I’ve
been in retail long enough to be on the receiving end of my fair share of
oddball complaints. You know the
ones. The people who complain that you
won’t give him or her a specific television even though you don’t have any in
your store and there’s nothing you can do about it yourself. The people who complain that the grapefruit
your store received is of mediocre quality and want to know why you,
personally, brought them in (despite having nothing to do with the
shipments). The people who complain
just for the sake of complaining. Kind
of like bloggers! (Hey, wait a second…)
A
few days ago, during the winter storm that nearly three-fourths of the country
went through, I was helping a woman with a television. She was looking for the cheapest product you
could find and despite finding a cheap television set, she wanted to “look
around” just because we didn’t have that exact one in stock to give her. I had to prevent myself from giving a
dumbfounded glance outside the doors as the falling snow turned everything
white outside. Hey, if she wanted to
drive around in THAT, be my guest. She
must’ve REALLY needed to watch TV.I went back to helping the other people who were also crazy enough to go shopping for non-essentials during a winter storm. Fast-forward several minutes when we received a phone call on the department phone. I just happened to be the one nearby and reluctantly answered. The same woman who was “just looking” was calling from a competitor of ours. She wanted to know why the price of the television online was different from the price of the television in the store. It happens. I went online but noticed that she was wrong about the price being different – she was just looking at a different model.
For some reason, this wasn’t good enough because this competitor of ours had the TV in-stock and was going to match our price for the same model but because the website was supposedly not showing the right price – which it was – they weren’t going to give her the price. Needless to say, at this point I was confused. I apologized for the supposed lack of information needed for our competitor to steal our sale away but what else could I do? Obviously, this apology was not enough for her. It’s not like it was my responsibility for them to sell her a product at the price she wanted.
In all of my years, I’ve never had anyone complain that another company I didn’t even work for wouldn’t give the customer the price we were offering them. Is that a thing? Anyone out there have something similar happen to them? Has anyone gone to a Ford dealership, asked for a product at a price, then gone to a VW dealership, asked for a product at a price, and then called the Ford dealership because the VW dealership wouldn’t give you the same price as the Ford dealership? Are people really in need to bitch that much that they have nothing better to do than to complain when it won’t even solve a thing?
If any of the answers to those questions was a “yes”, then in the words of Bill Engvall, “Here’s your sign…”
Does anyone have a particularly amazing complaint that had nothing to do with anything you had control over? Please, if you could top this, I’d love to hear how hilariously stupid it is.
More soon from the frontlines...