tree down and proclaimed, “Now it’s your problem!”. Apparently, the nice lady had purchased this tree two weeks before the Christmas holiday and it was “very much alive” at that time, but since then it has met its ...
Customer Return Story – Prom Stinks
Prom season was always the worst! It was worse than the Christmas rush, it was worse than spring wedding season, and it was even worse than Black Friday! Working in a boutique bridal and dress shop we deal with bridezillas and difficult customers all the time, but nothing like what we saw during prom season 2004. It must have been a plan, or something premeditated, because it happened too many times to be a coincidence. After selling various dresses, renting tuxes, and even selling flowers at the front of the store, prom season was off to a great start. It wasn’t until the day after prom that we were blindsided by a huge swell of dress returns. Shortly after we opened for the day we had three girls come in and try to return their dresses. Now, our policy is pretty lenient, and we’ll gladly refund a worn dress for store credit. This however, was not the case. I’m not sure what happened the night before, but shortly after the girls walked into the store with the merchandise they wanted to return a wave hit us. It was the kind of toxic sewage smell can linger for hours. Not only ...