Return to Vendor
I admit, I can be something of an impulse buyer. And unfortunately for me, those impulse buys used to take place primarily at places like the Prada boutique on Fifth Avenue — places, I should point out, with nonexistent return policies.
At some point — perhaps after I had given my umpteenth unworn Prada shoes away — I figured out that I needed to stick to shopping at places like Saks and Bergdorf’s, where indecisiveness is considered perfectly acceptable, if not encouraged. In fact, some of my favorite salespeople at those places are known to call me up when new merch comes in and say things like, “Oh, I’ll just put it on your card and send it to you and you can decide if you like it later. It’s triple points, and you can always return it!” (I imagine they bet on my forgetting to return it — fairly good odds, actually.)
Dangerous.
Especially because these cozy relationships with people who work on commission make for very awkward moments at the return counter. I just feel so guilty. I suppose returning one pair of shoes for every three I buy isn’t egregiously bad — though returning all three of the Nancy Gonzalez bags I bought on one giddy shopping spree, I admit, might have been, however fiscally sound a move it was. Still I’m not above calling a store to find out a salesperson’s work schedule so I’d know what days not to come in to make a return. (At least in the Saks and Bergdorf’s shoe departments, the return desk is located off the sales floor, so the likelihood of being caught returning by the one who sold you the item is slightly lessened.)
Still, I have this awful feeling that the salespeople get weekly reports of the commissions made and lost, and they know when I do them wrong. That I’m on some America’s Most Wishy-Washy list posted on the wall of the employee lounge. Am I just being paranoid? Or did that shoe salesman really just give me the evil eye?
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November 7th, 2005 17:51
They do keep track, over in my country some retailers have been accused of creating a “blacklist”
Here’s an interesting article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/11/07/MNGP89NDF118.DTL
Now, I disagree with this, the store should always stand by their return policy no matter how often a person returns merchandise. Refusing to honor a return policy should be against the law.
November 10th, 2005 21:05
I heard about that too! And it’s really unfair, especially since so much shopping is done online now– how many times have you bought an item in different sizes because you’re not sure how things fit? Sure, blame someone for being dishonest. But being indecisive? Isn’t that in the shopper’s bill of rights?!
November 14th, 2005 20:10
I remember that when I was a young child, my mother used to shop for me by buying a bunch of stuff without me and bringing it home for me to try on. This resulted in a few returns, but she thought it was much easier than bringing a small child to the mall.
If they would have tried to pull this on her, she would easily taken her business elsewhere.