Customer Tries to Inflict Guilt Trip

At 9:30AM the phone rang at work.  This is nothing unusual in itself, but the subject of the conversation was different.

Seems that the customer had been in the store on Sunday asking about having a refrigerator delivered to her house that day.  Well, for starters, we are basically only open on Sunday for video rentals.  We used to be closed, but we had several requests from customers that we be open on Sunday.  We tried it for a little while and it paid for itself, allowing us to provide more hours to our part-time employees.  When the employee working told her that we don’t do deliveries on Sunday, she tried to play a trump card.  She told him that the former owner, from 7 years ago, had told her to have the employee call the owners at home.  Now I don’t know what she thinks “former” means, but to me it means “they no longer have any thing to do with the operations of the store”.  Needless to say, she did not have a refrigerator delivered to her home immediately on Sunday.

When she calls at 9:30, she tells me that she had tried to call the store early in the morning, but no one answered the phone.  I asked her what time she tried to call.  She called at 6:00AM and 7:00AM.  Well the store opens at 9:00AM (she knew this), so why the hell did she think that someone would be here at those times.  Now, we do have people here at 8:00AM to open the store.  Had she been patient and called a little later, someone would have been there to take her call.

Now, for the reason why she was calling now.  She wanted to let me know that because she had been in yesterday, she had not gotten a call back Sunday night and she was unable to reach us at 6:00AM, she had called another store, in another town and purchased another refrigerator.  WTF?  Ok, am I supposed to be upset?  By this time I am realizing that this lady is a nut.  She called attempting to make someone feel guilty about her not purchasing an appliance from a “local” business.  Out of all the people involved with this cluster, I think that she is the only one feeling any guilt.  I am certainly not.

Actually, the woman did manage to accomplish one thing in all this.  She managed to waste about 3 minutes of my time!

Crazy Days

The town that I work in had an event yesterday called “Crazy Days”.  There was also a function in the park right in front of the store which they called, “Art in the Park”.  Actually the “park” is a patch of grass where a building burned down due to arson years ago, but I digress.

Crazy Days was a big joke.  The theory is that the businesses downtown go “crazy” and sell stuff cheap.  There was some crap on sale, but for the most part the sales were pretty lame.  The boss and I went over to the sporting goods store, that is pretty famous in these parts, to purchase an item for his wife.  Guess what?  It wasn’t on sale.  We also noticed that we were the only people in the store making a purchase.  So basically a lagre number of people flooded our downtown area and were not making purchases.

The “Art in the Park” seemed to be a pretty popular attraction also.  Many, many people came and went as the day wore on, I know because they parked in our parking lot.  Local artists had arrived early in the morning to setup shop in the park and pedel their wares.  I’m not sure how much they sold, but I can say for sure that I saw no large paintings being lugged back to an vehicles.

The people parking in our lot were really getting on our nerves.  They were parking directly in the areas that were designated, “NO PARKING”.  Generally when you come across a “NO PARKING” sign, it has been placed there for a reason.  Our “NO PARKING” areas happen to be loading and unloading zones that we need clear for our appliance business.  The parking lot also happens to be for customers and employees.  We had several customers complain and two of the employees had to park several blocks from the store.

Since our parking lot is private property, we have to pay in order to have a vehicle towed.  Which means that we would have to seek our own restitution.  If the people were parked in the street, blocking other vehicles, the city would pay to have them towed.  When people started parking directly in front of the store and walking across the way to shop elsewhere, I seriously considered having them towed anyway.  That is just plain rude behavior.

Unrealistic Expectations

There is a phenomenon in the retail electronics industry that I like to call “Unrealistic Expectations”.  I call it this for a variety of reasons.  First, we have the customer that wants a high-end component, but does not want to pay high-end prices.  An example, would be the customer who wants a complete media server, yet thinks this can be purchased for $50.  We next come upon the customer who is buying a device and thinks that the near cost sale price should include free delivery, free setup and unlimited free on-site support.  This customer is unaware of how the retail electronic industry works.  Margins are extremely skinny and money is made by add-ons.  So when you buy a $1000 TV, the cost is probably close to $950 or more.  At these margins you are lucky if the store offers to load the thing in you vehicle.  If you want someone to bend over for you, there are places you can go to purchase such things.  The third and final customer is the worst of all.  Basically nothing is good enough for them.  They want warranties on $2 items.  There is a reason that it cost $2.  Most likely the thing was made in China, shipped over on a huge, salt atmosphere container ship and trucked and shipped to the location.  Now, after you get done calculating the actual expense of getting the item to you hands, the $2 item probably has $0.02 worth of parts at cost.  You are not getting a warranty.  They also want you to guaranty that the item they are looking to purchase will fill every need they have.  Now we know this is not going to happen, because the average telephone or router does not come with psychiatric help.  Although, you could use these products to access such help.